‘Middle-Aged Husbands Falling for Girl Factory Workers’

From the Feb. 22, 1943, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

One of the by-products of the war that would be cynically amusing if it were not so pathetic and tragic, is the effect that it has had upon the middle-aged married men whom it has changed from faithful Darbys into philandering Casanovas. At any rate, that seems to be the result of pretty young girls flocking into the factories, and of men earning more money than they ever did before. And it leaves one speculating about the perils of propinquity [being in close proximity], and if the lack of the price is the source of virtue, and about various and sundry other things that we have not heretofore connected with the horrors of war.

What leads me to these reflections is the perfect avalanche of letters that I am receiving from wives of the men who are employed in war industries and who are, for the first time, working side-by-side with women. These tear-stained missives tell the same story. The wife has been married for 5—10—maybe 25 years to her John who has been as good a husband as any woman could want. He has been as domestic as the house cat.

War Altered Domestic Scene

He has brought home his pay envelope to his wife on Saturdays and turned it over to her. They have stepped out together for a modest spree, going to the neighborhood movies and stopping somewhere on the way home for a hamburger and a glass of beer. Everything was perfectly jake until the war started and they began employing women in the factories.

At first her husband was furious, threatened to quit in spite of the high wages. Said he wasn’t going to work with a mess of women all around him; that making bombers and airplanes was not business for a woman, and he wasn’t going to spend his time helping some little silly chit of a girl do work she wasn’t fitted for and didn’t have enough sense to do, anyway. Let her go back to her own job of selling ribbons and painting peoples’ fingernails.

But Friend Wife, wife like, soothed him down little suspecting the trouble she was bringing on herself, by telling him that with the increase in wages they could pay off the mortgage on the bungalow, and that probably girls wouldn’t like hard work and would drop out anyway. And when Husband quit complaining of his girl helper, she congratulated herself that, for once, he had listened to her good advice.

And then she began noticing that he was beginning to shave oftener than he used to. And to buy a lot of new clothes. And to run to fancy neckties. And he quit turning over this pay envelope to her. And he began stepping out at night without her. And he refused to tell what he did with the extra money he earned. And now he tells her that he has fallen in love with a pretty little girl, who is about half his age, and wants a divorce so he can marry her.

Bubbling Cutie Displaces Faithful Wife

But the tragedy comes in when the middle-aged man is thrown in contact with youth and beauty in the factory that he would not meet normally at his old job where he worked only with men. When he compares his fat and staid Maria with some slim cuties bubbling over with youth and high spirits, Maria doesn’t look so good to him as she did. He forgets all of her years of love and devotion and hard work, and forsakes her.

And it is a tragedy for the man as well as the wife, for these middle-age romances are just a flash in the pan that soon burn out, and that leaves the elderly husband and the young wife the most miserable of all men, longing for the old wife with whom he had everything in common, and the children he has given up.

When Uncle Sam drafted women into war factories, he had no idea he was starting a matrimonial agency and an annex to the divorce court, but he did. Perhaps, it was a necessity, but among the casualties of war should be listed the wrecked homes and broken-hearted wives that are the result of once staid husbands, having the temptation and the price, turning philanderers at middle age.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)