Photo taken ca. 1944-1946 of local volunteers in front of the Connellsville Canteen.
Women all across the United States were encouraged to volunteer and work outside of the home in new, typically male-dominated occupations. Like the Connellsville Canteen volunteers, this photo captures a woman aircraft worker on the job at Vega Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, CA.
The Connellsville Canteen, which today is a café and museum, takes its name from the community-sponsored canteen that provided snacks and conversation to World War II soldiers aboard trains passing through Connellsville, Pennsylvania. Beginning in December 1941, when the United States entered the war, the U.S. Army began sending soldiers across the country by railroad. Oftentimes these were days-long trips in crowded, uncomfortable sleeping cars. Pulling into a station with a canteen meant an uplifting respite. The canteen in Connellsville operated between 1944 and 1946 at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station on Water Street—you can visit a historical marker there, across the street from the station’s parking lot—and more than 600,000 members of the armed forces passed through during those two years, meeting some of the 800 local women who volunteered to staff the canteen 24 hours a day. [1]
Opportunities to work and volunteer in the war effort offered women valuable roles within the workplace and outside of the normalized domestic responsibility at that time. As both men and women headed overseas to aid the Allied Forces, many industries were left in need of workers.
Though women became much of the labor force within the United States in the early 1940s, many were forced out of employment once men returned home after the war. Along with being forced out of work, women also endured having their pay reduced, leading to conversations about equality in the workplace based on gender. These conversations grew over decades into national movements, including the Women’s Liberation Movement, beginning in the 1960s. [2]
At today’s Connellsville Canteen you can still get a snack (it’s not free, though). With a full belly, you can visit the World War II museum and learn more about Connellsville’s contributions to the war effort. There’s also a large model railroad display—if you’re there on a Saturday, you can see the trains running.
Photo taken ca. 1944-1946 of local volunteers in front of the Connellsville Canteen.
Courtesy of Fayette County Cultural Trust
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