The Bluestocking, vol 321: Girls and planes

passive endurance of lifestyle martyrdom

Happy Friday!

This weekend is Orwell and Kafka Fest at Radio 4, and Ian Hislop and I are co-hosting SIX episodes of a series comparing the two writers’ visions of the twentieth century, with contributions from Alan Bates, Dorian Lynskey, Shehan Karunatilaka, Professor Carolin Duttlinger, DJ Taylor, Anna the nun from the first series of Big Brother . . . and loads more.

Here we are being interviewed by the Telegraph (link, £) about the series, looking like you’ve let the school down, but most of all, you’ve let yourself down.

Because it’s a whole fiesta, the BBC has also commissioned great actors to read an abridged version of 1984, and perform The Trial, plus new radio plays and a special edition of Opening Lines.

Helen

PS. I also joined Rob Hutton and Duncan Weldon on their podcast about WWII films, War Movie Theatre, to talk about Sound of Music. The lads liked the Nazi bits far more than the emotions.

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B-25 bombers being assembled in North American Aviation’s Inglewood, California factory, 1942

How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years (Substack)

Creating an aircraft industry capable of producing planes by the hundreds of thousands didn’t happen overnight, and on the eve of the war the industry was a tiny fraction of what it would grow into. In 1937 the U.S. produced around 3,100 aircraft, most of which were small private planes. Prior to the war the value of aircraft made in the U.S. was about one-fourth the value of cans produced, and just 3.5% of the value of cars produced. Despite the continuing escalation of the war in Europe, the U.S. was reluctant to prepare for large-scale mobilization. Existing mobilization plans assumed that any future war would be smaller in scale than World War I had been, and that only half of the already-small existing aircraft manufacturing capacity would be devoted to war production. As late as 1940 the U.S. military had just 2,665 aircraft, around a tenth of what Germany’s Luftwaffe fielded. And the aircraft the U.S. did have were out of date: Though the airplane was invented in the U.S. in 1903, by the late 1930s the most advanced aircraft were being produced in other countries, and there was little urgency to close this gap. Military orders for Boeing’s advanced B-17, of which more than 12,000 would ultimately be built, were canceled in 1937 after a crash during testing in favor of the cheaper and less capable B-18, nearly driving Boeing into bankruptcy.

Producing the aircraft needed to win the war required a complete transformation of the aircraft industry. Between 1939 and 1944, the value of aircraft produced annually in the U.S. increased by a factor of 70, and the total weight of aircraft produced (a common measure of aircraft industry output) increased by a factor of 64. In 1940, the airframe industry employed just 59,000 people; three years later that reached 939,000, with another 339,000 building aircraft engines. Factories of unprecedented size, enclosing millions of square feet were built; by the end of the war aircraft engine factory floor space had increased from 1.7 million square feet to 75 million, and a single large engine factory encompassed more space than had been used by the entire pre-war engine industry.

This is one for the Warhammer Dads in the Bluestocking audience: a deep dive into the industrial miracle that was America’s airline industry in the Second World War.

Although the Feminist Caucus might also enjoy it—one of the lessons of this period is that it’s very possible to adapt working practices for women, if you really try: some factories ended up with 90% female workforce, simply because those were the people who were available. To accommodate these new unskilled and physically less strong workers: “Tasks were rearranged to be less physically taxing, and aids like trunnion jigs, which parts could be mounted to and freely rotated, were more widely adopted. Tools were redesigned to make them easier to use. Rivet guns, for instance, were redesigned to have counterbalances, which not only reduced the strength required to use them but made it possible to rivet with a single worker where it had previously required two.” And then bosses realised that these modifications made the work easier for everyone.

In three years, the American aircraft industry was transformed: “In 1941 Boeing required more than 140,000 hours of labor to assemble a B-17. By 1944, that had fallen to less than 20,000. The cost to produce aircraft fell on average by 32% over the course of the war.”

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Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash

how to be respected as a teen girl (Knowingless, Substack)

as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren't. people praise and laugh at boys for doing high risk things. boys do all the good thinking and flying planes and action movies. and they put women in action movies too but it doesn't reflect life around you - the women you know are moms and shy and weak. you can feel the weakness emanating off of them. they do have passive endurance, of lifestyle martyrdom, of quietly putting up with so much. that’s a type of strength, they say.

"Maybe women shouldn't have been allowed to vote" is a conversation you hear occasionally, slightly tongue in cheek but also kind of not. you’re embarrassed to watch romance movies in the same way you might be embarrassed to watch reality tv - if you do it you've got to be meta about it, like 'lol yeah just giving into a guilty pleasure'. it has to be guilty, it can't just be pleasure.

Aella describes the same thesis as Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs — how to be a woman in a world where femininity is uncool and unserious, and how you’re never quite sure if you’re genuinely into Stuff Boys Like or you’ve just decided that’s the price of admission to the paddock of proper people with subjectivity.

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Quick Links

1. “O’Toole, then almost 50 and skeletal-gaunt, was carrying in his hands a little red book. As the audience hushed he explained that the book was given to the actor who was considered the definitive Hamlet of his generation.” Lovely John Phipps story about a copy of Hamlet passed down from actor to actor, with the latest three custodians being Derek Jacobi, Ken Branagh and Tom Hiddleston. It’s also a reflection on how acting styles change—every “greatest actor of his generation” knows that one day his style will seem unbearably cringe to his successors (Financial Times).

2. “What Blair and Corbyn share is the ability to make a deeply unpopular case in the teeth of great opposition.” I’ve been revising my old pieces to cover the election, and I enjoyed this check-in with mid-image-rehab Tony Blair in 2017 (New Statesman).

3. “So why did Vice self-destruct? It was hubris. It was avarice. […] It was a CEO hired to insulate the company from further accusations of being a “boys’ club,” who built her reputation on a TV show about a right-wing family who sold duck calls—and now sent emails, written in Comic Sans, lamenting the pervasiveness of racism in America.” The full version of this insider account of Vice’s strange pivot from articles about taking ketamine at war graves to handwringing about niche identity issues is behind a paywall, but the free preview is still pretty fun (The Free Press, Substack).

4. “Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others.” Ibram X. Kendi, breakout star of the anti-racist moment, has had a rough year. Now, he’s fighting back (New York Times, £)

5. Fascinated by the Pokemon evolution of Owen Jones from Labour activist to Green activist. Here he is trying to have a “little chat” (faux chummy phrasing, bleurgh) with Bristol MP Thangam Debbonaire while she’s out canvassing, about the vital local issue of …. Gaza. Why her? Why Gaza? Because, of course, her new Bristol constituency is one of the Greens’ four target seats. As both Rob Hutton and Marina Hyde noted at the Green launch, the speeches might have been about environmentalism, but the party’s ground campaign focuses heavily on Gaza to peel away Labour votes. “It was probably an oversight that this subject, on which the party is campaigning so hard locally, didn’t feature in the speeches for the TV cameras,” wrote Hutton.

6. Two related thoughts: yes, Gaza is a vote-moving issue in Bristol, but seeing the Greens as the mirror-image of Reform—ie a destination for people who don’t find Labour leftwing enough—might be wrong. Sam Freedman’s election briefing offers this nugget: “The Greens have gained significantly more councillors from the Conservatives than Labour in recent years.” Worcester, where I grew up, is a Labour-Tory bellwether seat, but the Greens have made big in-roads lately at council level. Those votes are not coming from Corbynites; Worcester hasn’t been Labour since 2010. There are lots of fruit-based analogies to describe the diversity of Green support (watermelons are green on the outside but red underneath, for example) but my shorthand for now will be Gaza Greens, for disaffected leftists, and Waitrose Greens, for environmentalist Remainers, aka disaffected conservatives.

7. Secondly, In case you think I’m picking on Owen Jones, I am a longterm implacable opponent of journalists being political partisans. This election it feels like half of Fleet Street tried to get selected, while even supposedly impartial broadcast networks are now full of serving (or recently ex) politicians. I’m really uneasy about this, at a time when many people think the media are biased and “have an agenda”. When I give my opinion, people should know that what they’re hearing is my best assessment of the truth, not what I feel gives me the best chance of becoming an MP or boosting the chances of the political party I support. But I concede this is a minority position in the British media.

8. Also, I don’t know about you, but I’m finding the election coverage so far oddly uncompelling. Maybe it’s because the outcome appears like a foregone conclusion. Maybe it’s because there’s just too much content. Maybe it’s because I feel like Britain has huge structural problems and I don’t feel either party is talking about them, for reasons of their own. (Two obvious things we could do to improve our economic outlook—build more houses and create closer ties with Europe—are likely to be entirely absent from the main parties’ campaigns.) Or am I just being jaded? Do leave a comment.

See you next time!