The Women of the Shipyards

What This Episode Covers

By May 1943, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed approximately 7,000 women. Terminal Island was 33% female. Portland and Vancouver had 30,000 women in their shipyards. The Women's Bureau documented 189 occupations — including, in official government classifications, "asbestos filler and sewer" and "asbestos layer-out and cutter." These were not peripheral roles. These women cut asbestos cloth with their hands, sewed insulation blankets, and worked in spaces their supervisors described as "so clouded with asbestos dust that workers couldn't see across them."

Nobody told them what asbestos was.

Episode 27 covers three interlocking stories: the women who built the ships and what they breathed; what happened to their records when they were fired in 1945; and what happened decades later when their children got sick.

Lucille Kolkin and the Seven Thousand

Seven thousand women worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at peak employment. One of them was Lucille Kolkin, who started in 1942 as a tack welder. She wrote home to her husband Al — a machinist at the same yard before the Navy shipped him to the Pacific in 1944 — every week. Her letters are in the Center for Brooklyn History oral history collection, donated by her family after her death in 1997. Forty-nine oral histories from women who built those ships exist in that collection: welders, pipefitters, women whose names the yard's official records filed under the single word "helper."

Kolkin described the conditions plainly: "The physical conditions were very rough, and I must say I wasn't crazy about the cold or the heat or… we stood on things that were very uncomfortable all day. I mean, ten hours a day." And: "Nobody ever asked for a hammer. They asked for a fuckin' hammer."

The women Kolkin worked alongside — Ida Pollack, Sylvia Everitt, Bettie Chase — described starting wages of approximately fifty cents an hour. The men beside them earned a dollar twenty. The War Labor Board's General Order No. 16 (November 1942) had mandated equal pay for equal work. The yards had found a way around it: classify the women as "helpers," and the equal pay order doesn't apply to a helper's pay scale. Same work, different word, different wage.

The Classification That Erased Them Twice

The "helper" classification was not only a wage instrument. It became an exposure instrument.

When a worker is classified as a welder, the records link to a trade — a trade with known asbestos exposure in the asbestos trust fund system built in the 1970s and 1980s. When a worker is classified as a helper, the record links to a category with no specific trade assignment. The exposure pathway is invisible in the administrative record.

Historian Amy Kesselman documented in Fleeting Opportunities that the displacement of women from postwar shipyards was not the women choosing to return to their kitchens — the popular myth — but the industry choosing to push them out. Four million women had left the industrial workforce by January 1946. Portland Kaiser went from 97,000 workers to 2,000. One in four women factory workers was fired in the first three months after the war ended.

When they left, their records left with them. Or rather, the records stayed — filed under classifications that decades later would not trigger asbestos exposure flags on a trust fund claim form.

Dr. Muriel Newhouse and the Household Exposure Problem

In 1965, Dr. Muriel Newhouse — a colonel in the British Army who had landed in Normandy after D-Day and whose colleagues described her as a "benign but fearsome ferret" for her ability to extract research compliance from subjects who had no interest in cooperating — published a study in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine that changed the legal landscape for asbestos litigation.

Newhouse and her colleague Hilda Thompson examined 83 mesothelioma patients at the London Hospital. Fifty-two percent had documented occupational asbestos exposure, compared to 11% of controls — statistically significant beyond reasonable doubt. But the more significant finding was the nine women who had no occupational exposure at all. Seven wives. Two sisters. Their only contact with asbestos had been through a family member who worked with it. The most common history in Newhouse's notes: "the wife who washed her husband's dungarees or work clothes."

One docker came home every day covered in asbestos fiber. His wife brushed him down at the door. She developed mesothelioma. She had never entered the workplace. She had never handled asbestos directly.

The industry had known this was happening since 1940. A Metropolitan Life Insurance internal report that year stated plainly: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure." In 1946, the Journal of the American Medical Association recommended that workers have access to showers and separate clothing storage. The Asbestos Textile Institute voted in March 1957 not to fund a study on asbestos and cancer — recording in their own minutes that such a study would "stir up a hornet's nest and put the whole industry under suspicion." OSHA did not mandate that work clothing not be laundered with family clothing until 1972.

Jeanette Franklin: A Childhood, a Verdict, a Technicality

Jeanette Franklin was born during the war. Both her parents — Vern Harnish, a welder, and Opal, a ship's carpenter's assistant — worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard in South San Francisco from 1942 to 1945. She never set foot in the yard. Her exposure was the asbestos dust that traveled home on her parents' clothing and in the family car, three years of contact during the first years of her life.

She was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1996. Her attorneys, led by Simona Farrise at Kazan Law, filed against USX Corporation — the corporate heir to Western Pipe and Steel through a chain of mergers running through U.S. Steel. Her attorneys have said USX refused to offer even one dollar in settlement. USX's defense did not contest the asbestos exposure or the cancer. They argued corporate liability: a 1948 purchase agreement's fine print said the buyer had not assumed the seller's tort liabilities. The exposure wasn't USX's responsibility. The paperwork, they argued, said so.

In March 2000, an Alameda County jury awarded Jeanette Franklin $6.5 million. In March 2001, the California Court of Appeal reversed the verdict — not because the exposure didn't happen, not because the cancer wasn't real, but because of the 1948 purchase agreement. The California Supreme Court was asked to review. Justice Mosk noted he would have granted review. The court declined.

Jeanette Franklin received nothing. More than fifty years after her parents' last day at the yard.

The Latency Problem: Cases Still Emerging

Mesothelioma's latency period is 20 to 50 years between exposure and diagnosis. For women, the median latency is 29% longer than for men — 43.7 years versus 33.8 years. A woman exposed in a wartime shipyard in 1943 has a median diagnosis date of 1987 — but the distribution extends well beyond that median.

Cases from 1940s wartime exposure are still being diagnosed. Dr. Irving Selikoff documented a mesothelioma death in a man who had never worked in a shipyard — born in 1942, two blocks from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The neighborhood itself was a secondary exposure zone.

The women who held the welding torches, who cut the asbestos cloth, who sewed the insulation blankets — their cases are in that distribution. So are their children's. The word in the record says "helper." The disease in the lung says otherwise.

If Your Family Was Exposed

Women who worked in WWII-era shipyards — whether classified as welders, helpers, or any other role — were exposed to asbestos. So were the family members who washed their work clothes. Mesothelioma compensation is available through asbestos trust funds, personal injury litigation, and VA benefits for veterans. Family members who experienced secondary exposure through a relative's work may qualify directly.

Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds established by bankrupt asbestos companies. Average settlements range from $1 million to $2.4 million. The classification on a 1943 personnel record — helper, welder, asbestos layer — does not determine eligibility for compensation. What determines eligibility is documented exposure.

For a free consultation, Danziger & De Llano has recovered nearly $2 billion for mesothelioma families over 30 years of litigation. A free consultation can determine whether you or a family member qualifies for compensation through trust funds, litigation, or VA benefits.

About This Podcast

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast series produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP. The series traces the complete history of asbestos — from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban — revealing how a substance known for millennia as the "Magic Mineral" became one of history's deadliest industrial cover-ups.

Each episode combines archival research, historical analysis, and modern medical and legal context to document how corporations suppressed evidence of asbestos danger while workers and families died. Over 30 years, Danziger & De Llano has recovered nearly $2 billion for families affected by asbestos exposure. If you or a family member was exposed to asbestos and have questions about mesothelioma, compensation, or your legal rights, visit dandell.com for a free consultation.