Lecture: “Wendy the Welder: Work in World War II,” Oct. 15

The Brooklyn Navy Yard reached its peak in World War II, employing 70,000 civilian workers. Desperately short of labor, the Navy employed more than 10,000 women at the Yard, in jobs ranging from seamstress to draftswoman to welder. This lecture by Andrew Gustafson will look back at the history of the Yard, and how World War II represented a major change in the culture of work, but also continued traditions of female labor dating back more than a century, utilizing documents, artifacts, and oral histories form the Brooklyn Navy Yard Archive, including many than we’re used in creating the world of Jennifer Egan’s bestselling novel Manhattan Beach.