Person

Frances Winifred Williams

An image with the text SWONS Shipbuilding Women of the Navy with heads of female workers at bottom — Shipbuilding Women of the Navy

Frances Williams worked as a welder in the Charlestown Navy Yard and South Boston Annex during World War II.¹

Williams's connection to the Navy Yard went back well before the war. As a child living in Charlestown, she and a friend would set up a lemonade stand across from Gate 4 at the end of a workday, selling lemonade and orangeade to sailors and workers going home for the day.²

Years later, at the start of World War II, Williams was working at Boston City Hospital when she heard about employment opportunities for women at the Navy Yard and decided to apply. Sometime around 1942, she began training as a welder in the Charlestown Navy Yard. Williams honed her welding skills, being tested on horizontal, overhead, and vertical welding, as well as the operation of Hobart machines. She trained on all kinds of steel and sheet metal, the latter of which she remembered as having a terrible odor.

Williams initially doubted her abilities during her training. "I never thought I would be able to [weld] at the time," she recalled in her oral history, "I was scared to death."³ Nonetheless, Williams passed her training after a month, and was assigned to the South Boston Annex.

Williams's small stature and low weight allowed her to fill a very important niche in ship repairing operations. She was routinely ordered to perform "hot jobs;" tasks that required a welder to work up in the air on the side of ships, in tight and narrow spaces, and in low visibility conditions. Such work was dangerous, and Williams received a number of scars doing it. Nevertheless, she grew accustomed to her assigned tasks. "I loved it," she said, "I mean, I wasn't afraid of anything." Towards the end of her time at the Navy Yard, Williams briefly worked in the ropewalk building.

Though Williams got through her time at the Navy Yard with minimal injury, some of her fellow workers were not so lucky. One woman was killed when a load of steel fell from a crane, an event Williams recalled as particularly traumatic for her and her fellow workers. One worker went temporarily blind while welding without a helmet, and another woman was injured when her hair was caught in a machine. Even workers who managed to escape serious injury often received burns and lacerations. Williams remembered her wartime patriotic spirit as helping her get through such difficult and dangerous work.

While not on the job, Williams and her fellow workers engaged in a number of recreational activities that helped keep up morale. When the weather was nice, the workers played baseball during their lunch hour. Often, Navy bands from ships docked in Charlestown and South Boston played music for the workers to dance to. On one very memorable occasion, the loudspeakers at the Navy Yard played Perry Como's rendition of the song "Prisoner of Love." As Williams recalled, "we all went crazy, you know, because...I had a boyfriend overseas, and...a lot of the girls did...I never forgot that." During the holiday season, workers decorated the Navy Yard's cranes with festive trimming and held small celebrations. Williams, a Catholic, attended mass on Sunday mornings, administered by the Navy Yard's own chaplain.

Williams remembered the Navy Yard as a fairly egalitarian workspace during the war, recalling that she and her fellow women workers were asked no more and no less of than their male counterparts. In fact, Williams found welding to be a job particularly suited to women, as certain types of metal, such as aluminum, required a lighter touch from a welder. Occasionally, women workers received jibes from the men at the Yard, but she easily ignored them. Sometimes male coworkers would put paint on the inside of Williams's helmet before she put it on, but Williams considered such incidents harmless pranks rather than evidence of real hostility.

The nature of work at the Charlestown Navy Yard put young female workers in close proximity to large numbers of sailors. Before the war, sailors had a bad reputation among women in Charlestown, typified by the saying, "a girl in every port," as Williams recalled. Her sister dated a Coast Guardsman in open defiance of social convention. During the war, however, public attitudes towards servicemen changed dramatically for the better. Though fraternization between workers and sailors was expressly forbidden by Naval authorities, Williams remembered such interactions as being common. Sailors often flirted with Williams and her fellow workers, writing their names down and encouraging them to send letters. Williams herself often exchanged letters with several servicemen overseas, some of whom she met at the Navy Yard. She saw such correspondence as part of her patriotic duty, helping keep up the morale of the men on the front lines.

Though she was a skilled welder and enjoyed her work, Williams quit her job at the Navy Yard after two years, likely in 1944, due to a medical condition. Though she left the specific condition unspecified in her 1982 oral history interview, it could have been due to anemia, which she mentioned suffering from, or a work-related injury or illness. Her decision to quit before the end of World War II in 1945 left her ineligible for a special award that a number of her friends received from the Navy Yard authorities. "I don’t have an award, but I have scars," she recalled with a laugh.

Williams painted a vivid picture of the end of World War II in Boston. She was in a movie theater seeing the film Tall in the Saddle starring John Wayne, a particular favorite of hers, when the film was stopped and the moviegoers were informed that Japan had surrendered and the war in the Pacific was over. Williams remembered walking out of the theater to scenes of wild jubilation, with young servicemen throwing their ties up in the air, riding fire engines through the streets, and embracing everyone they saw. The celebration lasted for hours as the crowd made its way to Stuart Street in the South End. Williams had to call her mother to tell her she would not be home until very late at night. "We had a great time," she said.

After the war, Williams found a job at the First National Warehouse in Somerville, where she worked for a short time before returning to Boston City Hospital. She planned to marry her boyfriend who had served overseas during the war, but such plans fell through for an unspecified reason. By April 1950, she was living with her mother, Julia, and her younger sister, Margaret, on East Springfield Street in the South End.⁴

American manufacturing saw a return to wartime production with the outbreak of the Korean War that year, and Williams got a job with Clifford Manufacturing Company in Fenway. As a heliarc welder, she manufactured aluminum parts for aircraft like the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Williams prided herself on the high quality of her work, and appreciated the ability to fulfill her patriotic duty as she had in World War II. After her job at Clifford Manufacturing ended, Williams worked her last welding job in Jersey City, New Jersey, which she held only for a brief time.

For Williams, it was her sense of duty and patriotism that resonated most strongly with her during the war years, as she explained to Laurie Joslin of the National Park Service during her oral history interview in October 1982. On a typical day, she entered and exited the Navy Yard just as Marine guards were raising or lowering the flag, during which she and other passersby would always stop and hold their hands over their hearts.

The war deeply affected Williams, who knew several men who went overseas. Some were killed in action, and some who returned "were never the same again" after their traumatic experiences. Though her boyfriend at the time made it home safely, his brother was killed at the Battle of Salerno in 1943. Recreation like dancing and a positive attitude helped Williams make it through the war years, she recalled: "You had to laugh a little bit, or you’d go crazy for sure."

Frances Williams's war work, including some of the most important and dangerous jobs at the Charlestown Navy Yard, was essential to the United States' victory in World War II. Through her vivid reminiscences in 1982, she also provided a valuable window into life in Boston during the war years.

Footnotes

"Frances Winifred Williams," Find A Grave, accessed March 2025.
This biography recounts Williams's experience at the Navy Yard based on her oral history: Interview with Frances Williams for the National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park Charleston Navy Yard, by Laurie Joslin, 6 October 1982.
All quotes are from the oral history cited above.
National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 5190; Page: 18; Enumeration District: 15-482