Excerpt from the essay "Peggy Terry"

Reprinted from "The Good War": An Oral History of World War II.

Compiled by Studs Terkel.

Published in 1984.

"We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. To us it was just an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing."

Peggy Terry was eighteen years old when she took a job in a munitions factory in Viola, Kentucky. Unlike women factory workers in war industry boomtowns, she was barely aware that a war had started and certainly did not understand its implications. Peggy Terry's job—putting explosive powder into shells—was hazardous. Some of the material she worked with was harmful to her health, but the job paid the rent and bought food and clothes, so she never asked questions about...