The Brooklyn Navy Yard hired its first women workers in 1940, in "traditionally feminine" roles such as telephone operator, but by 1942, women were taking on the jobs of mechanics and welders. As young men shipped off to war by the tens of thousands, the home front was forced to accept the idea of women working outside the home, leaving a lasting effect on the American labor force. Of the women who were employed in war-related work at the end of 1945, nearly 50 percent said that they hadn't wanted to work outside the home before Pearl Harbor, but 75 percent said they wanted to continue working once they had begun. This shift was not without controversy, of course, and support was not always eagerly given. The motivations of working mothers were almost immediately called into question. Working mothers were often "blamed" for encouraging improper child-rearing; taking jobs away from unemployed men; and causing overcrowding in day care centers. Some even went so far as to ask: Is it un-American for mothers to work?

The Brooklyn Navy Yard wasn't the only workplace taking in women during the war. Brooklyn's bar scene also introduced women to its ranks. In 1939, a group of women bartenders formed Bar Maids Local 101, an official union for women who had taken on the important duty of pouring drinks and lending an ear to the war-torn borough. By the end of the 1940s, the union included over 100 barmaids working in 75 Brooklyn bars, where they were welcomed to keep working until 1950 when Brooklyn assemblyman Alfred A. Lama proposed an amendment "barring barmaids from bars" (as the Eagle so eloquently put it). Battles for the right to work ensued, and were eventually won, by women.

Legendary actress, singer, dancer and civil rights activist Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, and as a child lived at 189 Chauncey Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She attended P.S. 35 and then Girls High School, pictured above, on Nostrand Avenue. As the first Black performer to sign a long-term contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1942, she set a historic precedent--and spent the rest of her career fighting against racism and discrimination both in the entertainment industry and in the country at large. Her resume as an activist is perhaps even more impressive than her acting credits: In the late 1940s, Horne sued a number of restaurants and theaters for discrimination and aligned herself with the liberal organization Progressive Citizens of America. She joined Eleanor Roosevelt's unsuccessful campaign for anti-lynching legislation and worked on behalf of Japanese Americans who faced discrimination after WWII. During Senator McCarthy's campaign against suspected Communists in the 1950s, Horne was among hundreds of entertainers blacklisted simply because of her progressive political views and commitment to social activism. In the 1960s, she performed in the south at rallies for civil rights, participated in the 1963 March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and supported the work of the National Council for Negro Women. She also won three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Brooklyn chapter of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) was one of the most active in the nation. The chapter was made up of an interracial coalition of Brooklynites, including many women. They protested school segregation, street conditions in neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents, and racist hiring practices, including at Ebinger’s bakery, whose Montague Street location is shown here. Ebinger’s refused to hire Black, Jewish, or Latinx workers. When negotiating, picketing, and boycotting all failed to produce results, CORE members staged a sit-in blocking the bakery’s delivery trucks, and they were forced to reconsider their hiring practices. The collection of Rioghan Kirchner, a white woman who was active in CORE, is held at the Center for Brooklyn History.

Just past the building with the arched windows at right is 573 Metropolitan Avenue, where the Greenpoint Print Shop was located. The shop was founded in the late 1960s by a collective of women that included Brooklynite Ina Clausen, whose papers are held at the Center for Brooklyn History. Clausen designed and printed materials for several local activist groups, including the Southern Conference Educational Fund, the Southside Community of Greenpoint, the National Association for Irish Freedom, Yellow Pearl (an Asian-American organization based in Chinatown), Los Tintos Indios (a Red Hook-based Puerto Rican group), and several women’s liberation groups. Clausen also participated in local activist organizations, including the Flatbush Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and designed and published informational packets to educate women about the Women’s Liberation Movement.

Among the first activists to combine the causes of environmental and racial justice, Hattie Carthan’s advocacy for trees and neighborhood beautification began in 1964, when she founded the Tompkins & Throop Block Association in Bed-Stuy and began raising money to plant trees on that stretch of Vernon Avenue. In 1966, she invited newly-elected Mayor John Lindsey to the block association’s annual barbecue fundraiser, earning from the mayor an unlikely but powerful endorsement that drew city-wide attention to the block association’s cause, and provided a platform for her visibility and influence in the community to rapidly grow. By the end of the decade, Carthan was presiding over one hundred block associations in Bed-Stuy, which she chaired under the umbrella Bedford-Stuyvesant Beautification Committee, and advising the New York City Parks Department on numerous city-wide tree planting programs. Under her leadership, the beautification committee planted more than 1,500 ginkgo, sycamore, and honey locust trees throughout Bed-Stuy. Source: nypap.org/preservation-history/hattie-carthan

Laura Holloway was a suffragist and activist and an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper, which was headquartered in this stately building in downtown Brooklyn. She also founded the Seidl Society in 1889, which sponsored free concerts featuring Hungarian composer Anton Seidl at Coney Island and Brighton Beach in order to bring music to low-income women, children and all residents of Brooklyn. The “concerts” were actually all-day affairs that included meals and enjoyment of the beaches, and the society also presented lectures by prominent feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Some of Holloway’s correspondence with Susan B. Anthony is held at the Center for Brooklyn History, along with the records of the Seidl Society.

In 2007, environmental activist Erin Brockovich (yes, that Erin Brockovich) helped Greenpoint residents win the lawsuit against ExxonMobil over damage resulting from the devastating oil spill discovered in Newtown Creek in 1978. The result of decades of industrial waste created by oil refineries in the area, the spill is one of the worst ever recorded in US history, clocking in at 17-33 million gallons of oil--significantly larger than Exxon Valdez. Learn more about Greenpoint's environmental history.

Just out of frame at the top of this aerial view of Brownsville is the location of Margaret Sanger's birth control clinic, the first of its kind in the United States, which opened in 1916. Sanger is undoubtedly a pioneer in the fight for reproductive rights, but her legacy is not without its complications, and we now denounce her eugenicist views, among other flawed aspects of her activism. Nonetheless, her Brownsville clinic paved a path that still has relevance and urgency for women today. Though the clinic was enormously popular, it was closed down after just 10 days of operation, and Sanger was imprisoned. The clinic and Sanger’s continued activism brought public attention and outcry to the issue, and two years later, a judge in the New York Court of Appeals ruled that doctors could prescribe birth control.