There would probably be a lot more women drivers but executives of trucking firms are still reluctant to accept women. Their excuse is usually that the work is "too hard" for women, which the women drivers are proving a lie.
One executive, however, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that he was against women drivers simply because he still likes to think of trucking as "a man's world." He hastened to add that he didn't want to be identified for fear he'd get "all those libbers on my back."
But many of the men who work with the women truckers have a different opinion. They can evaluate the work these women do firsthand and have developed a new respect for them. A dispatcher for Leonard Brothers Trucking Company was asked by the Dallas Morning News if he felt the women could do the job. "You'd be amazed," he said, "these gals can handle a rig better than a lot of men. It'd blow your mind."
September 27, 1948
RICHMOND - Calif. Sept. 15 - In a pitched battle against tear
gas-hurling police, and in defiance of a court injunction, some
3,000 massed pickets and sympathizers of the CIO Oil Workers
Union yesterday called a halt to fink-herding and picket-line-
crashing in this oil workers' town just across the bay from San
Francisco.
They turned back a motor caravan of finks that tried to enter the Standard Oil Refiners here under escort of 150 steel-helmeted police. For more than an hour, the striking workers and their supporters, led by experienced war veterans and battling from behind barricades, fought off the tear-gas assaults of the heavily armed cops.
One hour and ten minutes after its erection, its purpose fulfilled, the pickets allowed the barrier to be torn down and held a victory meeting on the spot, right outside their union hall.