Asbestos Podcast EP27 Transcript

Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards

Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.

Episode Information
Series	Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making
Season	1
Episode	27
Title	The Women of the Shipyards
Arc	Arc 6 — The War Effort (Episode 3 of Arc)
Produced by	Charles Fletcher
Research and writing	Charles Fletcher with Claude AI
Listen	Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube

Episode Summary

By May 1943, 45,174 women worked in U.S. Navy yards alone. Terminal Island in California was 33% women. Portland and Vancouver Kaiser shipyards employed 30,000 women. The Brooklyn Navy Yard received 20,000 applications from women and employed approximately 7,000 at peak. The Women's Bureau documented 189 different occupations held by women in these facilities — including, in official government classifications, "asbestos filler and sewer" and "asbestos layer-out and cutter."

Nobody told them what asbestos was.

Episode 27 covers three interlocking stories: the women who built the ships and what they breathed; what happened to their records when they were fired in 1945; and what happened decades later when their children got sick.

The "helper" classification — one word in a personnel file — did two things simultaneously. It justified paying women less than half the rate of the men beside them (the War Labor Board's equal pay mandate covered "equal work," not work reclassified as a lower grade). And it severed the link between women workers and any asbestos exposure category in the trust fund systems built in the 1970s and 1980s. The erasure wasn't accidental. It was structural, built into the hiring paperwork from day one.

Key Takeaways

45,174 women in Navy yards alone by May 1943. Terminal Island: 33% women. Portland and Vancouver: 30,000 women. Brooklyn Navy Yard: 20,000 applications, ~7,000 employed. The Women's Bureau documented 189 official occupations including "asbestos filler and sewer" and "asbestos layer-out and cutter." The "helper" classification erased them twice. It justified paying women roughly 50 cents/hour while men beside them earned $1.20 (War Labor Board General Order No. 16, November 1942, mandated equal pay for equal work — the yards complied by reclassifying women as "helpers"). It also meant decades later, when they got sick, their employment records didn't link to any asbestos exposure trade category. 79% of Norfolk Naval Shipyard workers showed lung abnormalities postwar. 9% of their wives did. The wives had never entered the yard. Their exposure pathway: work clothing, physical contact, family vehicles carrying asbestos fiber from the workplace to the home. Dr. Muriel Newhouse, 1965: household-only exposure established as independent mesothelioma pathway. 83 patients, 9 with no occupational exposure — 7 wives, 2 sisters. Most common history: washing a worker's dungarees. A meta-analysis across multiple studies found household contact confers a 5.02 times increased mesothelioma risk. The industry knew in 1940. OSHA mandated separate laundry in 1972. Metropolitan Life Insurance internal report, 1940: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure." Thirty-two years between industry knowledge and regulatory mandate. The ATI voted in 1957 not to study asbestos and cancer because it would "stir up a hornet's nest." Those are their actual minutes, on file, distributed to six companies. Eight years later, Newhouse proved in peer-reviewed literature what they had voted not to investigate. Jeanette Franklin: $6.5 million verdict. Reversed on a 1948 purchase agreement. Child of shipyard workers, peritoneal mesothelioma from childhood secondary exposure. Jury awarded her $6.5 million (March 2000). California Court of Appeal reversed (March 2001) on corporate chain-of-liability fine print from a 1948 acquisition. California Supreme Court declined to review. Jeanette Franklin received nothing. Female latency 29% longer than male. Median 43.7 years from exposure to diagnosis versus 33.8 years for men. Cases from 1940s shipyard exposure are still emerging today. A man died of mesothelioma at age 30 — never worked in a shipyard, born 1942, lived two blocks from Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Key Concepts

The "Helper" Classification and Structural Erasure

The War Labor Board's General Order No. 16, issued November 1942, mandated equal pay for equal work across war industries nationwide. The shipyards found two ways around it. The first: declare that women were doing "modified" or "diluted" versions of the same tasks, creating a separate pay category for what was substantively identical work. The second — simpler and more durable — was the single word "helper."

Welders filed as helpers. Tack welders filed as helpers. Asbestos layers and cutters filed as helpers. Historian Amy Kesselman documented in Fleeting Opportunities (SUNY Press, 1990) that contrary to the popular myth of women voluntarily returning to domestic life after the war, many sought to continue working and were pushed out by a combination of layoffs, union indifference, and overt pressure. When four million women left the industrial workforce by January 1946, their records went with them — or rather, the records stayed and said "helper."

The consequences arrived decades later. Asbestos trust funds — established from the 1970s onward when major manufacturers filed for bankruptcy — use occupational codes to process claims. A worker classified as a pipe coverer or insulator is linked to specific asbestos exposure categories. A worker classified as a helper has no such link. Women who spent years cutting asbestos cloth or sewing insulation blankets in spaces "so clouded with asbestos dust that workers couldn't see across them" were administratively invisible to the compensation systems built to compensate them.

Dr. Muriel Newhouse and the Household Exposure Problem

Muriel Newhouse was a colonel in the British Army — she landed in Normandy after D-Day, served in India and Singapore — who by the 1960s was conducting occupational health research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her colleagues described her in a published obituary as a "benign but fearsome ferret" for her ability to extract research compliance from subjects who had no interest in cooperating. In a study of North Sea trawlermen, she achieved 94% compliance conducting physical examinations on sailors who had just disembarked from long voyages and were, in her words, "intent on reaching the nearest bar."

In 1965, Newhouse and colleague Hilda Thompson published their mesothelioma study in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Of 83 patients at the London Hospital: 52% had documented occupational asbestos exposure (versus 11% of controls). Nine patients had no occupational exposure at all — seven wives and two sisters whose only contact with asbestos had come through a family member who worked with it. The most common history in Newhouse's notes: "the wife who washed her husband's dungarees or work clothes." One docker came home every day covered in asbestos fiber; his wife brushed him down at the door; she developed mesothelioma. She had never entered the workplace. She had never handled asbestos directly.

The industry had known this was possible since 1940. A Metropolitan Life Insurance internal report that year stated: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure." The Asbestos Textile Institute voted in March 1957 not to commission cancer research — recording three reasons in their minutes, including that it would "stir up a hornet's nest and put the whole industry under suspicion." OSHA did not mandate that work clothing be laundered separately from family clothing until 1972. Thirty-two years after the industry itself documented the household risk.

The Jeanette Franklin Case: Verdict, Reversal, and the Limits of Corporate Liability

Jeanette Franklin's parents — Vern Harnish, a welder, and Opal, a ship's carpenter's assistant — worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard in South San Francisco from 1942 to 1945. Jeanette was born during the war. She never set foot in the yard. Her exposure was the asbestos dust that traveled home on her parents' clothing and in the family car, three years of contact during the first years of her life. She was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1996.

Her attorneys at Kazan Law, led by Simona Farrise, filed against USX Corporation — the corporate heir to Western Pipe and Steel through a chain of mergers running through U.S. Steel. According to her attorneys, USX refused to offer one dollar in settlement. Their defense strategy never contested the asbestos exposure or the cancer. Instead, USX argued corporate non-liability: a 1948 purchase agreement had stated in its fine print that the buyer was not assuming the seller's tort liabilities. The exposure, they argued, was not their legal problem.

In March 2000, an Alameda County jury awarded Jeanette Franklin $6.5 million. In March 2001, the California Court of Appeal reversed the verdict — not because the exposure didn't happen, not because the cancer wasn't real, but because the 1948 purchase agreement's language did not transfer tort liability through the corporate succession. The California Supreme Court declined to review; Justice Mosk noted he would have granted review. Jeanette Franklin received nothing. More than fifty years after her parents' last day in the yard.

Latency and Cases Still Emerging

Mesothelioma's latency period — 20 to 50 years between first exposure and diagnosis — is the mechanism that allowed the asbestos industry to function as it did. Executives who signed internal memos documenting hazardous conditions in 1944 were retired or dead before the workers they managed started dying in the 1960s and 1970s. For women, median latency is 29% longer than for men: 43.7 years versus 33.8 years. A woman exposed in a wartime shipyard in 1943 has a median diagnosis date of approximately 1987 — but the distribution extends well beyond the median.

Dr. Selikoff documented a mesothelioma death in a man who had never worked in a shipyard — born 1942, two blocks from Brooklyn Navy Yard. The neighborhood was a secondary exposure zone. The women who held classification "helper" aren't in the long-term follow-up studies. Their children weren't systematically tracked. Cases from wartime exposure are still being diagnosed today.

Full Transcript

Cold Open: Ships Called "She"

Host 1: Quick quiz. Why do sailors call ships "she"?

Host 2: Protective. Maternal. Ships carry you, shelter you, bring you home through storms.

Host 1: That's what I always heard.

Host 2: That's one theory. Here's another — ships were property. Like wives under English common law. Belonged to their master. Did what they were told. Or didn't, and got called difficult.

Host 1: That's... less romantic.

Host 2: There's more. Ships were expensive. High-maintenance. Unpredictable. Temperamental. Need I go on?

Host 1: Please don't.

Host 2: But there's also this — ships were named after goddesses. Athena. Isis. The Virgin Mary. Divine protectors. The feminine as sacred.

Host 1: So which is it?

Host 2: All of them. Probably. That's how language works. The possessive and the sacred, wrapped up in one pronoun.

Host 1: She's all yours, Captain.

Host 2: Be my first mate?

Host 1: Aye, aye, Cap'n.

Host 2: Here's the thing — every ship had a name. The women who built them? History forgot theirs. This is Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards.

Section 1: The Women Who Came to the Yards

Host 1: Before Pearl Harbor, women in the shipyards?

Host 2: The Women's Bureau put it at about two percent. And that two percent was mostly clerical. On the production floor — on the hulls, in the asbestos-thick insulation bays — almost none.

Host 1: And then Pearl Harbor.

Host 2: By May nineteen forty-three, forty-five thousand one hundred seventy-four women working in Navy yards alone. Terminal Island in California hit thirty-three percent women. Portland and Vancouver shipyards? Thirty thousand women.

Host 1: They were recruited.

Host 2: "Women in the War — We Can't Win Without Them." Brooklyn Navy Yard received twenty thousand applications from women. The entire yard employed about seventy thousand people at peak. Seven thousand of them were women.

Host 1: What jobs were they doing?

Host 2: The Women's Bureau documented one hundred eighty-nine different occupations. Including — and I'm reading directly from their report — "Asbestos filler and sewer." "Asbestos layer-out and cutter."

Host 1: Those are official job titles.

Host 2: Official government classifications. The women who held them cut asbestos cloth with their hands. They sewed insulation blankets. They filled sewn forms with loose asbestos fiber. They worked inside engine spaces that were white with it.

Host 1: And nobody was telling them what asbestos was.

Host 2: No warnings. No explanations. Instructions, not information.

Section 2: Lucille Kolkin and the Classification That Erased Them

Host 2: One of those seven thousand women at the Brooklyn Navy Yard was Lucille Kolkin. She started in nineteen forty-two. She trained as a tack welder. And she wrote home to her husband Al — who was a machinist at the same yard before they shipped him out to the Pacific in nineteen forty-four.

Host 1: What did she say?

Host 2: "The physical conditions were very rough, and I must say I wasn't crazy about the cold or the heat or… we stood on things that were very uncomfortable all day. I mean, ten hours a day."

Host 1: Ten hours a day standing on whatever they gave you.

Host 2: And she wrote — "Nobody ever asked for a hammer. They asked for a fuckin' hammer."

Host 1: She fit right in.

Host 2: She fit in, and she pushed back. She wrote about an African-American woman named Minnie who was planning to quit because she felt persecuted, and Kolkin and other women fought to convince her to stay. She organized. She paid attention to the pay. And she wrote it all down.

Host 1: Those letters still exist?

Host 2: Donated to the Center for Brooklyn History at Brooklyn Public Library after Kolkin died in nineteen ninety-seven. Handwritten. Her letters, and her oral history recorded in nineteen eighty-nine. Jennifer Egan read them to research her novel Manhattan Beach. There are forty-nine oral histories in that collection — welders, pipefitters, women who built the ships that crossed the Atlantic.

Host 1: And here's what they promised those women.

Host 2: Equal pay for equal work. The War Labor Board issued General Order Number Sixteen — November nineteen forty-two. Nationwide policy. Mandatory.

Host 1: Did they get it?

Host 2: The same order that mandated equal pay gave employers a way out. If they called the job "modified" or "diluted" — if they said the women were doing a slightly different version of the work — they could pay less. And in the Navy yards, there was an easier trick than that.

Host 1: What was the trick?

Host 2: They called the women helpers. Not welders. Not journeymen. Helpers. One word. One category with a different pay scale.

Host 1: Kolkin was a tack welder. Filed as a helper.

Host 2: Ida Pollack. Sylvia Everitt. Both welders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Their oral histories are in the same collection. They described starting wages of something close to fifty cents an hour. The men beside them were making a dollar twenty.

Host 1: Less than half.

Host 2: And they got closer to parity only after they organized. After a fight. The War Labor Board's equal pay mandate was real. The enforcement was not.

Sponsor Break 1

Host 2: This episode is brought to you by Danziger and De-Yano. A team where everyone has skin in the game. Dan-Dell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Section 3: Working Conditions and the 1945 Displacement

Host 1: And the working conditions.

Host 2: Multiple sources describe the shipyards as — quoting here — "so clouded with asbestos dust that workers couldn't see across them."

Host 1: Were there respirators?

Host 2: The Navy required them. Kaiser shipyards — Portland, Vancouver — one of their own officials admitted years later they "never required workers to wear protective gear."

Host 1: The Navy had a policy. The yards chose not to enforce it.

Host 2: And when women did get respirators, there was another problem. "They didn't make them to fit women. They were in men's sizes."

Host 1: So you're working in dust you can't see through, with equipment designed for someone else, being told it counts as protection.

Host 2: And nobody's telling you what asbestos actually is.

Host 1: How bad was the exposure?

Host 2: Norfolk Naval Shipyard studied their workers after the war. Seventy-nine percent showed lung abnormalities.

Host 1: That's almost everyone in the yard.

Host 2: And nine percent of their wives. Who never set foot in the yard.

Host 1: Wait. Their wives.

Host 2: We'll get there. First — what happened when the war ended.

Host 1: The men came home.

Host 2: June to September nineteen forty-five. One in four women factory workers fired.

Host 1: Were they given a choice?

Host 2: The unions didn't fight for them. No documented efforts to retain women workers. And some of the foremen were very clear about why.

Host 1: What did they say?

Host 2: "The foreman said you ladies have to stop working so fast because when the war ends the men are coming."

Host 1: He said the quiet part out loud.

Host 2: By January nineteen forty-six, four million women had left the industrial workforce. Portland Kaiser went from ninety-seven thousand workers to two thousand women. Ninety-three percent reduction.

Host 2: Historian Amy Kesselman spent years documenting what happened to the women of the Kaiser shipyards after the war. She called the book "Fleeting Opportunities." Because that's exactly what it was. The work, the skills, the pay — all of it treated as temporary. Quote: "Despite the myth that these women yearned to return to their kitchens, in fact many wanted to continue working."

Host 1: But they were pushed out anyway.

Host 2: And when the women left, their records went with them. Here's something that gets overlooked: the word "helper" wasn't just a pay classification. It was an exposure classification. When you're listed as a helper, your records don't link to the trade you were actually working. You're not a welder. Not an asbestos layer. A helper. The exposure category doesn't exist for helpers.

Host 1: So decades later, when they got sick—

Host 2: When they got sick and their families went looking for documentation of where they'd worked and what they'd breathed — the records either didn't exist, or they were filed under a category that didn't match any asbestos exposure code on a trust fund claim form. Women weren't included in the long-term follow-up studies. Their children weren't tracked.

Host 1: The erasure wasn't random.

Host 2: It was structural. Built into the word "helper" from the day they hired her.

Sponsor Break 2

Host 2: Women who worked in shipyards during the war — or washed their husband's work clothes — were exposed without warning, without protection, without choice. If that's your family's story, Danziger and De-Yano can help. Dan-Dell dot com.

Section 4: Dr. Muriel Newhouse and the Household Exposure Proof

Host 1: Nine percent of the wives. You were going to get there.

Host 2: Muriel Newhouse was an occupational physician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She had been a colonel in the British Army. She landed in Normandy after D-Day. She served in India. In Singapore. By nineteen sixty-five she was in occupational health research, and her colleagues described her as — and I'm quoting an obituary here — a "benign but fearsome ferret."

Host 1: Fearsome ferret.

Host 2: If you had information she needed, you were giving it to her. In one study of North Sea trawlermen, she achieved ninety-four percent compliance conducting physical examinations on sailors who had just disembarked from long voyages and were, quote, "intent on reaching the nearest bar."

Host 1: She stood between sailors and a bar and won.

Host 2: In nineteen sixty-five, she and her colleague Hilda Thompson published a study in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Eighty-three mesothelioma patients from the London Hospital. Fifty-two percent had documented asbestos exposure — compared to eleven percent of the controls. Statistically significant beyond any reasonable doubt.

Host 1: And the household cases?

Host 2: Nine women in her study had never worked a day near asbestos. Their only exposure was contact with a relative who did. Seven wives. Two sisters. The most common history: "The wife who washed her husband's dungarees or work clothes."

Host 1: Laundry.

Host 2: One docker came home every day — quote — "white with asbestos." His wife brushed him down at the door. She got mesothelioma.

Host 1: She never touched the material herself.

Host 2: Years later, Los Angeles County studied two hundred seventy-four shipyard workers' wives. Eleven point three percent had asbestosis. A meta-analysis across multiple studies found household contact gave you a five point oh two times increased risk of mesothelioma.

Host 1: Five times higher risk from living with someone who worked with asbestos.

Host 2: Here's the question. When did the industry know this was happening?

Host 1: Nineteen sixty-five, when Newhouse published.

Host 2: Nineteen forty.

Host 1: What?

Host 2: Metropolitan Life Insurance, internal report, nineteen forty. Quote: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure."

Host 1: They knew in nineteen forty.

Host 2: Nineteen forty-six, Journal of the American Medical Association. Workers should have showers and separate clothing storage.

Host 1: Okay, so by forty-six—

Host 2: By the nineteen fifties, the industry understood cancer was spreading to homes and neighborhoods.

Host 1: And they did what about it?

Host 2: March seventh, nineteen fifty-seven. The Asbestos Textile Institute's Air Hygiene subcommittee held a meeting. Question on the table: should they fund a study on asbestos and cancer? They voted no. And they wrote down why. The minutes record three reasons. First: someone else was studying it. Second — and these are their actual words, in their actual minutes — it would "stir up a hornet's nest and put the whole industry under suspicion." Third: there wasn't enough evidence.

Host 1: In nineteen fifty-seven. Not enough evidence.

Host 2: Those minutes were filed. Copies went to six companies. Someone typed them up, printed them, mailed them. Not one person in that chain said, "We can't write that down." Eight years later, Muriel Newhouse proved in a peer-reviewed paper what the industry had voted not to investigate.

Host 1: Their reason for not looking became the eight-year gap.

Host 2: Nineteen sixty-five, Newhouse publishes. Nineteen seventy-two, OSHA finally mandates: do not launder work clothing with family clothing.

Host 1: Nineteen forty to nineteen seventy-two.

Host 2: Thirty-two years of knowing and not warning.

Section 5: Jeanette Franklin and the Latency Clock

Host 2: And here's why that math isn't abstract. Latency period for mesothelioma — how long between exposure and diagnosis.

Host 1: Twenty to fifty years.

Host 2: For women, it's twenty-nine percent longer than men. Median forty-three point seven years versus thirty-three point eight.

Host 1: So cases from the war are still emerging.

Host 2: Right now. Today. Jeanette Franklin was born during the war. Both her parents worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard in South San Francisco — her father Vern Harnish, a welder; her mother Opal, a ship's carpenter's assistant. Neither one worked directly with asbestos. They worked in spaces where it was present. Mixing mud. Sweeping debris. And then they came home.

Host 1: Jeanette never set foot in the yard.

Host 2: Never. She was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in nineteen ninety-six. The exposure pathway: asbestos dust on her parents' clothing and in the family car, traveling from the yard to the house, three years, nineteen forty-two to forty-five.

Host 1: She was a child.

Host 2: Her attorneys — Simona Farrise at Kazan Law — filed against USX Corporation. USX was the corporate heir to Western Pipe and Steel, through a chain of mergers and acquisitions that eventually ran through U.S. Steel. Her attorneys said USX refused to offer even one dollar in settlement.

Host 1: Not one dollar.

Host 2: Their defense had nothing to do with asbestos. USX argued they weren't legally responsible because a purchase agreement signed in nineteen forty-eight — when Jeanette was still in grammar school — said in its fine print that the buyer was not assuming the seller's tort liabilities. The exposure wasn't their problem. The paperwork said so.

Host 1: They never argued the asbestos wasn't dangerous.

Host 2: They never got there. They argued the chain of corporate ownership. March two thousand. The jury awarded six point five million dollars. They heard the evidence. They understood what childhood exposure meant. They found for Jeanette Franklin.

Host 1: First major verdict for secondary childhood exposure.

Host 2: And then USX appealed. In March two thousand and one, the California Court of Appeal reversed the verdict. Not because the exposure didn't happen. Not because the cancer wasn't real. Because of the nineteen forty-eight purchase agreement. Because the fine print said USX hadn't assumed those liabilities. The California Supreme Court was asked to review. Justice Mosk noted he would have granted it. The court declined.

Host 1: Jeanette Franklin received nothing.

Host 2: The jury found for her. The appellate court found a technicality. More than fifty years after her parents' last day at the yard.

Host 1: How many others?

Host 2: Dr. Selikoff documented another case. Man died of mesothelioma at age thirty.

Host 1: Never worked in a shipyard.

Host 2: Born nineteen forty-two. Two blocks from Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Host 1: And we don't know how many more.

Host 2: We genuinely don't. That's the answer. The women weren't in the long-term studies. The children weren't tracked. The records say helper.

Sponsor Break 3

Host 2: Anna Jackson is the Director of Patient Support at Danziger and De-Yano. Nearly fifteen years of experience. She lost her own husband to cancer.

Host 1: One of the families she helped — a woman whose father worked construction and auto repair in the seventies. As a little girl, she helped him out of his work clothes every evening.

Host 2: Secondary exposure.

Host 1: Diagnosed with mesothelioma at age ten. Given three to six months.

Host 2: She survived thirty-five years. During those years, she counseled over two hundred newly diagnosed families. Her name was Michelle. Her story is in "Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma," compiled by Dave Foster.

Host 1: Available free from Danziger and De-Yano. Dan-Dell dot com. That's D-A-N-D-E-L-L dot com.

Closing

Host 2: The industry knew in nineteen forty that asbestos required changing clothes before going home. They knew in the fifties that cancer was spreading to families. They voted in fifty-seven not to study it. They didn't mandate separate laundry until nineteen seventy-two. Thirty-two years.

Host 1: And the women who built the ships—

Host 2: One hundred eighty-nine documented occupations. They built the ships that won the war. They got fired when the men came home. They got sick decades later. And when they went looking for records of what they'd breathed — the records said helper.

Host 1: Not welder. Not asbestos layer. Helper.

Host 2: Next time — what happened after the war ended. Not to the workers. To the industry. Production didn't slow down.

Host 1: Episode 28: Wartime Production, Peacetime Deaths.

Host 2: Ships are called "she" because sailors have always named them for goddesses. Because something that carries you through danger deserves a name that holds the weight of that responsibility. Aphrodite. Athena. Things that protect.

Host 2: Seven thousand women built ships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard alone. Millions more in Baltimore, in Portland, in South San Francisco. They held the welding torches. They cut the asbestos cloth. They were "helpers."

Host 2: The ships went to sea. The women were sent home. The asbestos stayed in their lungs. And in their children's lungs.

Host 2: The industry that called the ships "she" — that named them for goddesses, for mothers, for the things that carry you through danger — voted in nineteen fifty-seven, in an actual meeting with actual minutes, not to find out what the dust was doing to the women who had built them. Not enough evidence. That's what they wrote down.

Host 2: She built your ship. She named it for a goddess. You sent her home.

Host 2: You didn't look back.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many women worked in U.S. shipyards during World War II?

By May 1943, at least 45,174 women worked in U.S. Navy yards alone. Terminal Island in California had a workforce that was 33% women. Portland and Vancouver Kaiser shipyards employed 30,000 women. The Brooklyn Navy Yard received 20,000 applications from women and employed approximately 7,000 at peak. Across all industries, an estimated 6 million women entered the defense manufacturing workforce between 1941 and 1945. The Women's Bureau documented 189 different occupations held by women in these facilities — including official government job titles "asbestos filler and sewer" and "asbestos layer-out and cutter."

What was the "helper" classification and why does it matter for mesothelioma claims today?

The "helper" classification was how wartime shipyards circumvented the War Labor Board's equal pay mandate (General Order No. 16, November 1942). By reclassifying women workers — welders, tack welders, asbestos layers — as "helpers," yards maintained a lower pay scale. The legal consequence: asbestos trust fund systems built in the 1970s and 1980s link compensation eligibility to occupational trade codes. A worker classified as a pipe coverer or insulator has documented asbestos exposure on file. A worker classified as a "helper" does not. Women who spent years cutting asbestos cloth in spaces "so clouded with asbestos dust that workers couldn't see across them" may find their employment records do not trigger any asbestos exposure category on a modern trust fund claim form. The classification that cut their wages also erased their exposure history.

What is secondary or household asbestos exposure and how does it cause mesothelioma?

Secondary exposure — also called para-occupational or take-home exposure — occurs when a worker carries asbestos fibers home on their clothing, hair, skin, or in their vehicle, exposing family members who had no direct workplace contact with asbestos. Common pathways include shaking out or laundering work clothes, physical contact with a worker who brought fibers home, and living in a home where contaminated clothing was stored. A meta-analysis across multiple epidemiological studies found that household contact with an asbestos worker confers a 5.02 times increased risk of mesothelioma. Dr. Muriel Newhouse's 1965 study — 83 mesothelioma patients, 9 with household-only exposure — was the first to systematically document household exposure as an independent pathway. Family members, including children, who experienced secondary exposure may qualify for mesothelioma compensation through trust funds or litigation.

When did the asbestos industry know about household exposure risk?

Metropolitan Life Insurance documented it in an internal report in 1940, stating: "It is known that asbestos is the type of toxic substance that requires changing clothes when leaving an area of exposure." In 1946, the Journal of the American Medical Association recommended that workers have access to showers and separate clothing storage. By the 1950s, the industry's own internal discussions acknowledged that cancer was spreading to families and neighborhoods. The Asbestos Textile Institute voted in March 1957 not to commission research on asbestos and cancer, recording in their own minutes that such a study would "stir up a hornet's nest." OSHA did not mandate that work clothing be laundered separately from family clothing until 1972 — thirty-two years after the industry itself first documented the household risk.

What happened in the Jeanette Franklin mesothelioma case?

Jeanette Franklin was born during World War II. Both her parents — Vern Harnish, a welder, and Opal, a ship's carpenter's assistant — worked at Western Pipe and Steel Shipyard in South San Francisco from 1942 to 1945. Jeanette never entered the yard. She was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1996, her exposure pathway being asbestos dust on her parents' clothing and in the family car during her first three years of life. Her attorneys at Kazan Law (Simona Farrise) filed against USX Corporation, the corporate heir to Western Pipe and Steel through U.S. Steel. USX reportedly refused to offer any settlement. Their defense never contested the asbestos exposure or the cancer — instead arguing that a 1948 purchase agreement's fine print stated the buyer had not assumed the seller's tort liabilities. In March 2000, an Alameda County jury awarded Jeanette Franklin $6.5 million. In March 2001, the California Court of Appeal reversed the verdict on the corporate liability argument. The California Supreme Court declined review. Jeanette Franklin received nothing.

Can family members who experienced secondary asbestos exposure file a mesothelioma claim?

Yes. Family members who were exposed to asbestos through a relative's work clothing, presence in the home, or other take-home pathways may qualify for compensation through asbestos trust funds or litigation. The legal doctrine of household or para-occupational exposure is established and has been litigated in many jurisdictions. Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos bankruptcy trust funds. Each fund has specific eligibility criteria, and secondary exposure claims require documentation of the worker's exposure history, employment records, and the nature of the household contact. Women who worked in WWII shipyards — or their surviving family members — may also qualify directly as primary-exposure claimants based on their own occupational exposure, regardless of job classification as "helpers." Contact <a href="https://dandell.com">Danziger & De Llano</a> for a free consultation.

External Links

Primary Documents and Legal Records

• Veterans and Mesothelioma — Danziger & De Llano
• Mesothelioma Compensation Guide — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Exposure Overview — Danziger & De Llano

Medical and Scientific Resources

• NCI Malignant Mesothelioma — National Cancer Institute
• NIOSH Asbestos Information — Centers for Disease Control

Compensation and Legal Resources

• Veterans Mesothelioma — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Trust Fund Payouts — Danziger & De Llano

Podcast Resources

• Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards — MLNM podcast landing page
• Asbestos Podcast Hub — All episodes
• Episode 27 on Apple Podcasts
• Episode 27 on Spotify
• Episode 27 on YouTube

Series Navigation

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Arc 6: The War Effort
Previous: Episode 26: The Shipyards Never Sleep	Episode 27: The Women of the Shipyards (Arc 6, Episode 3)	Next: Episode 28: Wartime Production, Peacetime Deaths

Related Wiki Pages

• Asbestos_Podcast_EP26_Transcript — The Shipyards Never Sleep: Howard Zinn oral history, Clarence Borel testimony, 1944 Navy dangerous-hazard memo
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP28_Transcript — Wartime Production, Peacetime Deaths: 107% postwar consumption increase, Braun-Truan fraud, Levittown asbestos, latency clock
• Occupational_Asbestos_Exposure — Overview of high-risk occupations and exposure documentation
• Asbestos_History_Timeline — Complete chronological record including wartime production period
• The_Asbestos_Podcast — Main podcast page with all episodes
• WWII_Asbestos_Exposure — Detailed documentation of wartime exposure across shipbuilding trades

About This Series

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast tracing the complete history of asbestos from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban. The series is produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP, a nationwide mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims.

Episode 27 is the third episode of Arc 6 ("The War Effort"). Episodes 25 and 26 established the institutional context and the scale of male shipyard exposure. Episode 27 turns to the workforce history that has been systematically underdocumented: the women who built the ships, the classification system that stripped their exposure records, and the latency math that means their cases are still emerging today.

Approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year. Women now represent a growing share of mesothelioma diagnoses — many tracing to wartime and postwar occupational and household exposure. The 5.02x increased mesothelioma risk from household contact with an asbestos worker means that families of WWII-era workers may qualify for compensation even without direct occupational exposure. Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds for victims and their families.

If you or a loved one experienced household or occupational asbestos exposure — including as a family member of a WWII shipyard worker — contact Danziger & De Llano for a free case evaluation. Call (866) 222-9990. Available seven days a week.