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Material Culture · Chapter 15, 1940–1950

The Nylon Riots

When stockings were worth standing in line all day.

Women lined up for nylon stockings at Miller's Department Store in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the postwar nylon shortage.
Women lined up for nylon stockings at Miller's Department Store in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the postwar nylon shortage.Ed Westcott, U.S. Department of Energy, "Standing in line for nylon stockings at Miller's Department Store, Oak Ridge, Tennessee," January 4, 1946. Public domain (U.S. government work).

When civilian nylon stockings returned in the autumn of 1945, demand vastly outstripped supply. Newspapers announced which stores expected shipments, and crowds formed before dawn; in November 1945 an estimated thirty thousand women lined up in New York, and in San Francisco a sale was called off after a crowd broke a store window. The most famous episode came in Pittsburgh on June 12, 1946, when an East Liberty hosiery shop offered its stock to 'working girls' only. Estimates put the line at thirty to forty thousand women, sixteen blocks long, for ten to thirteen thousand pairs; fights broke out, and the Pittsburgh Press headlined 'Nylon Mob, 40,000 Strong, Shrieks and Sways for Mile.' The shortage eased as DuPont expanded production. The episode is often told as comedy, but it captured the pent-up consumer demand—and the arguments over who deserved scarce goods—that shaped the postwar economy.

Sources

  1. Scholarship'Pity the Poor Working Girl': Nylons, Work, Class, Ideology, and Politics in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1945–46. Tortoise (Princeton University), 2020.
  2. Primary sourceWilliam Cooper. Nylon Mob, 40,000 Strong, Shrieks and Sways for Mile. The Pittsburgh Press, 1946.
  3. ScholarshipEmily Spivack. Stocking Series, Part 1: Wartime Rationing and Nylon Riots. Smithsonian Magazine, 2012.

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