“They May Not be Able to Keep a Secret, but They Can Keep a Flamingo”: Gender, Labor, and Zoos during World War II

In 1941, Pathé News released a short newsreel about newly employed female workers at the Paignton Zoo in Devon, England. Over shots of women pushing wheelbarrows and feeding caged tigers, the narrator declares: “Yes, they may not be able to keep a secret, but they can keep a flamingo!” Not everyone in the zoo industry agreed. Before the war, most zoos refused to hire women in anything other than administrative roles. Beginning in the early 1940s, however, growing numbers of women began to don zoo khaki to work as animal keepers, trainers—even zoo directors. Drawing on evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Germany, and elsewhere, this paper examines zoos’ controversial efforts to hire female workers during World War II. Although zoos in the United States and the British Empire often went to great lengths to publicize women’s war efforts, female workers routinely faced discrimination and hostility from male staff. For their part, zoos in Axis countries typically resisted the urge to hire women, citing the inherent dangers of working with animals. Instead, some embraced an alternative solution to their labor shortages, relying upon prisoners of war and forced laborers—including married couples—to maintain their dwindling animal collections. This paper concludes with a brief comparison of two of the most significant “zoo women” of the era, San Diego’s Belle Benchley and Berlin’s Katharina Heinroth, both of whom leveraged gendered expectations to legitimize the presence of women in the zoo profession. Ultimately, this paper suggests the need to look beyond “Rosie the Riveter” to understand the fraught history of gender and labor on World War II’s multiple homefronts.