Rosies have always been Riveting
Writing a new post has been nagging at me for the last two weeks of my first battle with ‘La Rona’. SIDE NOTE: Sometimes I think having worked in marketing and as a creator AND now in the entertainment industry that my overachiever perfectionist imposter syndrome brain overthinks how to make something work vs. executing. I’d probably write about it more, but I don’t have a solution for it. We can tackle that topic later.
As I’ve come closer to feeling better overcoming the plague, it’s been this one Instagram post that has been the sticker burr in my boot I can’t seem to shake.
But why? Thing is ‘Rosie the Riveter’ wasn’t broadly used in wartime propaganda posters.
Don’t get me wrong. By far, the most prolific image we associate with American women of World War II outside of Alberto Vargas’ infamous pinups is ‘Rosie’. Walk into any novelty shop and you’ll find sections riddled with a wide variety of paraphernalia dedicated to the flexing war production worker. Let’s be real. I’ve single-handedly kept these tchotchke manufacturers in business. Campaigns dedicated to ‘girl power’ and the annual Women’s History celebration every March move the popularity of this icon in and out of our everyday lexicon, reminding us of the strength, patriotism, and all around kick-assery of female willpower. We can do it! WOOT!
Comb through the magazines and newspaper pages of the war years when most would have seen resemblance of her figure trotting victoriously down the avenues of the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ and any reader will find themselves overwhelmed by articles and profiles that shower the wartime achievements and contributions of American women in oceans of praise. The tone shifts are STARK.
Truth is not many people saw ‘Rosie’ as we’ve come to know her. She was only a briefly displayed work-incentive poster circulated internally among factories at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company. Obviously this origin story isn’t widely known.
It’s not surprising then that popular memory and recollection of the bandana coiffed fem-dol has limited the significance of what she truly represents, associating her more to the post-war happy Stepford Wives awakening of early 1960s Feminine Mystique acclaim and 1970s Women’s Liberation instead. Oh, the sacrifices they made, the losses they must have felt in the absence of all their wartime gains.
Even historical scholarship on both the wartime and post-war experiences of real-life ‘Rosies’ ignore the magnitude of their place in history. Women’s movement research claims it was put on pause the years between 1920s suffrage and the 1960s. Some go as far as calling it the “feminist void”. This one still baffles me.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, ‘Rosies’ were mostly working mothers who’d long been workin’ hard for the money, their rights, and the ability to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit happiness for herself and her family. Actually, they were doing this well before the war. Like since around the turn of the century. AND they’ve kept on doing this since.
Not like any of us really know this though. I don’t imagine that anyone really views ‘Rosie’ in this manner other than myself, maybe some other historians, and likely Women’s Studies folks. Truth be told, what you’re about to read is only a sneak peek into what I’ve been obsessively researching since the summer of 2020. And it’s spiraled out of control and made me feel like I am stuck in the Matrix. It’s a crazy spiderweb, labor of love that I really hope you enjoy, find interesting, and want to learn more about but ultimately send me feedback cause yo, history can be boring and I’m hellbent on making it not so. Or don’t keep reading, but maybe just…
If you’re reading this in your email inbox, you might want to click here to open the link cause apparently some email providers clip TLDR messages. *cough*Gmail*cough*
This is gonna be a long one. You’ll want to get comfy. It’ll be worth it. Promise. But just so you know, you’ve been warned.
Ok, let’s jump in.
Ask any American about the early years of the war and they’ll likely gloss over anything that happened before Pearl Harbor. Remember, remember. Over a year before the winter months of 1941, the first peacetime military draft in 1940 was already welcoming soldiers into the armed forces. All the while, women were joining wartime production labor. I mean, we already know how significant the war was for women busting down doors to finally enter the workforce. Work was not a new gain for ‘Rosies’ nor was it a significant milestone for the status of women. Well, shit. Nearly two years prior to the ‘day that will live in infamy,’ 11.5 million women in the country were already working, albeit not alongside welcoming arms as we’ve been led to believe.
Post-Depression 1930s was intensely hostile towards women in the workplace. Even more so if they were married–more than 80% of 1938 America was opposed to hiring them and laws were passed restricting their employment. Campaigns jointly produced by labor, government, and mass media urged women not to take what few jobs were available and were plastered everywhere in stateside communications. Too bad it didn’t work. Women’s employment remained stable throughout the decade. It was the Great Depression, y’all. Think Grapes of Wrath Dust Bowl. People needed to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. To be fair…I have been wanting to learn to pickle and can.
AND these women weren’t strictly collecting a paycheck.
1930s working women organized, protested, went on strike etc. to fight for improvements in wages, hours, and safety conditions. Domestic workers, store clerks, restaurant employees, switchboard operators, etc. etc. etc. worked with national union federations, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) to pressure the government to pass laws like the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that guaranteed an eight-hour workday and a forty-hour workweek, minimum wage, and "time-and-a-half" overtime pay for working women and men.
By 1940, the percentage of women who were working hadn’t significantly changed–it was practically what it had been in 1910, campaigns be damned *shakes fist in the air*–only now they’d ALSO advanced labor conditions for working Americans. BOOM. You’re welcome.
With the war ramping up, more and more men enlisted or were drafted into military service, diminishing the number of available workers. The growing war production space reached outside of their industry to recruit women. Here she came to save the day. Lower-paying positions in restaurant, laundry, and cleaning work were significantly affected, their workers lured into defense production by the higher wages associated with industrial work, an average 40% higher than in consumer factories, some three times what service businesses could afford. Can you blame them?
Almost overnight, America's newly FDR-minted ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ created changes–better pay and opportunities for promotions, education, and training–that women and activists had been lobbying and organizing to win for over a decade, albeit unsuccessfully.
More than any other group of Rosies, women of color gained the most from these changes, particularly Black women who had the largest percentages of employed workers in domestic and farm work. Employment percentages of Black women in housework declined from 72% to 48% and 20% to 7% in farm work during wartime, though not without some hurdles. Defense work also offered Mexican American women cleaner work at higher pay and a sense of stability/steady income since many worked seasonally in agriculture and the cannery industry. What’s really MOST significant of all the wartime workplace gains for ‘Rosies’ was that many traditionally male jobs, like those in industrial manufacturing, were employing women for the first time.
Still, unions continued slimy 1930s practices that prevented working women from enrolling in union membership, especially women of color. Joke’s on them because working women were already familiar with union rhetoric thanks to the shop floors and activities they’d taken part in during the 1930s. They understood how membership would enable them to gain valuable and much-needed political experience while also providing them with the resources they needed to mount a collective challenge to sexual discrimination in employment practices.
Unionizing would quickly prove its worth in gold and be put to good use. Due to complaints from United Electrical Workers (UEW) and United Auto Workers (UAW) ‘Rosies’, the National War Labor Board declared women would receive equal pay in 1942. UEW and UAW ‘Rosies’ joined AFL-affiliated Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) ‘Rosies’ in advocating for state legislatures to expand unemployment insurance to include disability payment support for expecting-’Rosies’ during pregnancy and also had contract clauses amended to include maternity benefits, job protection, transfer rights, no loss of rank, use of accrued sick leave, and medical insurance throughout pregnancy. WHOA. Now these are significant wins worthy of a TikTok trend. But not everything was coming up rosy.
Working women of color were often faced with difficulty in getting hired, found themselves segregated, their skill levels overlooked in favor of lower performing Euro-American women, assigned harsher work for having Spanish-last names or speaking the language, and weren’t allowed into union membership. Surprised? Thankfully, integrated shop floors opened up new opportunities for mixed-race coalitions to be built to organize activities for the first time:
Layle Lane, Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, pulled nation-wide plans together for the 1941 March on Washington, a protest of discriminatory employments policies at government contracted facilities, led by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Walter White, the President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Though the protest did not take place and results were limited, Lane and others efforts did prompt Executive Order 8802’s ban of such policies in government and defense industries and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC).
On the other side of the country, activists Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright of El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española, a coalition of activists dedicated on the improvement of labor conditions and civil rights for Latinos living in the U.S., led interracial efforts like the campaign for the release of the wrongfully convicted youths of the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder of Zoot Suit riots notoriety.
By wars’ end, labor statistics grew by 6M ‘Rosies’ and 3.5M union memberships were added to national totals from previous years. U.S. Department of Labor report statistics average 4,143 total number of strikes each year between 1941 and 1945, not including the record-breaking strike wave of 1946 in which a whopping 4,985 strikes took place. Current figures pale in comparison. ie. ~35 a year.
As the need for soldiers continued to grow, campaigns began to lure housewives to work. Responsible for creating propaganda and managing public communications, the Office of War Information (OWI) and War Manpower Commission (WMC) mounted the challenge of creating a successful campaign that could both squash voice of opposition and draw housewives in from their dwellings. Slogans like “Do the Job He Left Behind” and “Women in the War–We Can’t Win Without Them” plastered ads in print, magazines, posters, and boomed from radios. Rest assured, they told them, women (and men) do not worry–defense work would only last the length of the war and their femininity standards would remain intact.
Soon, facilities and companies across the nation lifted their bans against hiring married women. Because the WMC viewed married working mothers as an indispensable labor reserve, they even persuaded companies to create “special provisions” like extended grocery hours and pre-ordered family meals at local cafeterias to support the workload of worker-mother-homemaker ‘Rosies’. Child care advocates and HERE among committees of Labor Councils across the nation tirelessly lobbied for government funded child centers and tax breaks for workers when thanks to a little help from Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR Congress passed the Lanham Act in 1940 and Community Facilities Act in 1942 that funded construction of childcare facilities and programs. Wait, they had federally funded childcare?! By 1944, labor polls reported that a majority of ‘Rosies’ weren’t single, but married and over 35. For the first time, wives made up almost a majority of female workers.
They were darn proud of it too. Work was fulfilling and, most of all, allowed them to contribute in helping their country and their soldiers. Research books, articles, memoirs, and oral histories quote ‘Rosies’ using words like “duty,” “obligation,” or expressing that they were “doing [their] part” when talking about why they joined the workplace that don’t cite anything to do with money. As if that wasn’t enough to melt your heart fall in love with them, their sense of pride and self-worth will grab you by the emotional jugular:
“I was just a mother of four kids[.] But I felt proud of myself and felt good being that I had never done anything like that [before]”, “The job reinforced the feeling that I was the equal of any man”, “[Women found out they could go out and they could survive. They could really do it on their own.”
And they were good at it, too.
Praise splashed across headlines in daily profiles on individuals and teams of women, and columns that celebrated ‘Rosies’ as steel workers, electricians, welders, riveters, lumberjacks, etc. were highlighted in every available media outlet. Local radio stations sponsored segments under headlines like “Working Women Win Wars Week” and “Commando Mary,” who broadcast tips on how women could help defeat the enemy, once declared that women possessed “a limitless, ever-flowing source of moral and physical energy, working for victory.” Rose Schneiderman of the WTUL shared: “the woman worker had become a first-class citizen whose contribution was recognized by everyone as indispensable to national survival.” In the end, even some of their loudest adversaries *ahem* men had grown a liking towards their ‘Rosie’ co-workers: “[...]I had become so close [to these women], who had worked seven days a week for years and had been commended so many times by the Navy for the work they were doing.” This feeling didn’t last long though. To quote Margaret Hickey of the Women’s Advisory Committee, “Perhaps intentions were never honorable.”
‘Rosies’ may have been well aware that their wartime work was temporary, but they themselves weren’t temporary workers. Those who had always worked would lose more than jobs and wartime benefits. When government contracts were lost or had expired, the jobs that had changed their lives quickly became scarce and non-existent. This didn’t change their need to support their families. In their eyes, work had become essential to building and maintaining the quality of family life. Statistics reflect these opinions. Predictions estimated that in the year after the war a large portion of the 6M people who would lose their jobs would be women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expected as much. In reality, it only seemed like these statistics had suffered a major loss.
Because women were leaving their better-paid wartime jobs and rejoining the workforce in other industries, the shifting statistics created the illusion that there was sudden widespread female unemployment. 3.25M women either left work or were laid off in the period between September 1945 and November 1946, but nearly 2.75M women over the same period were (re)hired. Why do we think they were so quick to hang their rivets up in exchange for aprons? What’s even more revealing about how wrong we’ve got it about ‘Rosies’ at war’s end is the growing number of wives that found gainful employment afterwards–roughly 10.4M by 1952–and the rate at which the population of working women would increase–a rate four times faster than that of men.
A 1951 Times Magazine article titled “Why do Twenty Million Women work?” found that 84% of working women polled cited their reasoning for employment as economic need and 79% said they enjoyed working. So, women weren’t living the dream in suburbia drinking martinis en masse? Just as it had been for working women throughout the 1930s, getting a paycheck continued to be an economic necessity, if not, even more so in the post-war period.
But most Americans continued to believe ‘a woman’s place is in the home.’ Women working threatened the integrity of the family. As men returned home, ‘Rosies’ and their families were faced with post-war inflation and price hikes. To keep up with the growing economy, many couples needed two incomes. But ‘Rosies’ would have to return to lower paid “pink collar jobs” to free up positions for returning soldiers, and they largely did, though their lives would not be like what it was during the wartime. It’s not like they were going to settle though. Good. Hmph.
An explosion of organizing took place between the war's end in and the Second Wave of the women’s movement. Instead of making advancements, ‘Rosies’ and organizations were forced to devote most of their energy and resources to fighting repeal or erosion of laws that were passed during the war period. A coalition called the Congress of American Women (CAW) and delegations of housewives lobbied to demand an extension of wartime price controls. When a Women’s Bureau report was released after the war that found wage differences based on sex persisted despite women’s wage being higher at the wars end. So, basically “pink collar jobs” still paid less like it did before the war compared to the war production work they’d just left. Women unionists across industries began to use what they’d learned from the war years, launching rallying cries for equal pay–women within the United Electrical Workers (UE) union sued, struck, and picketed General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, and others from the mid-40s until the mid-50s, joined unions of electrical, telephone operators, hospitality workers, department store employees and thousands of others in what has become known as the largest strike wave in our nation’s history. Working women like Tillie Olsen, President of the California CIO Women's Auxiliary, their unions, and other ‘Rosies’ from across the economy fought to continue or secure government funded childcare, if only for a few years. Many cases won local funding in Detroit, Philadelphia, D.C., New York and Denver, but only California, Philadelphia, and New York City would keep centers that had been built during WWII running.
The same year, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) rallied to compel Congress to replace the temporary wartime FEPC with a permanent organization as a means to continue to prevent racial and religious discrimination. Pressures from these and other labor organizing groups along with the mounting civil rights movement led President Truman in 1946 to issue an Executive Order that created the Committee on Civil Rights, a group that a year later would release a report condemning denials of citizenry and liberty to American minorities. It would take yet another coalition of unions and civil rights groups to garner any sort of action. Truman desegregated the federal workforce and armed services in 1948, but did not apply so to other spaces until 1954 with the desegregation of public education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Non-partisan Community Service Organization (CSO), grown out of mutual benefit cooperatives (Mutualistas) instituted by Mexican American women during the war, brought together activists from across a variety of issues and would find members like Dolores Huerta and Helen Chávez working alongside boycotts’ cultural icon of the United Farm Workers (UFW), César Chávez, to found, lead, and participate in Spanish-speaking women’s groups of the 1960s and 1970s.
And all of this is less than a fraction of the work and advocacy of many ‘Rosies’. Everything I’ve referenced in this post are literally the tip of the historical iceberg. There was a lot of work left to be done when the war was over. There still is. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
As working women continued to participate in organizing activities, their political activities and personal lives as working mothers began to overlap. These working parent homes often embodied example possibilities of gender equality at home and in public, made social and political issues the norm among the topics of conversation around the dinner table, and encouraged their children’s curiosity and challenge of the world, often bringing them along on their political outings. For Mexican American ‘Rosies’, organizations like the mixed-gender CSO thrived on the cultural emphasis of family, many established their own youth organizations, and relied on women’s roles at home, in the family, and community to organize for change. In the years after the war, ‘Rosies‘ who had daughters, unknowingly though some maybe intentionally, raised the women, often referred to as “red diaper babies,” who not only lead future social movements, but continued to cultivate ‘Rosie’s’ legacy of persistence in the generations that were yet to come.
What the war afforded ‘Rosies’ was much more than ‘girl power.’ It offered them the experience of economic and social gains and opportunities they’d not yet had, but wanted–better workplace benefits, proof they could perform just as well as their gender counterparts could, self-assurance and the belief that the standards of living they had achieved during those years they deserved and wanted to maintain. When the aggregate of all of this was taken away and they were relegated to a life that did not afford them such luxuries, they went into action, fighting to maintain the wartime life they had grown accustomed to while also contributing other social issues fights, instilling their values in their children, passing the torch to the next generation of organizers who mounted their own movement, faced with similar challenges, that, to this day, we continue to press forward.
Such is the true significance of ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ Much more than a symbol of female empowerment and encouragement, she stands as a reminder…
Nevertheless, we will persist.
Sources & Links from this post
“1930s-1950s,” Feminist Movements, 1880s to the Present”, Duke University Libraries, last modified Mar. 11, 2022.
The American Woman, Her Changing Social, Economic, And Political Roles, 1920-1970 by William Chafe, Oxford University Press, 1974.
Analysis of Work Stoppages 1956 by Ann James Herlihy and Herbert H. Moede, United States Department of Labor, 1957.
“Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958,” by Joanne Meyerowitz in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, Temple University Press, 2006.
Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care After the Second World War by Emilie Stoltzfus, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 by Annelise Orleck, University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Double Victory: How African American Women Broke Race and Gender Barriers to Help Win World War II by Cheryl Mullenbach, 2017.
"Employment of Women in War Production", Social Security Bulletin 5, no. 7, July 1942.
Feminism in the labor movement : women and the United Auto Workers, 1935-1975 by Nancy Felice Gabin, Cornell University Press, 1990.
Feminism unfinished: a short, surprising history of American women's movements by Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry, Liveright Publishing Company, 2014.
From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: the lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front by Elizabeth R. Escobedo, University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
“Gender and Civic Activism in Mexican American Barrios in California: The Community Service Organization, 1947-1962” by Margaret Rose in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Temple University Press, 2006.
Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945 by Melissa A. McEuen, University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Manipulating images: World War II mobilization of women through magazine advertising by Tawnya J. Adkins Covert, Lexington Books, 2011.
Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II by Emily Yellin, Free Press, 2004.
The Mourning Bride: A Tragedy by William Congreve, proprietors, under the direction of John Bell, British Library, Strand, Bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, 1791.
“Recapturing Working-Class Feminism: Union Women in the Postwar Era” by Dorothy Sue Cobble in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Temple University Press, 2006.
The Year of Peril: America in 1942 by Tracy Campbell, 2020.
"Vanguards of Women's Liberation: the old left and the continuity of the women's movement in the United States: 1945-1970s" by Kathleen Weigand, Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1995.
Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes in 1947 by Don Q. Crowther and Ann J. Herlihy, United States Department of Labor, 1948.