The Role of Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter was the symbol that corporate USA decided to use at first to try to convince women to join into the workforce once the military had depleted most of the men for the war effort. Rosie was shown as a woman dressed in overalls and a bandanna to show that women could work in ‘men’s’ jobs. But the companies were not only trying to convince white women, they wanted anyone and everyone to be able to ‘keep USA running’. Everyone meaning that even minority women were encouraged to join into the workforce, something that was even more uncommon than white women, for the jobs that were needing to be filled. 

The actual Rosie herself was a woman, a widow, mother of 2 who was a riveter of airplane parts in an airplane factory in Ysilanti Michigan. She was found by a man who was wanting to make a short ‘movie’ or commercial to help better convince women to join into the workforce, into jobs that were only previously held by men, and mostly white men. The women made a big impact, giving way for 6.5 million women to enter the workforce, but even then, they were only four percent of the skilled industrial workers during the war years. During this time, companies offered child care to convince homemakers to work for them. Some even gave out meals that the women could take home to their families. From 1940 to 1945 the % of women in the workforce went from 25% to 36 %. Even with this larger force of women working in industry they (women) were still only paid in 1944 an average of just $31.21 a week. Men who did the same work earned an average of $54.65 a week. It was truly unfair, since the jobs that women took over were everything from manufacturing of everything, from weaponry to furniture, to riveters, welders to bankers to principals to even Doctors. Women used to think of themselves and be thought of as just wives and mothers, even though many held degrees. This ‘new’ taste of freedom from the tediousness of home life gave some women a chance to grow. Although some of this new freedom ‘feeling’ did lead to some divorces, separated families, more women doing things such as drinking, once only thought of something done by men, it was still a new revelation to women, a whole new world that they only imagined could be or ever happen. 

Even though all this had happened, Rose Monroe still left behind a legacy. After the war ended, most of the women who joined into the work force returned home. Rosie Monroe though, went on to drive a cab, own a beauty shop, and set up her own construction company. She became a pilot and started a flying club, although she was the only woman in her flying club. In a flying accident in 1978 Rosie lost a kidney. A few years later, her other kidney began to fail and she soon passed away from it. Rosie left behind two daughters, six sisters, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She also left behind a new image for women. It was an image of independence, of women bringing home their own pay and succeeding at work.

At first, women were ‘supposedly’ happy with the men being back home from war and that they (the women) could go back to being ‘happy, happy, housewives’, but that soon showed to not be the case of many women. Women were bombarded by magazine articles that they should not follow through on an education, lest they be ‘too educated’ to ‘catch a man’. Women, children, were having children and getting married, in their teens, even the articles and commercials were pointed at YOUNG children, ages 6 to 13. Young girls were thought to be on the ‘right track’ if they were going steady with a guy by their early teen years and even more so if they were engaged to be married by their early teens. The birth rate soon started soaring to a rate that could compete with the birth rate in India. It was a both an empowering and a degrading time altogether and soon women started to see that they were still missing something. 

Women started talking, they were missing, something, what they were not sure. They felt ‘empty’ and wondered if it was them, or their families? Should they have an affair, redecorate, move…what? They would go to doctors with symptoms of being tired. The women would say to the doctors, “I get so angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason." (A Cleveland doctor called it "the housewife's syndrome." Other women would say they would get “…great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms.”I call it the house wife's blight" said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. "I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn't caused by detergent and it isn't cured by cortisone.” So the world was turning their noses down on women and their feelings of aloneness and ‘depression’. They were expected to do what was ‘expected’ of them. Get a good husband at a young age; be a good wife by taking care of HIS needs, taking care of the house and providing him with lots of children. My thoughts were what were they there for? Breeding purposes? Don’t speak unless you are spoken to type of thinking? It was not only ridiculous to expect women, who had been given a taste of freedom in the early forties, to then go back to their plain mundane lives and live life with no purpose other than to ‘serve her man’; especially without even giving her the recognition she deserved for doing what she did for her country and her family all the while the war was going on. It was demeaning! 

Even more gruesome than how the women were being treated, was how black Americans were treated after the war. Black Americans went to war to fight for our country. They also stayed here at home and fought the good battle for the war effort, but after wards they were treated less than the dirt on a white man’s shoe. Now the only jobs that a black American could get was a ‘black man’s only job’, or a job as a servant to a white man’s household. They were now given the demeaning jobs and segregation flew into full force. There were black only schools, busses for those children, which carried blacks only, and even places on local transportation (busses) that only blacks could sit. It was a shame that Black Americans gave as much as white Americans during the war overseas and the war effort to keep our country running at home, to help keep US companies running and afloat while WWII was commencing, but when the war was over, they (black Americans) were back to being just blacks, not even considered ‘black Americans’. 

Then in 1954 the Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas decision changed the way things were now being handled towards people of color, not just blacks. Those who were being forced to walk past a white only school to catch their black (or colored only) bus, were now able to go another route to do so, legally, without legal hassles. Not that the South wanted to go along with these legalizations with any type of ease. 

The actual cause of the beginnings of the civil rights movement began in August of 1955 when a fourteen year old boy was kidnapped, beaten and thrown into a river for ‘allegedly’ whistling at a white woman. Soon after in December of 1955 Rosa Parks decided to not get up out of her seat when ordered to do so by a bus driver and was arrested for defying the rules of bussing segregation. Even though she WAS sitting in the blacks only section, because she was sitting in the first seat of the blacks only section, she was chosen to move and because no white American was expected to sit next to a black American (using those words purposely), she was being expected to get up, but refused to do so. Soon after the bus boycott began and the white supremacist of the south decided to try to deal with this in what I would consider the ‘white’ way (for back then). The white way would be for the ‘white’ supremacist trying to take the black Americans to court for carpooling each other to work (which was later thought of to be one of the best systems used for a very long time!). Martin Luther King was then elected to take lead of the fight against segregation of their people and he made a life changing speech that touched Americans of all color. “I HAVE A DREAM!...” Don’t we all? I always thought of America to be more than what it is and that we have all evolved as a nation, but we are still fighting segregation and forms of discrimination in all types in forms, from women trying to fight to get a good paying job, to be thought of as more than just an object, marriage material, a wife, a baby maker, but as a fine upstanding American who has potential to make a difference in our society, to colored people of all nationalities still trying to fight for that American dream of being in America the free. How can they consider themselves free if they have to face constant discrimination and hate from other Americans all around them (or at least those select ones who choose to be discriminatory)? We are still a work in progress and will be for some time to come!