Rosie the Riveter: How you can share your family story
BELLEVILLE, Mich. (WOOD) — On Rosie the Riveter Day, March 21, a group is looking for any women in the state who might have been a “Rosie,” or have a family member who was.
Claire Dahl is a volunteer and presenter for Yankee Air Museum at Willow Run in Belleville.
“It is exciting to get these women’s stories, how they left wherever they lived, what they did, why they went, how they worked, what they wore, how they got there, what lunch did they take? It’s fascinating,” Dahl said.
Women who would qualify as a “Rosie” would now be at least 98 years old, but living family members could still share the stories of their lost loved ones and have them memorialized at the museum on the Wall of Honor.
If you think you have a Rosie in your family, contact the museum on it’s website.
WHO WAS ROSIE THE RIVETER?
Yankee Air Museum has a new exhibit all about Rosie the Riveter. She is not a person, but rather an umbrella term for the women who worked in the factories as part of the World War II effort, building trucks, boats and especially airplanes.
At Willow Run, women factory workers built one B-24 Bomber every hour. The riveters pieced together thin rectangles of metal using rivets, with one woman on the inside holding a bucking bar, and the other using a riveting gun to push the rivet into the bucking bar, making the back of it flatten out and securing the two pieces together.
“It was an aerodynamic way to keep pieces of aluminum together to make the planes. Each B24 at Willow Run had 330,000 rivets, and the riveting teams were very, very organized and very efficient at doing what they had to do,” Dahl said.
Detroit, home of car manufacturers, was the heartbeat of the war production. They converted their lines quickly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, from making cars to making Jeeps, trucks, tanks and airplanes for the first time ever on assembly lines.
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There were so many men in the service after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the government started recruiting women to make the weapons.
“They convinced her that she had to do it if she wanted to bring her father, her son, her boyfriend home, if she wanted to get on with the rest of this her life,” Dahl said.
She now gives presentations about Rosie the Riveter all over Michigan, and marches with the Rosie Drill Team in parades across the country, including West Michigan. The team will march in the Tulip Time Parade in Holland and Coast Guard Fest Parade in Grand Haven once again this year, and Dahl plans to be a part of both events.
She is a retired history teacher whose Masters Thesis was all about Rosie the Riveter, so she loves being able to teach young women about how Rosie upended traditional gender roles.
“Rosie is a hero, and many people don’t think that she is, but not only did Rosie, the women of this country, give their sons and husbands to the military service, they did all the military work. They did all the heavy working to get this war finished. Rosie is a hero,” Dahl said.
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