Rosie the Riveter

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ROSIE THE RIVETER

With some 16.3 million men in the military, employment opportunities for women expanded at unparalleled rates during World War II. Rosie the Riveter became the

national symbol of the millions of women who took on new and challenging jobs created by the nation's expanded wartime economy. Songwriters Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb first popularized the term in a 1942 song that heralded the contributions of a dedicated riveter named Rosie. Newspapers and magazines regularly published stories about strong, powerful women in overalls and hardhats performing "men's jobs" in behalf of the war effort. This image was reinforced early in 1943 when a recruitment poster, commissioned by the U.S. War Production Commission, featured a resolute female worker, with upraised muscular arm, that included the caption, "We Can Do It!" The May 29, 1943, issue of the Saturday Evening Post drew further attention to wartime working women when it published on its cover an extraordinary painting by Norman Rockwell that depicted an imposing and self-assured riveter, clad in overalls with her shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal commanding, muscular arms. Rosie the Riveter has now become a generic term used to describe all women workers in the United States during World War II.

In sharp contrast to the Depression years of the 1930s, when working women were often harshly criticized for taking jobs away from men, the woman worker of World War II was highly lauded. Responding to the unprecedented demand for war workers, the number of employed women grew by 6.5 million. The proportion of women in the work force rose from 25 percent at the beginning of the war to 36 percent at war's end; an increase greater than the previous four decades combined. Just as important, growing numbers of married and older women joined the work force. More than 3 million of the new female war workers were married. Married women over the age of thirty-five were far more likely to seek employment than younger mothers with children. Public disapproval of working mothers, coupled with woefully inadequate childcare programs, discouraged young mothers from working. In contrast to earlier eras, when the typical female worker was young and single, women workers during World War II were much more likely to be older and married. This changing profile continued into the postwar era.

The largest gain in female employment occurred in manufacturing, with more than 3 million women employed in defense industries. While defense work paid better than most other jobs available to women, such as service and office work, the wages of female industrial workers equaled only 60 percent of what men received. This discrepancy reflected the fact that women were concentrated in lower-paying, less skilled positions; rarely did they qualify for skilled work.

New opportunities in manufacturing enabled African-American women to leave low-paying domestic work for better paying factory jobs. In fact, the number of black women employed as domestics declined by 15 percent while their participation in factory work more than doubled. Yet black industrial women were usually relegated to the lowest-paying jobs, such as janitors and sweepers, and they suffered even more discrimination than their white counterparts. Still, even these factory jobs were preferable to domestic work.

At the conclusion of the war, as the nation shifted its production from a wartime to a peacetime economy, female industrial workers were laid off from their jobs at nearly double the rates of men. By 1947, the percentage of women in the work force had declined to 27 percent. While the labor participatimon rate of women began to climb in the years after 1947, women discovered that jobs in heavy industry were now cut off to them. Instead, they were forced to accept less-prestigious, lower-paying jobs in areas such as retail trade and service. Moreover, the decade of the 1950s witnessed a renewed interest in motherhood and traditional family life that resulted in wage-earning women placing family needs above work.

Historians continue to debate the impact of World War II on the lives of working women. For some, the Second World War represented a major turning point for women as they eagerly supported the war effort by engaging in new and challenging jobs that had previously been denied them. Other historians have emphasized that the changes wrought by World War II were only temporary, pointing out that immediately after the war women were expected to return to their traditional roles as wives and mothers. A third group of historians has emphasized how the long-range significance of the changes brought about by the war provided the foundation for the rejuvenation of the contemporary women's movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the daughters of the wartime generation demanded greater equality for women in the workplace and in society at large.

bibliography

Campbell, D'Ann. Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Gluck, Sherna. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Litoff, Judy Barrett, and David C. Smith. Since You Went Away: World War II letters from American Women on the Home Front. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991