Welcome to More than Rosies: Naming Home Front Heroines! The purpose of this website is to pull together facets of the lives of female factory workers during World War II, or Rosie the Riveters, from the four corners of the internet and library archives. This site also includes pieces of memoirs and oral histories with real life Rosies still alive today! Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at Katherine.Corrado@lcps.org

Introduction

In the face of U.S. entry into World War II there was a tremendous need for both increased labor and war material. Women of the United States answered the call to action and provided both, while millions of American men were deployed fighting a two-front war. By the final year of American involvement in World War II, U.S. factories had produced “296,429 airplanes; 102,351 tanks and self-propelled guns; 372,431 artillery pieces; 47 million tons of artillery ammunition; 87,620 warships and 44 billion rounds of small arms ammunition.”1 By the war’s end in 1945, there were 20 million women in the workforce, a figure nearly twice the 11.5 million women in the workforce in 1940 prior to U.S. involvement.2 American women took advantage of the new employment opportunities and gained attention alongside the fictional figure of Rosie the Riveter. Due to posters, a catchy pop song, and a feature film, the image of “Rosie the Riveter” not only became popular but allowed the American public to visualize women in the workplace. The term “Rosie” is commonly used to describe all home front female workers in WWII, just as “riveter” was a blanket term that referred to anyone who worked on an assembly line.3

Such rapid mobilization was not as simple as it appears in the history books today, as social norms were slow to change. The War Department ran a campaign to unofficially draft women into defense work, as many men were overseas serving in the armed forces.4 In this effort there was a balance between sparking change and holding onto the social norms people sought to preserve during wartime. In magazines for example, editors were willing to advertise and encourage women to join in defense work, though the concept of mandatory defense work was too extreme.5 As more women chose to take advantage of these financial opportunities, low paying jobs in local businesses sat empty and eventually forced businesses to close.6 For example, six-hundred laundries were forced to close across the United States without female workers to run the business, in addition to hundreds of restaurants that could not find enough waitresses to function.7

This same process plagued schools. Teachers were frequently urged to use their summer vacation to take a patriotic part-time position in a factory.8 As teachers realized that the pay was substantially more attractive in factory work, schools had a hard time keeping teachers. In the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington, for example, a female teacher found she could increase her salary by 60% by taking a job as a shipyard worker.9 As women made these difficult career choices, one must also consider that the high school population was shrinking given the number of male students who dropped out to serve in the military and female students who dropped out to take high paying factory jobs.10 There were a tremendous number of factors that changed American lives throughout the war that historians must consider in gleaming details of the lives of these women. However, here are some challenges that are common among their stories, that will introduce you to the day-to-day experiences of the real-life Rosie the Riveters.

Challenges Not Frequently Considered

Being “the first”

All written directions available regarding how to obtain a job quickly became out of date, as they were only written for men. Mary Beatty Trask later wrote that instructions for a job interview advised: “wear a clean shirt, well pressed pants. Above all, wear a necktie.”11 Just a few years prior when such materials were published, American men were completely unprepared for the idea that a woman would enter the workplace. In a desperate attempt to meet the standard of the time, Trask wore the only suit she had, which was made of wool, on a mid-August day.12 Women quickly learned that wool was unacceptable in a factory, as even a miniscule piece of lint could “destroy the accuracy of an instrument which might be on the dashboard of a bomber.”13 Apart from the learning curve, there was also a highly uncomfortable and even humiliating aspect of entering factory work. On the first day of the job, women were subject to a strip search examination to ensure that they were not bringing inappropriate materials into the factory to sabotage Allied operations and production.14 This level of pressure and lack of privacy demonstrated that female factory workers demonstrated bravery and grit. With immense responsibility also came pride and clout. Airplane factory worker Constance Bowman reflected in her factory diary Slacks & Calluses that people were “impressed when [her friend and illustrator, Clara Marie] told them she strung the wires that made bombs drop.”15 In contrast, people were not so impressed by Bowman’s task of installing seat belts and antennas to the bombers. While many of these women felt immense pressure entering factory work as the first female family member to do so, most accounts include an immense amount of pride.

Noise

Nearly all factory accounts describe the piercing noise of World War II factories. Historian Doris Weatherford summarized this experience based on a variety of oral histories, stating: “All day, every day, they were surrounded by the cacophonous sound of battle.”16 While it was a hazard that could not be avoided in getting the job done, it also demanded immediate commitment and sacrifice of comfort from female factory workers. As one welder, Augusta H. Clawson, described it: “The excruciating noise you get down in the ship… Any who are not heart and soul determined to stick with it would fade right away.”17 Because the noise frequently prompted headaches or migraines, many women quit after the first day of factory work.18 One way that women coped with the stress of the noise was to sing the popular songs of the era in unison.19 This passed the time in work that could grow monotonous and kept spirits high.

Accidents

While most Rosie the Riveters walked away from factory work at the end of the war without bodily harm, accidents were far more frequent than one might think. For every American who developed a disability from a battlefield injury, there were eight produced from factory accidents throughout the war.21 While the exact injury rate for female employees across all defense work is unknown, there are some gender-neutral statistics that have been preserved in the historical record. For example, there were 7.3 injuries for every 100 employees in federal contract shipyards in 1943.22 The odds of a disabling injury were of course substantially lower, as “there were 31.2 disabling injuries for each one million employee hours” in the same shipyards.23 Dr. Josephine Von Miklos explained to her friend about her factory work that "I have burned my fingers and it does hurt like hell. But doesn't everybody around here get hurt every once in a while?.”24 Her friend responded in the affirmative, but pointed out that Von Miklos was a woman, to which she replied “that doesn’t make me a sissy.”25

Though all Rosies received bumps and scrapes as indicators of her patriotic service, African American Rosies faced far more dangerous conditions. From the start of the war, the most dangerous positions, particularly in munitions factories, were available to African American women.26 While more types of defense work opened to women of color throughout the course of the war, they were disproportionately represented in injury statistics.27 More information regarding these challenges can be found about this in Betty Reid Soskin’s profile.

Sexism

Women were frequently underestimated in factory work, but also frequently heard comments of awe and surprise when they proved successful. The most frequently cited instance of blatant sexism in the workplace comes from Dr. Josephine Von Miklos, who worked as a mechanic, riveter, and shipyard worker. While working in a munitions factory, a man stopped by and examined her work, stating “you’re a pretty good mechanic…for a woman.”28 She went on to describe what it felt like to work so diligently and still feel like a sore thumb, stating:

Day after day, I was working among them, I would suddenly get a funny feeling in the back of my neck. I would turn around, and someone would be standing there, chewing tobacco, and looking at me, my hands, and my machine; and then walking away again, not saying anything, maybe, but just looking back at me once more. There wouldn't be any expression on his face, but I knew what he was thinking. ‘It ain't women's work.’29

In some cases, this broad sexism and resentment escalated to sexual harassment. Shipyard worker Leona Ellis for example, “brought that hammer right down on his hard hat and knocked his glasses off and broke them” when a male coworker grabbed her ankle.30 She reported that she was never harassed again after the incident. In Dr. Von Miklos’ case, the same man who felt the need to qualify her gender seemed to understand her value over time. In reflecting on a later compliment on her work which did not include her gender, she stated: “Which seems to have been the point all along. I'm not all right for a woman, but I'm all right.”31

Conclusions

While the fictional icon of Rosie the Riveter grew so popular that her presence undermined these real-life individuals, without the pop culture phenomenon of this cartoon, there stories would not have been as well preserved for future generations. In fact, the contributions of these women were so crucial to Allied victory in the Second World War that they surpassed the expectation set by the men who created the Rosie the Riveter archetype.

Citations

[1] Colman, 19.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Erick Trickey, “Rosie the Riveter Isn’t Who You Think She Is,” The Washington Post, September 3, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/03/rosie-the-riveter-isnt-who-you-think-she-is/.

Ann Pendleton, Hit the Rivet, Sister! (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1943), 21.

[4] Weatherford, 120.

[5] Ibid., 123.

[6] Colman, 42-43.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Kathryn S. Dobie and Eleanor Lang, Her War: American Women in WWII (New York: iUniverse, 2003), 26.

[9] Colman, 42-43.

[10] *Secondary school enrollment dropped by about 10% nationwide during WWII.

Editor Thomas Snyder U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement, “Figure 7.--Elementary and secondary enrollment as a percentage of 5- to 17-year-olds, by level: 1869-70 to fall 1991” found in page 36 of “120 Years of American Education: A Statical Portrait,” January 1993, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.

[11] Pendleton, 17.

[12] Ibid., 18.

[13] Giles and Dunn, 14.

[14] Weatherford, 145.

[15] Reid, 75.

[16] Weatherford, 129.

[17] Yellin, 59.

[18] Weatherford, 131.

[19] Giles Dunn. 30-31.

[20] Marek Korczynski and Michael Pickering, “’We Sang Ourselves through that War:’ Women, Music and Factory Work in World War Two,” Labour History Review, August 2005, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233619123_%27We_Sang_Ourselves_through_that_War%27_Women_Music_and_Factory_Work_in_World_War_Two.

[21] Audra Jennings, “The Human Machinery of War,” eHISTORY (Ohio State University), accessed July 1, 2021, https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/machinery/credits.

[22] Norris F. Collen, Bryan Culp, and Tom Debley, “Rosie the Riveter's Wartime Medical Records,” The Permanente Journal, accessed July 5, 2021, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037133/.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Von Miklos, 36.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Yellin, 62.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Von Miklos, 91.

[29] Ibid., 92.

[30] Dumenil, 23.

[31] Von Miklos, 134.

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