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Girl Power: Women like this Lockheed employee, shown working on a canopy for a fighter plane, were an essential part of the American war effort and changed the country's workplace forever.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Remember When
'Rosie the Riveter' has built herself into American history
By Cookie Curci-Wright
The year was 1944. World War II was raging in Europe, and patriotism surged across the country. America's automobile manufacturers were building engines for sleek fighter planes instead of the family car.
Hollywood, America's barometer of current events, was mass-producing movies with wartime themes and messages.
Since You Went Away, featuring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, had American families transfixed at the local theaters. Jukeboxes rumbled at the corner soda shops with the wartime boogie-woogie beat, blasting out the Andrew Sisters' "Boogie, Woogie, Bugle boy of Company B" and the plaintive sounds of Harry James' trumpet, wailing "It's been a Long, Long Time."
The war was in full swing and patriotic Americans wanted to do their part to help the cause. Every American family was limited to certain food products and commodities, but families were willing to make the small sacrifice for America's fighting men.
Life for the American people was changing subtly at first, but in a way most families would never forget. Every man, woman and child wanted to do their part to "fight the good fight" for the war effort. But not everyone could join the military. Women that were left behind, many of them with young children to care for, were anxious to do their part. Knowing they were needed to fill the void created by the wartime draft, America's wives, mothers and daughters volunteered for the tough jobs of assembly line work on shipyards and airplane factory lines.
It was around this time that Life magazine commissioned artist Edna Reindel to create a series of paintings that featured women of every age and background donning goggles and overalls while they drilled holes in junction boxes for the PV-1 bomber, welded the intake duct on a P-38 fighter plane, cut the edge on a wheel well and tightened the screws on the gunhood of the P-38 and made final checks on Lockheed's Ventura bomber.
Working side by side with the men in the factories, they wore heavy denim overalls, badge numbers and their hair tied in kerchiefs. Reindel depicted these woman working side by side, enthusiastically, alongside factory men. With these paintings, Rosie the riveted was born, the mythical icon who captured and represented the American woman's fighting spirit.
There were other artists, too, who captured the essence of the American factory woman's spunkiness.
Norman Rockwell and J. Howard Miller both created magazine covers and posters that conveyed the true grit and enthusiasm of these hard-working women. Miller's poster featured a woman dressed in gray overalls, her arm bent at the elbow and her fist clenched. A slogan above her said, in red, white and blue letters, "WE CAN DO IT!"
Local diners near the shipyards catered to these factory workers. It was a common sight at these eateries to see the hat racks filled with men's drab factory caps, fedoras, and military hats--and, alongside them, an abundance of women's brightly colored factory kerchiefs.
At home these same factory women were planting Victory gardens, growing their own vegetables to subsidize the economy; they used lard , tinged with a touch of yellow food coloring to replace the rationed butter.
Nylon, needed for military parachutes, had become a wardrobe luxury. Cruising around in the family car, once a favorite Sunday afternoon ritual for these ladies, had to be curtailed until the war ended because gasoline was strictly rationed.
Magazine ad campaigns were tinged with military appeal and wartime pride. Coca-Cola ads depicted a young soldier returning from the war to his hometown malt shop to enjoy a refreshing glass of coke with his childhood friends.
After the war, most of these women were replaced by men in the workplace, but gender roles would never be the same because of the wartime work force of women like "Rosie the Riveter," who gave America its first real glimpse of the working woman.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
