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Sixty-five years ago, some people considered the 6 million “Rosie the Riveters” a temporary blip in the Great War’s home-front workplace mobilization. Today, they’re a collective cultural icon, now memorialized with their own national historical park.
Real Rosie the Riveters Speak Out, Honored with Memorial During World War II, these women worked in defense plants as blacksmiths, shipfitters and clerks, while male workers left their jobs to fight in Asia and Europe. Says Betty Reid Soskin: It was a heroic generation. And the heroes weren’t only on the battlefield. Soskin was one of those heroes. These days, she’s a park ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif. The 2.5-acre park covers the site where the colossal old Kaiser Shipyard #2 once stood. It’s the right place for this memorial. During the war, the four Kaiser shipyards in Richmond produced more than 740 ships, more than any other shipyard in the country—and thousands of women helped make that happen. The park’s centerpiece is a memorial that is the same length and width as an old Liberty ship. It includes an imposing steel sculpture designed to look like a ship hull under construction. When it was dedicated in 2000, some 200 Rosies took part in a parade along a special walkway. Soskin was there. Soskin recently sat down with Rosalie Pinto, another woman who worked on the homefront, and both discussed their experiences during the war years with park resources program manager Lucy Lawliss, and noted historian Emily Yellin. The result is “Rosie: A Legend on the Home Front,” a article published in the fall issue of the National Park Service magazine Common Ground. All of the 6 million Rosies had much in common: They were doing what very few women had ever done before by joining a workforce heavily dominated by men. They had that chance only because of the great wartime shortage of male workers. They may not have been universally welcomed in the workplace—”in a 1943 Gallup poll, only 30 percent of husbands gave unqualified support to their wives working in war jobs,” Yellin notes— but for many of the women, it was a deeply liberating and life-changing experience. The Common Ground article subtly points out that each woman’s experience was in some ways unique. Indeed, the experiences of Soskin, an African American working as a clerk for a boilermakers’ local union at Kaiser during the war, and Pinto, an Italian-American who was a tack welder on PT boats at the Navy Yard in her hometown of Philadelphia, were quite different. That was partly because of race. “It was a time of growth, but also pain,” Soskin recalls. As for growth: It was an opportunity to be something other than a young woman who took care of people’s children or cleaned their houses.” The experience also gave her a new definition of what I might be—a clerical worker. As for pain, there was still racism and segregation, in society, on the job and in the union. For example, Soskin’s African American husband “could not become a journeyman [at Kaiser] because he could not join the union as a full-fledged member.” As for Pinto, even though one of her eyes was injured by a spark from a welding rod and she had to wear glasses for six months, she never had any regrets. “I loved it,” she recalls. First you showed your badge at the gate. When I resigned, I had to turn that in, which I regret, but I remember the number—30307. Everybody knew each other. I had wonderful—they call them ‘bosses’ but we didn’t — I had wonderful leading men. Soon after the Allied victory in 1945, the soldiers returned home and the vast pool of job opportunities for women largely disappeared. But Rosie left her legacy. As Lawliss points out: An anonymous quote at the Rosie the Riveter Memorial gives credit where it is due: ‘You must tell your children, putting modesty aside, that without us, without women, there would have been no Spring in 1945.’ And there is another part of the legacy. All of the women who now work where only men were allowed to work before are the millions and millions of Rosie’s proud daughters. |
