Oral histories of actual Rosie the Riveter(s) come alive at NYU.
Rosie is the woman of today. Driven, successful and tough against all bets. Yet the real Rosie, or rather Rosies, came to life in 1940 at the advent of the Second World War. If you know Rosie, it is likely from a letter-size poster with the words “We can do it!” emblazoned across, headlining a bicep-flexing working woman showing her more masculine side, as it were at the time.
This Rosie, who captured a moment in time and the hearts of millions of women over the decades, became known as Rosie the Riveter – from a 1942 song about a working woman on an assembly line by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. She rose from the suds of dishwater and the murmur of the vacuum cleaner to the frontlines – the working class, factory battlefields of America during World War II. While the men grabbed guns and ran to war, she stayed behind, and, from 1940 to 1944, took over every man’s job – from building ships to making machine guns. She kept business alive; she built a wartime economic boom; and she fought for her country in a way that no man had done before.
She literally rolled up her sleeves and worked. And, she did all of that for nearly the same pay as her male counterpart. She didn’t take no for an answer. She paid her union dues just like the man who came before her, and she industriously earned her own keep – money she had never been able to call her own before.
Estimated to represent more than six million American factory-working women, Rosie rose to the pinnacle of society. Women were suddenly given credence beyond the home and a pretty pair of heels. And beyond women, African Americans, minorities, disabled citizens – all formerly second-class workers – suddenly had access to the vast job market too.
“Women had virtually been excluded from these jobs previously, and then they entered into unions overnight,” describes Ruth Milkman, Academic Director at the Joseph F. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.
“Women’s issues suddenly appeared on the labor agenda,” Milkman says.
While these women’s stories have been told before, a new film archive of oral histories is now available, housed at the New York University Tamiment Library. The Real Rosie the Riveter tells the stories of many real Rosies, now in their 80s and 90s. Created by film-makers Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly of Spargel Productions NYC, along with Executive Director and playwright Elizabeth Hemmerdinger, this collection of personal stories keeps history alive and tells, as Hemmerdinger says, “universal stories” – ones that “really saved the universe” – at that time, and far beyond.
Kelly describes the Rosies as “real icons.”
“My grandmother was a Rosie, and she had the opportunity, for the first time ever, to earn money and have camaraderie with other women. I remember her telling me that she was so excited to have her own money that she bought 27 bras. I was like, ‘Grandma!’”
And then there are the stories straight from the Rosies themselves, like Esther Horne and Jerre Kalbas. Horn, now 89 and ¼, as she tells me, is sharp and spry like her Rosie teenage self. And she remembers her time during the war with precision, like the fact that she graduated from high school in 1940 and worked in a machine shop. “I didn’t weld, I soldered,” Horne clearly distinguishes.
“After the war, when the men came back and took back their jobs, I worked in a press-clipping bureau. I only had a high school education, so that was about all I could do. I then became a union activitist for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), then a clerk typist. At the age of 26 I finally starting going back to school, and I got my bachelors, masters and doctorate, and I became an elementary school teacher,” says Kalbas.
Kalbas, now 94 years old, is, like Horne, a sharp bullet of wit and energy. She grew up in the South Bronx of New York and today lives in New York City’s East Village. As a real Rosie during the war, she headed west to California and worked on a ship as an electrician.
“I loved the work, and I had to fight for equal pay and the title of ‘electrician’. I, and all the others, were paying Union dues, so one day I went to the boss and simply demanded the same pay as a man since we had been doing the same job. I wouldn’t leave until they increased my pay and the pay for all the others,” Kalbas adds.
Yet, after the war, the Rosies – the symbols of feminism, worker rights, progressive ideals and freedom – were forced to leave their newfound factory jobs. “The Division of labor returned after the war. The barriers that the Rosies had broken returned,” says Milkman. Some returned to their former roles as housewives. Although most, like Horne and Kalbas went on to work in other jobs or go to school – a quite liberal notion at the time.
“The thing is that job segregation persisted during the war, it just took new form,” explains Milkman. As is still the case in some ways today, employers didn’t know how to organize work without dividing it by gender class – men’s jobs versus women’s jobs.”
While separation between man and woman persists today, with women earning 70% of what men make for the same job in the U.S. (that gap narrowed to 90% during WWII), broader sweeping advances have been made. Take the Equal Pay act of 1963, in which unionists fought for equal pay rights for women because they were concerned that if they didn’t, everything they had fought so hard for on behalf of their male members would be undermined.
“Things that we well know today, like ‘work family balance’, paid maternity leave, child care and contraception, were given a big shot in the arm from all that happened during WWII,” says Milkman. “There are many parallels here to our own time. We have a history of change and of continuity. It’s the cycle.”
Through all these ups and downs of millennia, Milkman focuses on the positive: “Just look at the enormous change. Just look where both women and men are today.”
It may be that beyond picket lines, the hiking of dress hems and the donning of sharply buttoned suits, what matters most and pervades today is the innermost sentiment that all the Rosies lived through. It’s what Horne calls “confidence.”
“What I got out of it [working during WWII] was a newfound confidence that you could be productive and worthwhile in an organization. Whichever direction you went, you went with more confidence.”
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