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Rosie the Riveter to Be Honored
Posted by bdk on Tue Apr 30, 2002 03:45:34 PM
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Rosie the Riveter to Be Honored
Washington Post 04/30/02
author: Peggy Andersen / Associated Press
SEATTLE When a labor group wanted to organize an event to salute the female workers who kept U.S. factories humming during World War II, it didn't take long to find one of its first honorees.
Margaret Berry, who went to work building B-29s as a "Rosie the Riveter" 60 years ago, was still working at Boeing Co. These days, she volunteers to help restore vintage bombers at age 79.
Berry is among dozens of former Rosies invited to a reunion luncheon Saturday sponsored by the Women in Trades Association, a nonprofit labor organization.
Billboards and ads for the event have drawn dozens of calls from former WWII workers who filled a crucial void and broke gender barriers when the nation's men were off at war.
After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, American men enlisted and faltering wartime factories called on women to help build aircraft and ships, among other jobs.
Nicknamed "Rosies" after one of the first women to work in a defense factory, the women were immortalized in a poster of a worker flexing her muscles with the slogan "We Can Do It."
Berry, strong from working in an orchard near her parents' general store, started at Boeing in 1942 for 62 cents an hour. Her hourly wage was bumped to $1.10, thanks to her ability to handle a rivet gun with a "25-pound squeeze" in tight spaces.
Columbia University instructor Penny Colman, author of "Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II," said factories convinced women that their country needed them.
"They decided they certainly did not want to appeal to women on the basis of independence and making a good living. They decided on the patriotism path," Colman said.
The Rosies helped acclimate Americans to the idea of wives and mothers doing paid work, said Karen Anderson, a history professor at the University of Arizona and author of "Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War II."
"It became much more commonplace and families got used to the income," she said.
Violet Nelson was on the front lines of change. At age 18, Nelson and three friends from her home in Clarksfield, Minn., got jobs at Winslow Shipyards on Bainbridge Island a Seattle suburb helping to make minesweepers.
She moved up to journeyman, though some men bristled at taking orders "from a woman, let alone one young enough to be my daughter," she vividly recalls being told.
After the war, the shipyards became a male bastion again, otherwise "I probably would have stayed in it," said Nelson, 77.
There were protests against postwar layoffs of women, and federal polls showed 80 percent of women wanted to keep their wartime jobs. Of the rest, Anderson said: "I think they were convinced it would be unpatriotic to keep those jobs from returning servicemen."
By early 1944, the campaign launched to get them into the work force was reversed to get them out, Colman said.
It didn't keep women from working, Anderson said, but it made them feel guilty and justified poor treatment "on grounds they shouldn't have been there anyway."
Eileen Brooks, of Mercer Island, went back into sales after the war even though she loved the work she did building ships.
"I did overhead welding, which was really rough. And vertical. I did big rooms of steel on the ship," recalled Brooks, 82.