ON PEARL HARBOR DAY: REMEMBERING THE WOMEN WHO DID MEN’S WORK: RUTH KING
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10979/pub_detail.asp
On September 16th, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt, affronted by Germany’s increasing belligerence instituted the first peacetime draft in the United States. In May 1941, the President declared a national emergency requiring massive industrialization to manufacture weapons, ships, combat vehicles and ammunition. New shipyards were commissioned particularly since Germany was sinking more merchant vessels than were being produced.
By September of that year “Liberty Fleet Day” was officially declared to launch the first ships in the renewed American fleet. Ship builders were challenged by President Roosevelt to increase the fleet by fifty percent.
On December 7, 1941, 183 Japanese warplanes attacked Hickam Field in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war.
On 5 December 1942 a presidential executive order changed the age range for the draft from 21-45 to 18-38, and ended voluntary enlistment which brought the total number of men drafted to one out of five.
Thousands of American men enlisted adding their numbers to those already drafted for service. Over 150,000 American women made noble contributions in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. The Bronze Star was awarded to 565 women for meritorious service overseas. A total of 657 WACs received medals and citations at the end of the war.
However, a two-front war required women to fill the gaps on the home front as well. The monumental decrease in the male work force imperiled the supply of munitions, ships, ordnance and all the goods for the war effort as well as the general population’s needs.
The government issued ads, appeals and columns urging women to fill the gaps.
And, the women responded. Neighborly feuds, racial barriers and religious bigotry were cast aside as grandmothers and neighbors volunteered their services for child-care to those who left homes every day to work in plants, factories, assembly lines, ship yards and munitions plants. Before the declaration of war millions of women had entered the work force but after Pearl Harbor the number grew to nineteen million. Of those, almost six million women worked in war related jobs….welding, drilling, metalwork, carpentry, lumber, building and maintaining railways, driving, loading freight, operating construction machinery, and building tanks among dozens of jobs in the shipping and aircraft industry. They were in the front line of war production and became known as “production soldiers.”
Rosie Will Monroe.
There were many “Rosies” who inspired America. Some, like Rosie Will Monroe helped build B 29 and 24 airplanes in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This is what her obituary in the New York Times of June 1997 said:
“The Rosie character depicted in the widely distributed poster by J. Howard Miller became a patriotic depiction of working women, but the image itself was fictional. Mrs. Monroe appeared in a promotional film for war bonds after Walter Pidgeon, the actor, discovered her at an aircraft parts factory in Ypsilanti, Mich., said Mrs. Monroe’s daughter, Vicki Jarvis of Clarksville.”
There was Rose Hickey of Tarrytown, New York who worked building the Grumman Bomber. Rosalind Palmer Walter also worked as a riveter on the night shift on a Corsair, building the F4U marine gull-winged fighter airplane. Rosalie Helen Merritt worked at the Lockheed Airplane Factory in Burbank California on the cockpit shells of bombers.Like many women during WWII, she took on previously male dominated trades such as riveting teams working on the cockpit shells of airplane bombers.
Norman Rockwell created a fictional “Rosie the Riveter” in the Saturday Evening Post of Memorial Day, May, 1943 of a woman in overalls, turban, goggles sitting with a tool in her lap with her feet on Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.
Here are five “Rosie the Riveters” with other names: From a wonderful site dedicated to these women:
Harriet Buono was employed as an explosives operator at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey during the war. Encouraged by Rosie the Riveter ads and a promise of decent pay, she and others like her, often without sufficient training, worked with gunpowder (black powder) and in the production of ordnance fuses in a dangerous environment where safety issues were always a concern.
Florence Holmes was an Aircraft Drill and Grinding Press Operator in a General Motors plant in Michigan, retooled to manufacture military aircraft. The secretive nature of much of the work contributed to the sense of importance the employees felt as they completed their tasks.The women were extremely careful in carrying out their work to specification, as they realized that soldiers’ lives depended on the parts they manufactured.
Irene Klalo who was an aircraft metal filer, rivet packer and drill press in a General Motors aircraft plant in Linden, New Jersey. The women who chose to work at these plants received little or no formal training. Long, grueling hours, in addition to threats of sexual harassment, did not always make the experience a pleasant one, but making fighter planes made the women feel as if they were making a difference in the outcome of the war.
Edith Worman Varga was offered part-time employment at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey while in high school and then opted for on-the-job training to become a full-time gauge draftsperson at the plant after graduation. Most of her supervisors were male, but men and women employed at the Arsenal did the same kinds of work and performed the same tasks.
Leonora “Lee” Whildin graduated from high school in 1943. Influenced by propaganda encouraging women to contribute to the war effort by becoming factory workers, she took a job assembling switches for parts used by the military in a small shop in Boston. She also hoped to earn higher wages to finance her education in nursing. She then entered the Cadet Nurse Corps, a physically demanding government program developed to staff civilian hospitals as older and more experienced nurses joined the military.
These are a mere handful of those wonderful women. After the war many remained at jobs, others put on their aprons and resumed house work and child-rearing, others became librarians, teachers and volunteers at schools and health institutions. However, the number of women in the work force never again fell to pre-war levels.
The National Parks Service maintains a site (pdf) to honor them.
They make those latter day faux feminists with hyphenated last names and burned bras who got the vapors over being called Miss or Mrs. look like whining ninnies. These women did real men’s work and contributed to overturning tyranny .
The name “Rosie the Riveter” first emerged as a song written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1942. Here are the lyrics that say it all:
While other girls attend their fav’rite cocktail bar
Sipping Martinis, munching caviar
There’s a girl who’s really putting them to shame
Rosie is her name
All the day long whether rain or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history,
working for victory
Rosie the Riveter
Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage
Sitting up there on the fuselage
That little frail can do more than a male will do
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie
Charlie, he’s a Marine
Rosie is protecting Charlie
Working overtime on the riveting machine
When they gave her a production “E”
She was as proud as a girl could be
There’s something true about
Red, white, and blue about
Rosie the Riveter
Everyone stops to admire the scene
Rosie at work on the B-Nineteen
She’s never twittery, nervous or jittery
Rosie the Riveter
What if she’s smeared full of oil and grease
Doing her bit for the old Lendlease
She keeps the gang around
They love to hang around
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie buys a lot of war bonds
That girl really has sense
Wishes she could purchase more bonds
Putting all her cash into national defense
Senator Jones who is “in the know”
Shouted these words on the radio
Berlin will hear about
Moscow will cheer about
Rosie the Riveter!
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth S. King is a freelance writer who writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.
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