Rosie the Riveter’s powerful legacy
Sometime around the 2016 election, Rosie the Riveter had a comeback as a symbol of the women’s movement. All the touchstones of the original World War II propaganda poster — the hair pulled back in a red polka-dot scarf, the clenched fist, the denim work shirt rolled up to reveal a firm bicep — became common dress-up themes and placard images for the Women’s March.
“It really is the symbol of a strong, independent, capable woman,” says Brad Bunnin, ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. “It’s simple, it’s colorful. It can’t be misunderstood.”
Bunnin is speaking of the poster image created by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. around 1942 to encourage women to work at its company factories.
The current Rosie resurgence, showing up on Instagram feeds from Israel to Brazil as well as a prototype for a new “Women of Achievement” Barbie, is not the first time she has surfaced as an icon of female empowerment in 75 years. Yet the legion of fans who order the polkadot scarves on Etsy or baby onesies with the cheerful “We Can Do It!” slogan might not even realize her deep Bay Area roots. Even fewer may be aware of the sexism that surrounded the Rosie era, a short midcentury interval when women were welcome in the workforce.
Naomi Parker Fraley was the original model for the Westinghouse Rosie the Riveter poster when she was working in an Alameda Navy machine shop during the war. She died in January at age 96 at her home in Washington state, only a year or two after she was finally identified as the model when others had long claimed the title.
Fraley was actually just one of many “Rosies,” the nickname for American women who worked in ship building, and aircraft and machinery assembly lines during World War II, including at several shipyards in Richmond owned by Henry J. Kaiser. Bay Area shipyards produced 1,400 vessels — on average, one ship per day — for the length of the war, according to the National Park Service.
To reach such production levels when so many men had been sent off to war, women were encouraged to take up welding, riveting and plumbing. Around 13.7 percent of the 77,000 wartime workers at Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards were women, or around 10,000, according to the museum’s historic archives.
As workers flooded into Richmond, housing was so scarce that women who worked different shifts would share a bed, historian Donna Graves says in a short documentary film shown at the Rosie the Riveter museum.
Clothing was also hard to come by. Because all-male unions had previously kept them out of such jobs, women had to wear men’s work clothes at first, says Bunnin, who gives a talk called “What We Wore During the War.”
“There was no specific clothes line for women. They made do with what was available,” he says, which often meant wearing bulky, ill-fitting coveralls. “Fashion wasn’t really the goal. The goal was to wear something that was durable.”
Newspaper articles of the time made that point loud and clear with headlines like U.S. Naval Air Station Definitely No Place for Glamor and It’s Fashionless War at Navy Air Base!
Those yellowed clips from the the Oakland Post-Enquirer during the war years (their exact date is unknown) had stern tips on how women should dress for work.
“Glamor does not mix with safety and safety must set the style for women working in the nation’s assembly and repair shops,” Lt. Cmdr. R.R. Darron, the “fashion dictator” at the U.S. Air Station in Alameda, was quoted as saying. “Women can look pretty in the home. When they come to work in the shops, they should forget about the lace and frills.”
While it’s hard to believe anyone might be tempted to wear their best dress to weld a ship together, one can imagine the rules on hair covering being more of an adjustment for some.
“Loose, long hair, which was the way women wore their hair in the ’40s, could get caught in machinery,” says Bunnin, calling it a dangerous, even potentially fatal risk. “That head gear, the Rosie scarf tied around the hair, was a mandatory safety precaution.”
While African American women often wore head scarves to work before the war, both black and white women who worked in factories during the war wore their hair that way, Bunnin points out.
Another rule was to wear slacks or jeans instead of skirts, which was so momentous for women that newspaper photographers were sent out to capture the sight. One newspaper caption from the era read, “Strongarmed, rugged and determined looking, these women in shorts and slacks are typical of thousands of their sex who are now doing men’s work in the arsenals of war.”
Almost universally, photos from the era show women who seem comfortable and at ease in their roles.
“I think women wore work clothes with a certain measure of pride that they were able to do jobs that they hadn’t been allowed to do before the war, and they did them with great skill and safety. They were doing their bit, and wearing industrial clothes was part of that,” says Bunnin.
The irony of the naval officer’s admonishment that “style and vanity should be secondary to utility and safety” is that Rosie in the propaganda poster is somewhat glam. Her eyebrows are arched and shaped, her lashes are full and she wears a hint of lip color and nail polish (unlike heels, makeup was allowed in the factory). Tufts of shiny, carefully curled hair peek out from under her scarf.
To visit: 1414 Harbour Way South, Ste. 3000, Richmond; (510) 2325050, Ext. 0, or https://www.nps.gov/ rori/index.htm. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, excluding three holidays. Betty Soskin gives popular talks on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and local Rosies do a meet-andgreet most Fridays. Rosie the Riveter Rally:
Each August, the museum and Rosie the Riveter Trust organize a rally attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as a Rosie the Riveter (see Page 6).