Document Set # 8, Women & WWII
Rosie the Riveter
The “Rosie the Riveter” icon began as a propaganda symbol that encouraged a collective effort from all American women during World War II (1939-1945). In another sense, “Rosie” was a symbol of the wartime sacrifices and discrimination that women endured during the war. In later years, feminists redefined the “Rosie the Riveter” image as a symbol of female empowerment.
During the war, there was a shortage of labor in the factories because millions of men had gone off to fight. To keep the country running and to provide the troops with needed materials, the federal War Manpower Commission and the Office of War Information (OWI) began a large propaganda effort known as the “Women in War Jobs” campaign. The campaign first targeted women already in the work force by encouraging them to seek higher paying wages in factories. Then, the campaign recruited young girls out of high school. Finally, when officials realized that even more workers were needed, they targeted older married women who had children and had not previously been expected to work outside the home.
Many ads appealed to patriotism. One ad stated, “Do your part, free a man for service.” Other ads told women that if they joined the workforce, the war would be over sooner. Some ads attempted to generate fear and guilt by telling women that more soldiers would die without their help. Furthermore, many propaganda posters underscored the specific dire need for industrial workers, and industrial leaders advertised high wages. Not surprisingly, about half of all women in the workforce during the war were employed in defense related industries. About six million women answered the call. Some worked under very dangerous conditions in munitions factories. Many did heavy factory work that had been previously reserved for men: building aircraft and warships. They drove streetcars, operated heavy construction machinery, and unloaded freight. Women were toolmakers, machinists, lumberjacks, blacksmiths, steel mill workers, railroad workers, and riveters who built war machines.
Artists celebrated “Rosie the Riveter” in popular songs and painting. Norman Rockwell painted a female riveter for the cover of the Memorial Day edition of the Saturday Evening Post, using a dental hygienist named Mary Doyle Keefe for his model. Rockwell’s figure’s pose resembled the pose of the prophet Isaiah on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. In a patriotic vein, an American flag waved behind a redheaded “Rosie” wearing a blue uniform with white pins on her chest. Evidence of the riveter’s work ethic could be seen by residue on her face and arms. As if to show that women’s industrial work could help defeat Adolf Hitler, a riveting gun lay on the worker’s lap while a copy of Mein Kampf lay under one of her feet.
After Rockwell’s portrait was published, the press found and celebrated several real women who they could associate with the powerful image, the most famous of these being Rose Will Monroe who worked as a riveter on B-24 and B-29 bomber airplanes in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
After the war, the image of “Rosie the Riveter” was almost forgotten. It was not until a wave of feminism swept the nation in the 1980s that the concept of “Rosie the Riveter” was resurrected. However, due to copyright restrictions on Rockwell’s work, feminists adopted a woman’s image from an earlier painting. In 1942, the Westinghouse Power Company had commissioned J. Howard Miller to design a propaganda poster to use to increase the morale of its workers. Miller created a poster of a woman wearing a bandana and flexing her arm muscle with a caption reading, “We Can Do It.” Since the 1980s, the Miller poster became one of the most recognized symbols of female empowerment. In this way, the “Rosie the Riveter” image went from being used as a recruitment propaganda tool during the war to a symbol of past injustices and a rallying call for women’s empowerment.
Women who took jobs in industrial work often faced negative attitudes from male co-workers. In extreme cases, factory managers refused to provide women with gender separate restrooms. Although women usually earned more doing factory work than any other work, they were sometimes paid 50% less than their male factory coworkers. In addition, women were often denied access to certain hazardous higher paying occupations, such as sandblasting. Promotions in pay and rank were often only given to men.
African American women, usually employed as factory janitors and sweepers, remained even lower on the job ladder than white women. After the war, both commercial and military sectors wanted women to leave the factories so that returning men could have the jobs. Consequently, the government launched a new propaganda campaign asking women to “return to normalcy.” The message was that it was not “normal” for women to work in factories; the crisis of war was over; and the aid that women had provided was no longer needed. In short, “Rosie the Riveter” was laid off in 1945.
Working in the factories demonstrated to women and to the world that they could do jobs that had been previously thought exclusive to men. In fact, although many women were let go from their factory jobs in 1945, an increase in postwar spending brought many women back to the factories a few years later. Even by 1947, the percentage of women in the workforce had risen to the same level it was in 1940. In the long run, women’s work experiences during the war served as a precursor to the more permanent employment opportunities that women enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, “Rosie the Riveter” is a symbol of not only what was but of what can be.
Rolando Avila
See Also: World War I; Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)
Further Reading
Wise, Nancy Baker, and Christy Wise. 1994. A Mouthful of Rivets: Women at Work in World War II. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor (1941-1945)
The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor was a group of World War II military nurses. After the Philippines fell, the nurses were captured by the Japanese and imprisoned for three years. Both Army and Navy nurses were taken prisoner. The women continued to work as a nursing unit throughout their captivity, caring for thousands of patients in the face of primitive conditions and extreme deprivation. They were the first group of American women to serve on the front lines and the first large group of American women captured and taken prisoner. All of the nurses survived their ordeal, a survival rate that remains unmatched by any other group of prisoners of war.
In early December of 1941, the nurses stationed in the Army and Navy bases around the Philippine capital of Manila were planning for the Christmas holidays. Most of the women were in their twenties and had joined the military for adventure and the opportunity to serve the nation as military nurses. The Philippines began as a pleasant military assignment, with a relatively light workload and servants to cater to military personel’s every need.
On December 8, ten hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese bombed the Philippines to prevent the Allies from using the islands as a staging area for the war in the Pacific. Before the Japanese could occupy Manila, 87 army nurses escaped to the Bataan Peninsula to nearby Corregidor Island. Twelve navy nurses decided to remain at their posts to care for the sick and wounded. They would later be captured and imprisoned at Santo Tomas and Los Banos.
The army nurses operated two field hospitals in the jungles of the Bataan Peninsula. In four months, the nurses treated 6,000 patients amid bombing and artillery fire in hospitals entirely outdoors. Rows of cots were arranged between the trees, with vines and shrubbery serving as curtains. The traditional white uniforms and stockings were impractical in the jungle, so the nurses wore tropical weight coveralls in a man’s size 42. Now in military uniform, the nurses called themselves The Battling Belles of Bataan. As the battle continued, the hospital became over-crowded and supplies ran low. Philippine natives built cots out of bamboo and hammered scrap metal into basins and bedpans. The nurses made sutures from hemp fibers.
Bataan surrendered on April 9, 1942 and the nurses were ordered to abandon their patients to evacuate to Corregidor Island where the hospital was located underground, in Malinta Tunnel. The nurses continued their work, this time in dank, crowded corridors amid constant shelling that shook the tunnels. When surrender appeared eminent, the commanders ordered a dozen nurses to escape to Australia on the submarine USS Spearfish. The remaining 77 stayed with their patients. On May 6, Corregidor fell and the nurses became prisoners of war.
The Japanese sent the nurses to Santo Tomas Internment Camp to run the camp hospital. The nurses each worked four-hour daily shifts, even as their rations were cut to 700 calories a day and they suffered from malnutrition and tropical diseases. Later, the nurses would tell stories of sautéing weeds in cold cream and counting the worms in their food as an extra protein source. By the time the allies liberated the camp in 1945, the average woman had lost 30% of her body weight. POW Capt. Maude Davison’s weight dropped from 158 to 80 pounds. Another nurse, Lt. Mildred Dalton (Manning) lost all of her teeth due to malnutrition.
The nurses returned home to a hero’s welcome, but after the initial welcome, most of them returned to anonymous lives. All imprisoned nurses were promoted and awarded the Bronze Star, but after the war, they were largely forgotten. Only a few nurses received long-term military benefits or health care. All of the women struggled with chronic effects of prolonged malnutrition as well as emotional and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Many of them died young, their bodies adversely affected by their imprisonment. In 1980 Major Maude C. Davison was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
Lynda C. Titterington
See Also: Army Nurse Corp; Cobb, Laura; Navy Nurse Corps; Nurses Selective Service Act; Tompkins, Sally; Wald, Lillian
Further Reading
Macdougall, Walter. 2015. Angel of Bataan: The Life of a World War II Army Nurse in the War Zone. Rockport, Maine: Down East Books.
Norman, Elizabeth M. 1999. We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese. New York: Random House.
Moreno, Luisa (1907-1992)
Luisa Moreno was a groundbreaking Hispanic leader and union activist. She is best known for co-founding the Hispanic Civil Rights assembly El Congreso de PueblosqueHabianEspanol (The National Spanish-Speaking Congress).
Luisa Moreno was born on August 30, 1907, in Guatemala City. The daughter of Ernesto and Alicia Rodriguez, she was christened Blanca Rose Lopez Rodriguez. As an adult, in deference to family concerns about her labor activities, she changed her name to Luisa Moreno, in honor of the well known Mexican labor organizer Luis Moreno. Moreno first came to the United States in 1916 with her parents and began attending school in Oakland, California. Upon the completion of her studies, she returned to Guatemala, where, working for local newspapers, she became interested in social issues. In August 1928, Moreno returned to the United States, arriving in New York City with her husband, Guatemalan artist Miguel Angel de Leon
Struggling to support her young daughter and unemployed husband in the early days of the Great Depression, Moreno experienced first-hand the conditions in the city’s sweat shops while working in a garment factory near Spanish Harlem. In 1930, attracted by its involvement in organizing workers, Moreno joined the Communist Party. In the early 1930s, she organized Black and Latin cigar and tobacco workers in Florida and sugar cane workers in Louisiana. In 1935, the American Delegation of Labor hired Moreno as a professional organizer.
In June 1937, Moreno divorced her husband. A year later she helped organize the El Congreso de Pueblos queHabianEspanol (The National Spanish-Speaking Congress). The following year Moreno moved east to Colorado, organizing their beet workers, many of whom were day or stoop workers. The first woman and Latino elected to the California Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Council, she also served as an international representative of UCAPAWA (United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America). In 1940, she moved to San Diego, taking a job with a labor newspaper. She and ally Robert Galvan organized the Fish Cannery Workers Union, UCAPAWA, Local 64, an organization that included hundreds of male and female workers.
The war years transformed San Diego, and the wartime industries led to a great influx of Mexican workers throughout Southern California. This shifting population created racial tensions and Moreno and members of El Congreso played a critical role in helping calm a populace. As the country emerged from World War II, Moreno’s life changed. After years of organizing work all over the west and southwest, Louisa married Gray Bemis in February 1947. She wrote a book that was both a memoir and a “how to” book on organizing. She also helped teach a class at the California Labor School titled “Mexican-Americans and the fight for Civil Rights,” and she began the process of securing American citizenship.
Moreno’s life soon fell victim to the postwar McCarthyite Red scare. Her citizenship application was stalled and her years as a labor organizer, her foreign birth, and her one-time Communist Party membership stamped her as a dangerous radical. After appearances before both the California and U.S. House Committees on Un-American Activities, the Justice Department issued a warrant for her arrest, and in March 1949 she was ordered to leave the United States. Officially a “voluntary departure under warrant of deportation,” her departure was hailed by HUAC figures and mourned by the area’s Hispanic Community and Americans who valued constitutional rights.
Moreno and Bemis remained in Mexico for a year before relocating to Guatemala. After the CIA engineered a governmental shakeup in 1954, the couple moved back to Mexico, where Bemis died on February 1, 1960. Moreno moved briefly to Cuba but returned to Mexico, where she lived until shortly before her death. After suffering a major stroke, her brother Ernesto took her back to Guatemala where she died on November 2, 1992. Though not well remembered, Moreno is an important figure in the Mexican-American civil rights.
William H. Pruden III
See Also: Day or Stoop Labor; United Cannery, Agricultural & Packing & Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA)
Further Reading:
Arredondo, Gabriella F., Aida Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera-Ramirez, and Patricia Zavella, eds. 2003. Chicana Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press.
Larralde, Carlos M. and Richard Griswold del Castillo. 1995. “Luisa Moreno: A Hispanic Civil Rights Leader in San Diego.” The Journal of San Diego History, San Diego Historical Society Quarterly41 (4).
Ruiz, Vicki and Sanchez Korrol, Virginia. 2005. Latina Legacies: Identity, Biography and Community. New York: Oxford University Press.