Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change

The poster image of the blonde housewife working in a factory to help her soldier husband win World War II is dispelled by the 10 women (out of forty-five interviewed for an oral history project) who tell their stories here. Blacks and Latinas as well as whites, they entered industry, not only out of patriotism, but for economic opportunity. The experience changed their lives. They gained confidence as well as skills; their horizons broadened as they worked with people outside their own ethnic groups. War work was not an exception, but part of the occasionally interrupted continuum of their working lives. Her perceptive conclusion places their experience as part of the process of incremental change occurring from the 1930s through the war years and the much-maligned 1950s. [Mary Drake McFeely]