Women at Work: Unlearn what you know about Rosie the Riveter
What if I told you that probably everything you understand about Rosie the Riveter, famed buff, headscarf-wearing factory worker, is misinformed? That her image was drudged up in the 1980s in a (highly successful) effort to inject the story of women into the narrative of WWII homefront history? There were women working in factories and industry during that time, but there’s a lot more nuance (and structural racism) to the actual propaganda posters of WWII recruitment.
Earlier this year, before a global pandemic changed the way we think about work, I read an excellent book about women and work. Specifically, Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor (Jessica Enoch and David Gold, 2019) looks at the ways women engaged rhetorically in workplaces they were often not “meant” to be in, or how they defined and defied those spaces marked for “women’s” labor.
I have long been interested in labor, and our human relationship to it, and the meaning, violence, satisfaction, and drudgery we find there throughout our lives. In fact, my eventual dissertation will likely focus on labor and rhetoric. (And I promise, in a future post, I’ll share more about what rhetoric and feminist rhetoric is; it’s a very exciting and relevant field!)
What Michelle Smith (scholar and professor at Clemson University) reveals in her chapter is the kind of thoughtful research on women and labor that we need right now. She complicates the view of a wartime woman and, by examining the rhetoric (the visual and language clues) of Office of War Information posters that called for women to take up work. The famous “We Can Do It” poster was not one of those ads. As previous scholarship from James Kimble and Lester Olson shows, the Rosie the Riveter poster was not part of a government recruitment campaign.
“Rosie” actually circulated for just two weeks, in one factory, as part of a series of work-incentive posters. It was only seen by men and women already working in the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company from February 15 to 28, 1943.
Smith, in Enoch and Gold, 186.
Dr. Smith asks the question, if Rosie was not the rhetorical image attracting women to the wartime workforce, then what were the actual government recruitment posters and messages, and who were they for? “I ask how public memories of women’s World War II work change if we remember these genuine recruitment posters alongside the properly contextualized Westinghouse Rosie,” Smith says (187).
“The more women at work.” Office of War Information Poster NO. 52. Public domain, image courtesy of Library of Congress.
The actual posters make three appeals: to patriotism, continuity, and domesticity. That is, any feminist potential was overshadowed in these recruitment posters in order to bolster a message that women in the work force was temporary, and they would soon return home (and men would “take back” those jobs). Many of the posters spoke about women, rather than to them. War time recruitment posters in the era were not about feminist liberation or an opening of work spaces to women. The rhetoric of the messaging needed to “reassure both women and men that gender roles would remain intact—if not during the war, at least after it.” (196).
In the nine posters actually produced by the Office of War Information, women’s appearance, race, age, pose, and work task are all very carefully composed. Despite doing “manly” work, women would still be pretty!
As the years and posters progressed, the language opened up slightly to imply women could find meaningful work in care-giving occupations, like nursing, which did somewhat open the door for implications of continued work post-war. However, this messaging did little to revise the standard white public understanding of labor for working-class women and women of color. It is critical to note that wartime recruitment was targeting housewives as the largest untapped force of women workers, leaving Black women entirely out of consideration. If white middle class women could be temporarily permitted in a man’s work world, working class white and Black women were certainly excluded, wartime need or not.
Smith’s scholarship advances a proper contextualization of women in “war work:” as temporary, heteronormative, and composed of predominantly white, middle-class women “whose conventional femininity remained intact” (187). Smith looks at visual rhetoric to study the nine posters and recruitment messaging, contextualizing WWII labor beyond the skewed feminist empowerment interpretation frequently referenced in public memory, building off the revelation that “Rosie” as we know her is a 1980s archival discovery that led to an anachronistic depiction of wartime feminism and work.
Every single chapter of Women at Work is a revelation, honestly, and so I hope to feature more of the scholarship in the coming weeks. I would love to hear your comments and questions, as I have certainly truncated Michelle Smith’s argument and left out a lot of fascinating nuances and details that she discusses. Did you know this about Rosie the Riveter? Tell me!
“Save his life.” Office of War Information Poster no. 49. Public Domain.
Citations
Kimble, James J. and Lester C Olson. "Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" Poster." Rhetoric & Public Affairs, vol. 9 no. 4, 2006, p. 533-569. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/210135.
Smith, Michelle. “In Rosie’s Shadow: World War II Recruitment Rhetoric and Women’s Work in Public Memory.” Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor. Jessica Enoch and David Gold, eds. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.