Analysis Of Rosie The Riveter: An Image Of Working Women During WWII

Rosie the Riveter is an iconic image of working women during WWII. She is shown wearing a red bandana, speaking the words: "We can do it!" She was used as a tool to recruit women to work in factories that produced military equipment. Women helped to provide the military with things that they needed; however, throughout history, women have been undervalued and underappreciated for all that they do.

When all the men went to war, the U.S. was left without anyone to take care of it. So the women stepped in and took the their places: they worked in factories, volunteered for various army-related organizations, and held their households together - women were an essential part of the war effort.

Some of the organizations women joined were the Women's

They analyzed photographs, worked as radio operators, rigged parachutes, worked as lab technicians, repaired airplanes, and drove trucks. They also flew military aircraft across the country and test-flew newly repaired planes. They helped to train anti-aircraft artillery gunners by acting as flying targets.

However, after WWII, women - who, for the duration of the war, had successfully done men's jobs - were forced back to their previous places in society. They couldn't take advantage of veteran benefit programs, and even during the war were paid half as much as their male counterparts. In Britain during WWII, there was similar sexism: the women worked hard, but to this day, are not recognized for their efforts.

Bletchley Park, a code-breaking organization in Britain, is still thought of as an all-male endeavor, even though there were women working there. While only a few of the actual code breakers were women, seventy-five percent of the workers there were women. From 1942 to 1945, about 8,000 women were drafted to work at Bletchley Park. But Bletchley Park is remembered, not for the vast majority of its workers, but for people like Alan Turing, the male

They weren’t expected to have a career. And yet they found themselves in this job they couldn’t even talk about, half of them not knowing what they were doing."

Women were held to the same standard of secrecy as the male workers. The stakes were just as high. Rozanne Colchester, a Bletchley girl, says, “You were told that if you talked about it, you could be shot. It was all terribly exciting.”

19-year-old Colchester could be seen on a bright red bicycle, making the daily commute to Bletchley, where she decoded messages sent between enemy fighter pilots.

Pamela Rose, an actress, was also recruited to work at the Park. She worked in the indexing hut of the naval intelligence section. “The codes came in broken up into something like a text message,” she explains. “We had to have a card for the battleship, another for the port it was leaving, another for where it was arriving, and so on. Some days it was incredibly exciting – other times it was very dull, about the captain’s socks or something.”

Women were responsible for various different things at Bletchley, including (but not limited to): decoding and cross-referencing words and phrases from German messages. To quote Tessa Dunlop, author of The Bletchley Girls: "It simply couldn’t have functioned without