Rosie The Riveter Thesis

The most iconic image of working women during World War ll, Rosie the Riveter was the face of a campaign that was working to recruit female workers for various defense industries for the war. The industry that the campaign was centered around was aviation, they were placed in the US aircraft industry in hopes to help the US army in the war. As the majority of men had left to serve in the war, there were gaping holes left in the American workforce that had to be filled. With the plethora of jobs available, women– even married women– were now encouraged to get jobs.

Rosie the Riveter is the quintessential figure of working women, especially in the mid-1900s. Her true identity is not known, however, the inspiration for her is assumed to be one

Years earlier, during the Great Depression, women were discouraged from getting jobs so that the few jobs that were available could go to men. However, when World War ll started, the governement now wanted women to start entering the workforce. They created the Rosie the Riveter campaign to try and entice women into getting jobs. In one version of the Rosie the Riveter poster, she was standing on a copy of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s political rulebook. The message this sent out to women was essentially that although men were on the frontlines doing the physical fighting, women were also doing their part to defeat the enemy and help people. The poster of Rosie the Riveter was changed slightly from the original one because the first is far more masculine, something no one wanted to see in a women in the 1940s. The new poster “appealed to the sense of patriotism and common goal of the Second World War while showing that women could retain their femininity and womanhood in their service” (Hawkes). The message was “We Can Do It!”, referring to how women were wanted and valued in the workplace. This was a message never before seen in modern society, especially not seen when targeted towards married women. This was in fact so unheard of, that “World War II was the first time in U.S. history married women outnumbered single women workers” (Hawkes). Also, by 1944, 1 in 3 defense workers were former full time