within which to justify their own demands. It offered them institutional resources. Paradoxically, when it
failed to live up to its own rhetoric of justice for all or only responded erratically, that too reinforced
women’s escalating calls for change.
“Women: There’s Work to Be Done and a War to Be Won . . . Now!”^12
What women judged as fair between the sexes changed dramatically during and after World War II. The
attitudes of the 1930s labor movement toward women’s rights came to seem tame, even conservative, and
much in need of reconceptualization. So too did society’s treatment of women, especially wage-earning
women. The upheavals of the war contributed mightily to these changes.
The most celebrated gender pioneers of World War II are the Rosie the Riveters holding their hammer
guns aloft, doing a man’s job with gusto and finesse. The iconic 1940s images of Rosie the Riveter are
upbeat, whether on government recruiting posters or taken from Norman Rockwell’s celebratory 1943
Memorial Day cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Yet for twenty-first-century observers, the image of
Rosie the Riveter may evoke a sense of loss as well as triumph. Many know that Rosie’s wartime day in
the sun—enjoying her boost in income, admired for her skill, and basking in societal approval—would
not last. At the war’s end, it is thought, Rosie the Riveter morphed into Rosie the Stay-at-Home Mom,
surrounded by her children in a suburban dream home, cheerfully wielding a vacuum cleaner, not a rivet
gun.
What often gets lost in both the wartime propaganda image and the popular narrative of Rosie’s rise
and fall is the experience of the majority of women war workers. Most Rosies were not new recruits to
the labor force but low-income workers. Women moved into men’s industrial jobs during the war, into
some of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in America, because they had few better options. Most
returned not to full-time domesticity but to their old jobs in the blue- and pink-collar ghetto of low-paid,
low-status women’s work. The baby boom at war’s end was real enough, but so too was another
phenomenon: the rise of the Working Wife and Mother.
J. Howard Miller’s 1942 recruitment poster for Westinghouse later became famous as “Rosie the Riveter,” representing women’s rights and
the millions of women who performed wartime jobs historically reserved for men.