Rosie the Riveter: American Women in the Wartime Workforce

Rosie the Riveter is the best-known symbol of the millions of American women who took jobs in factories, shipyards and munitions plants during the Second World War, between 1942 and 1945. The figure grew out of a popular song and a famous magazine cover, and decades later became attached to the “We Can Do It!” poster. Behind the icon lies a real and lasting change in the American workforce.

Background: a labour shortage

When the United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, industry already faced huge orders. Under the Lend-Lease Act American factories were supplying Britain and its allies, and now they had to arm the US armed forces as well. At the same time, more than 16 million Americans would serve in uniform during the war, nearly all of them men.

The result was a severe shortage of workers. Before the war many employers and unions had kept women out of heavy industrial jobs, and married women were often expected to leave paid work altogether. The government’s War Manpower Commission and Office of War Information now ran campaigns urging women to fill the gap, presenting factory work as a patriotic duty that would bring soldiers home sooner.

Women at work

The response was large. The number of women in the American labour force rose from about 12 million in 1940 to roughly 18–19 million by 1945, and women’s share of all workers grew from around a quarter to over a third. Many of the newcomers were married, older than earlier generations of working women, and mothers.

Women built bombers and fighters, welded ships, made shells and ammunition, and operated cranes and lathes. In 1943 more than 300,000 women were working in the American aircraft industry alone. Large plants such as the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California, and Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant in Michigan employed women in tens of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled roles. Others worked as government clerks, drove trucks, or joined the women’s branches of the armed forces.

For many, the jobs meant higher wages than they had ever earned. Women who had worked as domestic servants, waitresses or shop assistants moved into better-paid industrial work. Even so, women were usually paid less than men doing comparable jobs, were often placed on lower grades, and were expected to leave when the war ended.

The song, the painting and the poster

The name “Rosie the Riveter” came from a 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, recorded by several artists, about a woman working on an assembly line to support her sweetheart in the Marines. The name stuck as a nickname for women war workers in general.

The most widely seen image during the war was Norman Rockwell’s cover for The Saturday Evening Post of 29 May 1943. It showed a muscular woman in overalls on her lunch break, a rivet gun across her lap and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf under her feet. Rockwell’s model was Mary Doyle Keefe, a 19-year-old telephone operator from Vermont. The magazine reached millions of homes, and the painting raised large sums when it was used in war bond drives.

The “We Can Do It!” poster, now the most famous Rosie image, had a much smaller wartime role. It was drawn by the artist J. Howard Miller for the Westinghouse Electric company’s internal War Production Coordinating Committee and was displayed for about two weeks in February 1943 in Westinghouse plants. It carried no name. The poster was rediscovered in the early 1980s, reproduced widely, and adopted as a symbol of women’s strength and the feminist movement.

Key people

• Norman Rockwell (1894–1978), illustrator whose 1943 magazine cover defined Rosie for wartime readers.
• J. Howard Miller (1918–2004), Pittsburgh artist who designed the “We Can Do It!” poster for Westinghouse.
• Naomi Parker Fraley (1921–2018), machine-shop worker at Naval Air Station Alameda, California, identified in 2016 as the woman in the 1942 photograph that probably inspired Miller’s poster.
• Rose Will Monroe (1920–1997), a riveter at Willow Run who appeared in a wartime promotional film, one of several real women associated with the name.

Childcare, race and discrimination

Wartime work exposed problems that families had to solve on their own. Few employers offered childcare, and absenteeism was high among mothers. Congress used the Lanham Act to fund public childcare centres, which at their peak looked after more than 100,000 children; the Kaiser shipyards also ran well-known round-the-clock centres. Nearly all of this support closed soon after the war.

African American women also entered war industries, many leaving domestic service for factory jobs for the first time. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 of June 1941 banned racial discrimination in defence industries, but Black women still often faced segregated facilities, the hardest or dirtiest tasks, and hostility from white co-workers. Mexican American, Asian American and Native American women had similar experiences of new opportunity mixed with prejudice.

After the war

When the fighting ended in 1945, war contracts were cancelled and returning veterans had priority for many jobs. Hundreds of thousands of women were laid off from heavy industry within months, even though surveys by the federal Women’s Bureau found that a large majority of women war workers wanted to keep working. Popular culture of the late 1940s and 1950s promoted the image of the suburban housewife.

Yet the change was not simply reversed. Female employment fell after 1945 but soon began rising again, and by the 1950s more married women were in paid work than before the war. Most were now in offices, shops and services rather than shipyards. Historians still debate how far the war changed attitudes, but many former war workers later said the experience showed them, and their daughters, what they were capable of.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Rosie the Riveter was one real woman. Fact: She was a composite symbol; several real women have been linked to the name.
• Myth: The “We Can Do It!” poster was a famous wartime recruiting poster. Fact: It was an internal company poster shown briefly in 1943 and became famous only in the 1980s.
• Myth: Women first entered the workforce during the war. Fact: Millions of women already worked before 1941, mostly in lower-paid jobs; the war opened skilled industrial work to them on a large scale.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1941, 7 December: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; the United States enters the Second World War.
• 1942: The song “Rosie the Riveter” is written; recruitment of women into war industries accelerates.
• 1943, February: The “We Can Do It!” poster is displayed in Westinghouse factories.
• 1943, 29 May: Norman Rockwell’s Rosie appears on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
• 1945, August–September: The war ends; mass lay-offs of women in war industries follow.
• 1980s: The “We Can Do It!” poster is rediscovered and becomes a feminist symbol.
• 2000: The Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park is established in Richmond, California.
• 2020, December: A law awarding a Congressional Gold Medal to the women war workers is enacted.

Why it matters

Rosie the Riveter tells the story of how total war pulled millions of women into skilled industrial work in a few short years. The jobs were often temporary, unequal and segregated, but they challenged assumptions about what women could do. The image survives because it links that wartime experience to later struggles over equal pay and opportunity, which go back to campaigns such as the fight for the Nineteenth Amendment.