Rosie the Riveter – the steel-eyed heroine of WWII with her red bandana, blue jumpsuit and flexed biceps – is one of America’s most indelible military images. Positioned under the maxim “We Can Do It”, the image of “Rosie” has come to largely represent the unwavering American working woman, and more specifically, the millions of working women who have thrilled the factories and offices of the industries of American defense.
What the iconic Rosie image does not convey is the diversity of this work force, especially the more than half a million “Black Rosies” who have worked alongside their white counterparts in the war effort. Coming from all over the United States, these “Black Rosies” worked tirelessly – in shipyards and factories, along the railroads, inside administrative offices and elsewhere – to combat both the foreign enemy of authoritarianism abroad and the familiar enemy of racism at home. For decades, they have received little recognition or historical recognition.
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Economic opportunity evoked
African-American riveter sitting on huge machine parts during World War II at Lockheed Aircraft Corp., 1942.
Time Life Pictures / Women’s Office / National Archives / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images
Like the Great War before it, World War II demanded that entire populations of participating nations contribute to the war effort. After the United States entered the conflict in 1941 and millions of American men were drafted into the military, the government had to rely on American women to fill roles related to domestic warfare. At the height of wartime industrial production, some 2 million women worked in war-related industries.
For African American women, becoming Rosie was not only an opportunity to contribute to the war effort, but also a chance for economic empowerment. Already on the move as part of the Great Migration, they sought to leave behind dead-end, often demeaning jobs of servants and sharecroppers.
“Blacks were leaving the south anyway and moving across the country,” says Gregory S. Cooke, director of Invisible warriors, a documentary on the Black Rosies. “The war gave women a more specific motivation to leave and an opportunity to earn money like black women never dreamed of before.
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President Roosevelt steps in to tackle inequalities in the workplace
Welders prepare for work on the SS George Washington Carver in Richmond, California, 1943.
EF Joseph / Anthony Potter Collection / Getty Images
At first, finding war-related work proved difficult for many future Black Rosies, as many employers – almost always white men – refused to hire black women.
“The war represented this incredible opportunity, but black women really had to come together and fight for the opportunity to be even considered,” says Dr Maureen Honey, author of Bitter Fruit: African American Women in WWII and Professor Emeritus of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. “Many employers have held on, trying to hire only white women or white men, until they were forced to do otherwise.”
This coercion came in the summer of 1941 when activists Mary McLeod Bethune and A. Phillip Randolph brought widespread hiring discrimination to President Franklin Roosevelt, prompting the Commander-in-Chief to sign Executive Order 8802 banning racial discrimination in the defense industry. The order spurred the entry of black women into the war effort; of the million African Americans who first entered paid service after signing 8,802, 600,000 were women.
The roles played by Black Rosies in the war effort ran the gamut. They worked in factories as sheet metal workers and assemblers of ammunition and explosives; in shipyards as shipbuilders and along assembly lines as electricians. They were administrators, welders, railroad drivers and more.
“It was a job you were proud of,” says Ruth Wilson, a 98-year-old Black Rosie living in Philadelphia.
During the war, Ms. Wilson quit her job as a domestic servant and became a sheet metal worker at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she worked in the yard dry dock to assemble ship bulkheads. “It made me feel good because my husband was over there in Europe fighting, and here I was doing my part,” Ms. Wilson said. Plus, she said, “I made more money!”
Industrial work was only part of the wartime employment picture, says Dr Honey: “All kinds of work were highly valued and considered ‘war jobs’.” Black Rosies held critical roles outside of manual labor, as computer scientists and typist, and in the fields as farmers, extracting the precious cotton needed for sheets and uniforms for American troops at abroad.
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A fight uphill
A tower operator at an aircraft manufacturing plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1942.
Universal History Archive / Getty Images
Yet despite their importance, the Black Rosies still face biting racism and sexism on the home front.
Black and white women were regularly paid 10 to 15 cents an hour less than their male counterparts, despite equal pay rules. Across the country, black workers have received fewer benefits and are denied the right to control union activity, with the shipbuilder’s union completely barring blacks from membership. And at Wagner Electric, a factory in Saint-Louis, despite a diverse workforce comprised of 64% white women and 24% black men, no black women were hired.
“These struggles were part of the Double V campaign,” says Dr Honey, referring to the slogan used during World War II highlighting the two-front struggle that black Americans found themselves fighting – for victory over freedom in the world. abroad and for victory over oppression at home.
READ MORE: Did WWII start the civil rights movement?
Willie Mae Govan, another Rosie and one of three black women who worked in the manufacture of gunpowder for the EI DuPont Corporation in Childersburg, Ala., Almost cried when describing the sexual harassment she suffered from the share of white male bosses in his factory. All while doing particularly dangerous work, which Ms Govan says has contributed to frequent and severe migraines for much of her life.
Bernice Bowman, who worked at the US General Accounting Office as a clerk-typist, says that despite frequent promotions for her white colleagues, she was never offered a chance for advancement.
“The point is, black people were used to discrimination,” says Wilson. “So we did our best to ignore it and kept moving forward.”
READ MORE: Black Americans who served in World War II faced segregation abroad and at home
Late recognition
Workers used spark plugs at a converted Buick plant to produce aircraft engines in Melrose Park, Illinois, 1942.
Ann Rosener / Underwood Archives / Getty Images
In 1945, in a written report prepared at the end of the war, Kathryn Blood, a Department of Labor researcher studying the contributions of black women in wartime, wrote the following about the Black Rosies:
“The contribution [of Black women] is a country that this nation would not be wise to forget or wrongly evaluate. “
But for decades, Black Rosies’ efforts went largely unrecognized – until African-American historians, playwrights, and filmmakers like Mr. Cooke began in the 21st century to shed light on their contributions.
“These women, I sincerely believe, are some of the most important women of the 20th century,” says Cooke.
“At the time, we didn’t really think we wanted recognition,” says Wilson. “But now it’s nice to know that the work we did is being remembered.”
