RIP ‘Rosie the Riveter’

The woman whose image was part of the campaign to encourage and empower women as factory workers while men were enlisting or being drafted for World War II has died, according to the Lansing Journal.

Geraldine Doyle was 86.

Doyle was the model for the poster that was created by J. Howard Miller in 1942 for Westinghouse, titled “We Can Do It!” That image was taken for Rosie the Riveter when it was re-popularized by feminists in the 1970s.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia names two other women as the inspirations for the iconic image of women taking on men’s work to help the war effort.

There was a song, Rosie the Riveter, purportedly inspired by Rosalind P. Walter, “who came from old money and worked on the night shift building the F4U Corsair fighter.”

Wikipedia goes on:

Rosie the Riveter became most closely associated with another real woman, Rose Will Monroe, who was born in Pulaski County, Kentucky in 1920 and moved to Michigan during World War II. She worked as a riveter at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, building B-29 and B-24 bombers for the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Few of the ‘Rosies’ holding jobs, especially in formerly male-only occupations, would be where we are without these women of the wartime factories, particularly those who refused to meekly return when that war was done – and at the government’s behest – to unpaid homemaking and/or gender-stereotyped work .

10 thoughts on “RIP ‘Rosie the Riveter’

  1. The seeds of Feminism were sown in WWI, and again in WWII, nurtured in the 1950s, grew in the 1960s and squashed by the far-right extremists (so-called Republicans) in the 1970s.

    So when Rush Limbaugh decries the Feminazis, he is really attacking the Greatest Generation for allowing those women to get uppity in the first place.

    I watched ‘White Christmas’ recently.  I had forgotten what a Feminist Manifesto that was, pushing the boundaries of women’s rights as far as they could while also staying within strictures of ‘marriage’.

  2.  The F4U Corsair,a fighter plane with a great name.

    My mother drove a truck for the military(as a civilian) during WWII and her sister enlisted in the navy as a WAVE.

    Funny to remember how radical it all was.

     

  3. Turns out that Doyle’s (nee Hoff) image was used without her knowledge, and the poster was part of an internal Westinghouse anti-absenteeism and anti-strike campaign. She didn’t know she was the model until the image was re-popularized in the 1980s.

    Doyle’s father died when she was 10 from pneumonia; her mother was a composer with serious scoliosis.  Geraldine briefly worked at the factory (one site suggests for as little as a week!), but as a cellist, she worried about injuries to her hands from the metal presses she operated; she quit the factory, took a job at an Ann Arbor soda fountain, and soon after married a dentist, Leo Doyle, to whom she was married for 66 years until his death earlier this year.

    NanuqFC

    In a Time of Universal Deceit, TELLING the TRUTH Is a Revolutionary Act. ~ George Orwell  

  4. The women did step up.  My Mom, now almost 90, went to work in the local steel plant on the wire mill while my Dad was at an airbase in England.

    These strong women were heroes too.

  5. Did I miss something in the news, Mr. President?  Did you come out and pay as much attention to this woman as you did to Michael Vick?  Did you tell the American people that an important figure in American History has just passed away and we should all note and honor her?  Maybe even lower the flag?

    “What, Peter?  Honor woman and labor and feminism and socialism?  I’ll get reamed by the Right.  Besides, I’m watching the games, Sunday.  Go Eagles!  Rosie the Riveter?  Everybody knows it was football that won WWII.”

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