Why rosie the riveter was important

After a decade of failing with the football paradigm and an equal number of years wearing bad clothes, women began to realize that it was impossible to disguise their essential nature in the workplace. What women discover is that the male corporate culture sees both extremes as unacceptable. Women who want the flexibility to balance their families and their careers are not adequately committed to the organization. Women who perform as aggressively and competitively as men are abrasive and unfeminine.

This simple suggestion started a heated national debate. The debate ricocheted throughout the national media for several weeks before the concept was derailed altogether. More recently, it has been in vogue to argue that women, who allegedly possess special intuitive and caring abilities, actually make better managers than men, who are now hopelessly trapped into the outdated scientific paradigm of management.

This integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is. For authors like Helgesen, motherhood is no longer a liability; it is actually an advanced management training program. In its way, this is as simplistic as the application of sports metaphors to management.

Both the sports metaphors and the new maternal metaphor of management are elaborate extensions of prevailing sexual stereotypes, the strong beliefs we hold about the way men and women should behave, translated into a business context. Still, there exists a persistent notion that the special sensitivity of some women can lead us to a new kind of interactional leadership.

Most likely, these women lack the organizational power necessary to create change and therefore fall back on the soft skills of nurturing and feeding people to gain allegiance. After all, women have been using food to cause groups to coalesce for years.

By extolling this brand of manipulation, authors like Rosener are doing little more than making a virtue out of necessity. Despite the popularity of the idea that women bring something special to the management table, there is also a certain danger inherent in this belief.

For even as we seek to define gender roles, we perpetuate them. For it is the very definitions that authors like Helgesen suggest women cling to that have excluded women from managerial ranks in the past. The skills Helgesen claims will make women exemplary managers are the same skills Rosabeth Moss Kanter told us were the emotional characteristics that define the other—the lesser skills that sit beside the rational manager.

Women, therefore, have bought into and are currently promoting the very definitions that have been used to exclude them from the work force in the past. Remember, as soon as Rosie got good at riveting, factory work was all about welding. Adding to the complexity of this issue is one inescapable truth: women today cannot avoid being judged as women. Take the case of Ann Hopkins, a woman who approached her job as an accountant by exhibiting a traditional male approach to authority.

Hopkins was in her early forties in when she was denied a partnership at the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse. Ann Hopkins had succeeded at being an accountant, but she had failed, in their eyes anyway, at being a woman. This double yardstick of gender appropriateness and managerial effectiveness often leaves women in an unbreakable, untenable double bind.

Women who attempt to fit themselves into a managerial role by acting like men, as Ann Hopkins did, are forced to behave in a sexually dissonant way.

After looking at a large number of sex discrimination cases, Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University, found that women have been denied promotions both for being ambitious and argumentative and for being old-fashioned and reserved. In other words, she found that there is often no acceptable way to bridge the gap between womanhood and work. And no way to break the bind that keeps women out of the top ranks of corporations. If the norm is male, women will always be the other, the deviant.

Superior or inferior, she is not the same. She is caught in a catch If she attacks the problem by trying to be male, she will be too aggressive. If she attacks the problem by trying to be female, she will be the ineffective other. Day to day, this translates into a minefield for women who must manage both their sexuality and their managerial performance. Even though the women who use these phrases run the risk of undermining their message.

Carli asked undergraduates to rate female and male speakers on persuasive ability. Ask any woman who has ever tried to navigate this cultural and linguistic minefield, and she will tell you that it is next to impossible.

The defense products that the women produced during the war, such as military aircraft and bullets, were no longer needed in mass quantities. Additionally, many employers tried to fill factory positions with returning veterans. Many women in factory work were included in massive layoffs or given increasingly difficult work within the factory to motivate the women to quit. Regardless of their ill treatment after the war, the majority of Riveters express in oral history that interviews the experience gave them a strong sense of accomplishment.

One such woman was Arlene Crary of Madison, Wisconsin. For almost two years, Arlene worked full-time for Boeing and found a babysitter for her two young daughters. Within the factory, Arlene was valued as an employee because her small size enabled her to work in small spaces, such as the wing of the aircraft. The money was enough for Arlene to pay for housing in Seattle, purchase war bonds, and save money for the future purchase of property.

Arlene returned to her hometown of Madison before her husband returned from the war, and she continued working as a waitress. Following the war, Arlene divorced her husband, but she used the money earned at Boeing to build a house in Madison. Reflecting on her time in the Boeing factory, Arlene commented that her experience as a Rosie made her more open-minded, less shy, and more aware of the value of teamwork. Her time as a Rosie also helped Arlene learn to find people in her life that would truly love and support her.

Like many other Riveters, Arlene was able to use the experience of wage earning to improve her life financially, as well as find the courage to establish relationships with a greater level of equality and mutual appreciation. The end of the war brought about the end the factory careers of many Riveters.

However, for many women, as the life and oral testimony of Mary Lawson shows, they did fight gender and racial discrimination to stay employed in her factory.

No longer surrounded by fellow Riveters, females who remained in factory work began working side by side with men. Other Riveters, such as Arlene Crary, sought employment in traditionally female occupations such as waitressing and teaching.

Another segment of Riveters returned to domestic life as full-time homemakers. While women during World War II worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers. More than , women worked in the U. The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as illustrated by the U. Based in small part on a real-life munitions worker, but primarily a fictitious character, the strong, bandanna-clad Rosie became one of the most successful recruitment tools in American history, and the most iconic image of working women in the World War II era.

In movies, newspapers, propaganda posters , photographs and articles, the Rosie the Riveter campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the workforce. The true identity of Rosie the Riveter has been the subject of considerable debate. Monroe also was featured in a promotional film for war bonds.

And Rosalind P. Walter was, in fact, a riveter on Corsair fighter planes. In the photo, she is sporting a telltale polka-dotted bandana. Fraley passed away in January In addition to factory work and other home front jobs, some , women joined the Armed Services, serving at home and abroad. Its members, known as WACs, worked in more than non-combatant jobs stateside and in every theater of the war.

By , there were more than , WACs and 6, female officers. The Coast Guard and Marine Corps soon followed suit, though in smaller numbers. They ferried planes from factories to bases, transporting cargo and participating in simulation strafing and target missions, accumulating more than 60 million miles in flight distances and freeing thousands of male U. More than 1, WASPs served, and 38 of them lost their lives during the war. The call for women to join the workforce during World War II was meant to be temporary and women were expected to leave their jobs after the war ended and men came home.