Imagine a place without men around to do many of the harsh duties required to keep a country running. Although the world views men and women as equals today, in the 1940s, they were quite separated in their lines of work. Men were the center of the workforce while most women were homemakers. When the world suddenly had the priority of war to deal with, America lost a large chunk of its male workers. Since the labor force was short-staffed, it was clear that a good option would be to employ the other half of the population: women. However, since women were accustomed to the idea that they were meant to stay at home doing household chores, a concept needed to be implemented into their minds to persuade them to join the labor force. Thus, Rosie the Riveter was born.
The cultural icon that was ‘Rosie the Riveter’ was an artifact strategically aimed at influencing women to join the workforce while many men were away at war. The reason this icon developed in the first place was due to the lack of male workers who instead were off fighting for America in World War II. The artifact of Rosie the Riveter centers in the concept that men are not the only ones who can get a job done. Women can be just as strong, and just as capable, as a man can be. Rosie the Riveter was an icon which all women could relate to because Rosie herself was a woman. Many depictions of Rosie the Riveter, like the image shown above, had her dressed in workers clothes similar to that which the men would wear as opposed to clothing with feminine characteristics such as dresses or skirts. Different pictures of Rosie the Riveter were distributed through the post and the icon even had a song about her which made her more recognizable to the public when they would see an image of her. Through this rhetorical vision that women could do any job a man could do, it made women everywhere feel more empowered.
While Rosie the Riveter did influence women all over the country to join the work force, it was an idea that could be, at the time, described as a fantasy. Although it achieved its motive of pulling in women everywhere to take on the usual male-dominated jobs, the artifact failed to address that at the end of the war, extreme amounts of men would come flooding back into the work force to take back their jobs, causing the women to revert back to being the simple housewife again. The vision of women performing labor-intensive jobs also hid the fact that women are most often less physically capable than men due to biological differences. Even though the artifact hid these aspects, most women knew this and understood the concept that the men would eventually return from battle to reclaim their jobs. Even with that knowledge, this did not stop the influence of Rosie the Riveter on women to join the labor force.
Rosie the Riveter was an idea that worked because it gave women a feeling of power and helped them see there was more to their identity than simply staying at home. At the time in which the idea of Rosie the Riveter was all happening, women had also still not achieved the goal of equal rights. Rosie the Riveter was not just an icon that influenced these women to join the labor force but one that helped pave the way for helping women gain equal rights. As more women learned that they were as capable as a man and viewed themselves with a sense of empowerment, they gained the strength to rise up and fight for their rights as well. The vision of Rosie the Riveter not only worked to place women in the workforce, it also helped give momentum to a revolution. While the artifact may have started out as a fantasy that women could perform the jobs which men were able to, it became a reality as time went on when women not only developed new skill sets, but a path towards equality.
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