Did WW2 really help Rosie the Riveters?

World War II often is cited as a watershed moment for getting American women in the workplace. To commemorate D-Day, Cristen and Caroline reexamine whether the war really helped Rosie the Riveters climb career ladders.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how stupp
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline,
I'm Kristen, and we are publishing this episode three days
after the seventieth anniversary of D Day, which is basically

(00:24):
the beginning of the in for World War Two. And
so to bring the focus the giant focus of World
War Two into our podcast, we wanted to take a
look at women during World War two, specifically working women
during World War Two, because oftentimes in the podcast we
will reference how this was a huge period for women.

(00:46):
Women were entering the workforce like never before. They were
leaving the homes, both single and married women, and going
to work in factories and munitions operations, and as we'll
look into a couple of other really interesting positions. And
so then the question is was this period such a
watershed for women's employment outside of the home, Because we

(01:08):
do cite it so often, it's almost a knee jerk
reflex to say, well, world War two, women leave the home, hooray,
and then we all live happily ever after. But there
have now been more recent revisionist histories taking a closer
look at the permanence of these labor shifts and have
found that it might not have been as much of

(01:31):
a watershed as we thought. So let's give a quick
rundown though of World War two the timeline to give
you a reference for when all of this is happening. Yeah,
don't worry, We're not gonna walk you through the entire war,
so don't don't turn off the podcast. We're just going
to sprint through the war. We're going to sprint through

(01:52):
the war. So um. For the Chinese, the war World
War two began in ninety one when Japan invaded northeast Stern, China.
For Europeans, the war began in nineteen thirty nine when
Germany invaded Poland. And for Americans, as we well know,
World War two began on December seventh, nineteen forty one,
when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And we time this

(02:15):
podcast four d Day, which commemorates the Battle of Normandy,
which started on June six in nineteen forty four and
lasted through August. And it's considered the beginning of the
end of the war because after the Battle of Normandy,
the Nazi Germany strongholds were starting to fall like dominoes

(02:35):
across Europe, and so by May nineteen forty five, the
war in Europe ended, and in the Pacific, the war
ended in August nineteen forty five with the nuclear bombing
of Nagasagi in Hiroshima, Right. And so by nineteen forty five,
when you're looking at the US specifically, there were twelve
point two million US military personnel, many of whom were

(02:58):
volunteers and some of whom were women. And the US
itself just specifically, the US experienced more than four hundred
and seven thousand military casualties during the war. And so
with all of these millions of people involved in the military,
so many people overseas, so many casualties, we wanted to
look at the home front. What were the women folk

(03:20):
doing while all of the men folk were out fighting. Yeah,
and not to discount all of the incredible roles that
women were filling in the military abroad and you know,
doing their part to fight for Allied freedom. But we
wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the home
front too, because I don't think it gets quite as

(03:41):
much attention. So what's going on at this time while
you know, soldiers are fighting in Europe and elsewhere, is
that there's rationing happening to conserve limited resources, especially food, rubber,
and steel. You also have the militarism and pro America

(04:01):
propaganda seeping into all corners of entertainment and pop culture.
You know, you have war themed movies, radio shows, songs,
comic books. If you look at Classic Superman and Wonder Woman,
there's a lot of you know, kind of war themes
of going and fighting the Nazis. Yeah, even even Disney

(04:22):
we talked about in our Disney episode. Even Disney did
a Donald Duck send up of Hitler. So even even
Donald Duck was involved in World War Two. And you know,
when you look at families as a whole, they definitely
were a part of the war effort on the home
front for sure. Um through various propaganda campaigns, families were
encouraged to recycle materials, even down to waist fats. So

(04:45):
after you fry up that bacon, don't forget to save
the fat and it's and my mother definitely still does that.
She puts the bacon fat and a tin can and
puts it in the fridge so she can use it
to cook green bean, not to make explosives, not to
make exploits. In World War two, Um, you were also
asked to to recycle scrap metal create victory gardens by

(05:08):
war bonds ration in list of course that's a huge one.
And stop spreading those war rumors because remember all those
posters that said things like loose lips sink ships, And
they had all these sexist posters to about like men
sitting around smoking cigars discussing war strategy, and like a
woman listening from the background, like, hey, don't talk about

(05:28):
the war in front of the lady. That he's such
a war gossip, such a war gossip. But I mean
speaking of victory gardens. Um, this was a huge thing.
This was a huge part of that whole food ration
ng aspect. And in nineteen forty four alone, twenty one
million families had planted seven million acres of victory gardens

(05:49):
that yielded eight million tons of vegetables. Can you imagine?
Uh No, I can't imagine, because now we are so
I feel like our even even in suburbia back then,
you know, you have all these victory gardens popping up,
and I feel like it's so rare these days that
we see that kind of suburban and more urban gardening.

(06:09):
Um although there have been revivals of it in pockets
around the country here and there. But I do remember
learning about victory gardens for the first time Caroline while
reading the American Girl series about Molly, because she was
she was my favorite American girl doll, even though I
owned Samantha. But I liked Molly the most because she

(06:31):
grew up during World War Two and for some reason,
as a child, I was very fascinated with that time
period interesting and I loved the idea of the rationing
and growing a victory garden just like Molly. All these things. Anyway,
apparently I'm a woman after my time. Um. Well, getting

(06:54):
getting into what really the focus of our episode today
will be about is we also have to talk about
the millions of new jobs that were created to support
the military's efforts here in the US on US soil.
As a result of all these jobs, there was a
large scale migration to city centers, industrial centers, and all
of this increased industrial activity led to more opportunities for

(07:18):
good paying war work for African Americans and for women.
And if you want to look at a great example
of someone who fits into both of those categories. Mary
mclaude Bethune, who was the president of the National Association
of Colored Women and founder of the National Council on
Negro Women, helped to publicize the availability of new job
opportunities through Black women's clubs and publications, and she also

(07:41):
promoted greater opportunities for women of color as a consultant
to US government agencies on labor matters and female officer candidates.
And even outside of paid employment, women were also rushing
to volunteer their services. So you have women's auxiliary organizations
forming to volteer for the military and civilian civil defense organizations.

(08:04):
You also have a lot of women training to drive ambulances,
fight fires, provide emergency medical treatment, become drivers for the
Red Cross, and motorcycle couriers. I mean it sounds like,
really this is also an opportunity when a lot of
cool kinds of jobs, whether paid or unpaid, are popping
up for women. Because this came up to in our

(08:25):
episode on firefighting women a while back, when you see
the spike in women's participation in local firefighting departments during
World War Two because the men are off fighting Nazis,
so the women have to stay home to fight the fires, right,
somebody has to put out the fires, and I mean

(08:45):
it's it's a shame that it took a war for
women to be able to do that in any sort
of official capacity. But anyway, let's look at the numbers,
shall we. So before the war in the United States,
eleven point five million women were working, so already there
was definitely a strong female presence in the U. S. Workforce.
But during the war we always hear about this massive

(09:08):
influx of women getting jobs. So six million at least um. Now,
during the war, as we often hear about this massive
influx of women into jobs. During World War Two, we
have over six million new women entering the workforce, around

(09:28):
half of whom are working in the war industries. And
so between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five, the female
percentage of the U. S workforce increased from twenty seven
percent to nearly thirty seven percent. And from the end
of nineteen forty three through early nineteen four, during the
peak of war production, around fifty of US women were employed.

(09:52):
So this is where why you hear all the time
about how this was unprecedented for you know, women's participation
the workforce right, And you know, there there is the
whole pay aspect that women basically provided cheap labor while
the men were gone. I mean, they rarely made more
than of what the men had earned. But think about it,

(10:14):
these jobs were paying higher salaries than the jobs that
were traditionally categorized as women's work, the work that was
acceptable for women to do outside of the home, things
like being a teacher, being in domestic service, clerical work, nursing,
stuff like that. UM and I thought it was interesting.
There was one study we looked at that that highlighted
women's participation in the auto manufacturing and electrical manufacturing industries. Specifically,

(10:40):
they pulled out just this information UM and pointed out
that in women made up twenty two point four percent
of auto manufacturing industry workers. And they also made up
of the United Auto Workers Union. And that's a whole
other aspect to that's so cred goal because during World

(11:01):
War Two the UAW had two hundred and fifty thousand
female members. That's huge. It even established a Women's bureau
in its War Policy Division that in nineteen forty four
addressed pay inequalities between male and female workers. And the
auto sector is a standout example because prior to the war,

(11:22):
there were very few women working in that type of
manufacturing compared to electrical engineering, which actually employed a lot
of women before the war. But if you look at
nineteen ten in the auto industry, only three percent of
it was comprised by female workers. Yeah, and so going
over to the electrical manufacturing industry, um, comparing that to

(11:45):
auto in women made up forty seven point five per
cent of those workers, and they made up of the
United Electrical Workers unions, so they definitely had a voice.
They might have been in sort of an unfortunate the
temporary work situation. I don't think they quite knew at
the time how temporary would end up being, but they

(12:07):
had a voice while they were there. And if you
just look at manufacturing across all of those different industries,
women's employment grew one during World War Two. So looking
at some other specific types of jobs that women were doing,
I found some articles on women being computers. Yes, women

(12:29):
as computers, not women programming computers, but actually being human computers. Right.
And what's so interesting about this line of work is
that it was kind of secret. It was kind of
a top secret wartime work mission in nineteen, hundreds of
women were recruited to work as computer tours, and they
were targeted for their math skills. Usually they had either

(12:49):
studied or majored in math in college. And basically what
they did as computers they would calculate the weapons trajectories
for soldiers overseas, often working double or triple shifts um.
They would use mechanical dusk calculators to solve these long
lists of equations and then send those results in table
form to the gunnery officers. And they also were able

(13:11):
to take into account variable conditions like temperature and air density,
and even calculate weather an enemy with standing or lying
in a trench. Yeah, and I mean that kind of
explains why a lot of this was top secret work.
And you have people though, like Lila Todd, who was
an example of a specialist. She was a specialized human
computer who operated a differential analyzer that calculated shell or

(13:36):
bombs flight paths as they flew through the air. Now,
of course, today all of this is completely mechanized and
you know, can be calculated in a split second. But
in these early days you have a host of women
like Lila Todd and others who are are doing these
important calculations for the military. Yeah, and I did read that.

(13:58):
You know, there were machines that could do various types
of calculations are set up the equations, but the women,
as the computers, were really expected to check the machines accuracy.
The machines were not to be trusted, and we would
be remiss so to not mention that. Out of this
military World War two fueled focus on computing, you have

(14:20):
the development of the ENIAC, which was one of the
first electronic digital computers, and it was a group of
six women quote unquote human computers who had been trained
during World War Two, Kame McNulty, Francis Biolas, Betty Jean Jennings,
Elizabeth Snyder, Ruth Lichtman, and Maryland Westcoff who were chosen

(14:40):
to program it. So early stem history in there for
you folks. That's awesome. Um In, I just this next one.
I just have like this great montage, this imaginary montage
in my head of of these women going down the street.
But in New Orleans they were affected by the war
because all their conductors left. Women had to work as

(15:01):
streetcar conductorates. And I just imagined them with like a
jaunty hat like pulling the whistle going down the street. Now,
I mentioned manufacturing a few minutes ago. Not surprisingly, if
you look at the major war industries like metalworking, chemical,
rubber that saw a major jump in women's employment of
four hundred sixty percent during the war, and the munitions

(15:23):
industry in particular heavily recruited women's workers. This is where
you get all those riveters, all those Rosie the riveters
lining up. Yeah, and the industry that saw the greatest
increase in female workers was the aviation industry, which makes sense.
More than three thousand women worked in the US aircraft
industry in which represented of the industry's total workforce, compared

(15:49):
to just one percent in the pre war years. So
we've established that, yes, there was this influx of women
into these various industries, some directly related to the war,
some not so much. But the government didn't just snap
its fingers and have all these women magically appear on
the job. Rather, they had to develop a propaganda program

(16:14):
to sell the idea of women in particularly married women
working outside of the home. And we're going to get
into that propaganda campaign, and yes, we are going to
talk some about Rosie the Riveter when we come right
back from a quick break. So all right before the break,

(16:39):
we were discussing the industries that women were entering, all
of the different jobs that they were taking over as
the men were going overseas to fight in World War two,
and how it wasn't necessarily an overnight sensation that all
of these women entered these various very masculine, traditionally masculine jobs.
It was as an effort, and during this time the

(17:03):
government turned to the War Advertising Council, which created the
Women in War Jobs campaign to stress the need for
women to do their patriotic duty, walk outside of their
homes and get a gerb. Jobs that were previously seen
as super masculine were now compared to housework to let
women know, hey, you can rivet yeah, And we've we've

(17:27):
read a lot about this in the book Gender at Work,
The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War Two,
which yes, it is a bit of a page turner
and that might not sound like it um And it
talks though about how World War two really saw the
extension of occupational sex segregation, where if you were to
walk into an electrical engineering plant, you would have the

(17:49):
women doing certain types of tasks that were highly repetitive,
reliant on a lot of manual dexterity, a lot of
focus and attention, whereas men would have done jobs that
required perhaps more physical stamina. And they then go into
talking about how war work was sold to women and

(18:11):
the author's right wartime propaganda imagery of a woman's place
on the nation's production lines consistently portrayed women's war work
as a temporary extension of domesticity, and jobs that have
been previously viewed as the quintessentially masculine were suddenly endowed
with femininity and glamour for the duration. And as a

(18:32):
result of this propaganda campaign, you also see articles in
popular media publicizing this need and probably to like adding
to that glamour effect of saying, oh, hey, no women,
we need you, come on, come to work. So, in
for instance, you have a Fortune magazine article headlined the

(18:53):
margin now is woman power, and which kind of sounds
like an article you'd still see rich in magazine. And
in the same year, Newsweek reported that the government needed
three point two million new workers and quote most of
these will have to be women. So they were really,
you know, pushing, pushing this message. Yeah, well you had

(19:15):
to fill the slots. I mean yeah, I mean it's
some cheap lady labor. We needed to build planes and
guns and all sorts of things. And who better to
build you a plane than a lovely lady named Rosie.
That's right. So the Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign was
I mean, she was a character. She was. She was

(19:37):
just a character. But I love reading the Rosie mythology
because some some real Rosie's come up that people say
that she's based on. Among some other women, we have
rose will Monroe, who moved to Michigan during the war
and worked as a riveter building B twenty nine and
B twenty four bombers, and she Rosie the character appeared

(20:01):
in various incarnations throughout the war. Um Her origins lie
around sometime around ninety two, when a Westinghouse artist named J.
Howard Miller created that we Can Do It campaign, probably
as part of his company's war work. And she's the
prototype for the Rosy we think of and the we
can Do It poster rolling up her sleeve. But there's

(20:22):
also other Rosie characters during this time. There's a song
titled Rosie the Riveter that was written by John Jacob
Lobe and Red Evans, that was released in early nineteen
forty three, and the lyrics described the role that she filled.
They said, she's part of the assembly line, she's making history,
she's working for victory. She's Rosie the Riveter. And that

(20:42):
is definitely a song I would love to hear. But
it was supposedly inspired by Rosalind P. Walter, who worked
also as a riveter on the night shift on a
course there building the f for You Marine gold winged
fighter airplane. She later became a philanthropist Lottie Dab, but
she inspired that. Yeah, And that was not the only
Rosie the Riveter song. There was also one by the

(21:05):
Four Vagabonds, and I enjoyed its lyrics that went, while
other girls attend a favorite cocktail bar sipping dry Martini's,
munching caviare nice rhyme or vagabonds, there's a girl who's
really putting them to shame. Rosie is her name, all
day long with a rain of sean and she's part
of the assembly line. And come to find out in

(21:28):
this Rosie the Riveter lore, she also had a boyfriend
named Charlie who was a soldier off fighting. So she
was working, doing her riveting, hoping that Charlie could come
home and then she could retire her red bandana. After
they get married and she becomes Rosie the housewife. How

(21:49):
how surprised Charlie would be when Rosie wanted to hang
onto that red bandanna, And how surprised Charlie would be
when his wife became a feminist icon. That's right. Well,
if we look to art and pop culture, we we
can't forget to mention Norman Rockwell um on Maree. His
depiction of Rosie appeared on the cover of the Saturday

(22:11):
Evening Post, and while nineteen year old Mary Doyle served
as the model for his Rosie, he made some drastic
changes to her appearance, making her more muscular. And when
I say that he made drastic changes, I mean if
you compare his Rosie on the cover of the magazine
to Michaelangelo's depiction of Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel, Like,

(22:35):
there's your Rosie, that that big prophet Isaiah on the
freaking ceiling of that. That's that's Rosie, just in overalls
and a woman. Hey, he'll take it. Yeah, And and
and when he's like bending his arm. I don't know
what he's doing on the Sistine show. I don't know
what he's doing on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But but
Rosie has a sandwich in that hand, something that I

(22:55):
greatly appreciate. Now for the US government selling this idea
of going to work was not too tough when you're
talking to a group of Rosie the riveters, and by
that I mean younger women who were probably unmarried, might
have had their you know, Charlie boyfriends off fighting, they
didn't have kids. It wasn't a crazy idea at the

(23:17):
time for a woman to work before she got married,
because I mean you have to remember too that this
was also the time when you start having what we're
called marriage bands. We talked about this in our teaching
episode a little while ago about how essentially as soon
as you got married, or if you were married, you

(23:37):
were barred from being hired by a lot of different places,
and so you have that eroding and the US government
was having to make this much tougher sell in this
era of marriage bands to get married women on the
job as well. And we read about this in the

(23:59):
book Our Mother's War American women at home and at
the front during World War two, and they signed a
ninety six poll which found that eighty two percent of
Americans believed that wives should not work if their husbands
have jobs. And you have to remember that only one
in ten new women workers during World War two had

(24:19):
soldier husbands, because earlier in the war there were automatic
wife exemptions basically like, oh, I got a wife, can't
go to war because I gotta stay home and take
care of her or the and and then that gave
way to like, okay, well, if you have a wife,
that's son enough. But if you have kids and a wife,
then you then you're not going to go. And gradually
those fell away, but it was still pretty common for

(24:41):
husbands with wives and children to not be called to action.
But because there was a lot of resistance for those
women who had you know, civilian husbands who were still
had jobs and we're working, there's a lot of resistance
to allowing those wives to war. You have articles like

(25:02):
this one published in the Nation in headlined America's Pampered
Husband's basically calling out these civilian guys who weren't keen
on their wives working, which again that was a lot
of them basically saying like, hey, guys, you can you
can make your own sandwiches. Rosie the riverter makes her
own sandwiches, you can too. It's not a big deal.

(25:23):
So that was interesting to me to to read about
how this was one one facet of this whole women's
work issue that was probably the most challenging for then
the US war propaganda machine. Well, yeah, because you don't
think about women's husbands still being hometelling them they can't

(25:44):
go to work. We do. We just think of World
War two is this time when it's like the parents
are gone, you know, the cats away, the mice will play.
It's like the doors are just open and women are
like stepping outside into the sunlight, you know, blocking the
sun from their eyes, going like, I can get a job. Well.
I wonder though, how many of those women really wanted

(26:04):
to get jobs too. It was probably a tough sell
to them as well. But there was also this great
letter published in that book, Our Mother's War from this
woman who was married. I don't think she had any kids,
but her husband was in the military and she had
gotten uh, some kind of manufacturing job in one of
the war industries, and she was so excited telling him

(26:25):
about how she opened her own checking account, and she
was like, Oh, it's the best feeling in the world
to be able to write a check and not have
to ask anyone for permission. Oh, what a what a
wonderful thing, and what a nice little dig. Yeah, but
she was like, but she was genuinely overjoyed by it. Absolutely.
But you know, and that sounds great women women are

(26:46):
working in their opening their checking accounts, But we didn't
end up in some amazing equal opportunity, equal working rights utopia.
And as soon as the war was over. So what
happened after the war was over, Well, if you think
about it, you know, we cited earlier in the podcast
that by there were twelve point two million US military

(27:08):
personnel involved in the war. Let's assume a majority of
those are men. So you have all these guys coming
back and they need their jobs back, right. Yeah. Basically,
basically after the war, women went home or they were
expected to go back into traditionally female occupations. And you know,

(27:29):
most industry analysts and government planners expected them to. And
not only did they expect women to go back to
the home or back to their clerical work, but they
expected women to want to do that, So how surprised
they must have been when the Women's Bureau of the
Department of Labor got their survey results back after asking

(27:50):
women workers about their future plans at the end of
the war, when they pulled all of these women, they
found that many wanted to stay, but factories were converting
to peacetime production and refused to rehire a lot of
these women. Of the woman women they talked to said
that they expected to be a part of the post

(28:10):
war labor force, and eight six percent of those looked
forward to staying in their very same industry. And when
you look at the women who were employed both before
Pearl Harbor was attacked and during the war, of those women,
so the majority of those women said that they wanted
to stay employed. These were women who, not to sound melodramatic,

(28:32):
but they'd gotten a taste of freedom. They had opened
their own checking accounts. They had been independent either while
their husbands worked at their normal jobs or while their
husbands and boyfriends were overseas fighting the war. And how
disappointing that so many of them were forced out of
their manufacturing jobs. Well, and one thing that jumped out
too in that post war report from the Women's Bureau

(28:54):
of the Department of Labor, it was as though they
were opening their eyes for the first time to this
idea of female breadwinners, because they found that out of
every one hundred married women who were living in family
groups of two or more people, eleven said they were
the only wage earner supporting the family group. And so
they go on to say that quote the state of

(29:15):
marriage therefore does not in itself always mean there is
a male provider for the family. How interesting. So this
is the period that a lot of people are very
interested in, including us, looking at were was this the
watershed moment that we think it was? Was this was
World War two the period that ushered in more and

(29:35):
more women working. Yes, it was, but it's not exactly
super cut and dry, because so many women were forced
out of their manufacturing jobs. But the service sector was expanding.
So even though women were having to leave certain jobs,
some of them went home, but some of them also
transitioned over to the service sector. Yeah. Essentially, blue collar

(29:58):
women transitioned to be um pink collar women as we
think of it more today, with pink collar jobs being
more oriented towards customer service waitresses, clerical work secretaries, etcetera.
And on top of this two, you have to remember
the cultural climate of the post war years where you're
having this baby boom happen. You're having this resurgence of

(30:21):
you know, traditional domesticity. I'll leave it to beaver with
the wife at home and you know, the husband going
out and for the first time too. I mean also
remember for the war, we had the depression, and so
this was also a new period where due to the
economic boom time happening, it was possible for a lot

(30:45):
more families than it was prior to the war to
have a soul breadwinner. And that soul breadwinner would have
in this time, you know, had to have been a guy.
I mean, it would have been a man going out
to to earn the wage for his June Cleaver, right,
And a lot of authors that we've looked at we're
talking about the defeminization of these manufacturing jobs as men
came back. And remember at the top of the podcast,

(31:06):
we were looking at the auto manufacturing and electrical manufacturing
industries in particular because they had a really high percentage
of women in ninety five. That drop though, if you
look at auto manufacturing in particular. Granted it had a
very low pre war women percentage, but the percent of
women involved in the auto manufacturing industry dropped from twenty

(31:29):
two point four percent in nineteen forty five to just
nine point five percent in nineteen forty six, So that's
that's not like that's a huge amount of time. In
electrical manufacturing, it dropped from a high of forty seven
point five percent in nineteen forty five to thirty nine
point four percent in nineteen forty six. So it leads
us back to that original question of whether or not

(31:49):
World War two really did have a direct role in
the eventual rise in women workers and even feminism, because
there's that one major school of thought that we hear
all the time and we say all the time on
the podcast that World War two was this watershed moment
for women's employment, because I mean, we have to acknowledge it.
From nine to night, the average hourly earnings of female

(32:12):
manufacturing workers, for instance, rose relative to that for male workers.
Even though we're still underpaid. We were by the end
of it less underpaid than we were before. But some say,
some like Claudia Golden, who has looked a lot into
this issue. She says, not so much, though you can't

(32:34):
make that blanket statement at least. Yeah. Golden's been writing
about this very specific topic for years, and in a
paper she and her co author were writing about how
basically states with a higher mobilization of men i e.
Soldiers heading overseas saw more women getting into the labor force. Okay,

(32:56):
that makes sense. If you have a bigger gap in employment,
you're going to have more women fill it um. But
she actually points out that the impact was strongest among
those women with higher levels of educational attainment. She says
that among those with at least a high school diploma,
almost eighty percent were in white collar jobs, and for
those with less than a high school diploma, just twenty

(33:18):
percent were in white collar positions. About seventy were in
blue collar jobs, and the vast majority of these were
in manufacturing. And so for those women in manufacturing, remember
they're kind of pushed out and transitioned into more pink
collar work. And so it seems like when it comes
to Rosie, the riveter life might not have been so

(33:41):
grand for her after Charlie came home, right, because, as
as Golden points out, she says, Look, by nineteen fifty,
these women's occupations, both blue collar, white collar, they weren't
that much different than they were in nineteen forty four,
except that those manufacturing positions like Rosie the Riveter held
decreased and the service occupations took their place among the

(34:05):
lesser educated group. So if you have higher educational attainment,
you're probably gonna be okay regardless. But it's those women
who were among the lesser educated groups that are probably
going to get shoved into poor paying and honestly less
exciting jobs. They're they're not riveting anymore. Yeah, I mean,
and and these are probably gonna be similar patterns that

(34:26):
you will continue to see even today when it comes
to I mean, what kind of educational attainment and socio
economic background, how that precludes you to the kind of
work that you end up in. And I don't think
that it would take an economist to tell you that
that kind of pattern between let's face it, more of

(34:46):
at least educationally speaking, haves and have not. It's probably
probably persists beyond the World War two era. But we
bring this up to maybe do a little a little
revisionist history of our own to add some context to
Rosie the Riveter, whether or not this really was that
watershed moment, whether you know all all of the different

(35:09):
moving parts of women entering the workforce and mass and
the numbers that we see today. It wasn't just a well, okay,
wars broken out, here we go. Yeah. It took some convincing.
And then once once they were in those roles, the
bulk of the women who were filling those roles were like, Okay,

(35:30):
I'd like to stay. Could I stay? This would be great.
I'm gonna stay, And people are like, no, I can say.
And to that point though, about World War two's impact
on feminism, one of the things we read was talking
about how not so much World War two, but really
the civil rights movement that lit that fire in terms
of organizing and demonstrating. And so maybe that's another podcast

(35:52):
for another time, but this has been our d Day
World War two commemorative episode. I hope you learned some
things about that era that you didn't already know. I
know I did, And I'm really interested in hearing from
listeners out there who might have a grandmother or a
great grandmother who who worked during this period. Yeah, let
us know any any cool photos that you have from

(36:14):
that time too. I love someone I still love World
War two era nostalgia. And you can send those emails
to us and mom stuff at how stuff works dot com,
where you can also tweet us or messages on Facebook.
And we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. So we have a couple of Facebook

(36:35):
messages to share with you about our episode, fittingly enough,
on military spouses, and this first one comes from Christopher
and he writes, I would love to give you some
feedback from the perspective of a male service member with
nineteen years experience. Being a military spouse is probably the
toughest job I know of. I may go into harm's

(36:56):
way in defense of this country, but I also do
so willingly, knowing exactly what I'm getting my self into.
Any spouse never signed up for this. They just happen
to fall in love with one of us. When we leave.
They keep the home front all on their own, never
knowing when they'll hear from us, or if that knock
on the door is going to be someone telling them
that their loved one is injured or worse. They need
to have that time at home to take care of

(37:17):
the house, the kids, the bills, etcetera. My brother in
law recently moved in with his wife and I and
he was shocked at just how much my wife does
just being a housewife. This creates a lot of stress
for them. From my own experience, this is the root
of why so many marriages fail in the military. It's
that either the service member or the spouse doesn't realize
this fully until that first serious deployment. That's why I

(37:39):
recommend that a couple should go through a deployment together first.
This is also the root of other such problems, such
as the high rate of infidelity within the military. It's
due to loneliness. One thing that I took to heart
were the comments about the stigma associated with the supposed
laziness of military spouses and the reasons you pointed out
about the moves and such affecting long term relationships and jobs.

(38:00):
My brother in law recently moved in with my wife
and I and he was shocked at just how much
my wife does being a housewife. This creates a lot
of stress for them. From my own experience, this is
the root of why so many marriages fail in the military.
That either the service member or the spouse doesn't fully
realize this until that first serious deployment, and that's why
I recommend that a couple should go through a deployment

(38:23):
together first. So thanks for that insight, Christopher, and I
have a letter here from Brooke looking at sort of
the darker side of what can happen among military spouses.
But Brooke writes that she was really excited to hear
the episode on Military Wives. I myself am a former
military wife. My ex husband was a tanker during the

(38:45):
thunder run in Iraq and we were stationed at Fort
Knox after he came back state side. I can vouch
for most things that were discussed in your podcast, including
the extramarital fairs. My ex husband was physically, verbally and
sexually abusive, and I allowed him to belittle me until
I true really had not an ounce of self esteem
left over. He came back from Iraq with an STD
which he blamed me for giving him, and slept around

(39:06):
with anything that looked his way. It wasn't until he
slept with his first sergeant's wife, a friend of mine
the less that I had proof enough to leave him.
The Army didn't punish to mote or reprimand him at all. Instead,
they backed him up, protected him, and allowed him to
stay and listed as a non commission officer. I was
disgusted as this was not behavior that was deemed becoming
of an n c O. With more and more stories

(39:27):
making headlines about these types of situations, I can only
hope that the armed forces will start to see the
forest for the trees and deal with these soldiers that
they should be dealt with instead of leaving the military
spouses to deal with it on their own. The spouse
is there to pick up the pieces when they come
back from combat, but receives no support when there's trouble
in their own home. Thanks for listening and giving us
something great to listen to, and thank you Brooke for

(39:49):
writing in. Yeah, and thanks to everybody who's written into us.
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
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please head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You
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(40:10):
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