If you’re ready for a mouthful, this story is about the ‘Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park’—it’s no wonder so many people just refer to it as the Rosie the Riveter Museum!
But the truth is, the museum at the visitor education center on the waterfront at Richmond, California, is about so much more than Rosie—the archetype of women workers in war industries—although she certainly gets her due.
The historical park includes not only the museum, but several other sites that are part of the story of how America’s industries rapidly turned to war production, how that change affected the lives of the communities around those industries.
Included in that history are exhibits on fault lines that appeared, with race and gender playing a role in how the Richmond ‘home front’ developed.
Richmond seems a natural place to tell that story; during the war, four huge shipyards built in the city by Kaiser Industries built more ships than anywhere else in the world, on occasion finishing as many as three in a day.
The city had already been a major rail terminal, and mass production shipbuilding depended on components and materials arriving constantly to be assembled in Richmond by Rosie and her co-workers.
And it wasn’t only ships; the huge Ford auto plant next door to the museum switched from cars to Jeeps and military trucks; it was the largest assembly plant on the West Coast.
While the museum has exhibits that focus on the work inside the plants, a major focus is on the lives of workers in the area, many of whom had worked in agriculture, and many more of whom came to Richmond from other parts of the country to work in the shipyards. The city’s population grew rapidly and housing needed to be built. One of the neighborhoods built for the war, Atchison Village, is still occupied and is on the trail of sites for the park.
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Of course, there were also thousands of children, many of them ‘8-hour orphans,’ either with both parents working, or with one working and the other in the military. A wide range of daycare and schooling systems had to be created in fairly short order, some of the country’s first organized mass childcare. At the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Federal Maritime Administration funded model centers at the Kaiser shipyards.
War production brought unemployment down from 17% to 1.2% quickly; nearly half of the population was involved, either in the military or in defense work. More than a million agricultural workers left the fields, and the Federal government helped make up the shortage by an agreement for short-term workers from Mexico, the beginning of the later ‘bracero’ program.
Along with the factories and shipyards, there were canteens, clubs and clinics created; in fact, the shipyard medical services were part of the origin of what is now Kaiser Permanente Health, one of the first large health insurance schemes in the U.S.
And it wasn’t just jobs—the exhibits point at other kinds of work the public was called on to do, from Civilian Defense, to growing Victory Gardens, to collecting scrap for war materials, and even ‘knitting for victory.’
Getting that many people to work was a major operation in itself, with ramped-up buses and a rather pointed poster reminding workers to save by car-pooling.
But calls to unite for the war effort were not always all-inclusive. Racial tensions ran high in a number of areas; in Richmond, demands by Black workers to be paid equally with whites, and for access to housing and services led to threats of strikes by white workers and occasionally to violence, which also occurred in a number of other cities, a struggle echoed in Langston Hughes’ question: “How long I got to fight / Hitler AND Jim Crow?”
The museum also exhibits a sizable number of wartime propaganda posters, and one interesting examination of a poster showing how it was designed for maximum effect on its audience.
Among the targets of these posters are labor unrest—labor/worker unity, don’t change jobs, work for factory savings and efficiency.
Others are aimed at the general public… Note the poster with the line “Victory Waits on Your Fingers—it’s a recruiting ad that says “Uncle Sam Needs Stenographers.”
There’s also a look at Rosie herself, whose origin story is not as simple as many of us have believed. We all know her as a symbol of women’s empowerment and war work but no, she was not created by Norman Rockwell, despite his well-known magazine cover. That cover was published in May 1943, a year after the We Can Do It! poster by J. Howard Miller appeared. But Miller’s poster never says Rosie; the name comes from a 1942 song “Rosie the Riveter” by Redd Evans and J. J. Loeb.
When the war ended, it brought immense change to Richmond and the shipyards, as it did across the country. In Richmond, between Septembrer and November 1945, the shipyards went from 90,000 workers to 8,500. An exhibit discusses in detail what happened after.
As for Rosie: three million women lost industrial jobs immediately at the end of the war. In some cases, the jobs themselves disappeared. In others, women were forced out to make way for returning veterans who were said to need the higher-paying jobs. Women were increasingly limited to ‘women’s work’ at lower pay, creating a pay gap that has still not disappeared.
As for Kaiser, the end of the mass shipbuilding industry was not the end of the world; it had other business to tend to, although some of its operations, including an attempt to jump into the automobile industry, didn’t work out… who here remembers this one?
