Rosie The Riveter Tools Of The Mind

But women had the option of sitting out the war (at least this was the middle-class image that dominated the public mind), In addition, selflessness was a well-established element in the. The heroine is a young service wife who has quit her job at a tool factory because the hours were too long and the work too hard.

A lifetime after the slogan 'We can do it!' Became the memory 'We did do it!' , thirty 'Rosie the Riveters' were feted and finally thanked for their service in Washington this week. Just as news of terror attacks in Brussels circulated Tuesday morning, an announcement at Reagan National Airport invited travelers to greet these heroes — a few of the thousands of American women who contributed to the war effort during World War II by doing what was then considered men's work in factories, making bombers and munitions. The 'Rosies,' now in their 80s, 90s and beyond, arrived from Detroit, where most of them live, via the first all-female honor flight, courtesy of the Yankee Air Museum and the Ford Motor Company Fund; in the 1940s, Ford employed many of the women. As they slowly moved off the plane in matching red cardigans and iconic red and white polka-dot scarves, hundreds of people waving U.S.

Flags cheered and school children sang 'This Land is Your Land.' The two Michigan lawmakers — Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell and Republican Rep. Candice Miller — who had organized the trip lauded the women during a luncheon at the Library of Congress: “We will not let fear divide us; we will always be Americans,” Dingell said in her remarks.

“And the 'Rosies' are our inspiration. The country was never the same for what you did for us, going to the workforce, opening the doors wider for us.' Miller noted that the 'Rosies' assembled one plane an hour at the height of the war, and made more in one month than Japan did in one year: “You might not have been armed, but you literally built the armor that brought the nation to peace.” Later in the day, they visited the World War II Memorial and the Women in Military Service Memorial at the gateway to the Arlington National Cemetery — at the very moment the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would once again allow female World War II pilots to be interred there. In interviews with Roll Call during their visit, eight of the women spoke about work, war, feminism, politics — and what happened after the men came back from the battlefields, and the 'Rosies' were sent back home.

Loraine Osborne At 17, Loraine Osborne went to work riveting together the wings of war planes at one of the country’s largest munitions factories, Willow Run Bomber Plant, a job she did with enormous pride from 1941 to 1945. “Like the Germans said, ‘We put ‘em out faster than they could shoot ‘em down.’” She also married a coworker during that time and had a child, 'but when I came back from maternity leave, the war was over' and the factory closing. Still, she was able to stay on with Ford, and even 'met old man Henry Ford' at the Ypsilanti, Mich., generator plant where she worked for 32 years. Widowed at 45, she raised her two children alone and 'might have been hard on them,' but is pleased with the result. Along the way, she also took in and cooked for a succession of family members. Now, 'I'm 90 years old but last year I put up two bushels of beans, I put up 12 dozen of corn, I still mow my own lawn — two acres in it.'

She doesn't have or want cable television, and though she does like to watch 'Jeopardy,' she enjoys work more than leisure. 'My mother always told me to put one foot in front of the other and keep going,' Osborne said. Phyllis Lenhard By the time Phyllis Lenhard got a job inspecting B-29 bombers, she had already held dozens of jobs.

She frosted donuts in the window of a coffee shop. She danced on a chorus line. She was a hostess at a country club on the PGA golf tour. She was no adventure seeker, said Lenhard, who was born in 1919, but was simply a child of the depression who was orphaned at a young age and doing what she could to get. In fact, Lenhard never knew her parents, lived on her own in rooming houses starting at age 15 and took every job that came her way.

Many were good ones, too, thanks to connections she made through an uncle, a boiler maker whose work had caught the eye of Henry Ford. She even dated Ford's nephew for a time. Lenhard enjoyed working in the factory, but when the war was over and she was forced out, she moved on to an office job for the Hearst newspaper company, soon making three times the $50 a week she'd taken home as a Rosie. Married in 1946, she didn't work outside the house again until her husband died in the 1960s. But even now, she wishes she could still get up and go to a job every morning: “It was something that you accomplish, you know, you accomplish each day. Sound Blaster Live Drive Ir Drivers there.