Remembering the African-American 'Rosie the Riveter'

[Blue_Tires]

When the U.S. entered World War II, many of America's men were at war in Europe and the Pacific. And that meant that laborers were in high demand on the home front to build war ships and airplanes.

Here in the Bay Area, industrialist Henry Kaiser built shipyards in Richmond that revolutionized that process. Before the war, Richmond was a sleepy town of about 20,000 people. The city’s population ballooned when about 100,000 people flocked to work at the ship yards – including women.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO: We are still short millions of hands. We must call upon women. Women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs.

Most of us have seen the iconic image of a white woman in blue coveralls wearing a red bandana and flexing her bicep while saying, “We Can Do It." That woman, endearingly known as “Rosie the Riveter,” represents millions of women who worked in the war industry during the Second World War.

ARCHIVAL AUDIO: They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men. Some jobs – better.

For the first time, women were allowed to work in high-paying trades that had only been done by men. But, according to 88-year old Betty Soskin who worked in Richmond at the time, the Rosie story…

BETTY SOSKIN: That was a white woman’s story. I was an African-American woman. Colored in those days.

Soskin tells another side of this story to KALW's Callie Shanafelt.

http://kalwnews.org/audio/2010/09/23/remembering-african-american-rosie-riveter_603845.html

[SemperEadem]

1. the black rosie the riveter? wouldn't that be all our grandmothers and great-grandmothers

who served as domestics or field workers since first being forced to set foot on this soil?

Black women have always had to work.

[bliss_eternal]

2. lol.

yes, you are probably correct. :spray: