Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: Who created Rosie the Riveter?
Norman Rockwell's image of "Rosie the Riveter" received mass distribution on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on Memorial Day, May 29, 1943. Rockwell's illustration features a brawny woman taking her lunch break with a rivet gun on her lap and beneath her penny loafer a copy of Adolf Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf. Her lunch box reads "Rosie"; viewers quickly recognized that to be "Rosie the Riveter" from the familiar song.[54] Rockwell, America's best-known popular illustrator of the day, based the pose of his 'Rosie' on that of Michelangelo's 1509 painting Prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Rosie is holding a ham sandwich in her left hand, and her blue overalls are adorned with badges and buttons: a Red Cross blood donor button, a white "V for Victory" button, a Blue Star Mothers pin, an Army-Navy E Service production award pin, two bronze civilian service awards, and her personal identity badge.[55] Rockwell's model was a Vermont resident, 19-year-old Mary Doyle, who was a telephone operator near where Rockwell lived, not a riveter. Rockwell painted his "Rosie" as a larger woman than his model, and he later phoned to apologize.[55] In a post interview, Mary explained that she was actually holding a sandwich while posing for the poster and that the rivet-gun she was holding was fake, she never saw Hitler's copy of Mein Kampf, and she did have a white handkerchief in her pocket like the picture depicts.[56] The Post's cover image proved hugely popular, and the magazine loaned it to the U.S. Treasury Department for the duration of the war, for use in war bond drives.[57]
On October 14, 2000, the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park was opened in Richmond, California, site of four Kaiser shipyards, where thousands of "Rosies" from around the country worked (although ships at the Kaiser yards were not riveted, but rather welded).[38] Over 200 former Rosies attended the ceremony.[39][40][2]
John Crowley's 2009 historical novel Four Freedoms covers the wartime industries, and studies the real working conditions of many female industrial workers. "Rosie the Riveter" is frequently referenced.
The West Virginia Rosie the Riveter Project is an ongoing effort created by Thanks! Plain and Simple, Inc. (“Thanks!”), a nonprofit organization founded in 2005. “Thanks” developed the project to involve women who worked throughout America during World War II on “men’s jobs” (most notably riveting airplanes and welding ships, but including a broad range of defense industry employment), which was critical to shortening and winning World War II.
Today, “Thanks!” has: 1) produced a documentary film (funded, in part, by the West Virginia Humanities Council); 2) created the first model Rosie the Riveter Community in America (funded, in part, by the Greater Kanawaha Valley Foundation); 3) created tools such as music, art, curriculum, written procedures for other communities to use to find and honor living “Rosies,” 4) partnered with various groups (arts, labor, history, schools), and 5) held events where emissaries from allied nations (Belgium in 2009 and Britain in 2010) formally thanked American “Rosies” for their contributions.
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter by Connie Field is a 65-minute documentary from 1980 that tells the story of women's entrance into "men's work" during WWII. Rosies of the North is a 1999 National Film Board of Canada documentary film about Canadian "Rosies," who built fighter and bomber aircraft at the Canadian Car and Foundry,[37] where Elsie MacGill was also the Chief Aeronautical Engineer.
The term "Rosie the Riveter" was first used in 1942 in a song of the same name written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. The song was recorded by numerous artists, including the popular big band leader Kay Kyser, and it became a national hit.[14] The song portrays "Rosie" as a tireless assembly line worker, who earned a "Production E" doing her part to help the American war effort.[15] The name is said to be a nickname for Rosie Bonavita who was working for Convair in San Diego, California.[16][17][18] The idea of Rosie resembled Veronica Foster, a real person who in 1941 was Canada's poster girl for women in the war effort in "Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl."[19]
"Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on The Home Front In World War" II is an illustrated social history of the lives and contributions of women workers during World War II written by Penny Colman. There are more than sixty archival black-and-white photographs (including one of Norma Jeane Baker Dougherty, who later changed her name to Marilyn Monroe), famous posters, advertisements, and cartoons. The author explains the origins of the phrase “Rosie the Riveter.” There are a Select List of Women’s Wartime Jobs, Facts & Figures about Women War Workers, Chronology, and an extensive bibliography. Rosie the Riveter received the Orbis Pictus Honor Award for Outstanding Nonfiction and an International Reading Association’s Teachers’ Choice and Young Adult Choice.
In 2018, MGA Entertainment released a L.O.L. Surprise doll called Can Do Baby who looks like Rosie the Riveter and is inspired by the We Can Do It poster.
During World War II, the "We Can Do It!" poster was not connected to the 1942 song "Rosie the Riveter", nor to the widely seen Norman Rockwell painting called "Rosie the Riveter" that appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of the "Saturday Evening Post", May 29, 1943. The Westinghouse poster was not associated with any of the women nicknamed "Rosie" who came forward to promote women working for war production on the home front. Rather, after being displayed for two weeks in February 1943 to some Westinghouse factory workers, it disappeared for nearly four decades. Other "Rosie" images prevailed, often photographs of actual workers. The Office of War Information geared up for a massive nationwide advertising campaign to sell the war, but "We Can Do It!" was not part of it.
Connie Field got the idea for the film from a California Rosie the Riveter reunion, and, with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other charitable sources, conducted interviews with many hundreds of women who had gone into war work. Out of these she chose five representatives—three black, two white—all marvelously lively, intelligent, and articulate women who recall their experiences with a mixture of pleasant nostalgia and detached bitterness.
A drama film, Rosie the Riveter, was released in 1944, borrowing from the Rosie theme.
"Thanks!" interviewed the first woman in the WV Rosie the Riveter Project in 2008. Anne Montague, Executive Director and Founder, first hoped to find 15 living West Virginia women who performed critical “home front” jobs during World War II, but “Rosies” were hard to find. A breakthrough came March 29, 2009, when the Charleston Gazette-Mail ran an advertisement with a picture of Montague’s mother, Jessie Jacobs Frazier, headlined, “Help us find our Rosies.”
The name and logo of the Metropolitan Riveters, one of the founding members of the National Women's Hockey League, are inspired by the character of Rosie The Riveter.
Rosie the Riveter became most closely associated with another real woman, Rose Will Monroe, who was born in Pulaski County, Kentucky[21][22][23] in 1920 and moved to Michigan during World War II. She worked as a riveter at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, building B-24 bombers for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Monroe was asked to star in a promotional film about the war effort at home. The song "Rosie the Riveter" was popular at the time,[2] and Monroe happened to best fit the description of the worker depicted in the song.[24] "Rosie" went on to become perhaps the most widely recognized icon of that era. The films and posters she appeared in were used to encourage women to go to work in support of the war effort. At the age of 50, Monroe realized her dream of flying when she obtained a pilot's license. In 1978, she crashed in her small propeller plane when the engine failed during takeoff. The accident resulted in the loss of one kidney and the sight in her left eye, and ended her flying career. She died from kidney failure on May 31, 1997, in Clarksville, Indiana where she was a resident, at the age of 77.[14]
Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon representing the working women of the United States during World War II.
After the war, the Rockwell "Rosie" was seen less and less because of a general policy of vigorous copyright protection by the Rockwell estate. In 2002, the original painting sold at Sotheby's for nearly $5million.[57] In June 2009 the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas acquired Norman Rockwell's iconic Rosie the Riveter painting for its permanent collection from a private collector.[58]
“Thanks!” conducts interviews of these “Rosie the Riveters,” now 85–95 years old, to archive in libraries, but more - the project provides opportunities for “Rosies” themselves to participate in the decision making of teaching their own legacy. The methods and tangible tools “Thanks!” has created help American communities find and learn from their “Rosies.
The 2013 picture book Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty, features Rosie as "Great Great Aunt Rose" who "Worked building aeroplanes a long time ago". She inspires Rosie Revere, the young subject of the book, to continue striving to be a great engineer despite early failures. Rose is shown wielding a walking stick made from riveted aircraft aluminum.[34]
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter is a 1980 documentary film and the first movie made by Connie Field about the American women who went to work during World War II to do "men's jobs." In 1996, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Rosie the Riveter may also refer to:
Elinor Otto, known as "Last Rosie the Riveter" built airplanes for 50 years, retiring at age 95.[31]
The film's title refers to "Rosie the Riveter", the cultural icon that represented women who manned the manufacturing plants which produced munitions and material during World War II.
Rosie the Riveter is a 1944 American film directed by Joseph Santley and starring Jane Frazee.
Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of World War II, representing the women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies.[1][2] These women sometimes took entirely new jobs replacing the male workers who joined the military. Rosie the Riveter is used as a symbol of American feminism and women's economic power.[3] Similar images of women war workers appeared in other countries such as Britain and Australia. Images of women workers were widespread in the media as government posters, and commercial advertising was heavily used by the government to encourage women to volunteer for wartime service in factories.[4] Rosie the Riveter became the subject and title of a song and a Hollywood movie during WWII.