We Can Do It!

3 Key excerpts on "We Can Do It!"

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  eBook - ePub

  Feminist Afterlives

  Assemblage Memory in Activist Times

  • Red Chidgey(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  They attribute feminist interpretations of this poster to “a deep cultural need to adapt the image in ways that are useful in modern culture” (2006, 548). The We Can Do It! image, they contend, has become “an indelible and influential part of US culture, shaping collective memory of World War II even as it continues to embody an empowering feminist fable” (2006, 535–536). Kimble and Olson do not come from a cultural memory studies perspective. They approach the feminist re-use of this image as akin to mythology, shot through with ideology and flattening of historical actuality. They are correct in that specific narratives of empowerment accompany reproductions and translations of this image which help secure it to a feminist imaginary. We can see this within commemorative discourses that tends to mobilise and consolidate empowerment legends in association with Rosie the Riveter assemblages. These memory scripts typically call on declarations of women’s unprecedented entry into male public spheres and their accomplishment in industrial work for their emotive factor. 10 What makes such narratives appealing to pass on is that the current conjuncture in the west and beyond is characterised by discourses, often commercially upheld, of ‘female empowerment’ (Harris 2004 ; McRobbie 2009). In a particular act of attachment—fuelling a kind of ‘stickiness’ in how the We Can Do It! image moves in connection to feminism—this poster’s contemporary circulation chimes perfectly with the current era of the neoliberal ‘can-do girl’

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  The Commemoration of Women in the United States

  Remembering Women in Public Space

  • Teresa Bergman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  40 In addition to the photos representing traditional women holding “male” jobs, the choice not to incorporate Miller’s graphic interpretation of a Rosie into the memorial also shifts the Memorial’s point of view from that of the factory owner to that of the worker.

  Figure 5.9 Image of the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California (photograph by the author, 2017).

  Howard Miller’s graphic image of a woman wearing a red bandanna and blue coveralls was based on a real Rosie; however, the original meaning of the poster was not the same as its contemporary connotations. Communication Professors James Kimble and Lester Olson’s research on this poster found that there has been substantial confusion over the poster’s origins and intentions.41 Kimble and Olsen found that the poster was not produced by the U.S. government, was not used for female labor recruitment, and was not famous nor widely distributed during World War II.42 Kimble and Olsen’s research established that the Westinghouse Corporation created the Miller poster through their “War Production Co-ordinating Committee” that “was a wartime labor-management organization within Westinghouse.”43 There was U.S. government recruitment propaganda that encouraged women to take on factory work to support the war, but the Miller image was not part of that propaganda. In fact, less than one thousand copies of this poster were made at the time, and they were displayed only inside a Westinghouse factory.44 Westinghouse used a series of weekly posters to promote morale among their workers during the increased wartime production schedules, and displayed these posters primarily “to increase production, to decrease absenteeism, and to avoid strikes.”45 The increase in U.S. employment during the war was impressive, with unemployment rates shifting from “17.2 percent in 1939, to 4.7 per cent in 1942, to an amazing 1.2 per cent in 1944,” and with this level of employment came a set of issues including stopping unionization while maintaining employee morale.46

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  Famous and (Infamous) Workplace and Community Training

  A Social History of Training and Development

  • David M. Kopp(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2006 ).

  What one gleans from the historical records on Rosie the Riveter is that monolithic metaphors can be problematic. That is, although the predominant media portrayal of female war workers was of young, white, middle-class housewives (Baker, 1942 ; Gluck, 1988 ; Honey, 1984 ; Rupp, 1978 ), in actuality the women who entered war production were not primarily middle-class housewives , but rather working-class wives , widows , divorcées , and students as well as women of color who needed the money to achieve a reasonable standard of living (Baxandall et al., 1976 ; Gluck, 1988 ; Rosie the Riveter Trust Fund, 2006 ; Rupp, 1978 ).

  Although scholars debate the representative demographics of Rosie the Riveter , what is clear is that following December 7, 1941, given the new female recruits, it would not be training as usual in the war industries. Even union leaders , who historically were reluctant in hiring women—lest they take jobs away from men—were revising their attitudes as the supply of labor became scarce; “the union leadership accepted as inevitable some use of women in jobs ordinarily held by men” (Baker, 1942 , p. 20).

  Because training the new women workers was a priority, governmental leaders such as J. W. Studebaker , the US commissioner of education, promulgated edicts urging that women be given full training opportunities (Dodd & Rice, 1942 ). As well, director C. R. Dooley of the training within industry (TWI) program , an advisory service formed by the National Defense Advisory Commission , set the government tone by noting that new women needed training in the same fashion as would new men, and although the women were entering a new environment so, too, were farmhands who took factory jobs (Dooley, 2001 ). Dooley famously opined that the only difference between men and women in industry was “in the toilet facilities” (Dinero, 2005 , p. 29).

  As a practical matter, to quickly fill the demands for workers in these new or expanding industries, complex jobs that formerly had been performed by highly skilled workers such as machinists were broken down into smaller tasks so that they could be quickly learned by the new female recruits (Dinero, 2005 ; Gluck, 1988 ). This systematic, on-the-job training method

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