from
www.ajc.com
Women whose strengths helped win WWII ready to fight for a monument
By JEFFRY SCOTT
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/15/07
At the outbreak of World War II, Lessie Stanley quit her job as a telephone operator in Atlanta to work on an assembly line building floats for seaplanes fighting in the Pacific.
About the same time, Betty Gore quit her job as a schoolteacher in North Carolina and went to work at a top-secret facility in Washington, D.C., trying to break the Japanese communication's code.
By then, Dolores Irvin had become one of Atlanta's pioneer long commuters. She carpooled every morning from her parent's home in Kirkwood to Marietta, where she worked, along with more than 10,000 other women, at the Bell Bomber plant.
Stanley, Gore and Irvin were among the 6 million women who toiled in American defense plants and government offices during World War II and collectively became known as Rosie the Riveter, celebrated in song, films and — most famously — a 1942 poster featuring a woman with her sleeve rolled up, bicep flexed, under the words: "We Can Do It!"
This weekend, the three women, along with other Rosies, will meet at the American Rosie the Riveter Association convention at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Virginia Avenue near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It is a meeting with some urgency. Most of the women are now in their 80s, some in failing health. And they have a new mission.
"This is our kickoff event for starting a fund-raising movement to get a Rosie monument built in Washington, D.C.," said Sadie Holt, the Warner Robins-based president of the association and the convention organizer.
The image of Rosie the Riveter is more prolific now than ever, said Sheridan Harvey, a women's studies specialist at the Library of Congress, which has a collection of Rosie memorabilia. "With the women's movement, people went back and found that image of strength and it hit a chord," she said.
That muscular display of femininity has also spun off a Web site (rosietheriveter.com) devoted to products from shot glasses to girls' clothes bearing the now-famous image.
The convention this weekend is part of a larger national effort to collect and preserve the history and stories of America's World War II veterans.
The Library of Congress is gathering the oral histories of women war workers, and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is scheduled to air a seven-part WWII series, "The War," in September.
Holt was too young to work in the factories but did her part as an 11-year-old girl living with her family on the Florida panhandle. She rolled bandages for the Red Cross and collected scrap metal to be recycled into ships, planes, bombs and bullets.
A robust 77-year-old who sometimes dons Rosie attire at the group's events, Holt says women leaving home to work in factories and government offices permanently changed the socioeconomic makeup of America — setting the stage for the women's liberation movement decades later — and contributed muscle that altered the outcome of the war.
"Hitler himself said that he would have won the war had it not been for the American woman, because they filled every job that every man had filled," says Holt. "He said he didn't think we could do anything but paint, powder, primp and look pretty."
Strenuous labor
Stanley, an 82-year-old now living in Bartow, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, said that even though she was "an old farm girl" used to physical labor when she became a riveter at the Lakewood Chevrolet Plant in Atlanta, she was 5-foot-4-inches tall and weighed about 100 pounds. The work was difficult.
"It was strenuous, and it was nerve-wracking because it had to be perfect," she said. "You couldn't make a mistake because the boss was sitting right there. If you made a mistake, then the rivet had to be drilled out and you had to put in a bigger rivet. They didn't like that because that made the float heavier."
Gore, who is 88 and lives in Decatur, remembered the thrill of moving from a small town to Washington, D.C. But, even now, she can't fully explain her role as a code breaker because each woman was an isolated part of the process.
"I used to say if I was kidnapped I still wouldn't be able to tell them what I did," she said, laughing. But she remembers the group celebrating when they were told they had broken the code.
On the day Japan surrendered in August 1945, the group received and deciphered the encoded message from the Japanese government.
"We knew they surrendered hours before it was announced in Washington and had to keep it to ourselves," she said.
Irvin, 85, worked as a statistician whose calculations helped Bell Bomber run at peak efficiency, producing 668 of the almost 4,000 B-29 bombers built during the war. B-29 bombers delivered the two atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced the Japanese to surrender.
She took great pride in her work. "It [the B-29] was a beautiful plane. It did a lot of harm where it was supposed to," she said. But there was little glamour in it.
Bell Bomber employed more than 28,000 and operated, like all the war plants, around the clock. The pace was such, said Irvin, that women who paused during bathroom breaks to apply makeup were penalized an hour's pay.
"I still remember a girlfriend of mine going in there and putting on lipstick because she planned to meet someone later," she said. "When she came out I heard a foreman yell, 'Punch the clock!' "
Returning soldiers took the women's jobs after the war, and the government mounted a publicity campaign urging women to return to their place in the home.
Stanley, Gore and Irvin all married. They settled down, stayed home and raised children, and they don't regret that, they said. They might have been in the vanguard of a work force that ultimately transformed American culture. But, back then, they didn't know.
Today, said Holt, it's a different story. "I think young women now are aware of what we did," she said. "But we need a memorial — it doesn't hurt to remind them."
ABOUT ROSIE THE RIVETER
Rosie the Riveter first appeared in 1942 on a poster drawn by J. Howard Miller. Norman Rockwell also produced a Rosie poster that appeared on a 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell is the far more famous artist, but Miller's is the far more famous poster — partly because Miller's image is not protected by copyright and can be used without charge by marketers.
IF YOU GO
• When: Starts today
• Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel, near the airport, 1325 Virginia Ave.
• Info: 404-768-6660
• Tonight: Dinner, keynote address, at 6:30.
• Saturday: Performance of play "Rosie The Riveter"
(10:45 a.m.); USO show, 6:30 p.m.
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Lets never forget that we had a lot of dedicated folks back home supporting the war effort.
Robbie
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