Rosie The Riveter

Words: 1615
Pages: 7

World War II was a time of opportunities for women; widespread male enlisting left a major gap in the United States labor force, opening a variety of positions that were previously exclusive to men. As factories quickly changed their production from family goods to munitions needed to win the war, government and Industrial leaders called out to women to join the workforce with several campaigns, among them, the most common and widely used campaign, Rosie the Riveter. The campaign was widely publicized in movies,newspapers, photographs, articles, and even a Saturday Evening Post cover, emphasizing the patriotic need to join the work force —and they did; thousands of women answered this call. The President’s Commission on the Status of Women …show more content…
In 1955, Eric Walker, Penn State University Engineering dean, wrote a column in which he expressed his thoughts that “Women [were] NOT For Engineering” (Bix, 33). He claimed women did not have the “basic capabilities” that were needed to be an engineer. Now established women engineers remember how intimidating it felt to be the one and only woman in an engineering class, yet the admittance of women to university programs was frequently described as an “invasion” of the program, even though, some women had already been doing engineer work throughout World War II. Likewise, personnel, administrators and corporate managers were not even willing to give women a chance to prove they were capable of doing the job; In fact, an article in the Industrial Relations News of 1961 revealed that “81 percent [of employers] wouldn’t hire female engineers, and most… would be dead set against permitting them to reach middle-management levels” (Bix, 36). This, however, was not the case for NASA, it was actually quite the