katherine hanson,
director, weea equity resource center
edc
55 chapel st
newton, ma 02158
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Subject: Morning Mail - June 4, 1997 - `Rosie the Riveter' star dead
Author: Reginald_Aubry/CAM/Lotus@lotus.com at Internet
Date: 6/4/97 8:58 AM
`Rosie the Riveter' star dead at 77
Associated Press, 06/02/97
CLARKSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Rose Will Monroe, whosehigh-profile role as``Rosie the
Riveter'' in promotional films and on posters pushed women to take jobs during
World War II, has died. She was 77.
Ms. Monroe, who died Saturday, was working as a riveter building B-29 and B-24
military airplanes at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti,Mich., when
she was asked to star in a promotional filmabout the war effort.
She was also featured in posters.
The role became synonymous with thousands of women who took defense industry
jobs, working factory positions usually held by men.
``They found Rose and she was a riveter and she was the
one who fit the profile for the `Rosie the Riveter' song,'' her daughter
Vickie Jarvis said Sunday. ``So she happened to be in the right place at the
right time and was chosen to be in some of these films.''
Ms. Monroe was born in Kentucky's Pulaski County and moved toMichigan during
the war. The Encyclopedia of American Economic History credited
the ``Rosie the Riveter'' movement with helping push the number of
working women to 20 million in four years of war, a 57 percent jump from
1940.
Unlike many ``Rosies'' who returned to the kitchen after
the war, Ms. Monroe kept working. She drove a taxi, operated a beauty
shop, and started her own home construction firm in Indiana called Rose
Builders.
Ms. Monroe's other daughter, Connie Gibson, recalled going with her mother to
see the Goldie Hawn movie ``Swing Shift,''about a woman working alongside men in
a munitions factory during wartime. In one scene, a man asked a female
colleague to get a left-handed wrench.
``Mother laughed at that because she remembered the men doing that to the
women in the factory, thinking they were too dumb to know
the difference,'' she said.
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