Rosie the Riveter: A Review

The "grotesque," as the critics called it, could well be a statement about human beings and their essential meanness and ultimately about life's diminished chances for happiness. Told in comic tone, that message became brutal and hit a hard wall of audience confusion. Thus the ogling and empathy arising from critical responses merely paralleled that confusion within the work itself. Tashlin wrote three books for children, and one of them, The Possom That Didn't, encapsulated its author's personal feelings. A possom,, smiling while hanging upside down, is discovered by passersby who mistake his upside down smile for a frown. Worried over the lonely possom's condition, the strangers walk him through the world to see what wonders the humans- have created. The possom's worldly experiences so distress the young innocent that he becomes truly unhappy. He returns to his tree, where contented passersby now mistake his upside down frown for a smile. Tashlin made his films from an upside down position, allowing audiences to laugh at their own expense. But unlike the naive possom, Tashlin seemed to relish the occasional embarrassments his characters had to endure. The Girl Can't Help It used comedy to sugar-coat a pessimism and condescension that bordered on misanthropy. ROSIE THE RIVETER: A REVIEW By Leslie Fishbein Leslie Fishbein is Associate Professor ofAmerican Studies at Douglas College ad, Rutgers University. Rosie the Riveter long has been the subject ofpopular myth. Presumably, a middle class housewife entirely content with domesticity, Rosie was transformed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and miraculously endowed with the ability to perform men's work, but only for the duration ofthe conflict. With demobilization Rosie returned gracefully and happily to her home, eager to resume her domestic responsibilities and to leave the world ofwork to its natural inhabitants, men. A superb documentary, The Life and Times ofRosie the Riveter, now exists to challenge that myth. Produced and directed by Connie Field and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film is the result of oral history research in four war-impacted areas: Los Angeles, with its burgeoning aircraft industry, Detroit, transformed from an automobile production center to tank and aircraft manufacture; the San Francisco Bay area, with rapid expansion ofshipyard construction; and New York City, with its proliferation of light munitions industries. Survey interviews with seven hundred former Rosies revealed a new vision of the woman war worker. In most instances Rosie was a working class female already at work before Pearl Harbor who was attracted to war industries because they offered her far better pay, more union benefits and greater access to upward mobility than had been available to her in the prewar years. Dismissal at war's end relegated Rosie to second class status rather than to suburbia; having no economic alternative but to work, Rosie found her opportunities restricted once more to the scant wages associated with traditional female employment. The film masterfully intercuts government documentary footage and March ofTime newsreels with interviews with five former Rosies to demonstrate the degree to which women war workers were the victims ofmyth and manipulation. The brittle phoniness of 11 the newsreel footage contrasts with the authenticity of the oral histories. The March of Time newsreel depicts highly manicured affluent women at a card party who respond eagerly to a radio message urging them to enlist in the war effort. The working class Rosies interviewed in the film became war workers for far more prosaic reasons: to earn money to support their children, to live more comfortably on wages comparable to those paid men, to have access to work far more challenging than the boring, repetitive labor common in female employment. The newsreel footage depicts their choice as natural because patriotic, effortless, and safe. The five former Rosies convince us that their emancipation from women's work came at a tremendous cost. Lyn Childs had to leave her child for what was supposed to be one year but stretched into five; the strain ofthat separation permanently scarred their relationship. Juanita Allen never heard ofthe excellent day care facilities touted by the newsreels; she was forced to send her daughter to a...