The 300,000 Women Who Broke Glass Ceilings During WWII

Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during World War II, and she became perhaps the most iconic image of working women, according to History.com.

American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during the war, as widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force.

Between 1940 and 1945, the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home.

Rosies in the Workforce

While women during World War II worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers.

More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, making up 65 percent of the industry’s total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years).

**Rose Bonavita, right, an inspiration behind “Rosie the Riveter.” She is pictured with Susan Esposito, another Italian American who worked in the GM plant in Tarrytown, New York.**

The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as illustrated by the U.S. government’s Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign.

Based in small part on a real-life munitions worker, but primarily a fictitious character, the strong, bandanna-clad Rosie became one of the most successful recruitment tools in American history, and the most iconic image of working women in the World War II era.

Did you know? Though women who entered the workforce during World War II were crucial to the war effort, their pay continued to lag far behind their male counterparts: Female workers rarely earned more than 50 percent of male wages.

In movies, newspapers, propaganda posters, photographs and articles, the Rosie the Riveter campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the workforce.

On May 29, 1943, The Saturday Evening Post published a cover image by the artist Norman Rockwell, portraying Rosie with a flag in the background and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s racist tract “Mein Kampf” under her feet.

Though Rockwell’s image may be a commonly known version of Rosie the Riveter, her prototype was actually created in 1942 by a Pittsburgh artist named J. Howard Miller, and was featured on a poster for Westinghouse Electric Corporation under the headline “We Can Do It!”

Early in 1943, a popular song debuted called “Rosie the Riveter,” written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, and the name went down in history.

The Real Identity of Rosie the Riveter

At least four women are lauded as the “real Rosie.” Rose Bonavita-Hickey, a New Yorker, placed a record-setting 3,345 rivets in an Avenger torpedo-bomber; Rose Monroe riveted B-24s and B-29s in Michigan; and Rosalind Walter of Long Island built Corsair fighter planes. Geraldine Doyle, the bicep-flexing model for the “We Can Do It!” poster, died in 2010 at 86, The New York Times reports. The impact of World War II on women changed the workplace forever, and women’s roles continued to expand in the postwar era.