Rosie the Riveter, media icon associated with female defense workers during. Since the 1940s Rosie the Riveter has stood as a symbol for women in the workforce and for women’s independence.Beginning in 1942, as an increasing number of American men were recruited for the war effort, women were needed to fill their positions in factories.

• Rosie The Riveter Biography

Initially, women workers were recruited from among the working class, but, as the war production needs increased, it became necessary to recruit workers from among middle-class women. Since many of these women had not previously worked outside the home and had small children, the government not only had to convince them to enter the workforce, but it also had to provide ways for the women to care for their households and children.

To accomplish this end, the U.S. Office of the War produced a variety of materials designed to convince these women to enter into war production jobs as part of their patriotic duty.

Rosie the Riveter was part of this campaign and became the symbol of women in the workforce during World War II.The first image now considered to be Rosie the Riveter was created by the American artist J. Howard Miller in 1942, but it was titled “We Can Do It!” and had no association with anyone named Rosie. It is believed that this initial drawing was part of the ’s wartime production campaign to recruit female workers. Miller’s drawing portrayed a woman in a red bandana with her bent arm flexed, rolling up her shirtsleeve.

In 1943 the song “Rosie the Riveter,” by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, was released. This song touts the patriotic qualities of the mythical female war employee who defends by working on the home front. Following the release of this song, ’s drawing of his version of the female defense worker appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, on May 29, 1943. This version of Rosie was a much more muscular depiction of a woman in a blue jumpsuit, with a red bandana in her hair, eating a sandwich. Rockwell placed the name “Rosie” on the lunch box of the worker, and thus Rosie the Riveter was further solidified in the American memory.

Rosie the Riveter is both a romantic and a heroic figure from the World War II era. A former housewife turned war hero, Rosie emerged from the kitchen and built the machinery necessary to fight and win World War II. Posters emblazoned with her picture became a symbol of wartime courage and patriotism. Her motto “We can do it!” stirred countless women.And not only did Rosie do it, she did it better than anyone had ever done it before. Rosie was a key player in the retooling of U.S. Industry from peacetime to wartime production. During the five years she was on the shop floor, from 1942 to 1947, productivity rose, product cycle time dropped, and quality improved.

Not only did Rosie do it. She did it better than anyone had ever done it.Yet despite her success, Rosie was forced off the factory floor when the war ended, her achievements buried in books, all her accomplishments wiped out of our consciousness. She had proven her abilities, but she remained that cultural enigma: a woman in a man’s job. Rosie’s skills, which had helped win World War II, were deemed unnecessary in the fight for competitiveness that began about the time she left the factory.

Rosie, it seemed, would have to spend the rest of her time baking cookies, not building machinery.While Rosie may seem like a quaint historical figure to some people, her story contains prudent, even urgent, lessons for women in management today. For they too work in what have historically been “men’s” jobs. As such, Rosie’s story can help us understand the plight of modern managerial women. That’s why we ask, whatever happened to Rosie the Riveter? And, more important, what can we learn from her?

Rosie Was Robbed!During World War II, women were free to be men; they were even encouraged to be men. In the face of the fervent demands of wartime production, the social and ideological barriers that had kept women off the factory floor gave way.

Women took on jobs as riveters, assemblers, and machinists, building bombers and tanks by day and tended their victory gardens by night.A new study by two University of Michigan researchers, published in the American Economic Review, documents the dramatic rise in the number of women working in factories during this period. According to Sherrie A. Kossoudji and Laura J. Dresser, there were never more than 45 women working at Ford’s massive River Rouge complex prior to the war. But as the war escalated and women were called in to replace men sent to the front, women suddenly accounted for 12% of the 93,000-member work force.Their tenure in the plant was short, however.

By war’s end, women made up less than 1% of all hourly factory employees. As Kossoudji and Dresser explain, “Women were laid off from industrial firms disproportionately, and women with seniority rights were not recalled, nor were new women hired when postwar auto production expansion was associated with new hiring.” To justify laying the women off and hiring male replacements, Ford managers claimed that the production process had altered so completely after the war that the occupations where women had proved themselves no longer existed.Bombers were riveted; cars would be welded. Therefore, it was possible for Ford managers to make a somewhat unconvincing argument that women were no longer qualified.

They claimed that the new auto production would require heavy lifting, not necessary in building bombers. As one woman put it, “They hire men there, they say, to do the heavy work.

The women do light work. During the war, they didn’t care what kind of work we did”But after the war, they sure did. Kossoudji and Dresser conclude that, even when the jobs remained exactly the same, the ability of women to do them suddenly became suspect as the men returned from the front. “These women had, during the war, many of the exact jobs that became men’s jobs after the war, using the same machines and drills” Even though the women had proven themselves capable workers, often more efficient than the men who had preceded them, the prejudice persisted that these were “men’s” jobs. The brief time that women had spent in these jobs was not enough to change our cultural perception of factory work from “men’s” work to “women’s” work.As such, Rosie was done in not by the men who came home from the front, nor by the men who ran the plant. Rosie was a victim of the power of definition, a demon that managerial women still struggle with today. For deeply embedded in our definition of what it means to be a manager is the belief that the manager will be male.

In fact, being male and being a manager have been synonymous since the inception of the managerial class in the early 1900s. If Men Are Good Managers, What Are Women?As Rosabeth Moss Kanter explains in her ground-breaking work, Men and Women of the Corporation, professional managers succeeded in wresting control of the organization from its owners only by establishing their “expertise” in the “scientific” methods of management.

This expertise was rooted in the characteristics our society has traditionally labeled “masculine”: a tough-minded approach to problems; analytic abilities to abstract and plan; a capacity to set aside personal and emotional considerations in the interest of task accomplishment; and a cognitive superiority in problem solving and decision making. As Kanter reminds us, “These characteristics supposedly belonged only to men.” On Women and Work. “The End of a Riveting Experience: Occupational Shifts at Ford After World War II,” Sherrie A. Kossoudji and Laura J.

Dresser (American Economic Review May 1992).Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Moss Kanter (New York: BasicBooks, 1977).“Are Women Executives People?” Garda W. Beatrice Worthy, and Stephen A. Greyser (Harvard Business Review July–August 1965).“If ‘Good Managers’ Are Masculine, What Are ‘Bad Managers’?” Gary N. Powell and D. Anthony Butterfield (Sex Roles April 1984).Games Mother Never Taught You, Betty Lehan Harragan (New York: Warner Books, 1977).“Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” Felice N.

Schwartz (Harvard Business Review January–February 1989).The Female Advantage, Sally Helgesen (New York: Doubleday, 1990).“Ways Women Lead,” Judy B. Rosener (Harvard Business Review November–December 1990).“Ann Hopkins,” Ilyse Barkan and Joseph L.

Badaracco, Jr. (Harvard Business School Case No. 9-391-155, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School, 1991).Justice and Gender, Deborah L. Rhode (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989).“Gender, Language, and Influence,” Linda L. Carli (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Volume 59, No. 5, 1990).“Organizational Demographics and Women’s Gender Identity at Work,” Robin J. Ely (Working Paper, Cambridge, Massachusetts: John F.

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1992). Women historically have been viewed as “unfit” or “too emotional” for the managerial role.This link between masculine traits and managerial abilities had become well embedded in our organizational psyches by the middle of this century. A study published in the Harvard Business Review in 1965 entitled “Are Women Executives People?” reported that 32% of the respondents believed that a woman’s fundamental biological makeup makes her unfit for a managerial role.As recently as the mid-1970s, researchers found that the traits most commonly associated with being male continue to be synonymous with the traits managers are expected to exhibit. In “If ‘Good Managers’ Are Masculine, What Are ‘Bad Managers’?” from the journal Sex Roles, Gary N. Powell and D. Anthony Butterfield report that the traditionally “masculine” characteristics of self-reliance, independence, aggression, and dominance have become inseparable from our definition of managers. Their poll of 1,368 business students of both sexes revealed that between 67% to 85% describe a good manager as possessing these so-called “masculine” traits.

It was this belief that men were made for the job that greeted women managers when they first joined corporations in large numbers in the mid-1970s, and it has plagued them ever since. The Metamorphosis of the Managerial WomanNot surprisingly, the first women managers attempted to fit themselves into the managerial role by adopting a “masculine” style. They dressed like men, they talked like men, they even tried to use sports analogies as men did. The first women managers dressed like men, they talked like men, they even used sports analogies.In her best-seller, Games Mother Never Taught You, Betty Lehan Harragan argues that, in order to succeed as managers, women need to understand the elaborate sports metaphor after which business is patterned. She asserts that “management patterns its functions after the most sophisticated of all team games—football,” then goes on to coach women on the intricacies of the game. “If you recover a fumble, complete a long pass, or make a long run into scoring position, press your advantage and capitalize on your opportunity to confound the opponents; try a trick play on the next down.”Unfortunately, as Rosie had already proved, it isn’t easy for women to fit themselves into a male model.

Women would have to understand more than fourth-down plays to be successful in business. After a decade of failing with the football paradigm and an equal number of years wearing bad clothes, women began to realize that it was impossible to disguise their essential nature in the workplace. Most obviously, it was impossible to ignore pregnancy and motherhood and their impact on a manager’s worklife. So it was that in the late 1980s the “Mommy Track” was born.In “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” published in Harvard Business Review in 1989, Felice N. Schwartz wrote, “The one immutable, enduring difference between men and women is maternity.” As such, Schwartz points out, pregnancy remains one issue where “female socialization” comes face-to-face with a male corporate culture. Male executives “place every working woman on a continuum that runs from total dedication to career at one end to a balance between career and family at the other.

What women discover is that the male corporate culture sees both extremes as unacceptable. Women who want the flexibility to balance their families and their careers are not adequately committed to the organization. Women who perform as aggressively and competitively as men are abrasive and unfeminine.” Not to mention bad mothers.Part of Schwartz’s solution to this dilemma is to separate women into two groups: “career primary” and “career and family” women. The corporation then can channel women onto different tracks: the fast track or what the New York Times later dubbed the “Mommy Track.”This simple suggestion started a heated national debate.

Rosie The Riveter Biography

On one side were critics who fervently believed that, since men were not being asked to choose between work and family, women shouldn’t be asked to either. On the other side were those who sought to be “pragmatic” and argued that, since most women would leave the work force at some point to have children, it was logical to separate them out anyway.

The debate ricocheted throughout the national media for several weeks before the concept was derailed altogether. A Return to the Basics of Sexual PoliticsMore recently, it has been in vogue to argue that women, who allegedly possess special intuitive and caring abilities, actually make better managers than men, who are now hopelessly trapped into the outdated scientific paradigm of management. Recent publications have extolled the “special” capabilities of women managers, arguing that women have a unique ability to engage in the interactive forms of leadership that are needed in corporations today.In The Female Advantage, Sally Helgesen writes, “As women’s leadership qualities come to play a more dominant role in the public sphere, their particular aptitudes for long-term negotiating, analytic listening, and creating an ambiance in which people work with zest and spirit will help reconcile the split between the ideals of being efficient and being humane. This integration of female values is already producing a more collaborative kind of leadership, and changing the very ideal of what strong leadership actually is.”. In this equation, women who were once thought to be inferior leaders because they were “too emotional” now turn out to be excellent leaders because they can exhibit “special” emotional qualities.For authors like Helgesen, motherhood is no longer a liability; it is actually an advanced management training program. As one woman executive who is quoted in The Female Advantage says, “If you can figure out which one gets the gumdrop, the four-year-old or the six-year-old, you can negotiate any contract in the world.”In its way, this is as simplistic as the application of sports metaphors to management. Managers aren’t mothers any more than they are quarterbacks.

Both the sports metaphors and the new maternal metaphor of management are elaborate extensions of prevailing sexual stereotypes, the strong beliefs we hold about the way men and women should behave, translated into a business context.Still, there exists a persistent notion that the special sensitivity of some women can lead us to a new kind of interactional leadership. For example, in “Ways Women Lead,” an article published in the November–December 1990 issue of HBR, Judy B.

Rosener speaks glowingly about the work of a woman in an investment bank who “hosts dinners for her division, gives out gag gifts as party favors, passes out M&M’s at meetings, and throws parties ‘to celebrate ourselves.’”Most likely, these women lack the organizational power necessary to create change and therefore fall back on the soft skills of nurturing and feeding people to gain allegiance. After all, women have been using food to cause groups to coalesce for years.