The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
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The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter is a 1980 documentary film and the first movie made by Connie Field, about the American women who went to work during World War II to do "men's jobs." In 1996, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Why It Rocks
- During World War II, the United States government made a concerted effort to increase the number of women in the civilian workforce. One of the outgrowths of this campaign was "Rosie the Riveter", a fictional defense worker who was the home-front equivalent to G.I. Joe. (There was a song about her recorded by The Four Vagabonds, and written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1943, as well as several newspaper stories of real-life Rosies) During the war, nearly 6 million women entered the workforce for the first time, and even after peace was declared, women continued to be presented in traditional roles in culture, as the war brought about a permanent change in society. And yet by the 1970s, Rosie the Riveter became a mostly forgotten artifact of an earlier time. That's where Connie Field attempted to explore the truth behind the image.
- Field was following two trends by documentarians: to re-examine World War II (as in the British docuseries The World at War), and to show the history of the labor movement from a feminist perspective, as in Union Maids and With Babies and Banners. Field employed a familiar approach to documentary filmmaking, combining archival footage, photographs, and music with newly filmed oral histories. Where Field is distinct from other documentarians is in her patience and selectivity. She interviewed over seven hundred people in preparing and filming The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, but distilled the onscreen interviews down to five women. By following their stories in depth, she could provide a sense of the dramatic changes the women underwent, while still making her own points.
- The Life and Times follows a chronological pattern, allowing the five participants to explain their backgrounds, their first days on the job, the problems they faced, and then the aftermath to the declaration of peace. The director's subjects include vivid details, like how much money a factory worker made in the 1930s, the subtle and overt discrimination women and minorities faced, what it was like to plow a field, and the limited jobs open to women. The structure of the film—cross-cutting among the women, contrasting them with archival material—allows its facts to emerge gradually, without belaboring political points.
- The film suggests that in the manipulation of public images of wartime women, the government, employers and media were pushing hard the traditional view of Woman as Housewife to suppress the runaway implications of women doing men's work so successfully, with the pride and camaraderie that wartime working conditions engendered. If women could master mechanics, blowtorches, and blueprints, what couldn't they master? If women were doing so well with 12 million men away, would they be willing to accept so readily their traditional inferior places — at home, at work, in society?
- In retrospect, Field's five witnesses seem keenly aware of the steps they were taking. Describing the reaction of men when she first started working in a factory, Lola Weixel says, "When a woman walked in, a man went to war," an evenhanded acknowledgment that hostile reactions had a variety of causes. While the documentary highlights and honors the women's accomplishments, it also showcases some of the struggles the women had to face -- one of the biggest struggles being racism.
- In what's considered by many to be a very powerful and dramatic point in the film, Lynn Child recalled an instance of racial discrimination. Working as the only woman and the only black on a welding crew in a ship's hold, she witnessed a 19-year-old white officer attack a Filipino worker, kicking him repeatedly and shouting racist insults. She swung around threatening the officer with the full flame of her blowtorch if he did not stop his attack, to which the officer stopped. Lynn was summoned to the main office, and braced for censure, she was surprised to see her entire crew behind her, to hear the commanding officer fumble with questions probing the incident, and to see the young officer cry. When the supervisor accused her of being a communist, she said that if that's what communists stood for, "Then I'm the biggest communist in the whole world." The story is dramatic, and holds up surprisingly well even today
The Only Bad Quality
- Some of the transitions can be a bit jarring and sudden, even if it's mean to prove a point. For instance, there's a scene that cuts from a newsreel extolling hygiene in plants to a witness describing how black women weren't allowed to use "whites only" showers.