Memorials to women are largely absent from commemorative culture in the United States. Often portrayed as allegorical representations, memorials representing women as tangible beings of collective memory are even rarer. It is for this reason, that the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Richmond, California occupies a unique space within America’s memorial landscape.
Initially conceived to honor the rich wartime history of Richmond, California, the memorial evolved into a national tribute to the diverse women laborers of the World War II home front. Instead of embracing the iconic image of women laborers embodied in the infamous J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster and Rosie the Riveter legend, the Rosie the Riveter Memorial challenges visitors to move beyond this singular depiction and towards the creation of new collective memories. The bandana-clad "We Can Do It!" depiction of Rosie the Riveter looms large in American collective memory regarding women on the home front, embodying all that Americans associate with female laborers and the "good war." However, contrary to popular belief, this now ubiquitous image was virtually unknown during the war years.
Created in 1942 by J. Howard Miller for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, the poster was never used as a recruiting tool for women, nor was its "We Can Do It" message meant to be targeted exclusively to women. Instead, it served as part of a series of motivational production posters specifically for Westinghouse employees where ironically, no female employees worked as riveters. Thus, the image, which only 1800 prints originally existed, never featured prominently in the American wartime consciousness. Only when it was rediscovered in the 1980s and used by second-wave feminists as a symbol for women's equality did the image become imbued with its modern connotations of women's liberation.
The modern myth embodied in Miller's Rosie the Riveter glosses over and abstracts the lived realities of women war workers on the home front during World War II. Specifically, to some, Miller's image posits a monoethnic, middle-class vision of an imagined sisterhood of married women that overcame sexist and racial lines to form the "arsenal of democracy." The reality is that most female defense workers were working-class women of a myriad of ethnic backgrounds, ages, and marital statuses, who moved to war industry boom-towns as much for financial security as for patriotic duty. Nevertheless, the Office of War Information constructed a massive propaganda effort to recruit married, middle-class, white women to glamorize war work as a domestic necessity to preserve the established social order to "bring the boys back home," according to Leila J. Rupp. This governmental push, born from a state of total war, was always undercut by the reminder that this aberration in gender norms was only acceptable for the duration of the war. Even today, historians still debate whether the war achieved a lasting effect on gender roles or was an exceptional event in women's history that only became a galvanizing point when highlighted by later women's equality movements.
The memorial originated to honor Richmond's wartime history as one of the nation's most diverse, productive World War II boom towns. Richmond's role in the war effort was largely forgotten by the 1990s as the former boom town became known for its high crime rate and crippling poverty, not for its robust industries or multicultural heritage. Richmond city councilperson Donna Graves championed the idea of constructing a public art project that would honor Richmond's wartime legacy while also serving as a point of connection between this history and its current residents. From the beginning, Graves was adamant that any proposed structures should focus on Richmond's women laborers. As Erika Doss details in Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, the mid-1990s to the 2000s marked an ongoing memorial boom centered solely on honoring the "Greatest Generation." According to Graves, such attention increased commemorative momentum, coinciding with a renewed academic interest in women's experiences during the war. While attention to women's wartime experiences rarely made it into popular culture, this renewed interest in "Rosie the Riveter" combined with an upsurge in commemorative activity proved a catalytic point for the city to expand the memorial beyond the span of local history and onto the national stage. As a result, the initial plan for what would become known as the Rosie the Riveter Memorial underwent several changes. The most significant transition was from a solely local memorial to a national one.
The memorial's finished design by Cheryl Barton and Susan Schwartzenberg melded the city's requirements of a national tribute with another goal: to create a space to form new memories of these women. Schwartzenberg stated that they wanted visitors to engage in memory-making using text, images, and the overall layout of the memorial. The finished memorial would contain distinct "rooms" representing aspects of a victory ship still under construction, engraved with quotes from actual Rosies alongside a timeline of the war. Taken holistically, the memorial's design provided spaces for the public to congregate and acted as a "metaphor for the reconstruction of memory, the process of collecting fragments and bonding them together into the whole," according to Graves.
One aspect of the memorial brought into sharp relief is the emphasis the designers placed on collecting "real" histories. Schwartzenberg and Barton conducted "memory gathering workshops" with former employees from Richmond's wartime shipyards. These workshops provided priceless insight into the labor conditions, feelings, and experiences of the women who worked in Richmond and around the country. The memorial designers sought to celebrate women's lived experiences by identifying overarching themes within these individual accounts and accessed through national archives. In this respect, the memorial forges new memories of "Rosies" beyond the popular myth. It is a tribute to the women who lived and worked in shipyards and other industrial settings.
Additionally, the pavers lining the Rosie the Riveter Memorial are integral to engaging and complicating the public's memory of women's experiences and World War II. Stretching the length of the memorial, the nineteen stone pavers act as guidelines and records of oral history, contextualizing women's home front experiences alongside critical events in American collective memory of World War II. The pavers denote the struggles for gender and racial equality, including key race-based conflicts on the home front, such as the internment of Japanese-Americans and the Zoot Suit Riots. In this manner, the Rosie the Riveter Memorial resists engaging in the easy national mythmaking present in many contemporary World War II memorials. Instead, it includes "the blemished as well as the valorous," according to Rose.
This saturation of context sets the Rosie the Riveter Memorial in Richmond, California apart from other commemorative monuments to the working women of World War II. This memorial honors a wide range of women whose etched names are alongside their personal mementos throughout the structures' surface. Its innovative use of imagery, text, and overall design subverts visitors' expectations regarding a national memorial to women defense workers. In this manner, the memorial collectively honors working women by moving beyond the allegory embodied by the famed "We Can Do It!" icon to expose and explore the lived realities and contributions of women war workers. Although it is only a small aspect of the memorial landscape in America, its commemoration of the women laborers moves beyond popular memory to forge a much-needed remembrance of the actual Rosies of World War II.
(Edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey)
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