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)

For more (including 9 images), view the original article.

In 1993, the United States Congress passed legislation authorizing the American Battle Monuments Commission (AMBC) to design, construct, and raise the funds necessary for a national World War II Memorial in Washington DC. The National World War II Memorial has served as a beacon of remembrance for the World War II generation since its dedication but falls short in recognizing the contributions of individuals, especially minorities.

The site's dedication for the WWII Memorial by former President Bill Clinton and World War II veteran Roger Durbin occurred on November 11, 1995. By the summer of 1998, the AMBC raised more than $195 million for the construction of the monument with the help of a small group of high-profile individuals, including senator Bob Dole, actor Tom Hanks, and the founder and CEO of Federal Express, Fred Smith. Construction for the monument began in September 2001 following the approval of Austrian-American Architect Friedrich St. Florian's design. The monument's construction was completed in April 2004 and was dedicated one month later by President George W. Bush. Since its initial completion, it has not undergone any further construction or renovations.

The large size of the monument's plaza exudes a sense of significance with the off-white stonework similar to the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and the framing of the Reflecting Pool. Robert Uth notes that the similarity of the design of the National World War II Memorial with the other monuments at the National Mall contributes to its historical significance by placing it amongst the other "important chapters in the American experience."

In the words of John S. D. Eisenhower, the National World War II Memorial design was to preserve "the broadest significance of the war experience to all Americans." The circular shape of the plaza signifies the eternal memory of the men and women that died during the war. The vertical pillars of the fifty states and territories of the United States provide a sense of victory as they tower over those that are standing in the central plaza. The staggering number of stars in the Commemorative Area (western wall), representing the 405,399 fallen soldiers, brings forth the scale of the American lives lost during the war. The 24 bas reliefs on the eastern end of the memorial grounds depict various moments during the war that contributed to the overall success of the Allied powers. Finally, as noted by Grooms, the monument's grounds contain dirt from the fourteen overseas American World War II burial grounds operated by the AMBC.

World War II veterans commonly mention how there is not a day that passes in which they do not think of their friends and comrades from the war. An opportunity to share in that remembrance is what the monument provides to the collective memory of the war. While this monument is a generally positive contribution to the collective memory of the World War II generation, its overall design fails to differentiate the soldiers and their individual experiences and journeys fully. For example, many minorities joined the American war effort as a means of social progression and to escape racial discrimination. But the contents of the memorial do not address this historical discourse. Instead, the memories of these groups cluster together, to only be remembered by their deaths.

Of the 24 bas-relief panels along either side of the ceremonial entrance, only two panels refer to a specific minority group of soldiers: women. Both the "Women in Military" and "Rosie the Riveter/ Aircraft Construction" panels are on the north side of the ceremonial entrance. The panels are an artistic representation of the contribution of women, both domestically and abroad, without descriptions or explanations. There is no mention of the social restrictions that drove women to join the war effort. In an interview for the "Voices of WWII," Elizabeth McIntosh recalls gratefully accepting a job as an OSS Officer for the Army, stating that "They [U.S. officials] asked me if I would go overseas. That was my idea of heaven because I didn't want to stick around watching [the war]."

According to the official United States Army website, "The selfless sacrifice of these brave women ushered in new economic and social changes that would forever alter the role of women in American society." One of the monument's two bas reliefs depicts Rosie the Riveter but does not expand on how important she was as a cultural figure. There is no explanation for how she was a beacon for women to join the workforce in factories and mills during a time when it was unheard of for women to have such jobs. There is no mention of women's importance in picking up the slack while men were overseas fighting the war.

In addition to institutionalized sexism, the Second World War occurred during racism in American society and policy-making, such as Jim Crow laws. During the war, minority soldiers served in segregated units. Battling racism at home by fighting abroad was a common tactic for those that sought social progression. In African-American communities, for example, this was referred to as the "Double V Campaign." The progress toward racial equality was slow, difficult, and sometimes tragic. When the war ended and the soldiers returned home, most minority soldiers did not receive the same warm welcome from the general public and were often mistreated or worse. In 1946, Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. was beaten and permanently blinded by a South Carolina Sheriff while exiting a bus. As noted by Waxman, Woodard returned home in his Army uniform from fighting overseas.

In an interview with the Friends of the National World War II Memorial, World War II veteran, Japanese-American Army Technician Terry Shima of the 442nd regiment, a fighting unit composed of American soldiers of Japanese descent, recalled Japanese-American soldiers not "being accepted as Americans" by the American public. Although Shima considered himself lucky to be from Hawai'i, where his family did not experience the Japanese internment camps, he shared that the United States government disowned the 442nd, changing their draft classification from 1A, which meant the unit was fit for military duty to 4C, meaning "Alien, unfit for military duty" even though every member of his regiment was a legal U.S. citizen. "We had a mission," he said, "to go into combat and prove our loyalty."

Friedrich St. Florian designed the National World War II Memorial to "tell the world there was a generation of Americans, who through their gallantry and courage and conviction truly changed the course of world history, and that we must remember them." Stories like Isaac Woodard's, Terry Shima's, Elizabeth McIntosh's, and the thousands of other soldiers looking for social progression are not visible throughout this monument. It eliminates their individuality and marks them in history as soldiers, not as people. And while the memorial does an excellent job of capturing the importance and scale of this moment in American history while creating a positive image of those that served, it fails to recognize the contributions of minority soldiers that expanded beyond the battlefield. While highlighting and celebrating the sacrifices of American World War II veterans, the National World War II Memorial falls short in recognizing the individuality of these soldiers as people. It disregards the history of discrimination that minority servicemen and women faced during and following the Second World War.

(edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey)

For more (including 9 images), view the original article.