But the jokes were just too easy. “Duck and twist as she may, the fact remains that Marjo is now masticating some of her very persuasive and well-paid words without condiments,” quipped columnist Alice Hughes.5 Before long Marjorie resigned herself good-humoredly to the humiliation. Three weeks after her wedding, she “broke down and confessed,” according to one journalist, to an audience of fifteen hundred of her husband’s employees that like them, she secretly enjoyed having Mr. Roulston as her “boss.” At the same event, the firm’s annual dinner in the Hotel Astor, the boss took the opportunity to frame his marriage as a successful business venture, holding it up as evidence of his skills as a salesman. The “former champion of single blessedness” looked on, reportedly all smiles.6
At first, Marjorie’s married life didn’t look all that different from her Live-Alone life. She honored the commitments she’d made before her wedding, which included chairing the Brooklyn division of the women’s committees for the World’s Fair’s “Women’s Month,” in May 1940, and receiving an award for her contributions to literature from the Brooklyn Women’s Club. But beyond those obligations, she vowed to “renounce” her public persona, giving up her newspaper column and her lectures, although she reserved the right to write “when she felt the urge.”7 She moved with Roulston back to Brooklyn, no longer on the water where she could hear the ships, but to a leafy block of First Street, steps from Prospect Park. There, she embraced the role of an “old-fashioned housewife,” but firmly dismissed reporters who suggested she might write a sequel to Live Alone on the pleasures of matrimony.
Whatever else it may have done for her, marriage effectively silenced Marjorie Hillis. In January 1940 she wrote from Brooklyn to thank Laurance Chambers for his Christmas gift, and confessed that she was still “in a non-writing mood,” which she hoped wouldn’t “prove to be a permanent part of matrimony.” Chambers wrote back to express his anxiety that the mood would be temporary and short-lived.8 It wouldn’t prove entirely that, but Marjorie turned her attention inward, to her new life and her past. She published nothing during her marriage but a guide to the birds on her country estate.
What, after all, could she say? A woman was expected to like her married life—and in the era of the companionate marriage, in which a husband was supposed to be a friend, a confidante, and a supporter, there was nothing radical in the idea of “live together and like it.” Yet there was still something unconventional in marrying as Marjorie did, in continued quiet and profound resistance to the expectations of society. She married late in life, after children were no longer a possibility, and after her husband’s children were grown, though she relished her role as step-grandparent. She married after her own financial stability was guaranteed, although the change took her from comfortable to wealthy. She married, in the end, for the simplest of reasons—because she liked him.
Rosie the Riveter
On August 3, 1939, the newlywed couple sailed on the Normandie for their European honeymoon. When they returned less than a month later, it was in darkness and anxiety. Their liner had been forced to take precautions including a zigzag route, radio silence, and blackouts of the main cabin lights at night. No explanation was given to the passengers except the occasional mutter of “Hitler,” and nobody knew until they arrived whether or not war had started in Europe. The 1,417 passengers—including Hollywood stars Constance Bennett and James Stewart—cheered and danced for joy upon learning that a precarious peace still held. It would last in Europe for just three more days, until September 1, when Germany invaded Poland. Despite this looming threat, reports of the ship’s tense return to New York also demonstrated that the marriage of Marjorie Hillis was still news—one took the trouble to quote Thomas Roulston declaring that his wife would write “no more books.”9
As alarming as their crossing on the Normandie must have been, the Roulstons were cushioned by wealth and privilege from the escalating threat of the war, and it remained distant for them, as for many similarly fortunate Americans. Indeed, at first the war was good news, at least for the domestic economy, as the massive expansion of industry absorbed many thousands of long-unemployed men. As early as 1940 the factories began to open their doors to women, too, to meet the upsurge in demand and heed President Roosevelt’s call for the United States to become the “arsenal of democracy.” In New York, women began driving taxis and operating elevators, as well as flocking to assembly line work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other local factories. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, women’s participation in the war effort was no longer optional. As men deployed overseas, their wives—of all races and classes—found themselves breadwinners and heads of households in unprecedented numbers. Five million women moved into the workforce between 1940 and 1944, including into the heavy industries that had never admitted them before.10
Once war became inevitable, married women’s labor was no longer judged to be harmful to family life, but was reframed as their patriotic duty. This took away—or at least muted—the question of choice that had always been so problematic in discussions of women working. During the Depression even single women had faced public vitriol for “taking” jobs from men—even though most jobs were gender-segregated, and men were hardly clamoring for positions in the low-paid stenography pool. But it was also widely accepted that single women were more likely to have to work, having no one else to support them—and economic necessity was something everyone had to respect. For married women, however, especially those with young children, the decision to work outside the home still carried a stigma of selfishness and neglect. Even during the war, many women struggled to weigh their family’s needs and their own desires against their country’s call, and women’s magazines frequently reassured them that staying home and raising children was war work of a different kind.
In the early 1940s, the war’s impact was unavoidable. Marjorie herself had barely settled into her new life of traditional domesticity, than women across the country found themselves facing the opposite prospect. While she turned away from the world, to wealth and marriage and building her new home with her husband, millions of women were turning to hardship, work, and self-reliance for the first time. Thousands of young women rushed into marriage before their sweethearts shipped out overseas, so that they began married life in the curious position of de facto Live-Aloners. But they could no longer draw strength from the independent and glamorous stories contained in Marjorie Hillis’s books: it was not a time for bed jackets, orchids, or tea parties. Marjorie was no longer in step with the culture, nor pointing the way—she ducked out, and it surged on without her.
Instead, the woman Americans looked to was a symbol: Rosie the Riveter, in her head scarf and overalls, embodying strength, beauty, and can-do spirit. “Rosie” was a composite, based on the experiences of a handful of women who worked in different industrial jobs, and her name soon became a synonym for any young woman who had rolled up her sleeves and joined the factory workforce. She first entered popular culture in early 1943, in a catchy song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, recorded by the Four Vagabonds, a pioneering African American a cappella group, who studded the performance with a distinctive rolling-r sound to mimic Rosie’s drill. The song, which enjoyed wide radio play, celebrated both Rosie’s patriotism and the novelty of her labor in its chorus: “She’s making history / Working for victory.” But any fears the song might stir up in celebrating Rosie’s power—perched on the body of a powerful weapon, riveting gun in hand, doing her work as well as any man—are allayed by the reassurance that she has a boyfriend serving in the Marines. Presented as the effort to protect her Charlie, Rosie’s potentially liberating work is brought back under domestic control. Her long hours on the assembly line serve her man as much as her country.11
The most famous painter in America, Norman Rockwell, was inspired by press reports of women’s industrial work to create his own homage. On Memorial Day 1943, the cover of the Saturday Evening Post featured a Rosie who was anythi
ng but frail, and who was yoked to the national cause rather than to any individual boyfriend. Despite her rouged cheeks, red hair, and bright lipstick, Rosie’s femininity is muscled out by her overalls, goggles, massive rivet gun, and bulging biceps (Rockwell’s model, a nineteen-year-old local telephone operator named Mary Doyle, was so shocked at how her slim frame had been expanded in the painting that Rockwell called her to apologize).12 Rosie’s commitment to the war effort is made explicit in the rippling backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, and the copy of Mein Kampf she’s trampling underfoot. Her twisted pose, crossed feet, the upward perspective, and the position of her hand deliberately evoke Michelangelo’s depiction of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel—with a half-eaten ham sandwich shoved into the prophet’s empty fingers.
The religious connection (underscored by the Kansas City Star, which ran a side-by-side comparison on June 6, shortly after the Rockwell painting appeared) transmuted Rosie, with her dirt-streaked face and serene, superior gaze, into a figure of effortless, superhuman power—but today, hers is not the image that comes to mind when we hear the name Rosie the Riveter. Instead, we see a glamorous cartoon version, featuring Rosie in spotted head scarf, overalls, and raised fist, under the heading “We Can Do It!” That version, however, was seen only by a handful of Americans during the war, if they happened to work in the Pittsburgh factory where she appeared briefly on a poster designed to boost morale. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when feminist activists seized on her image, that she began to supplant Rockwell’s painting as the iconic female war worker. Although both versions feature a woman in work clothes pictured alone, only Rockwell’s radiates a sense of solitude—perhaps surprising given that factory work was necessarily cooperative, and most other propaganda showed women working in teams. Rockwell’s Rosie has the air of a wartime Live-Aloner, maintaining her self-reliance even in the midst of the collective national effort, stomping Hitler with no hint of Charlie or any boyfriend in her thoughts.
Rosie’s influence continued through the later war years, but it was rare that she appeared as butch and nonchalant as Norman Rockwell painted her. Wartime movies that placed women in factory roles made sure that the stars looked feminine and delicate, and that the plots continued to revolve around romantic entanglements. The movie Rosie the Riveter, released in 1944, is a musical comedy starring platinum-blonde B-movie comedienne Jane Frazee. Essentially a bedroom farce, the plot revolves around a shortage of lodging space near a California defense plant, which requires workers Rosalind “Rosie” Warren and her friend Vera to share their space with two men who work a different shift. Rosie falls in love with one of her rotating roommates and breaks off her existing engagement, while spending the rest of her spare time trying to reunite her landlady’s daughter with her estranged husband.
The lightness with which the fictional Rosie the Riveter treated women’s work and its impact on their relationships is in stark contrast with the story of Rose Will Monroe, one of several women who had a claim on “the real Rosie.” Tough enough to suit Rockwell’s vision, Kentucky-born Monroe worked as a riveter in an aircraft factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she assembled B-24 and B-49 bombers. A film crew visited her factory in 1944 to shoot footage for propaganda films, and Rose was duly discovered by their star, the popular actor Walter Pidgeon, going on to make several promotional films with him. She was no glamorous starlet but an approachable, curly-haired brunette who displayed skill and confidence at her manual job. Recently widowed and with two young children, Monroe had no choice but to provide for her family, but she was also ambitious and good at her work—a tomboy, according to her daughter, who knew the skills of her father’s carpentry trade. Whether from practical need, personal desire, or some combination of the two, Rose Monroe did not retreat into her home after her industrial job disappeared at the end of the war. She took a series of jobs that were still rare for women—driving taxis and school buses—and eventually started her own luxury-home construction business, proudly self-named: Rose Builders. She had originally hoped that the aircraft factory where she worked would train her to fly, but they refused because she was a single mother. Years after the war, she earned her pilot’s license from a local aeronautics club, where she was the only female member, and then taught her daughter to fly, too.13
In Life magazine on August 9, 1943, the pioneering photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White created a vivid picture of the working lives of the women at a Gary, Indiana, steel mill. The cover image and photo spread portrayed a variety of women, from teenagers to middle-aged mothers, with all the grit but little of the glamour of the Rosie ideal. Some were married with children, others fresh out of school, and several had relatives or husbands working elsewhere in the plant. Despite the powerful propaganda image of the husband off fighting overseas, less than 10 percent of women war workers were in fact in this situation. Many were carrying on as before, albeit in industrial environments that were new to them. The magazine noted that the women in the Gary factory were not treated as “freaks or novelties” by the men, yet the magazine took care to insist that their presence was still exceptional, a “revolutionary adjustment” of the natural domestic order, and that once the “crisis” had passed, they would go home.
The expressions on the women’s faces convey a range of emotion, from pride to boredom to lurking fear, and for most it’s apparent that hard work is nothing new to them—unlike the curiosity of the press. According to the accompanying article, it is a diverse group: “They are black and white, Polish and Croat, Mexican and Scottish.” Where the photograph is a portrait, the captions name the women, their jobs, and an identifying detail or two, and avoid making any comment on their physical appearance. One jarring exception is the photograph of one Mrs. Rosalie Ivy, pictured at work in her overalls and described as “a husky Negro laborer.” Her race overwrites her femininity, underscoring that she is a “laborer” before she is a woman, and that hard physical work is, for her, no revolution.14
The opening up of access to industrial work during World War II was nonetheless transformative for African American women like Rosalie Ivy. Unlike white women, they did not require a propaganda push to entice them out of their homes—simple necessity had always done that, and 90 percent of those who were working at the end of the war had been working at its outset. But the new opportunities in industry gave black women options, often for the first time in their lives. By the end of the war the proportion of them employed in domestic service—those dead-end, unavoidable jobs to which they had long been relegated—had dropped by 15 percent.15 “My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,” recalled Fanny Christina “Tina” Hill, a Texan who went to work at North American Aircraft in Los Angeles at the age of twenty-four, and used it as her ticket into a comfortable middle-class life. Unusually, after leaving the factory at the end of the war to have a baby, Tina returned, and worked there for the rest of her life.16 Even though black women workers were still barred from many of the higher-paying riveting and welding jobs in factories, there was palpable pride in doing work of national importance.
The access of women like Rosalie Ivy and Tina Hill to factory work was the result of tenacious activism on the part of black unions and civil rights leaders, using tactics more usually associated with the 1960s movement: boycotts, marches, and rallies. The irony of the U.S. government going to war to defend freedom and democracy abroad while vicious Jim Crow laws ruled at home struck many African Americans as grotesque. Yet at the same time they recognized that military service, ever since the Revolution, had offered a way for black Americans to prove their loyalty to the state and win incremental victories in the fight for racial equality. Was there a way for black Americans to fight Hitler—even in a segregated military—and win their own rights in the process? In early 1942 a young man from Wichita came up with an answer. He wrote a letter to the editor of the prominent black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier suggesting that the common slogan of “V for Vic
tory” was not enough for black Americans, who should insist on a “double V”—victory from without and within, abroad and at home. The newspaper seized eagerly on the concept, creating posters, buttons, and songs to promote it, and push the government to make good on its democratic promise.
Harnessing the power of the Double V campaign, NAACP head Walter White and others planned a march on Washington for 1941, refusing appeals from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and then the president to call it off. They only relented when Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin.” The military itself would not be desegregated until 1948, under President Truman, but the antidiscrimination legislation was an important victory, laying the groundwork for the postwar civil rights activism that would gradually transform American society.
The civil rights leaders spearheading the Double V campaign recognized the importance of publicly celebrating the contributions of women. At the annual Negro Freedom Rallies organized throughout the war in Madison Square Garden, a “Miss Negro Victory Worker” was crowned; in June 1944, The Crisis reported that the winner would be presented to the “huge Garden crowd” and receive a merit certificate and a war bond. Dancer and anthropologist Pearl Primus performed in front of a crowd that was indeed huge: twenty thousand people watched her crown the African American equivalent of Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of black women’s strength, dedication, and patriotism. By staging the rallies downtown, rather than in Harlem, the organizers made it clear that the work of Double V and the contributions of black workers were central to New York’s and the nation’s war effort.
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