When was rosies formed

While millions of men deployed to the front lines, the Rosies maintained American war production by manufacturing the planes, ships, tanks, arms and munitions required to defeat the Axis powers in both the European and Pacific theaters.

American production would not have been able to keep up with the needs of the war effort had these women not elected to work in factories that had typically employed male workers.

Additionally, many women also assumed essential jobs as first responders such as firefighters. It is estimated that between 5 and 7 million women held war industry jobs during World War II, increasing the female work force to about 19 million. This permitted American industry to transform to war production rapidly, supplying not just our armed forces, but also the armed forces of the Allied powers.

The mission of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights. FAQ Contact Us. Book-ended by what is now viewed as the first two waves of feminist theory and activism in western culture Evans , Rosie is historically situated at the interstices of ideological cross-appropriation and re-interpretation.

Paradoxically, she has now become a simultaneous contraction and expansion of the gender ed roles and politics of several generations. In this paper, I consider the ways in which this image has recently been re appropriated in a variety of contemporary popular cultural discourses and contexts. I begin with a short description of some of the easily accessible versions of the Rosie iconography all obtainable via the internet and a simple web search.

I follow with a short contextualising his her storical perspective of what is now called "Rosie the Riveter" and the myths surrounding her, many of which have already been debunked and which I briefly summarise.

I situate my reading of the imagery in the context of ideological and poststructuralist criticism and apply the thoughts of critical theorists of ideology, power and culture, such as Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Angela McRobbie and Judith Butler, to my reading. Rosie is potentially 'a powerful platform I argue that Rosie is now, and possibly always has been, an empty or open signifier, a simulacrum and palimpsest of herself, which transcends not only her original post-war intent, but also her second wave iterations.

In this way, and with the increasing aid of communication and cyber-technologies, the image of Rosie the Riveter has, in less than a century, become a multi-vocal, multi-purposed signifier, a contemporary ideologically distorted dreamscape where all manner of heterotopic experiences Foucauldian crisis, deviation and compensation play themselves out in individual and collective forms.

Reclaiming Rosie for feminism requires, in the first place, recontextualising her into the historical positions that she occupied during wartime and in feminism's second wave, and then newly and productively reinscribing her with historically contextualised meaning for post-millennial generations.

Contemporary Rosie iconography and iterations. There is a Rosie Lego figurine and a variety of dolls porcelain, paper cut-out and bobble-headed , as well as a poster with space for a face to be inserted, inviting one to 'Rosify Yourself! Clad in a nurse's uniform, playing on the Florence Nightingale trope, she is used as a reminder that 'health care is a human right' and, in another version, she is part of the call for solidarity among the wives of American Marines 'Proud Marine Wives'.

Rosie also vacillates between, among others, the status of a burlesque pin-up, a drag show staple persona, tattoo art, a Halloween costume, a fashion statement, and a consumer vehicle for anything from doggie treats to bed linen, and from washing powder to vacuum cleaners. The appropriation of Rosie for western consumer home-making culture is especially significant and ironic, as I explain later. Other interesting variations on the image, with clear counter-hegemonic intentions, include a male version, with a bearded man holding a baby and dusting brush, declaring '[h]e can do it' and several Rosies representing non-Caucasian racial groupings and non-Christian religions a Rosie image with the woman wearing a burka can be found on the internet.

In one example from the internet, Rosie is used as the face of a breast cancer awareness campaign, supported by the slogan 'fight like a girl'. The latter is a tenuous connection at best, probably based on the idea of endurance in the face of adversity, inner psychological warfare in the familiar rhetoric of "a battle with cancer" and also "the battle of the sexes" , and the "positive thinking" rhetoric of popular psychology.

The intent is clearly counter-discursive and counter-hegemonic, but the effect is ironic for a couple of reasons. First, because the attitudinal value of "girl fight" is loaded with connotations of weakness and relational violence, rather than strength Dellasega Relational violence is viewed as a quintessential "female" fighting strategy, as opposed to typical "male" physical violence.

The entrenchment of such binary oppositions is not productive for the advancement of radical new ways of thinking. Think, for example, of the connotations attached to a girl - or a boy - on a sports field being told "you play like a girl". The gendered unequal pay controversy in world championship tennis is a clear example of this, suggesting that many still view women's activities and exertions as inferior to those of men see BBC News Second, the appropriation of Rosie for the 'fight like a girl' cancer campaign is ironic and counter-productive, since the original wartime Rosie did not fight, either in combat or for women's rights, but exclusively functioned in a patriotic-nationalist and corporate ideological context, and by extension as a place-holder - at home and at work - for male soldiers.

Using Rosie as a champion for women's fight against breast cancer brings together physical femaleness, implied by breasts, though men have them too and can also develop breast cancer; feminism, implying women's rights to equality with men; and femininity, the conventional and socially-constructed roles and rules associated with women Zimbardo All these connotations are significant in understanding the complex dys functionality of the Rosie image.

This becomes clear if one asks how would it be perceived if one told a man with testicular or prostate or breast cancer to 'fight like a girl'? The differentiated discursive effect is a signal that something is amiss in the appropriation of this image for certain messages and thus calls for a re-contextualisation of Rosie before indiscriminately reappropriating or "reinventing" her.

Another example from the internet provides an interesting illustration of both inter-and sub-textuality. A modernised version of the same poster without headscarf, tools or recognisable context presents a photograph of a smiling woman, passively sitting in a generic outdoor environment, this time facing the viewer directly, but suggesting eye contact with an implied person in the space just off camera.

The text, presented in similar typographical layout as the previous poster and functioning as the link between the two images, states, '[m]odern day Rosies - still doing our part - she's a Riveter'.

Despite the differences in posture looking away and facing the viewer , the move away from discernible activity in the original poster to passivity in the later version, accompanied by the shift from the pronoun 'she' in the original implying objectified, even heroic or idolised, activity to 'our' in the modern version implying communal, internalised passivity are important changes in the visual and linguistic coding of Rosie-messages across three generations the war generation, the second wave generation and the post-millennial generation.

The original poster presents a contextualised Rosie - the context of the Second World War, industrial work and nationalistic patriotism is implied - while the latter presents a woman who is merely pretty, with no overt clues to why she is 'a Riveter' or what being a riveter is supposed to signify. Without the first poster to provide context, the latter is rendered meaningless and empty. It utilises the Rosie image in its film poster and DVD cover footage, yet, incongruously, never engages with the image of Rosie in the film itself, though the fate of women in industry after World War II is briefly mentioned.

A search of the internet also soon delivers what is probably a very accurate articulation of contemporary and post-millennial iconographical praxis: the original wartime '[w]e can do it! Having become an empty signifier, the image of Rosie at the same time contains the potential for any appropriation or inscription of meaning.

Postfeminism and feminist backlash. Rosie iconography, as I have argued, is not necessarily, and has never been, constitutive of a feminist agenda. In fact, exactly the opposite is true, especially in the current era of what is often called "post-millennialism", or, the third - sometimes even the fourth - wave of feminism some have even referred to it as "postfeminism", although this is a highly contested term.

In full acknowledgement of the multiplicity of feminist experience, praxis and theory, I argue that Rosie the Riveter is both a site for genealogical excavation and an example of how 'girls have become the new poster boy for neoliberal dreams of winning, and "just doing it" against all odds' Ringrose Viewed as such, Rosie - the long-accepted icon of working women - is indeed today a neoliberal chimera and, arguably, 'patriarchy's Trojan horse' Davies et al.

Rosie has arguably also, at least in some instances, been appropriated as part of the popular backlash against feminism, of which Susan Faludi warned in her book Backlash. Likewise, she is also seen as part of what is often loosely called postfeminism - a conceptual construct that is defined by Angela McRobbie a; as 'feminism dismantling itself' and as 'an active process by which feminist gains of the s and 80s come to be undermined Seminal feminist critical theorists, Judith Butler and Chandra Mohanty , have both, along with many others, identified the waning of sexual politics, feminism and the women's movement with the rise of global capitalism, consumer culture, women's involvement in the global labour market and a shift in global politics to the right McRobbie ; Ringrose , which is often associated with the neocolonialist aspect of neoliberalism Rottenberg The "feminist paradox" thus emerges,.

McRobbie a describes this as 'a form of Gramscian common sense' - the simultaneous identification and repudiation of feminism, thus dismantling possibilities for feminist politics and its much-needed renewed discourses. It is a space of neoliberal subjectification par excellence, where contexts constitute subjects and subjects constitute contexts in the perpetual motion of representation and iteration.

Jessalyn Keller and Jessica Ringrose define this type of neoliberal feminism as,. McRobbie identifies 'a new social contract' as pivotal to western post-feminism, where feminism is perceived as 'no longer needed' McRobbie and is caught in a 'double entanglement', comprising 'the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life According to McRobbie , this new postfeminist social contract rests on four silent agreements.

The first is 'the guise of equality', which is assumed to have been achieved by second wave feminism through the seeming standardisation and normalisation of equality in legislative and civic spaces, and through systems such as gender mainstreaming and the institutionalisation of equity through policies and quotas McRobbie The second silent agreement is consumer culture's 'postfeminist masquerade where the fashion and beauty system appears to displace traditional modes of patriarchal authority' McRobbie The third is the emergence of the 'phallic girl' or 'ladette', to use British terminology, who 'appears to have gained access to sexual freedoms previously the preserve of men' McRobbie The fourth agreement is the construction of idealised '"top girls" in education and employment, understood to be the subjects of female success, exemplars of the new competitive meritocracy' McRobbie ; see also Ringrose The so-called 'mama grizzlies' Ha ; Schreiber of the new American conservative politics is an example of a mature version of this "top girl" phenomenon, where the combination of conventional masculinity and femininity in the gender ed performance of female excellence has become ubiquitous.

McRobbie further says about the "top girl" phenomenon,. Underpinning this attribution of capacity and the seeming gaining of freedoms is the requirement that the critique of hegemonic masculinity associated with feminism and the women's movement is abandoned. The sexual contract now embedded in political discourse and in popular culture permits the renewed institutionalisation of gender inequality and the re-stabilisation of gender hierarchy by means of generational-specific address which interpellates young women as subjects of capacity.

With government now taking it upon themselves to look after the young woman, so that she is seemingly well-cared for, this is also an economic rationality which envisages young women as endlessly working on a perfectible self, for whom there can be no space in the busy course of the working day for renewed feminist politics. This continual pseudo-feminist representational politics and economics of self-perfecting and self-surveillance is all consuming work in terms of time and energy, often reliant on contradictory discourses of power, choice and sexuality, that are centred around "having" or "getting" imperatives rather than those of Heideggerian Dasein-driven "being" or "belonging" implying that being human is necessarily always also already a state of unitary [wholeness] and holistic being-in-the-world.

As neo-feminists situated within popular cyber culture, bloggists Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett argue in The Vagenda that sexualised femininity and the indiscriminate appropriation of feminist discourses also known as "girl power" can manifest as a baseline for anti-feminist or even misogynist backlash discourses, such as those contained in "lad culture", or what Kitty Nichols also calls 'mischievous masculinities'.

These are not exclusively performed by men, but are also often symbiotically appropriated by women through socialisation and media representation. As Baxter and Cosslett argue also see Francis ; Edwards ; Gill ; Nichols , stereotypical post-millennial lad culture - a specific masculine embodiment, enactment or trend of patriarchy - is a complex occurrence, like "girl power" and "top girls", at the intersecting nexus created by consumer ethics, women's magazines, men's magazines, advertising culture, feminist discourse, popular music, social networking and the internet.

McRobbie aptly quotes Foucault as saying 'it is quite clear that the danger has changed'. In commenting on pop singers such as Beyonce's commodified and highly sexualised girl power rhetoric the word feminism is often specifically reclaimed by the new wave of post-millennial celebrity feminists , often aimed at prepubescent and very impressionable young audiences, fellow-singer and humanitarian activist Annie Lennox distinguishes between "feminism lite" and "feminism heavy" as two ends of a scale.

At the "heavy" end of the scale, she situates feminists such as Eve Ensler as 'very impactful feminists who have dedicated their lives to the movement of liberating women, supporting women at the grass roots' Leight At the "lite" end of the scale she identifies sexualised, corporate and consumerist girl power music, 'I find it disturbing and I think it's exploitative.

It's troubling Twerking is not feminism It's a sexual thing that you're doing on a stage; it doesn't empower you' Lennox ; see also Azzopardi ; Leight ; Weidhase These all signify the hollowness and neo-voyeuristic aspect of much of post-millennial "feminist" discourse and its agendas.

Rosalind Gill , following Robert Goldman , calls it 'commodity feminism', describing 'the ways in which advertisers [seek] to appropriate and harness the cultural energy of feminism and sell it back to women, emptied of its political content'.

Roxane Gay writes,. That we require brand ambassadors and celebrity endorsement to make the world a more equitable place is infuriating. This produces a new objectification of the female as something to be looked at only in terms of the concept of "success", or its lack, which would signify "failure". Brigid Delaney says about lifestyle feminism, '[i]t's also a movement that empowers individuals often at the expense of the collective.

The result is a blend of capitalism and feminism that feeds successful women into a patriarchal power structure of money, comfort and privilege but does not do much to improve the lives of many women who still live with capitalism's boot on their neck'.

That women are often deeply implicated and complicit in this patriarchal power structure, both exploiting and benefitting from it, cannot be ignored. Jessa Crispin, an Australian author who distances herself from this kind of feminism, says in a conversation with Delaney ,. You use feminism to ask for a raise at work, or negotiate your romantic relationships - but you don't use it to negotiate the shared experience that minorities have or to renegotiate capitalism.

There is less of an understanding of the big picture and more instead of how you are doing as an individual Feminism has become a way of shielding your choices from questioning. This is part of choice feminism; I call myself a feminist and I'm making a choice so therefore the choice is feminist.

And that's absurd. Elsewhere, Crispin Cooke says about lifestyle feminism what Cooke [] calls 'this self-obsession and ideological laziness' , 'it is about individualism, and self-achievement. It's about pop stars and television and narcissism. It's not about subsidised childcare, or institutional and structural social change.

It's meaningless' and 'not getting what you want is not, by any stretch of the imagination, oppression'. Similarly, Rosie images associated with this kind of "feminism" can be seen as meaningless. Feminist heterotopology. Foucault describes contemporary heterotopic experience - generated in part by living in different ideological spaces at the same time - as 'a sort of mixed, joint experience' and as mirror-like. This resonates with McRobbie's a 'double entanglement' of contemporary women, who are discursively often constructed as eternal 'girls', designating them to a type of perpetual adolescence, a ritualised and often pseudo-sacred liminal space of self-constitution and self-contestation.

One invariably thinks of the two ironic lead characters, Edina and Patsy played by Jennifer Saunders and Joana Lumley , in the British television series Absolutely Fabulous as examples of these "stuck old girls" with literal emphasis on each word ; postfeminist veterans, so to speak, and an extreme example of flipped laddish behaviour and self-obsession. Their younger alter egos can be found in the female characters of popular Anglo-American millennial films and television series such as Sex and the City , Ally McBeal , Bridget Jones's Diary Maguire , Friends and Will and Grace Foucault argues that heterotopic experience is 'a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live'.

Manuel Castells describes social media and social movements in contemporary societies as paradoxically being simultaneous 'networks of [both] outrage and hope'. As McRobbie a says, '[the media] casts judgement and establishes the rules of play'. Heterotopia can offer freedom from patriarchal restrictions but can equally reinforce these restrictions.

This has wide-ranging implications for the ways in which female subjectivities and desires and the objects of this desire are constructed and commodified within contemporary western neo-liberal consumerist cultures. The result is contradictory discourses and representational politics of feminine success girl power and girls having it all , which are, as Ringrose points out, 'both wildly celebratory and deeply anxiety ridden'.

In keeping with Foucauldian ideas on heterotopic engagement, Castells explains that in networked societies symbolic spaces are transformed into public spaces, which then become political spaces. Certainly, this is not new and has always been part of human relationship management. However, the unprecedented variety, simultaneity, immediacy and intensity of these transformations are unique to contemporary technology-driven societies virtual and real.

He says 'it is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous If everything is dangerous then we always have something to do. Ringrose , following McRobbie a also points out the need to remain vigilant about how some feminist discourse can feed into neoliberal formulas and fantasies of girls as 'metaphors for educational [and by implication workplace] success and equality'.

This kind of vigilance stands in opposition to the pop culture Zeitgeist term 'slacktivism', which describes 'a virtual relatively costless display of token support with brief shows of public support of a cause via Facebook or online petition signing' Guillard ; Kristofferson et al. Furthermore, Foucault says of heterotopic experience writing presciently from the pre-millennial s that,.

We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

He goes on to describe three kinds of heterotopic experiences that are ideologically constructed and negotiated by societies. These are: first, crisis heterotopias that are socially constructed places where people in crisis go; second, heterotopias of deviation, which are also socially constructed places but, in this instance, where individuals go who deviate from the norm; and third, heterotopias of compensation that are socially constructed ideological utopic ideal places.

Of the latter, Foucault says that 'their role is to create a space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled'. In the next section, I apply Foucault's insights to images of Rosie the Riveter. Rosie the Riveter as heterotopic site. Rosie the Riveter presents an example of how contemporary iconographic culture engages with all three of these spaces simultaneously. First, the image of Rosie is repeatedly utilised as a site of heterotopic crisis.

It is more accurate to speak of plural nostalgias, since one may argue that the critiques of postfeminism often contain within them a degree of nostalgia for certain kinds of seemingly less complex and layered second wave feminism, or feminist politics. Rosie has also always been a site of heterotopic deviation and dissidence. During wartime, this manifested as women being employed in traditionally male jobs, and during the second wave, as women's rights and equality. For post-millennials, she has become a paradoxical site of both postfeminist and reactionary nostalgia, often superficial sexualised girl power discourses and anti-feminist backlash.

Finally, Rosie has also always been a site of heterotopic compensation, symbolising a type of ideal or perfect woman.

During the Second World War she was presented as both strong and capable in carrying a nation to victory on the home front a direct descendant of the American "frontierswoman" and a female version of the icon of the cowboy in American mythology , while also "knowing her place" and playing all the assigned traditional feminine roles, thereby playing into the traditional heteronormative fantasies of domesticity, sexuality and nurturing.

During the second wave feminist movement, with the anti-war sentiments of the Vietnam era rendering Rosie ineffective in her previous World War II iteration, she symbolised the feminist ideal of the working woman, equal and on par with her male colleagues - engaged in the battle of the sexes in employment and civic spaces.

For the post-millennial generation, she has become a heterotopic site of compensatory commodified nostalgia and consumer culture, presenting a dehistoricised ideal of women, especially in relation to what McRobbie a calls 'top girls' and 'phallic girls', both eternally infantilised and sexualised in the linguistic coding of the word girls; '[neoliberal] subjects par excellence, and also subjects of excellence'.

In the film, A pervert's guide to ideology Fiennes , controversial psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains that 'when we think we escape ideology in our dreams, that is when we are in ideology' emphasis added. Language and discourse, including visual imagery and iconography, present us with ideological dreamscapes through which human beings both reveal and conceal themselves at the same time and often simultaneously in more than one space real, virtual, social, cultural, ideological, and so forth.

Thus, ideology can be seen as the complex heterotopic playing field of our dreams and desires. Zizek in Fiennes describes ideology as the distorting glasses through which we view the world.

He says that critical engagement with ideology is like removing these glasses - always a painful experience, since, after all, 'we enjoy our ideology' Fiennes Rosie is a powerfully ideological figure, having been mobilised through nearly a century in the service of contradictory ideological agendas.

Rosie in wartime and in the workplace. Throughout history, women have always been central to war efforts. Most often, certainly in the popular western imagination of the last two centuries, this role was constructed as fivefold. First, women provided inspiration and existential meaning for fighting, suggestive of participation in the protection of the nation state, and by extension the sanctity of the home and family.

Nurturing associations relating to the mythical "motherland" abound in wartime rhetoric, as does the idea of women as incubators, breeders or producers of more fighters against a clearly identified common enemy. Second, women in wartime are depicted as providing essential home-front emergency and other support services, thus literally "keeping the home fires burning" and temporarily occupying spaces previously filled by men.

War posters from the Second World War contain messages such as '[k]eep 'em smiling with letters from folks and friends' and '[b]e with him at every mail call'. Coinciding with the emergence of new communication technologies at the turn of the twentieth century, "entertaining the troops" was seen as the patriotic duty of popular film and radio personalities during both World Wars both at the front and at a distance, from radio at the home front, and from recording studios and film locations.

Morale building, closely related to propaganda in wartime, is a central part of any war effort and mainstream examples from Rosie's era are the uniform-clad Andrews Sisters producing up-beat dance songs with a lot of sexual innuendo , Vera Lynn called "The Forces' Sweetheart" and best known for nostalgic songs of loss and longing , and the androgynous Marlene Dietrich, whose haunting versions of Lili Marlene in both German and English are iconic of the pathos of war.

Invariably, as counter-point, unenlisted male entertainers like Bob Hope supplied comic relief, while their female counterparts supplied nostalgic inspiration and sexualised distraction. A related staple role for women during wartime is that of pin-up model. One of the most famous series of images of Marilyn Monroe shows her in a sequin-dress entertaining the American troops in this style in during the Korean War.

Monroe was a 'Rosie' during the Second World War - she worked as a factory worker in the aeroplane industry before breaking into the entertainment industry after the war. Photos of her as Norma Jean Dougherty, taken in by army photographer David Conover Collman , show her in what has become the quintessential Rosie-pose, assembling an early version of what we today call drone planes.

In a complex ideological combination of military aerial identification strategy, nostalgic patriotic affection, wistful sexualised ideation, hommage to femininity, and militaristic pornography, Second World War bomber aircraft which, ironically, women were building in factories "back at home" were painted with pin-up pictures of women in provocative poses, in the style of the famous photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing costume looking back over her shoulder. These sexualised pin-up-style images have become a staple of the complex contemporary vintage and burlesque revival genres, with strong links to classical and Victorian parody and caricature, like the Vaudeville tradition.

These images have re-emerged, like Rosie and often as Rosie, in the post-millennial era amid an unprecedented boom in communications technology. They form part of both the backlash against feminism and the re-imagining of gender and sex roles also in drag and queer counter-cultures, some of which are contentiously claimed as feminist discourses.

Simultaneously inscribed with the meanings of the complex and varied roles women occupy during wartime, Rosie has become a vehicle for self-conscious gender ed performance: women and sometimes men purposefully enact or depict gender ed Rosie-style roles and adapt these roles to suit different situations.

These references to Rosie are often subliminal, making their ideological force stronger. The industrialisation of the nineteenth century, including printing and communication technologies, not only advanced the capacity of the military war machine to staggering levels, but also aided the communication of nationalistic patriotism in ways that were unimaginable in earlier centuries.

This also coincided with what is now called the first wave of feminism, which campaigned for women's suffrage and rights. The film, Suffragette Gavron , based on Emmeline Pankhurst's autobiography, My own story, published in the first year of the First World War, provides a media-saturated generation with visual images and a coherent narrative to reimagine the revolutionary history of a previous generation.

The suffragettes' struggle took place against the backdrop of increasing activism for women's rights within the textile industry. During wartime in both World Wars , many of these factories turned to the manufacturing of weapons, bombs, tanks and aeroplanes, in addition to supplying uniforms and related equipment.

In the US, during the First World War, the now iconically famous picture of Uncle Sam with Kitchener being the British equivalent was augmented with wartime posters aimed at women. Posters aimed at women stated, for example, 'Gee, I wish I were a man; I'd join the navy' with a picture of a coy, wind-swept woman in a sailor's hat and navy uniform ; 'Hello, this is Liberty speaking - billions of dollars are needed and needed now' with a picture of a woman with a Statue of Liberty-headdress speaking into a telephone ; and 'Joan of Arc saved France - Women of America save your country - Buy war savings stamps' with an armour-clad woman wielding a sword, while casting her eyes up to heaven.

Ironically, the contradictory fact that both Marianne the emancipatory figure of the French Revolution, closely associated with "Liberty" and Joan of Arc were leading armies of revolutionaries to their death on the battlefield seem to be superfluous and inconvenient information in these patriotic images. Neither of them was spending or saving money as part of the home front war effort, as implied in the poster's message: they were engaged in active combat.

The irony here is that the posters encourage economic frugality and austerity as the domain of warring women, whereas similar posters aimed at men would have emphasised recruitment to the battlefield. A famous British poster of the time shows two women and a child clutching each other and their clothing while peering out of a window at a darkening sky and uniformclad, bayonet-wielding troops marching away to the front; the text simply states, '[w]omen of Britain say - Go!

The gap left behind by the nearly three million British men called to combat Crang - and death - were filled by the women "left behind". A British poster of the time shows a smiling woman, with aeroplanes flying overhead as a factory and tank emerges from behind her skirt.

The poster's text reads, 'Women of Britain -Come into the factories'. Another shows two women in nondescript brown and blue uniforms, with corresponding silhouettes of two men, one with a combat helmet and the other with aeroplane microphone-headgear, and text declaring, '[e]very woman not doing vital work is needed now'.

It does not define 'vital work'; by implication, this would be "men's work", leading to the illogical assumption that non-essential work is all the work that women usually do. Two decades later the same patriotic iconography was repeated on both sides of the Atlantic. The emergence and use of these posters contextualise Rosie's appropriation and reinvention. Can the real Rosie please stand up?

As I have shown, there are a multitude of variations on the themes and images associated with Rosie. The last three images that I describe form a trio of seminal iconographic and ideological meaning-making that shows - at least in part - the evolution of the central character of this paper and the intersecting early twentieth century discourses about women and war and women in the workforce. The first image is a pencil drawing depicting two women in similar postures; the first, in the upper left-hand corner, portrays a pioneer woman in bonnet and hoop skirt busy loading a rifle, while the second, in the lower right-hand corner, is the same image of the same woman, but in factory overalls with a red polka-dot headscarf and red manicured nails, busy riveting what most likely is a piece of fuselage from an aeroplane.

The accompanying text reads, '[i]t's a tradition with us, Mister! The second image is the original poster of the first so-called 'Rosie', emblem of the blue-collar working woman - the much-reproduced image of a woman with balled fist, in overalls and polka-dot headscarf, rolling up her sleeve while flexing her bicep and declaring, '[w]e can do it! Some claim that the image is of a year old factory worker, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, while others argue that it is Naomi Parker Kimble If these claims are true, this would be one of a series of corporate public relations posters created in by J.

Thus, ironically, and in hindsight, the poster symbolises patriotic nationalism, corporatisation and control rather than dissidence, individualism or feminist communalism. The 'we' in the slogan refers to 'the company' and not to 'women'. The poster was therefore not intended as a rallying call to feminist solidarity, but was part of a series of visual communications addressed to all company employees. As Sharp and Wade , following Kimble and Olson explain, 'the idea that the poster was an inspirational call to other women is the result of reading history through the lens of our current assumptions about gender and politics Rosie, then, isn't calling out to women to join her in working at the plant, as [US] national mythology suggests; she's speaking to workers already employed there'.

Thus, as Sharp and Wade explain,. Ironically, the iconic image that we now imagine as an early example of girl-power marketing served not to empower women to leave the domestic sphere and join the paid workforce, but to contain labour unrest and discourage the growth of the labour movement. The third image and the source of the name Rosie is a Norman Rockwell painting, published on the cover of the May Memorial Day edition of the Saturday Evening Post, which depicts a red-haired female riveter on lunch break, sandwich in hand, with a rivet gun in her lap, her lunchbox resting on her thigh and the American flag as backdrop.

The name 'Rosie' is inscribed on the lunchbox. American women played important roles during World War II, both at home and in uniform. Around 5 million civilian women served in the defense industry and elsewhere in the commercial sector during World War II with the aim of freeing a man to fight. Working Rosie Employees of the Glenn L. The women traveled as part of a special Honor Flight to honor the Rosies — women who entered the workforce during World War II as male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force.

Some women served near the front lines in the Army Nurse Corps, where 16 were killed as a result of direct enemy fire. Sixty-eight American service women were captured as prisoners of war in the Philippines.