Remembering Rosie the Riveter

Julia M. Siebel

If you stand on the dock of the historic Ford Assembly Plant in Richmond, California, and look south, the view is breathtaking. The open expanse of water, the city of San Francisco and the bay—with its famous bridges and miles of coastline—have long inspired creativity. When you turn around and examine the current state of the industrial plant directly behind you, or look west to view Shipyard #3, you need a lot of creativity to understand both the past and the future of these buildings and their surroundings. With some imagination, though, you can begin to recognize the National Park Service’s new Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park and its significance for current and future generations.

Last April at the OAH San Jose meeting, two dozen attendees had a special behind-the-scenes preview of this new park. Our trip, cosponsored by the OAH and the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites with a grant from the National Park Service, included visits to many of the park’s sites, talks with four eloquent, distinct, and memorable “Rosies,” and meetings with scholars collecting oral histories. We also heard from key community leaders and National Park Service employees including Judy Hart, the park’s first superintendent, George Turnbull, Deputy Regional Director for the Pacific Northwest Region, and Representative George Miller (D-CA).

Because fewer “Rosies” remain each year, collecting their stories right now is extremely important. Hopefully, the park will lead to a greater awareness of their important role in history and help preserve existing physical resources while creating new primary documents for future scholars. As the Statement of Purpose notes, the historical park is a creative public-private partnership that aims to preserve “the stories, sites, structures and areas that are associated with this industrial and governmental efforts that contributed to victory in World War II and to lasting change to America.” That “lasting change” included innovations in prepaid preventative health care and childcare.

As the U.S. geared up to fight World War II, Richmond, California, grew overnight from an agricultural hamlet to a wartime boom town. While our military history is well known, the home front history is much less so. Unlike other such towns, many of Richmond’s original 1941-1946 buildings remain. Spread along the waterfront, the park’s seventeen specific sites include the Ford Assembly Plant, the USS Red Oak Victory, Henry Kaiser’s Shipyard #3 and related historical buildings—two childcare centers, the Kaiser Permanente hospital, canteen, fire station 67A and wartime public housing.

The Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park seeks to research, preserve, and interpret the hard and dangerous stateside work, workers, and related sites key to the war effort. The 120,000 predominately female workers from Richmond built more ships than any other shipyard. The park preserves key structures once filled with women workers of all ethnic and age groups busy assembling the ships, tanks, and jeeps so essential to the Allied victory. Working in teams with lights ablaze all night long and everyday, they built 747 ships (their four-day record for building an entire ship still stands). The Ford Assembly Plant was converted from assembling cars to jeeps and trucks and other combat vehicles—it will become the park’s visitor center. The two childcare centers that operated from 1941 to 2004 remain, as does the Kaiser Permanente Hospital and Fire Station 67A. The USS Red Oak Victory—launched at Shipyard #1 in November, 1944. and owned by the Richmond Museum Association—is being restored by World War II veterans now volunteers in their eighties.

The value of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historic Park extends far beyond these actual physical spaces bounded by bay and railroad tracks. The park will also house museum and oral history collections. Ford Motor Company advertisements elicited nine thousand “Rosies” eager to share their long-unheard stories. (Current estimates reach six million American women employed in World War II war-related work). These include stories of “riveting tests,” frequent prejudice from male bosses who underestimated the women’s capacity, five families living in one apartment, and family sacrifices mixed with war-heated romances. Disparate racial treatment for white and black workers remains particularly painful: lack of African American access to housing and childcare and doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work.

In addition to adapting the Ford Assembly plant into a visitor center, the partnership also needs to collect more histories and objects associated with the “Rosies” including uniforms, the infamous riveting tests, and photographs that would be useful in future scholarship. Particularly important are the extensive oral histories being collected and digitally preserved by Richard Candida-Smith. Each woman’s personal history offers a frank and highly individual interpretation of the work, cultural shifts, and social challenges that dominated everyday wartime life on the home front.

For more information on the park, please visit <http://www.nps.gov/rori/>. Given the success of this year’s program, the OAH will work again with the National Park Service to offer a similar history-intense tour departing from the 2006 conference and returning to local airports. For more information on the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, please visit <http://ncwhs.oah.org/>.