Iowa women remember being Rosie the Riveter

NORTH ENGLISH — Linda McCann has published several books about towns and counties across Iowa, the people that settled them and lived and died in them.

But researching “Rosie the Riveters in Iowa” was perhaps most enlightening.

In a presentation at English Valleys History Center Sunday, McCann spoke about Iowa women who worked in factories in the state and across the country during World War II.

McCann, of Shell Rock, was working as a registered nurse when she began genealogy research and discovered she descended from the town’s founder.

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“I ran into eight named locations that I’d never heard of,” McCann said.

The local museum asked her to write about the towns she’d discovered, and a publisher saw the manuscript on someone’s desk at Creighton University.

McCann’s writing career began.

Her first books were about Iowa towns that have disappeared, but her research led her to other topics.

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“I very much stumble into every topic,” McCann said.

McCann thought about Rosie the Riveter about 10 years ago, but she couldn’t find any women to interview.

She was working on another book when she heard a woman say she’d been a Rosie. McCann told the woman her dilemma. “She reaches down in her purse and gets her phone,” McCann said.

An original member on the Rosie Foundation board, the woman had contact information for women on her phone. She told McCann she’d reach out to some women from Iowa to see if they were interested in being interviewed for a book.

“So she sent me 35 women that I could talk to.”

The women told her things she would never have thought to ask about, said McCann.

Her granddaughters were in college at the time. McCann asked them if they knew what Rosie the Riveter was. “Wasn’t that made up?” one of them asked

“They were real people,” said McCann. “But they were made up.”

Rosie the Riveter was a campaign, McCann explains in her book. The government hired a public relations department to encourage women to work in positions vacated by men in the war.

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“Rosie’s the big catch name for the women who worked in the factories,” said McCann. The campaign featured Wendy the Welder and Assembly Line Annies and women in other vocations, said McCann.

“The one I like is Jenny on the Job,” said McCann. The poster shows a woman with dress shoes in one hand and a time card in the other as she gets ready to punch in for her shift.

“You can’t work if you don’t sleep,” the poster said.

“Women worked during World War I also,” she said. They were mostly married women, which surprises McCann.

One group of women McCann met said they decided in 1945 that they weren’t going to lose touch. They continued to meet to socialize.

The women allowed McCann to sit in on one of their gatherings, but she could not record video or audio, take notes, take photos or ask questions.

The women felt they needed permission from their husbands to work,“ said McCann, so they wrote letters to them. All of the women said the letters came back giving them permission to work so the men could get home.

One woman carried her letter with her, said McCann. Her husband never saw it. He was killed in action.

The women wouldn’t disclose what company they worked for or where it was located, but they said they were initially suspicious of the job offer. They thought it sounded to good to be true.

Some women went to the company to ask questions, and the man they talked to told them when they cut their hair and put on slacks they could come back.

McCann didn’t know where they got the slacks or the work boots that they needed later, but she couldn’t ask.

McCann said that nearly all of the women she talked to said they were not properly trained. “They were shown what they were supposed to do one time.”

One of the posters says if you can run a mixer you can run a drill press. Not true, the women said.

They got a tour, filled out paperwork and agreed not to talk about what they saw or did for 50 years after the war ended.

One of the first problems the women encountered was that there were no women’s restrooms. Someone cleaned out one of the men’s for them to use.

Some women McCann interviewed in northwest Iowa said they had to use porta potties. “

Most of the women didn’t drive, and gas was rationed. Some companies ran buses, and some set up car pools for the women.

At Boeing, in Washington State, the women were welding inside the noses of airplanes. They felt like they were being used for their small size, said McCann.

The women were paid $31 to the men’s $56 under the war production board sent out a memo that no one’s wages should depend on their size.

As the war continued, the age to work dropped from 18 to 16. “There went the babysitters,” said McCann.

Several women told her they rented a large apartment and lived with other women who worked different shifts so someone was always available to watch the children.

Others took night shifts and left their children alone from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.

“I could find no one hurt. No one injured,” said McCann.

“We had 70 factories in Iowa with military contracts in World War II,” said McCann. An estimated 19 million women worked nationwide.

When the war ended, the women were out of a job. “I said something about the money,” said McCann, but no one seemed to care about it.

“We weren’t working for the money,” they told McCann. “We got money from our husbands.”

The women liked socializing with the other women, they said.

In a nationwide survey taken in 1945, 75% said they would continue working if they could.

Some people say this was the beginning of women’s lib, said McCann. “I think it was the beginning of women telling their daughters they can do anything.”