Rosie the Riveter:
The Typical Life of a Wartime Working Wife and Mother


In order for women to fulfill both their function as a wife and mother and their duty to country, some women took night jobs. The typical day for a wartime woman who had a night job is explained by Doris Weatherford in her book American Women and World War II. She uses the example of a woman named Alma, who because she worked nights would often times get home just as her children were getting ready to leave for school. Immediately she would send her children off to school, then she would eat breakfast, clean the mess in the kitchen, and then finally go to bed around 10 am. She would get about an hour and a half of sleep before the alarm went off to tell her that her kids would be home for lunch. When they got home she would feed them, and send them off again. After that it was back to bed until 3 pm, when they arrived home again. Once the children were home for the day she would clean the house, do the laundary (if there was time), and then cook dinner with the limited amount of supplies avaiable to her. The family would eat when her husband got home around 6pm, and after she cleaned the kitchen she would take a nap unitl she needed to leave for work at 10pm. The average woman who worked nights and still took care of her family averaged about five to six hours of sleep a day, but they were never consecutive.

The above,left poster suggests that a woman
should both work and be a mother,
once again demonstrating the mixed
message being delivered by the American government.
(Oldsmobile Division, General Motors Corporation Poster, 164371.37)


And despite of all of the responsibilities and burdens women endured during the war years, housework was almost never shared. Most men did not lift a finger to help their wives, because they felt that they were in fact doing their share by allowing their wives to work. Most of the accounts of Rosie the Riveter suggested that despite her daily struggles, she asked for nothing and continued to meet her family responsibilities, as well as the new responsibilities dictated to her as awartime worker.

By the end of 1943, one-third of women war workers were mothers of children living at home. For these women, life was very arduouss, because the balancing act between one's home and one's job was more difficult then than it is now. The reason for this is that housework in the 1940's was far more laborous than it is today. This was the era of cooking from scratch and washiing dishes by hand. Washing clothes in the 1940's consisted of wringer washine machines, a tub of rinse water, and an outdoor clothees line. Clothes dryers or dry cleaners did not exist, and housewifes starched and pressed clothes by themselves.


"America will be as strong as her women."
This poster shows a working mother,
a symbol of strength, lifting her smiling child.
NWDNS-44-PA 237 - NAIL

In some cases women had to devote a whole day to doing laundary because it was such a tedious task. In addition to this burden, Banks were only open in the mid-day hours, and so women who worked jobs during the day had a difficult time keeping their financial obligations in order. There were also very few grocery stores that stayed open at night to accomodate women who worked. Wartime working women, often times, devoted their Sunday's off to cleaning and catching up from what they could not complete during the week. Because of the fact that some women had a hard time completing such tasks as going to the grocery store and bank some women literally had to quit their jobs in order to fulfill their job to their family.

Mothers who joined the workforce while their husbands were away or mothers who had small children not yet in school had an even bigger burden to bare due to the lack of child care facilities available to them. Section B of article IV of Paul Mc Nutt's 1942 War Manpower Commission directive stated that,"If any such women are unable to arrange for satisfactory care of their cildren...adequate facilities should be provided...Such facilities should be developed as community projects and not under the auspices of individual employers or employer groups."

However, cities did not know how to handle such a dilemna and instead of forcing industry to deal with the problem, the burden was shifted to state and local governments. Though the Landam Act, a federally subsidized child care system, attempted to deal with these problems it fell short. At the programs peak it only had about 3,000 child care facilities, which cared for about 130,000 children. The government simply could not develop a comprehensive system for dealing with the large number of mothers going to work. With so much else to do, child care facilities were not regarded as high priority, and as a result some women quit their jobs to take care of their families.
There was a small faction of women however, that were against America's participation in the war. They called themselves the Mother's Movement and they were comprised of anywhere from five to six million women who recognized the goodness of facism and in doing so respected it's leaders. This organization was comprised of antisemities and as a result they believed that the Roosevelt administration was controlled by Jews as well as communist. They were devout Protestants who aligned themselves with the ideals of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Though they wre not a particularly strong force they did conduct some demonstrations as well as publish some articles professing their beliefs.

| >

Table of Contents