Rosie-Colored Glasses

ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: –social system. But they literally turned the course of the war around right here.

BRIAN: What you’re hearing right now is one of tours that takes place every day at a former World War II shipyard in Richmond, California. It’s right across the bay from San Francisco. The site is run by the National Park Service. And the person giving the tour is a national park ranger.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: My name is Betty Reid Soskin, born Betty Charbonnet. Well, I’m the oldest park ranger in the system, at 93.

BRIAN: The park Betty Soskin works at commemorates a moment in history. And as it turns out, it’s a particularly complicated one.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: Which is why our title became so long.

BRIAN: It’s called the Rosie the Riveter/World War II home front National Historical Park. And Betty’s a guide there because she lived through that history. We sent a reporter, Eli Wirtshafter, to spend an afternoon with Betty. And what she told him puts a bit of a different spin on the familiar Rosie the Riveter story. Here’s Eli.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: Betty Reid Soskin had a job on the home front. But one of the first things you learn about her is that she doesn’t want to be called a Rosie.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: It’s simply not the history that I lived.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: To understand why, you have to know a little bit about her family. They were Creole family from New Orleans. And they moved to Oakland, California in 1928. Now at the time, there weren’t a lot of other black families in the Bay Area.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: I came here as a six-year-old, had grown up attending integrated schools. There weren’t enough of us here to make any rules about.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: And here’s where the myth of Rosie the Riveter– the idea that women left home to work just until their men came home from the war– starts to fall apart for Betty.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: Our mothers and aunts had always worked outside their homes, because it took two salaries to support black families. I graduated from high school with only two opportunities for employment open to me. I could have worked in agriculture, or I could have been a domestic servant.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: But when the war came, different kinds of jobs were opening up. Betty found a desk job with the Air Force. She was light-skinned. And at the time, it simply didn’t occur to her to mention her race.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: I didn’t realize that the Air Force didn’t hire blacks, except in the canteens.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: And one week into the job.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: The officer in charge of our section called the young woman whose desk abutted mine. I could see her face was red, and she was nodding. And when she came back, I said, what was that? And she said the lieutenant told me that you were colored. And he thought that we were getting so friendly that I ought to know.

And so I marched up to him and said, of course I am. Who told you anything other than that? And I picked up my things and walked out on the Air Force. And it was at that time, that was for resignation, I took the job in a black Union Hall, because that was at least a place that I knew where I was and who I was.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: The Union represented shipbuilders. But if you were black, you could only join the auxiliary. And that’s where Betty worked.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: I filed cards, change of address cards, 3 x 5 file cards, to save the world for democracy.

ELI WIRTSHAFTER: Most of the shipbuilders were fresh from the Dust Bowl and the farms of the South. To get the workers he needed for his shipyards, Henry Kaiser had recruited black and white Southerners by the thousand.

BETTY REID SOSKIN: That period of World War II, when the Bay Area went through this period of the immediate, incoming, total system of segregation out of the South, whole, it was such a painful, disorganizing experience for me that I had left that history long ago. We tend to revisit that history through a more enlightened era. And so we read those pictures of masses of people having their pictures taken, all ages and all sizes and all colors, standing together on the Kaiser yards, and we read that as examples of brotherhood and fellowship.

But if you knew the sequence in which people were hired– it was first the men who were too old to fight. And then it was the boys who were too young to be drafted. And then it was single, white women, and then married white women, and in 1943, black men to do the heavy lifting for the Rosies that they had brought in. And it wasn’t until late in 1944 when black women began to be trained as welders. So that history gets revised without our intending it to.

I instantly recognized them as sites of racial segregation, because what gets remembered is determined by who’s in the room doing the remembering.

If we can go back to that era and see it as it was lived, not by the myths that we’ve made up about it, what we get is a baseline against to measure how far we’ve come. That’s not black history, that’s not Betty history, that’s something we all did.

BRIAN: That’s Betty Reid Soskin. Her story came to us from Eli Wirtshafter, a reporter in Berkeley, California.

ED: So here’s a surprising statistic from 1999. That’s the year that employment figures for American women peaked at 74%. Since then, the percentage of women in the workforce has fallen off, dropping from fourth highest in the world in 1999, to eleventh today. And looking farther backward in time, we learn from people like Betty Soskin that the story of women entering the workforce stretches back many generations, long before World War II and Rosie the Riveter.

PETER: All of which points to the fact that the history of women in the American workforce is hardly a straight line, but rather one that zigzags through time and is very much shaped by class and race. For the rest of the hour today, we’re going to explore some of those zigs and zags. In what ways are things better today for women than they were in the past? And in what ways have we fallen behind?

BRIAN: But before we do that, let’s take a few more minutes to consider the story we just heard. Peter? Ed? You know, maybe I’ve read too many 20th Century history textbooks. But in general, when we think about Rosie the Riveter, we think about that heroic moment when women broke out of the home and served their nation by doing industrial work, often literally on the wings of bombers that they were building. And Betty presents such a different story of the women who worked during World War II. And what really strikes me is she puts that story in the context of a very long history of women working outside the household. So Peter, I wish you would tell me a little bit more about that history of women working inside the household and how they came to work outside the household.

PETER: Well, women have been working for millennia, Brian. That’s the news here. We think of household or the home as a refuge for sentimental family life, for nurturing, and all those good things, but the household is the primary unit of production throughout American history. And its hierarchical. There are apprentices, and servants, and slaves, and family members all working under the leadership of the planter, farmer, patriarch. That’s the basic unit of production, and women are integral to that work in the household.

ED: And Peter, the 19th century is critical in this, as slavery turns into something else.

PETER: Yeah.

ED: This is a direct tie to Betty’s story. You’re exactly right about slave owners imagined portrayed their plantations as a big house with a big family. And they talk about “our people.” and that illusion is shattered, of course, when slavery ends and the African-American people who can leave that household, set out and try to create their own households.

PETER: Right. Right.

ED: But what happens is that system you’re talking about kind of breaks into pieces which lives on for generations, so that after slavery, white Southerners are saying, we’d love black women to come back into the household, a few at a time, to be our domestic servants, to do the washing and cleaning and taking care of children, at the same time that we very much want to segregate all relationships with black people we don’t know. So you have this kind of bifurcated history, I think, Betty’s family herself lives.

In that world, African-American people have to channel their ambition in two directions at once. Somehow, they have to take advantage of whatever employment opportunities they can have at the same time they save something for themselves and for their own families, to build their own households, doing exactly the same kind of work. And escape into California, as Betty’s story shows us, is a chance to maybe reboot, to reconfigure that calculus in some ways, that you can have your own household, but do other work outside your own household that’s not just replicating that work.

PETER: And Ed, I think that comes back to your excellent point about the transformation of the household from a site of work for others, whether it’s in the plantation or in the segregated South working for white families, to make a home of your own. It’s a new kind of house. It’s not a place where you work for others. Your home is a place where you work for the people you love.

ED: And it’s a kind of a foundation for doing other kind of work, perhaps. And I think that’s the wobble in the story, Brian, that we tell the story of Rosie the Riveter more simply than it, in fact, was. It’s like, oh, OK, now white women are escaping from the household, because, as we know, they often were deeply encouraged, even forced, to go back into it and leave that other field of work.

So throughout the 20th century, in many ways, the story has been connecting back to Peter’s story of the household as the fundamental building block of the economy, to a time in which so much of the work happens outside the household. Betty’s story, the story of World War II and Rosie the Riveter catches that story at a really awkward and revealing moment.

We need to take a quick break now, but stick around. When we get back, we’ll talk more about the history of women in the workforce. And we’ll hear why, for many young women in the 19th century, going to work was one of the most frightening things they could imagine.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

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