Commentaries

May 25, 2009

 Commentaries is where Minnesota Public Radio welcomes your thoughtful opinion about current events and issues. Commentaries are like letters to the editor. To be considered for publication, your commentary should be issue-related, clearly written, and follow our Terms of Use. New insights into ongoing topics are especially welcome. Not all commentaries received are published. For topical interaction with others, visit the discussion groups.

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Considering Rosie the Riveter

I want to challenge the conventional wisdom that the women who worked in the wartime factories were largely dismissed after the war so the men could take their jobs. [MPR Midday: Minnesota's Greatest Generation celebrated at History Center] This does not jibe with my family's history, nor with my recollection of life in the 1950s.

My grandmother got a job at a General Motors plant during the war after her husband became disabled and she still had one child at home. She said it was the best job she ever had. She stayed with GM until 1956, when she retired at age 65. I don't recall her ever saying she was asked or was told to leave at the end of the war.

My mother, who had been working as a secretary before and during the war, married my father when he returned from service at the end of the war, and immediately gave up her job. Within a year my sister was born, the first of 4 children. She never returned to the workforce, nor did she want to. In our lower middle class city neighborhood, very few women who had children worked. At my overcrowded Catholic grade school, everyone went home for lunch except the kids whose mothers worked. They barely filled a single classroom.

Social values and mores were much different in the 1940s/1950s than they are now. I believe that during the post-war decade, most women did not want to work unless they had to. Men were expected to be the breadwinner, women were supposed to have and raise children. For men, it was a reflection of male pride and social aspiration to have a "stay-at-home" wife (a term they wouldn't have even used back then!). Families with working mothers were looked upon as socially inferior.

The world was much different in the 1940s and 1950s than it is today. One of the dangers of historical interpretation is assuming that those who lived in previous times had the same values and aspirations as we have today.

Tom Fields
St. Paul, Minn.


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