THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9510010029
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
She wore blue coveralls, tied her hair in a polka-dot bandanna and curled her arm to make her bicep bulge.
No woman could have been more glamorous.
She was Rosie the Riveter, the poster woman who encouraged homemakers to drop their cookie sheets for factory jobs during World War II. Her muscle-flexing image was immortalized on posters the government plastered across the country.
Rosie is interesting to consider these 50-odd years later as our policy makers are once again encouraging women to go to work.
This time around, though, they're targeting only some women: welfare mothers.
And this time they're hyping the shame of staying at home rather than the glamour of going to work.
The tone was different five decades ago.
``We Can Do It!'' Rosie proclaimed back in World War II days, and she was right.
In the bomb factories and the shipyards, in the foundries and the steel mills, women welded, riveted and hammered away in jobs thought to be men's work.
World War II was not the first time women rolled up their sleeves for wartime jobs. Women had made munitions during earlier battles.
But the difference in the '40s was Uncle Sam's loud-and-clear message: It was women's patriotic duty to go to work. Poster girls like Rosie the Riveter and Winnie Welder drove the point home.
Of course, the propaganda tune changed abruptly in 1945. With the war's end, it suddenly became women's civic duty to do an about-face: to give their jobs to returning male veterans and go back home to their children.
Some welcomed the idea; others bridled at the thought. Even though millions of women returned to the home front, American life never would again be the same.
For the next five decades this country would wrestle with the issue of whether mothers should work.
Now government is once again encouraging, or rather, mandating, women to report to the employment office. For the welfare mom, it's not just a patriotic duty; it's the law, at least in Virginia. The ``We Can Do It!'' slogan has a new beat to it: ``Get Out of The Wagon and Pull.''
The ultra-conservatives of the world think a mother's place is in the home. That is, unless those mothers are poor. They blame two-income households for the demise of society, but they tell welfare parents to be good role models by getting jobs.
Gets kind of confusing, doesn't it?
Legislators loath to consider government-subsidized child care now must face the music of the '90s.
Maybe they can tune into the '40s era for inspiration.
During the peak of World War II, more than a million children were going to day-care centers paid for by the government. Many of the centers were open six days a week, 12 hours a day, on shifts to serve mothers who worked in around-the-clock factories.
True, the centers were often poorly run, mired in red tape. True, most shut down soon after the war was over. Still, they remain one of the largest public commitments to child care in the nation's history.
The world war may be over, but the war on poverty rages on. The same level of commitment to child care is needed today as in the '40s.
Not just for the Rosie the Riveters of the world, but for their children. by CNB