By KAYLA DEMICCO
Opinions Editor
Before I knew exactly what feminism was, I think I always considered myself a feminist. I noticed the different sexes were treated differently and one would be ridiculed for acting like the other. This wasn’t just in real life that I noticed this, but also in the content I was learning in school and the media I was consuming.
It wasn’t until I got to college when I was taught about the women’s suffrage movement to its full extent. Throughout my grade school years, we didn’t learn much about it; just the fact that it happened and brief details of it. In college, I was learning about it at the time when it was 100 years since the passing of that law that allowed women to vote.
When learning about World War II in high school, I always found it fascinating. I thought it was interesting (in an odd way) how a war could pull the country out of The Great Depression. There were many factors that contributed to boosting up the war, which meant great things for the country at the time.
One part that resonated with me was the existence of Rosie the Riveter. According to www.history.com, the poster of a woman in a red and white scarf on her head wearing a blue collared shirt while flexing her bicep and text over her head that reads “We Can Do It!” was created by J. Howard Miller. The original purpose of this was for a company called Westinghouse Electric that “aimed at boosting morale among the company’s workers in the war effort.”
According to a page on www.history.com, James Kimble, an associate professor of communication at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, found that the popular poster was not circulated for as long as we think. Apparently, the poster was a part of a promotional series, which included a few other women, and was only on display for a couple of weeks until replaced by another. The image we now know and love was not a hit until it resurfaced in the 1980s.
Even though the iconic photo is supposedly inspired by Naomi Parker Fraley, who died at 96 in January 2018, there was a song that went with it, which is considered to be the original Rosie the Riveter.
The song, written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, was inspired by Rosalind P. Walter, who passed away at 95 on March 4. The song was about the women who joined the workforce in the war industry at the beginning of World War II. The New York Times reported that Walter was along the “millions of other women in the home-front crusade to arm the troops with munitions, warships and aircraft.”
During her lifetime, Walter went on to become a philanthropist along with her husband, Henry Glendon Walter Jr. Rosalind was a big time supporter of PBS Programming, which included the NewsHour and NewsHour Weekend. According to PBS, she “served as a trustee at WNET for more than thirty years and became the station’s most generous individual supporter in its history.”
Even though she was born into wealth, she did care for those less financially fortunate. She chose for public television to be her focus in philanthropy because she “wanted all Americans, whether they were rich or poor, well educated or not so well educated, to have equal access to news and knowledge and the arts.”
As a student journalist who looks at the news in multiple forms on a daily basis and talks about it very often with those I interact with, this is actually very beneficial and I commend her legacy for that.
While the creation of Rosie the Riveter did not invent the concept of feminism, I personally think that it definitely helped. Before World War II, women were not allowed in the many places of any kind of workforce, let alone in production. Women have been able to hold many kinds of positions of employment that they probably could only dream of back in the days.
We as a society have come a long way for feminism since the early 20th century. Yes, we are not at a perfect place at the moment and there is room for improvement. As long as women remain resilient and empower other women, and others support us along the way, there is sure to be true equality between all genders in the future.
Let’s take this International Women’s Day to say, “Thank you, Rosie.”
