BY NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writer
5th District Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske relates the history of Rosie the Riveters in Long Beach to the Wrigley Area Neighborhood Alliance.
During World War II, approximately five million women in the United States held jobs in the defense industry, helping to assemble the ships, airplanes and other equipment used in the nation’s efforts to defeat Germany and Japan. Affectionately characterized as “Rosie the Riveter,” about 25,000 of those women worked in the Douglas Aircraft factory in Long Beach.
Last Thursday, 5th District Long Beach Councilwoman Gerrie Schipske presented the history of Rosie the Riveter to an audience of about 35 at the monthly meeting of the Wrigley Area Neighborhood Alliance (WANA). The meeting took place in the auditorium of Jackie Robinson Academy at 2750 Pine Avenue.
Schipske, who was born and reared in Long Beach, said the city’s history is very important. She explained that Rosie the Riveter always fascinated her, but she only started doing serious research on the subject a few years ago.
While delving into old records and photographs, Schipske found out that during WWII, about 45 percent of Douglas Aircraft employees were women. She told the audience that when Boeing wanted to name its new light industrial development “Douglas Park,” it seemed only logical to her to rename the small city park that was already called “Douglas Park” as “Rosie the Riveter Park.” Located near the corner of Clark Avenue and Conant Street, that park is adjacent to a site where a Douglas Aircraft factory building once stood. The city council agreed with Schipske, and about two years ago, the park’s name was changed in honor of the female defense factory workers.
To get ready for the park’s dedication, Schipske went online to the U.S Library of Congress and typed in the keywords “Long Beach,” yielding about 200 photographs of women who had worked at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach during WWII. “As I went through this wonderful collection, I thought, ‘This is incredible material,'” she said. “So I contacted Arcadia Publishing (which publishes historical works) and told them I found a history of women who worked in Long Beach during World War II.”
After Schipske sent Arcadia Publishing a formal proposal, the company agreed to publish her book Rosie the Riveter in Long Beach, and copies of the book were placed on bookstore shelves last May.
Now Schipske is pushing for the development of a Rosie the Riveter interpretive center at the park. She noted that Boeing officials recently allowed her to peruse a small warehouse filled with historical items dating back to the early Douglas Aircraft days. That warehouse had much memorabilia and photographs pertaining to Rosie the Riveter. Schipske hopes Boeing will donate much of the collection to the interpretive center so that the public can view it.
About a year ago, Schipske formed a nonprofit organization called the Rosie the Riveter Foundation, through which she hopes to raise money to develop the interpretive center and a memorial to women who worked in the aircraft industry.
“One of the things that I found out in my research was that a great many African-American women worked at the Douglas plant in Long Beach,” Schipske said. She explained that it was not a well known fact because most of the posters and drawings published of women during WWII depicted white females.
“This was a very large change in our society because traditionally women did not work outside the house,” Schipske said, explaining that the federal government undertook a massive public relations campaign to convince women and men that it was appropriate for a woman to work in a factory and do what had previously been exclusively men’s work. She noted that women’s hairdos began changing to make them more accommodating to factory work, and women began wearing slacks in public for the first time.
That practice met with resistance. “In Long Beach, it got so bad that the police department had to escort the women from the plant to the bus stop because they were being harassed so much,” she said.
Schipske noted that, with millions of women working in factories, women began changing their views on their proper place in society and the workplace. “They did the jobs just as good as the men did,” she explained. “But there were some pilots that did not want to fly planes that had been riveted by women; they thought they would fall apart.”
To overcome that discrimination, the federal government had pilots fly a B-17 Bomber called The Memphis Belle all over the United States to show that a plane riveted by women was the sturdiest aircraft in the world. Schipske stressed that Rosie the Riveter was instrumental in bringing vast sociological changes in the U.S. and the entire world.
“When the war was over, the propaganda switched,” Schipske said. “You started seeing magazines and movies where women were no longer in slacks but were back in dresses.” She noted that women factory workers throughout the United States— including those employed at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach— were laid off to make way for the men returning from the war.
Nevertheless, the millions of women who spent the war years working in factories and the tremendous role they played in America winning the war forever changed societal norms in the U.S. Nowadays, stay-at-home moms are hard to find.
After talking to the WANA audience for about 15 minutes, Schipske showed a video that displayed many photographs of women working in factories around the country— including the Long Beach Douglas plant— and the airplanes they made, while a narrator detailed the history of Rosie the Riveter.
When the presentation was over, Schipske sold and autographed copies of her book and a collection of postcard featuring historical photographs of Rosie the Riveter. For more information on the book, the postcards and the Rosie the Riveter Foundation, call Schipske’s office at (562) 570-6932.
