| "We
Can Do It!"
Working
Women in World War II
| 
Thirteen-year-old
student, Emily Lester, contacted the Rosie the
Riveter project from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma,
in the Spring of 2000 as she began to prepare
an assignment for Women's History Month.
Many
people call to ask if we can put them in touch
with "Rosies," and we try to help
them find women to speak to in their own communities.
To her delight, Emily found that Gladys Stearns,
the mother of one of her teachers, had worked
on the Home Front and was eager to be interviewed
over the telephone at her home in Texas.
Emily's
project took the form of a short essay and a
ten-minute monologue. Encouraged by her teachers,
Emily entered her work in the National History
Day Competition -- placing first in her district
and state, and going on to compete in Washington,
D.C. last Summer.
Photo
Courtesy: Emily Lester |
It
was 1944. All the boys were clear across the ocean
fighting a war for world peace, and the home front
itself was searching for some way to make up for their
absence. With a patriotic spirit, women one by one
stepped up to do "men's work" with little
pay, respect, or recognition.
Somewhere
on a farm in central Louisiana a young 17 year-old
girl was gathering her things to leave home for training
at the Brown shipyards in Houston. She was anything
a normal teenage girl in her shoes might be: nervous,
scared, anxious, and excited. After all, she was to
stay in a dorm to train for her job and it would be
her first real journey away from her home and family.
How
had she come this far? She had first heard of the
idea for women working when a representative from
the National Youth Administration came to encourage
young women to get a job in the city.
Gladys
Stearns was one of many inexperienced women who evolved
from either housewife or child into the skilled, determined
shipyard worker. Her only means of transportation
to her job at the shipyards were either the bus or
carpooling with other ladies -- occasionally, relying
on her own two feet to carry her there. Sometimes
even after a week of hard work it was difficult to
scrape up the two dollars for a bus ticket.
Her
job as a welder required a full twelve hour day working
to produce one destroyer escort and two landing crafts
a week. With landing crafts that were 300 feet long
and a destroyer escort that was 450 feet long, the
task at hand at times seemed almost impossible to
finish.
Yet,
with the cooperation of all the workers, the pieces
seemed to fit together, and jobs were occasionally
finished with time to spare. At the end of the week
she would hang up her gloves, pick up her paycheck
and set aside the extra $18.75 she would need to buy
her weekly war bond.
She
had given her country everything she had: her money,
her time, her service, and her loyalty in an act of
pride and love for the United States.
Much
like millions of other women, Gladys Stearns helped
open a gate of opportunity for future generations
of women to never limit their abilities and have the
confidence in knowing that "We Can Do It!!!!!!!"
Story by Emily Lester
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