I just finished watching a Today Show segment honoring Rosie the Riveters. It started me thinking about what my mother and grandmother did during those years. I’ll start first with my mother. My father had basically kicked her and their 3 year old daughter (me), out of the home so he could continue his affair with our married landlady. (Another story for another time.) Mother, an only child, and I moved in with her parents.
My grandfather was one of the first automotive mechanics sent by their Car Dealer employers to be trained in Detroit by the automotive pioneers, teaching them the how to take care of and repair the motors and other working parts. Until about 20 years ago, I thought my grandmother was simply “a homemaker.” But more about that later.
(I realize this next part seems very hostile, but I need to include it to explain the rest of this history. It is the truth, even though it is ugly.) My other grandparents never helped us. It was the other way around, with my mother and me supporting them the rest of their lives even though my dad’s mother openly and publicly blamed me (remember my age?) for the breakup of the marriage. Even though, he was also an only child, he disappeared from all of our lives a couple of years following their divorce. He reappeared 35 years later after both his parents were dead. He told me he never got in touch with them because he had overheard them talking when he was young; they were discussing the possibility of giving him away. They were in their late 30s when he was born. They never owned any property and my grandfather never held a full-time job. He would do house painting on occasions when someone asked him to help them. His mother occasionally did quilting for others. In other words, they did not have sufficient income to live on or take care of him, but he thought they did not want him. (Sadly, he may have been partially right because they never exhibited much concern for others. They rarely lived in the same place more than six months because one or the other of them would get into a quarrel with a neighbor.)
Since my father had no intention of supporting us (he paid a total of $20.00 child support over the next 15 years and no alimony), Mother had to go to work. She found a job in the Merit Clothing Company, starting at an elevated pay of $0.50 an hour. The other factory employees were only making about half that, but Mother had experience in all areas as a seamstress. Since it was wartime, their main product was uniforms for the soldiers. Most times she worked six days a week and ten hours a day. Now, I’m sure you are thinking “How in the world did she take care of a home and child?” Well, she couldn’t. My grandmother quit her job as a “repair lady” in an alterations shop so she could stay home and care for me and the home. I did not know about her career until many, many years later and only then because when her former boss died, the employer’s family talked about how sad she was that she had failed in her efforts to keep my grandmother as an employee - even to the point of offering her the position of Manager of the business. They said my grandmother’s response was “My daughter needs to work worse than I do, and for her to be able to do that my granddaughter needs me to be at home with her.”
During those early years, and until the after the end of World War II, there were many weeks when I did not see my mother from Sunday to Sunday. Of course, my grandmother was always there. She continued to work as a seamstress and do alterations, but did it in the home. I knew in my head who was the parent and who were the grandparents, but my heart did not agree with my head knowledge. Mother knew this, always accepted that fact, and explained it to others.
Both of these ladies took up the call to help the war effort by what they did. They may not have been official “Rosie the Riveters,” but they qualify in my eyes.
Women today are blessed, or cursed, however you view it, by what the women in the early 1940s were willing to do when the “boys and men” left their families and jobs behind. Life for them, and the women following them, was never the same. The world learned what women are capable and willing to do, and it isn’t just cooking, cleaning, and raising families!
