Rosie the Riveter : Representation Common Task 1

You can find it with the picture attached, my plan, and comments here

Before we delve into my interpretation of the extremely well-known poster commonly known as the ‘We Can Do It! Woman’ or ‘Rosie the Riveter’, we first have to look at the extensive context behind the poster and the cultural norms at the time the poster was produced. The poster was produced in 1943 which was a very complicated time period as it was in the crux of the second world war. Men were worried about being drafted and sent away and women were worried about their husbands and sons so there was a lot of unrest in the general populous. In the 1940s the government also rationed goods that are seen today as quite plentiful and are commonly taken for granted, you couldn’t simply walk into a grocery store and buy as much sugar as your heart desired, you could only buy a certain amount fixed by the government. This rationing and lack of freedom surely put the average American into a state of distress as well as giving the impression that life isn’t good which consequently gave the American people lots of doubt. In the time period of the early twentieth century, women were known more as housekeepers than as workers in society, Commonly overshadowed by their male counterparts, the most common roles women could attain in the workplace was to be a nurse, receptionist, or secretary. These jobs, whilst important, are seen as quite menial and so relative to today’s era where women can work in almost any field, it is seen as quite a conservative and demeaning time for women’s rights. In this time because of the lack of a male work pool, many women had to take up jobs which were originally very male-dominated such as taxi driving, labour-some tasks in workshops, and war-related munition jobs. So as we can see in the time period, women who were very restricted in where they could work were thrown in the deep end to work at jobs only men would have normally had.

The poster portrays women in many different ways. For the time, as discussed previously, women were not seen as workers and commonly didn’t hold very elevated roles in the workforce but the poster depicts a woman in clothing that would suggest she’s a labourer which promoted the idea that women can do these jobs just as how men have done them and they can do it well. The poster proudly flaunts “We Can Do It!” to further push this agenda that women are extremely capable to hold these jobs and succeed in them. It also represents women as the same as men, where men can work is where women can work. This again can be derived from her workshop-esque clothing and how these types of jobs would almost never be assigned to women before the war. This message of how women and men can be looked at in the same light might not be very influential in modern-day cultures but in the 1940s and earlier, where women were seen just as maids for the house and mothers to children, this poster was an extremely forward-thinking and progressive concept. It also encouraged the women to take these jobs and take them with pride, in that time women were definitely not accustomed to working in roles such as that and where weary when taking up jobs after the men went to war, so the poster inspired and motivated women to look at themselves in a role more influential to society than just a maid but as crucial to the war effort. The poster is now a sigil for feminism as it was one of the first widely influential feminist related pieces in western culture. It also represented women in the workplace as a community. “We Can Do It!” It presents the idea that the women who are filling these job roles shouldn’t feel marginalised or ostracised but rather feel like a big community, this, in my opinion, would help quell doubts in women’s minds as well as make them feel more welcomed in the new roles they were taking up.

 

General Feedback:

You made a good job of trying to engage with the text, thinking about how it relates to wider concepts we discussed representation, culture and context: well done. The analysis of the text is quite generalised, and there are times where your phrasing of points could have been more clear, but for both bands, I would place this in the ‘very good’ category.

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