Rose Will Monroe, popularly known as Rosie the Riveter, dies in Clarksville, Ind. During WWII she helped bring women into the labor force - 1997 ~De
Rose Will Monroe also worked in a Michigan factory. In 1944 she was discovered at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti by the popular Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon. Pidgeon, who had starred in various wartime propaganda films, such as Mrs. Miniver (1942), visited Monroe's factory to shoot footage for films promoting the sale of war bonds. When Pidgeon met Monroe, she was working on the assembly line as a riveter of B-24 and B-49 bomber airplanes. Pidgeon's discovery matched a real Rosie with the national ideal, a relationship that received national attention in the promotional films that Monroe and Pidgeon made during the war. Because Monroe appeared as a Rosie the Riveter in these popular films, she is most often identified as the real Rosie the Riveter. In Monroe's New York Times obituary, her daughter Vicki Jarvis states, "Mom happened to be in the right place at the right time" (New York Times, 2 June 1997).
One of nine children born to a carpenter and a housewife in rural Science Hill, Kentucky, Monroe was skilled at her father's trade and defied traditional gender roles from a young age. According to Jarvis, her mother "was a tomboy who could use tools. She could do everything" (New York Times, 2 June 1997).
Like many Rosies, Monroe fled rural poverty to seek employment in more prosperous urban centers. When a car accident claimed the life of her first husband in 1942, Monroe and her two young children left Kentucky and traveled north, to the Willow Run factory. This factory trained female pilots to fly armaments around the country, and Monroe hoped to be chosen for this program. Because she was a single mother, however, she was not selected, and so her career consisted of assembling planes, rather than flying them.
The end of World War II meant the end of Monroe's assembly-line job, as it did for many Rosies. In 1945 she moved to Clarksville, Indiana, continuing to work outside the home for the rest of her life. Monroe held a variety of jobs typically associated with women, such as seamstress and beauty shop owner, as well as the more unconventional positions of taxi driver and school bus driver. Following a stint as a real-estate agent, Monroe realized that she knew how to build homes, so she founded Rose Builders, a construction company that specialized in luxury homes. At the age of fifty, Monroe finally earned her pilot's license and went on to become the only woman in her local aeronautics club. She also taught her younger daughter how to fly. In 1978 Monroe was in a plane accident that resulted in the loss of a kidney, a contributing factor to her death in 1997.
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