WWII Rosie the Riveters Are Honored in Washington

Rosie the Riveters, American women who filled a crucial labor shortage during World War II and reshaped the work force, were honored at the Capitol.

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A group of women who joined the U.S. defense work force during World War II to ease a labor shortage received a Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday.

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Marian Sousa moved to California to care for the children of her sister Phyllis Gould, who had gone to work as a welder in a Bay Area shipyard.

Just a year later, Ms. Sousa, at 17 years old, joined the wartime work force herself, drafting blueprints and revising outdated designs for troop transports. Wearing a hard hat and with a clipboard in hand, she would accompany maritime inspectors on board ships she’d helped design and examine the product of her labors.

She and her sister were just two of the roughly 6 million women who went to work during World War II, memorialized by the now iconic recruitment poster depicting Rosie the Riveter, her hair tied back in a kerchief, rolling up the sleeve of her denim shirt and flexing a muscle beneath the slogan, “We can do it!”

More than eight decades later, Ms. Sousa, now 98, gathered at the Capitol on Wednesday with around two dozen other so-called Rosies — many of them white-haired and most wearing the red with white polka dots made famous by the poster — to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of their efforts.

ImageMarian Sousa, wearing a red shirt with white polka dots in a nod to the classic recruitment poster depicting Rosie, at the ceremony on Wednesday.Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

“We never thought we’d be recognized,” Ms. Sousa said in an interview. “Just never thought — we were just doing the job for the country and earning money on the side.”

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