By Katie Sanders
Facing the greatest healthcare crisis in a century, the current U.S. government is calling on private companies and individuals to help provide critically needed equipment and supplies.
During World War II, with the need for equipment surging and more than 16 million Americans in the military, women on the home front heard a similar call and stepped up to help their country.
Photograph courtesy FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress
Video courtesy National Archives
By 1943, more than 310,000 American women worked in aircraft production, many as riveters who helped assemble warplanes in Michigan factories.
Workers at Ford’s mammoth Willow Run plant churned out an astonishing 8,685 B-24 Liberators. These long range bombers were key to the Allied victory.
Video courtesy National Archives
Helen Kushnir
One of the original Rosies
Video by National Geographic Studios
Most “Rosie the Riveters”—the term for women who worked in defense plants—never imagined that they would become symbols of female empowerment...
Photograph courtesy FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress
...immortalized by the now-iconic “We Can Do It” illustration they inspired.
Image courtesy National Archives
Video by National Geographic Studios
Decades after the last bomber rolled off the assembly line, three original Rosies—Marjorie Haskins, Virginia Basler, and Helen Kushnir—visited Willow Run. Much of the sprawling plant has been demolished, but part has been saved for a museum.
Video courtesy National Archives, National Geographic Studios
National Geographic asked five members of the Willow Run Chapter of the American Rosie the Riveter Association to share their wisdom for navigating life in challenging times. Here’s what they said.
Use your own brain.
Marjorie Sutherland Haskins, 97
Use your own brain.
Marjorie Sutherland Haskins, 97
“Don’t listen to everyone else. Work hard and don’t believe everything you hear.”
Born and raised in the 2,000-person town of Carleton, Michigan, Haskins lost her father at 16. In 1940, right out of high school, she got a job working at the Willow Run Bomber Plant, where she tracked the inventory of dyes used in the planes. She made $1 an hour and commuted through the snow and sleet with her mother, a fellow employee. Her husband and brother were at war. “My mother and I had to keep things going for my grandmother,” she says.
Screengrab courtesy National Geographic Studios
Know you have something to offer.
Clara Hunter Doutly, 98
Know you have something to offer.
Clara Hunter Doutly, 98
“I figured I was just as important as the next person. I still do.”
The youngest of six siblings, Doutly grew up in Detroit and graduated from Cass Technical High School. She put on pants for the first time at 19, when she accepted a job at Briggs Manufacturing riveting components for B-24 and B-29 bombers. She remembers World War II as a time of unity, when neighbors from all backgrounds came together to listen to the radio or memorialize young soldiers killed in battle overseas. “Somebody had a potato. Somebody had an onion. You threw it all together and made soup,” she says. “You see what can be done.” A three-time cancer survivor, she has been volunteering at a Detroit senior center daily for the past three decades.
Photograph by Robert Clark, National Geographic
Check on your neighbors.
Virginia Hines Basler, 96
Check on your neighbors.
Virginia Hines Basler, 96
“Volunteer as you can, whatever that might mean for you.”
Born in Alpina, Michigan, Basler got a job at Willow Run drilling the holes that other workers filled with rivets. After nine months she left the bomber plant to join the women’s branch of the Coast Guard Reserve, called SPARS. After many years volunteering for Meals on Wheels, she currently volunteers at a thrift shop.
Screengrab courtesy National Geographic Studios
Trust God and keep going.
Mallie Mellon, 100
Trust God and keep going.
Mallie Mellon, 100
“The best thing we can do is love each other and keep the faith.”
Born in a Kentucky farmhouse, Mellon, along with her husband and their young son, boarded a bus to Detroit in 1943, responding to a radio ad for civilian war jobs. She worked at Briggs Manufacturing, burnishing parts for bombers rolling off the assembly line at Willow Run. Mellon never heard of Rosie the Riveter until five years ago, when she learned that she was one. She still has her southern drawl, but Michigan is home, and the Rosies are family.
Photograph by Robert Clark, National Geographic
Don’t be too quick.
Helen Preiss Kushnir, 94
Don’t be too quick.
Helen Preiss Kushnir, 94
“You can find yourself having to start all over again.”
A lifelong resident of Dearborn, Michigan, Kushnir picked up a rivet gun in 1944, while her husband was serving as a medic with Gen. George Patton’s Army in North Africa. For a year she worked at Detroit’s Chrysler-DeSoto plant shooting rivets into the Navy’s Curtiss Helldiver dive bomber. “I was little, so I could rivet in the corner on the plane all day,” she says. In 2016 she was among a group of original Rosies who took an honor flight to Washington D.C. From the floor of the Library of Congress, she declared: “I have a real hard time with ‘We can do it.’ We did it.” She loves to garden and has volunteered at the Detroit VA for the past half century.
Screengrab courtesy National Geographic Studios
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