My first cousin, Roxie, was a generation older than me. She was a beautiful woman. She also had the saltiest language of any man or woman that I knew. Her language probably stopped a lot of harassment from men in the plant. She was a Rosie the Riveter long after women were forced to give up their jobs after WWII.
Rosie the Riveter was made popular by Norman Rockwell in a painting that first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. I was unfamiliar with Rockwell’s painting until I went to Rosie’s Diner on Aurora Avenue in Naperville run by Lynn Lowder, a Vietnam Marine. That image of Rosie with bulging muscles and a smudged face eating a sandwich is the first thing you see. And she is a woman I wouldn’t want to cross.
Like my cousin, Elinor Otto also was the typical Rosie. Elinor died in November 2023 at the age of 104. In December 1941 she was a divorced mother with an infant. She jumped at the chance to get a lucrative job in the aviation plants. After the war, she was forced to leave her job to make way for returning men. But she didn’t give up and ended up working for over seven decades as an aviation riveter and was finally “laid off” in 2018. I’d say that’s quite an accomplishment for someone who was 5’2” and 103 pounds.
Elinor spent her senior years telling groups, “I was just doing my job like thousands of others. We made history.” WW II was the first time in U.S. history that married women outnumbered single women workers. The riveters had lasting effect on both the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Rights Movement.
Like Elinor Otto, my cousin was a single mom during the war. Roxie remained at Chrysler and had a very nice home and was NOT a cleaning lady. Her language was the trade-off for a solid middle-class life.
