`Rosie The Riveter' Of Wwii Fame Dies At 77 -- Rose Monroe Never Went Back To The Kitchen

CLARKSVILLE, Ind. - Rose Will Monroe, whose high-profile role as "Rosie the Riveter" in promotional films and on posters pushed women to take jobs during World War II, has died. She was 77.

Ms. Monroe, who died Saturday, was working as a riveter building B-29 and B-24 military airplanes at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Mich., when she was asked to star in a promotional film about the war effort. She was also featured in posters.

The role became synonymous with thousands of women who took defense-industry jobs, working factory positions usually held by men.

"They found Rose and she was a riveter, and she was the one who fit the profile for the `Rosie the Riveter' song," her daughter Vickie Jarvis said yesterday. "So she happened to be in the right place at the right time and was chosen to be in some of these films."

Ms. Monroe was born in Kentucky's Pulaski County and moved to Michigan during the war.

The Encyclopedia of American Economic History credited the "Rosie the Riveter" movement with helping push the number of working women to 20 million in four years of war, a 57 percent jump from 1940.

Unlike many "Rosies" who returned to the kitchen after the war, Ms. Monroe kept working. She drove a taxi, operated a beauty shop and started her own home-construction firm in Indiana called Rose Builders.

Ms. Monroe's other daughter, Connie Gibson, recalled going with her mother to see the Goldie Hawn movie "Swing Shift," about a woman working alongside men in a munitions factory during wartime. In one scene, a man asked a female colleague to get a left-handed wrench.

"Mother laughed at that because she remembered the men doing that to the women in the factory, thinking they were too dumb to know the difference," she said.