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You know how America's issues with race made a big impact in

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World War II? Well, it turns out gender issues also played a pretty big part. Yeesh, [man raising eyebrow]

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it's almost like war is profoundly related to social and cultural [people hold up tank]

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structures or something... who would've thought? Anyway, women hadn't made a lot

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of social progress in the U.S. since the whole getting-the-vote thing happened in [women's suffrage signs]

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1920. All that flapper action in the twenties turned out to be a high

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water mark for independent modern women, but then the Great Depression took us [flappers flapping]

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several steps backward. Flapping is hard to do when you're depressed. But the [flappers falling]

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war did suddenly raise America's interest in employing every able-bodied

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adult, even if those adults were female and probably had cooties. Roosevelt's [employed man and woman]

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Dr. Win-the-War strategy involved banning racial and gender discrimination [FDR and workers]

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in the workplace... and surprise, surprise: that created more job opportunities for

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African Americans and for women. Well, one big misconception that people have about

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women in wartime industry is that before the war, they were all just housewives [housewife drawing]

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who had never worked outside the home. And yeah, it's true that approximately five

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million women who entered the labor force between the years 1940 and 1944 were [data on women working]

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in fact newbies... and yeah, a lot of them were married, white, middle-class women.

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But that was only five million women out of a total of 19 million women who

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worked for wages during the war years. Quick math people: 19 million minus 5

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million... leaves a lot. What, we're not mathematicians. Roughly three-quarters of

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these women had been working for wages before World War two the war industries [chart of working women data]

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gave jobs to a lot of women who had been dying for them all through the Great

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Depression. Sure, the jobs were mostly low-paying and mind-numbing, but after [woman getting a job]

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the Depression, well, anything looks good. The U.S. was actually so eager to recruit

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female workers that they fired up the good old propaganda machine. The U.S. [FDR with propaganda machine]

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Office of War Information, which was almost as 1984 as it sounds, produced [war propaganda]

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posters and sponsored magazine articles and advertisements showing women workers

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as heroines. They even recruited artist J. Howard Miller to paint the popular image

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of Rosie the Riveter. Well, sure Rosie was a government ploy designed to [Rosie the Riveter]

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manipulate the masses, but she was a big deal in terms of changing

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the rules of pop iconography. Rather than depicting women as docile and submissive,

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she was tough, determined, and even had some muscles there. Rosie was the female [Rosie flexes]

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equivalent of G.I. Joe, and she could probably beat him in an arm wrestling

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match. To this day, she's seen as a symbol of girl power. Well, once the war ended, [Rosie beats G.I. Joe at arm wrestling]

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millions of men came back and were like, "Out of the way ladies, the jobs are

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for us," and many women once again found it hard to find any well-paid work, or [men knock women over]

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any work at all. We figure Rosie kept her job though; with muscles like that, who was

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going to tell her she was fired? [Rosie scares man]

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