The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter is a 1980 documentary film by Connie Field about the American women who went to work during World War II to do "men's jobs". In 1996, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The film's title refers to "Rosie the Riveter", the cultural icon that represented women who manned the manufacturing plants which produced munitions and material during World War II.
Connie Field got the idea for the film from a California “Rosie the Riveter Reunion”, and, with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other charitable sources, conducted interviews with many hundreds of women who had gone into war work. Out of these she chose five representatives—three black, two white—all marvelously lively, intelligent, and articulate women who recall their experiences with a mixture of pleasant nostalgia and detached bitterness.
The reminiscences are intercut with the realities of the period – old news, films, recruiting trailers, March of Time clips, and pop songs such as “Rosie the Riveter”.
Famous quotes containing the words life, times and/or rosie:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Frankie threw back her kimono, she took out her forty-four.
Root-a-toot-toot, three times she shot, right through that hardwood
door.”
—Unknown. Frankie and Johnny (l. 25–27)
“Yet fairest blossome do not slight
That age which you may know so soon:
The rosie Morn resignes her light,
And milder glory to the Noon:
And then what wonder shall you do,
Whose dawning beauty warms us so?”
—Edmund Waller (1606–1687)