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:
“Oh sure, everyone goes back to the earth at some point, but life itself is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that’s what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“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)