Post #69 – Women’s Memoirs, Rosie the Riveter – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett
Writing Family Stories
If you are a regular visitor to WomensMemoirs, then you probably know that this website grew out of the collective memoir, Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story, that Kendra Bonnett and I wrote (First Edition, 2007; Second Edition, 2012). Our interviews with more than 100 women nudged us into helping other women tell their stories.
In addition to writing (Writing Alchemy: How to Write Fast and Deep), teaching (online and in person), conference speaking, and coaching, we continue to maintain our RosiesDaughters.com website. Our presentations about the collective memoir even lead to a complete Rosie the Riveter product line that we sell on Etsy.com
We thought it would be fun to put out a call for stories of Rosie the Riveters and to share them with our readers. We will be doing that over the coming months. Most of these stories will be shared on our RosiesDaughters website. However, one story seemed especially appropriate to also share with our WomensMemoirs readers. Put the story on this website? On the other website? Our solution? We split the story. You will find the first half by Clicking Here. Then return to this blog post to read the second part. (Don’t worry. We put a link at the end of Part 1 to make it easy for you.)
The author, Barbarann Ayars, tells her mother’s Rosie story from her own perspective, that of a four year old girl who is in an orphanage so that her widowed mother can work to support the family. This was not uncommon at the time, but few of us know much about the struggles of families as they dealt first with The Depression and then World War II. We think that Barbarann has created a strong story of a life and a time seen through her young eyes. We hope you enjoy this story and welcome your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Life in the Dormitory: An Exciting Time (Part 2)
By Barbarann Ayars
My nose is tucked into Mama’s armpit where it’s warm, where it tickles because she doesn’t ever shave there, and smells softly comforting and familiar. I snuggle against her sleeping body, content. As I drift back to sleep she nudges me awake.
“Shh. I have to find you some fresh milk, Barbarann. What’s in the bulkhead has soured overnight. I can’t use it for your cereal. Stay in the bed until I come back. If you need anything just call out for Annette. She’s asleep in the other bed. Don’t look at me like that! I swear, I’ll be back!”
I nod and peek at the snoring Annette as I lay back down.
When I waken again, Mama is there with my breakfast of cereal with a banana. I look around and see that I have an audience of beautiful young women watching me as if they’ve never seen a child eat breakfast before. It seems they watched me sleep, too.
During the next couple of days, I discover that all the rooms in the dormitory are the same, full of girls with their hair in curlers, ironing boards and irons everywhere, a sewing machine or two, and yards of fabric hanging on wire hangers. The stuff of veils is all over the place.
“We make our own wedding veils, honey!” a chubby girl explains when I ask.
Mama says that early on, Elkton lacked space for so many girls. Farmers opened their homes, renting spare bedrooms, summer porches, sofas for them to sleep on, but quickly that became a crowding problem. The government authorities threw up dormitories to house them, but forgot that thousands of girls needed adequate plumbing. Four bathrooms to a barracks are woefully inadequate; the toilets often overflow and the sinks back up and don’t drain. The waiting lines to use the facilities cause much impatience, irritation and even swearing.
But the girls adjust and make do. Mama explained that they work long hours with explosive material, making ammunition for the Navy, handling nitro and sulfur. I’m not sure what that is but a strong smell hangs in the air, pungent and irritating to the nose. Annette tells me it is gunpowder. The plant where they all work is at least as long as a football field. Although there is no way to cool the air, huge fans blow incessantly, moving the gunpowder throughout their workspace. It was years later when I learned that as the women inhaled the gunpowder deep into their lungs, many of them, including Mama, contracted powder poisoning causing their skin to be green, destroying their teeth and damaging their livers. The labor is hard, depressing and the women put in long hours, often working shifts back to back.
I hear talk about how they are all young, away from home and earn lots of money. They make their own entertainment and, best of all, they’re surrounded by two bases of men preparing to go off to war. On weekends, those who didn’t take the train home “raised hell” (that’s what one of the girls told me) in the tiny town until the government created canteens where they “blow off steam, dance for hours, hang out, and couple up.” Once grown, I researched all of this and found that there were so many weddings in Elkton that it put the British wedding capital, Gretna Green, to shame. Looking back, I see that it explains all that fabric in the dormitories, white satin and tulle.
In their free time they will play with me. Laughing girls curl my hair with their curling irons, paint nail polish on my fingers and make me a little tutus with tulle when they’re not making wedding gowns. I loved all of this attention.
Their hair in curlers, they’re in their slips or underwear and most own silk stockings from the mills in Reading. My father used to make them, working for Berkshire Hosiery along with half his relatives. Mama brings them with her and passes them out. The girls roll them to their knees, straighten the seams, paint their lips with deep red lipstick, and cigarettes hang out of their mouths, the air blue with their smoke. They tell jokes I don’t understand, fill the building with raucous laughter, and share secrets. Makeup is everywhere, bricks of mascara on dresser tops, powder in the bathroom, on shelves, in shoeboxes under their bunks. They cream their underarms with Mum deodorant, bathe with Lifebuoy soap, wear Evening In Paris perfume. Some drink hard liquor but never on duty. I watched as many of them took a swig or two from a flask in the dorm.
Annette is awake, stretching and yawning in her bed. She peers at me and winks, climbs out from her covers and picks me up. She nuzzles my neck and I giggle. Annette smells of sleep and bourbon and Evening In Paris.
“You’re such a cutie! Look at those big blue eyes!” she cries as she swings me in the air and plants a kiss. “Later we’ll take a walk outside, but for now, let’s find your tooth brush.”
Mama dresses for her shift. I watch her pull on slacks which make her legs look really long. Annette takes my hand and I toddle off to the bathroom. She brushes the tangles from my hair and washes my face. I’ll spend the whole day with her and later she’ll put me to bed, dress for the night shift and pass my mother on her way back from the ammo factory.
In the room we find Tooty and Marie cutting tulle. “What’s that for?” I want to know. It’s like the rough mosquito netting at Gramma’s house.
“We’re making Marie a wedding dress”, Tooty explains. “She’s getting married next week before her soldier goes off to the war”.
It seems everybody is getting married but Mama. Men and women get married at the Justice of the Peace in Elkton, on their break, or on their lunch hour. Long lines on the sidewalk will be recorded in the newspapers.
A couple of Mama’s friends take me into town for ice cream and parade me around to show me off. This is fun! They pass me around like a baby doll. I’m held and handled by countless men and women who dote on a little child out of her element but enjoying every minute. I’ve never been so fussed over, held and cuddled, admired, even adored, I’m content, with no ability to understand that in a war atmosphere a child could be a breath of fresh air, a harbinger of hope in a time of fear held at bay with the excitement of this impermanent life.
While I absorb this attention, Mama is making ammo, supervising many girls at their work, protecting their faces behind glass squares, working with the nitro carefully, to keep their fingers. They move with precision, never dropping the nitro. Several times in this life there will be explosions that cost lives. The hospital personnel on the grounds always expect new patients, as does the local hospital in town. I begin to understand that my mother is in danger much of her day, and sometimes night, as she works her double shifts. It scares me.
All too soon it’s time to return to the orphanage. So many kisses, hugs and tears. So many goodbyes. This is a magical time in a place where there is little magic, where I am the magic, where the women of the nation answer the call to serve while millions of men go away to war, hundreds of thousands of them never to return and many more returning with combat injuries. I’m a distraction from their pressing work, the hope stored up in the children of the nation. I feel the sadness of separation and underlying unease permeating the place where my mother lives, despite the laughter. I feel the heartache of having to return to where I live, a place without her.
Together we board the train, without excitement this time. The trip goes by too quickly for me. Time is a blur. Before I’m ready Mama leaves me in the foyer of the Home for Friendless Children, where my matron collects me, helps me get into night clothes and tucks me into the white iron bed with the white counterpane in my own dormitory. Mama has kissed me goodbye with soft, dry lips. I touch my cheek as I lay there. Hot tears roll down my face onto my pillow. I ache all over with grief, already missing her. Sleep is a long time coming.
Mama’s fleeting kiss remains until morning when Matron washes my face and helps me brush my teeth. She untangles my hair with a brush and helps me dress. Her hair is not in curlers and she is not standing in just her underwear. Her lips are naked, no bright red lipstick or lingering scents of perfume. She is, however, my anchor in this place that is not my home, and she has a kiss and a squeeze for me, not unlike Annette. It’s not the same but it will have to do.
Barbarann Ayars writes: “I live in a small town in Ohio where I work with writers as I shape my memoir. Writing at Writing It Real and Writers Digest has given me such wonderful exposure to the gifts of others. I can be found at Persimmon Tree and archived at Tiny Lights, Flash in the Pan and soon in another online magazine in June. Writing consumes unreasonable amounts of time and I’m not even sorry!”
