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Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (Meridian)

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"Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change" is an ambitious project in Oral History. Sherna Berger Gluck champions the useful applications of personal interviews to the reconstruction of the experiences and memories of the women who worked in the U.S. defense industries during and after World War II. Her introduction and epilogue are interperative discourses on the benefits of oral data collections and a persuasive call for further documentation of the perceptions and recollections of every day people. The meat of the book is composed of ten oral history interviews with women she felt would best illustrate the socio-cultural, racial, and economic dynamics of women's labor opportunities in the middle decades of the twentieth-century.

An admitted feminist, Gluck directs these interviewees to consider the historical significance of their work. In many instances, she is disappointed to learn that several underestimated the long-term gendered implications for their employment and how their activities would shape the worlds their daughters inherited. Gluck's selection of women surveyed offers rich stories of struggle and persistence in the face of divorces, deaths, poverty, child-rearing, and struggles. Her choices are biased in favor of a greater number of non-white narrators, many of whom were also mothers; their perspectives are evocative but also give the incorrect impression that more Mexican-American and black women worked in the industrial sector than Gluck's statistical evidence supports.

Nonetheless, the book is useful for students interested in the centering of personal experience and oral data as the basis for historical interpretation. Gluck's reliance on personal narrative means that the book is noticible lacking in other source materials that would give balance to the collective reminiscences, and actually reinforce how oral data can apply to generalizations about the collective, without exceeding the truly historical.