Rosie the Riveter High
Last week The Los Angeles Times featured an article on an extraordinary Long Beach charter school that was founded to help young women train for careers as plumbers, welders, electricians, carpenters, and the like.
The school’s 50-member student body includes girls and boys, but its organizers strive to break down barriers for women seeking careers in what largely remains a man’s world.
And you gotta love the school’s name. Rosie, was a fictional character depicted on a motivational poster created in 1942 for the Westinghouse company, symbolized thousands of women who entered the American workforce to replace men who had joined the military.
“It’s about trying to change the way society looks at women,” Lynn Shaw, who helped create Rosie the Riveter High, told the L.A. Times. “We just feel that women should have an equal opportunity.”
Shaw has worked as a miner at a limestone mine in the desert, a steelworker in Pennsylvania and a longshoreman in San Francisco. Did she do it to be a feminist trailblazer? Not quite.
“For me, it was all about the money,” she said. “Women in nontraditional jobs earn 20% to 40% more than women in what are considered ‘traditional’ women’s jobs. That’s $1 million over a lifetime.”
That’s real talk.
wonder if my job is non traditional.