Rosie's Daughters: The "First Woman To" Generation Tells Its Story

Meet Rosie's Daughters in this collective memoir of American women born during World War II, precursors of the Baby Boom generation. Their stories will inform, entertain, and surprise you. In these in-depth interviews, they are declaring their place in history.

Rosie the Riveter is a mythic figure in our culture, with good reason--she built ships, flew bombers and filled thousands of other essential wartime jobs, upending traditional views of "women's work. When the war was over, however, American industry thanked Rosie and sent her home.

Rosie's Daughters flung wide the doors of employment opportunity that Rosie had unlocked. These women can claim more career "firsts" and greater socio-cultural change than any other generation.

Momentous events at eventful moments in their lives shaped their remarkable journeys--the post-war education boom, sexual revolution and the Pill, civil rights and gender equality, the Vietnam War, NOW and consciousness raising, Roe v. Wade, no-fault divorce, old fields to conquer and new ways to work.

Rosie's Daughters: The "First Woman To" Generation is an inspiring collective memoir of the generation of women born during World War II who excelled at "firsts" in large numbers - in the amount of education, in the numbers of divorces, in the presence in the workforce holding jobs previously occupied only by men. Laugh and cry as these women, Rosie the Riveter's daughters, tell their generational stories for the first time. Learn from the lessons of their lives as you shape your future.

For as long as people have sought opportunity, fought injustices, explored uncharted frontiers and striven to accomplish more, a few men and women have always earned the position of being The First: First Man on the Moon, First Woman Nobel Laureate, First Female Senator and First African-American Graduate of a Major University. But it takes more than one individual's achievement to change perceptions at the societal level.

Since the country's founding, women have achieved firsts. But they achieved them primarily as isolated distinctions. That is, when a woman achieved "firstness" of a particular kind, other women did not immediately follow. When Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman physician in 1849, she was not soon followed by a large number of female physicians. Belva Ann Lockwood's achievement in 1872 to become the first woman admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court did not spur numerous female lawyers to follow. When Jeannette Rankin was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, women across the country did not follow her into Congress. As important as their achievements were, these individuals did not break down barriers or change societal perceptions.

Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett's insightful analysis, explored in Rosie's Daughters: The "First Woman To" Generation Tells Its Story, shows that women's "firsts" result in real change when they achieve two milestones. First they involve a critical mass of women. Second, they occur under ordinary circumstances. Rosie's generation achieved the first milestone but not the second. Millions of Rosies stepped into traditional male roles. They did change societal perceptions of women's abilities, but in the extraordinary circumstances of wartime.

Rosie's Daughters have been able to achieve both milestones.

The "First Woman To"-Generation, or FW2-Generation as Butler and Bonnett have titled them, broke the actual and perceived barriers to female participation in society. They succeeded in turning their firsts into accepted roles for themselves and subsequent generations of women.