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Rhetorical Analysis: We Can Do It

Decent Essays

Throughout time, women have been considered housewives and mothers. Not all women stayed home, throughout history women have worked, mainly clerical jobs, teaching, charity workers, and other less demanding physical work. It was never a new thing that women were in the work force, it was the impact the propaganda posters and WWII made on the women in that workforce. This propaganda poster; titled “We Can Do It” features a beautiful women with her arm flexed and she is in her work coveralls, above her it say “We can do it.” the author is J. Howard Miller, he uses pathos and ethos to inspire a social movement that increased the number of working women, and changed the face of the workforce. Women have always work, especially the minorities …show more content…

Howard Miller was hired by Westing House Company’s, War production committee to create a poster for the war efforts. He used pathos to express a women with confidence and beauty to show people a woman can be beautiful and work in factories, he also used the slogan, “we can do it” this is using ethos to show that they had the capabilities to go above and beyond what any person believed they could do, they proved that they had the skill and determination to accomplish the jobs in the factories. Although maybe not a true celebrity like people we may consider famous, the author uses Geraldine Doyle in the propaganda poster “we can do it”, she was a factory worker in Lansing, Michigan. She died on December 26, 2010 at age 86. She was remembered as an unwitting feminist hero as a model for the ionic poster of WWII. On this poster Geraldine became known as Rosie the riveter, as did many of the women in that time, there was also a Rosie the Riveter song out in 1942. Soon after, the once fictional ‘Rosie the riveter’ came to life, her name was Rose Will Monroe, widow with 2 girls, and she moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan to work in the aircraft factory, she was noticed during a bond drive at the factory and was asked to do bond commercials, although she never capitalized on that, she was always known as a feminist icon. After the war she didn’t go back to being a house wife, she had a variety of jobs such as taxi driver, hair salon operator, and she even opened her …show more content…

Women were taking jobs in factories, built planes, made war supplies, worked on assembly lines. This poster was not just directed at women to inspire them to join the workforce during the war, it was directed at husbands as well, to show them that women can do it. During this time one of the down falls was, pay was never equal, men were receiving $54.65 a week, and women were making $31.50. But more good than bad came out of working in factories and assembly lines. African American women were really affected by these changes, they were now working alongside white women and this forced a break in social barriers, and brought the equality brought on from the civil rights movement to reality. Entering the war there were 12 million women in the work force, at the end of the work about 20 million women were in the work force, 3 million of those women were factory

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