Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War. By Carrie Brown. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002. x, 240 pp. $35.00, isbn 1-55553-535-6.)

Abstract

Rosie's Mom covers familiar ground since it is virtually entirely derived from a handful of books supplemented by relevant newspaper articles and occasional references from manuscript sources. It presumes to tell the story of working-class immigrant women employed in industry and commerce before, during, and after World War I and of well-known women reformers who sought to protect them from dangerous employment conditions. Granted, the narrative is composed in the author's own words with brief references to wartime developments abroad and lavishly illustrated with black-and-white photographs of women wage earners by Lewis Wickes Hine and anonymous photographers from federal agencies. It makes a handsome book for a cocktail table display. But one wonders why this book merited publication and for which audience it is intended. The author is silent on these matters. Certainly it is not meant for professional historians who are already well acquainted with Nancy Schrom Dye's research on the Women's Trade Union League of New York, or Leslie Woodcock Tentler's work on immigrant women workers, or Amy Hewes's investigation of women munition workers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or Mary Anderson's autobiography, or Maurine Weiner Greenwald's case studies of women war workers. Those sources are milked for all they are worth and then paraphrased in prose accessible to able middle school and high school readers. If there is a thesis in this book, it is that women workers helped win the war and deserve to be remembered for their contributions to the Allied victory. No one can quarrel with that sentiment. This book reads and looks like an exhibition catalog, an expertise for which the author, a free-lance curator, has ample credentials.