Honor the Rosies where they belong: On the National Mall 

I was 17 years old when I first picked up a rivet gun. 

It was the summer of 1943, and I had started my first-ever job attaching sheet metal to the frames of airplane wings — mostly B-17s and B-29s, U.S. military aircraft used during the Second World War. The job paid well, but what I remember most is how proud I was to be contributing to the war effort, to something bigger and more important than myself. 

Though I didn’t know it at the time, my decision that summer to leave my small North Dakota hometown for Seattle to join The Boeing Co. marked my initiation into an incredible contingent of women with bandanas and can-do attitudes who would one day become American icons.  

The “Rosie the Riveters,” or more simply the “Rosies,” are the 18 million American women who answered the call when legions of men across the United States departed to fight the Axis powers. We worked long hours carefully assembling the planes, tanks and ships that would be sent to support the war overseas. But women served in many other roles, keeping America’s entire economic engine running.   

They were mechanics, pilots,........

© The Hill