Clark Girls

Rose Will Leigh was born on March 12, 1920 in Pulaski County, Kentucky. The daughter of Walter G. Leigh & Minnie A. Calder.

Left with two young children after her husband was killed in a car accident. She was a young widow with two children when she joined the thousands of Kentuckians who left their rural homes during World War II and headed north in search of good-paying defense jobs.

Hired in 1942 to work at Ford Motor Co.’s Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., Monroe was not the bandanna-wearing, muscle-flexing woman in the “We Can Do It!” poster by J. Howard Miller.

That poster was made before Monroe, a widowed mother of two, was “discovered” by Walter Pidgeon, a Hollywood leading man who visited the plant. Monroe was picked for a promotional film encouraging women to join the workforce.

She was working as a riveter at the Willow Run bomber factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan when actor Walter Pidgeon arrived to make a film promoting war bonds. He asked Monroe to appear in his film. Capable and attractive, Monroe embodied the mythical Rosie the Riveter's can-do spirit.

After the war, Monroe drove a cab, owned a beauty shop and ran her own construction company in Indiana called Rose Builders. She became a pilot and lost a kidney and the vision in her left eye in a 1978 flying accident. Nearly 20 years later, her other kidney began to fail, leading to her death in 1997.

Monroe left behind two daughters, six sisters, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren — and a legacy for all postwar women.



Rosie's Obituary

`Rosie the Riveter' star dead at 77
Associated Press, 06/02/97


CLARKSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Rose Will Monroe, whose high-profile role as "Rosie the Riveter'' in promotional films and on posters pushed women to take jobs during World War II, has died. She was 77.


Ms. Monroe, who died Saturday, was working as a riveter building B-29 and B-24 military airplanes at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Mich., when she was asked to star in a promotional film about the war effort. She was also featured in posters.


The role became synonymous with thousands of women who took defense industry jobs, working factory positions usually held by men.


"They found Rose and she was a riveter and she was the
one who fit the profile for the `Rosie the Riveter' song,'' her daughter Vickie Jarvis said Sunday. "So she happened to be in the right place at the right time and was chosen to be in some of these films.''


Ms. Monroe was born in Kentucky's Pulaski County and moved to Michigan during the war. The Encyclopedia of American Economic History credited the "Rosie the Riveter'' movement with helping push the number of working women to 20 million in four years of war, a 57 percent jump from 1940.


Unlike many "Rosies'' who returned to the kitchen after the war, Ms. Monroe kept working. She drove a taxi, operated a beauty shop, and started her own home construction firm in Indiana called Rose Builders.

Ms. Monroe's other daughter, Connie Gibson, recalled going with her mother to see the Goldie Hawn movie "Swing Shift'', about a woman working alongside men in a munitions factory during wartime. In one scene, a man asked a female colleague to get a left-handed wrench.


"Mother laughed at that because she remembered the men doing that to the women in the factory, thinking they were too dumb to know the difference,'' she said.