Getty Museum

Lovers, Richmond, California

Dorothea Lange

Date

1942

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Charles Wollenberg's 1995 book *Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the East Bay at War, 1941-1945* captions a wider view of this scene, which includes a Coca-Cola billboard and a car at left, as follows: "New economic opportunities and wartime cultural changes transformed this young couple's world. MacDonald Avenue, Richmond." This was no doubt true, but probably much more so for the young woman than for her boyfriend, whose face is barely see but whose arm encircles her neck. It is likely that both were newly employed at the Kaiser Shipyards but unlikely that they held the same jobs or belonged to the same union. > > Heavy industry was one of the last modern arenas of male exclusivity, and the shipyard men wanted to keep it that way. To this end, women were kept in the lowest-paying jobs, excluded from most of the unions, and made to adhere to "rules of rude and graceless dress," as Katherine Archibald (*Wartime Shipyard : A Study in Social Disunity*, 1947) called the camouflaging requirements that included covering one's hair, wearing overalls or pants, and doing without makeup on nail polish. Although "Rosie the Riveter," the superwoman of the assembly line, was partly myth, she was a pioneer, especially in the wartime shipyard. Rather than recognizing this as progress, her male colleagues reacted with resentment and calls for women to return to the home. But these new welders, pipe fitters, and, occasionally, electricians wanted to learn a trade and, at the same time, maintain evidence of their femininity. This they attempted to do after their shift, and in spite of the workplace tension between the sexes. The prominent parking meter on the right in this image may refer to round-the-clock shifts that now governed the workers' lives. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 56. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.