Throughout the era of World War II, gender equality and roles in the work place quickly steamed to the front of the list as one of America's hottest issues of debate. However, racial equality in the workplace was still towards the end of the list, and, although this issue was becoming increasingly prevalent, it still lacked the imperative exposure and sentiment that it would eventually need in order to evolve into an issue that received the attention it deserved. In the documentary, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, gender equality in the workplace is clearly displayed as the film's main theme. However, in a deliberate yet subtle manner, the documentary also clearly illustrated that race, racism, and racial inequality in the workplace were overwhelmingly present, and were especially apparent in the types of jobs that the different races had, and in the status and treatment that the different races had at these jobs.
             Throughout the documentary, it became increasingly visible that the types of job that a female worker had were dependent not primarily on her skill, however, primarily on her race. Laborious, uncomfortable, and often draining jobs were designated for the female workers of color. African-American female workers would often work long hours as cooks in a hot kitchen, would do intense manual labor loading and unloading heavy objects to and from ships, or would be strenuously labored at a steel factory, where three quarters of the employed women were black. "Black women could always get hard jobs or cooking jobs because they were saved for us," stated one black worker in the documentary. Sometimes, the available jobs to the African American women would even be dangerous. One black women in the documentary even recalled being struck in the head by a bolt of steel, and as a result, she had to make the painful decision of losing her weekly paycheck and quitting. Yet, in the film, many of the white women had jo
             ...