We’ve seen her in posters, tote bags, books, t-shirts, banners, Halloween costumes, publicity, basically everywhere. For decades, the famous “We Can Do It” poster, also known as Rosie the Riveter, has been a symbol of female empowerment, a banner for women’s rights, and an icon of resilience. But who was the woman who inspired all this? What was her story? And what’s the story of the poster itself?
First things first, the famous poster was made during WWII in 1942 by J. Howard Miller. However, he was far from wanting to create a banner for women empowerment. Actually, he had been hired by the Westinghouse Company’s War Production Coordinating Committee to design some posters to be put up in factories to encourage the production of war supplies.
This particular poster was put up at some Westinghouse Electric Corporation plants, along with some others with more straightforward caution or instruction messages telling them they had to leave their workspace clean and keep breaks short. The idea of this one was to simply tell the employees that they had to work hard and that all of them (men and women) were capable of fulfilling the high production the war effort required.
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Campaigns like this one were common at the time and so were the aesthetics. The question here is why did this one become so emblematic and famous? It’s said that Miller was inspired to create the “We Can Do It” poster from a photograph of a young woman working at a factory published by the United Press International wire service. As compelling and powerful as the poster is, it was forgotten for about four decades after the war.
Then, in the 1980s, the poster was rediscovered and given a whole new meaning. At the time, the feminist movement had been growing more and more, and the strength Rosie conveyed, along with the bold colors and the clear and short message were easy to appropriate. Not only that, it was also seen as a token of the war and patriotism, so its spread became a natural step.
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It appeared in magazines, exhibitions, merchandise, and post stamps with the same strength and popularity it still has today. It was also at that time that the identity of this powerful woman became public. Then, in 1984, a first face appeared. It was Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who after watching an article on the poster on a magazine was sure it was a photograph of her at the time she was working at a factory. Since no one had actually made the claim in decades, it was assumed she was actually the face of the famous poster.
For about twenty years Hoff was thought to be the beloved Rosie, until 2011, when a woman named Naomi Parker Fraley, discovered at an event for women wartime workers her own photograph as the reference for the poster. Her surprise was that it wasn’t her name on the caption, which made her feel a bit uneasy. About the same time, an associate professor at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University started doing research on the identity of the photograph not being that convinced about the story.
When Hoff passed away in 2010, and after seeing all the obituaries in which she was linked to Rosie the Riveter, he saw the perfect chance to actually confirm his doubts. He found an old archive of news with photographs of the original image which had a caption no one had ever seen before. It identified the woman as Naomi Parker. Despite this clarification, though, Hoff’s name is still associated with the iconic poster.
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Though for Professor Kimble it was crucial to find the real Rosie the Riveter, at the end of the day, the importance of the poster and the image isn’t about a single individual, but about a moment in which women were finally able to perform any job, but more importantly the symbolism is still evokes, that of resilience, gender equality, and a fight we’re still fighting.
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