Many 'Rosie the Riveters' Inspire One Ideal

Rosie reemerges in '80s

Mary Keefe, 78, stands next to Norman Rockwell's painting "Rosie the Riveter" on May 17, 2002, at Sotheby's auction house.

Susan Watts/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Perhaps the image that pop culture today considers the most iconic is the “We Can Do It!" J. Howard Miller poster created as part of a patriotism campaign for Westinghouse factory workers. But during the war, that poster was displayed for only a few weeks as part of a rotating series of inspirational messages for Westinghouse workers on the home front.

Most of the women of the war effort left their jobs when the war was over. And Miller's poster languished unnoticed in the National Archives for 40 years — until it was rediscovered in the government's collection and published in a magazine in 1982.

At one point, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who had worked briefly at American Broach & Machine Co. in Ann Arbor, Michigan, believed she was the subject of a 1942 United Press International photo thought to have inspired Miller. But in 2016, almost six years after Doyle died, Professor James Kimble of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, unearthed evidence that another woman was photographed.

Naomi Parker (later Fraley), in a polka-dot bandanna to keep her hair from getting tangled in machinery at Alameda Naval Air Station in Oakland, California, was the name affixed to the negative. Fraley died Jan. 20, 2018, at age 96 in Longview, Washington. Doyle died Dec. 26, 2010, at age 86, in Grand Ledge, Michigan.

A movement in need of inspiration

The “We Can Do It!” Rosie also could have been entirely a product of Miller's imagination. But its resurfacing came at an ideal time for the women's movement, which was looking for inspiration.

In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment fell three states short of ratification. The National Association of Women Judges pointed out that the Reagan administration had just four women on its list of 84 federal court appointees. And the number of single-parent families headed by women had more than doubled from 1970 through 1981.

In its original time, “We Can Do It!" was an echo of the 1941 song written the day of Pearl Harbor, “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again.” In 1982 and beyond, it became the rallying cry for a new generation of women.

The millions of women who worked in factories during WWII also inspired a national park: The Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, opened in 2000. It was assembled from the sites of shipyards, a tank factory and housing developments that expanded during the war.