The women behind an American icon

Remembering the three women who inspired one of America’s most famous pieces of propaganda

One of the most tumultuous times in history, World War II, also saw the rise of women as a workforce outside of the home.

While men went to fight overseas, there was still a need for labor in factories producing military artillery and supplies. Women were not allowed to join the military at the time, so many supported the Allies’ cause by filling the labor gap and taking jobs that men would normally have worked at that time. This created the cultural image of “Rosie the Riveter,” a strong, hardworking woman unafraid to get her hands dirty. It was further emblemized with J. Howard Miller’s famous wartime propaganda “We Can Do It!” poster, featuring a woman wearing a bandanna and worker’s jumpsuit flexing her arm.

The poster was believed to have been inspired by a photograph taken by a press photographer at the Alameda Naval Station, catching a woman at work in a similar outfit as the one that would come to be depicted in the poster.

Initially, the woman in the photograph was believed to be Geraldine Hoff Doyle. Doyle came across the photograph in 1984 in an article for the magazine, “Modern Maturity,” and believed it to be a picture of herself. Ten years later, Doyle saw the “We Can Do It!” poster on the front of the Smithsonian magazine, and made the mental connection between the two images. Subsequently, she was credited widely as the poster’s inspiration.

Though made in innocence and without the intention to profit from it, Doyle’s assertion that the two images were connected was without evidence. Westinghouse historian Charles A. Ruch, who had been a friend of Miller’s, said Miller preferred using live models for his paintings rather than working from photographs. However, the photograph had appeared in the Pittsburgh Press in July of 1942, when Miller was working on the poster, so it could be possible that he had seen it and was influenced by it when he was painting.

It wasn’t until 2016 that the true identity of “Rosie the Riveter” was revealed. James J. Kimble, associate professor of communication and the arts at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, obtained the original print of the photograph from an archive of Acme news photographs, including the yellowed caption identifying the woman, Naomi Parker Fraley. Kimble reported his findings in 2016, in “Rosie’s Secret Identity,” an article for the journal “Rhetoric and Public Affairs.”  The article’s publicity exploded — and brought long-deserved attention to Fraley, who had worked in a Navy machine shop throughout World War II.

“I didn’t want fame or fortune,” Fraley told People magazine in 2016, shortly after Kimble’s revelation. “But I did want my own identity.”

Fraley passed away Jan. 20 at the age of 96 in Longview, WA.

When asked by The World-Herald in 2016 how it felt to be finally, publicly known as Rosie the Riveter, she only had one thing to say: “Victory!”