A specific moment. February 1982, the offices of the Washington Post Magazine in downtown Washington, D.C. The magazine’s editorial team is finalizing a story about a National Archives exhibition of WWII propaganda posters. They have selected an image for the cover: a young woman in a blue work shirt with a red and white polka-dot bandana tied in a top knot, her right arm flexed, with the caption We Can Do It! above her head. The image was designed in 1943 by J. Howard Miller. The exhibition’s curator has identified it as one of the lesser-known posters in the Archives’ wartime collection. The cover runs on February 7, 1982. Within a decade, the image will be on a Smithsonian magazine cover, on the office walls of female members of Congress, on t-shirts in every souvenir shop in Washington, and on its way to becoming the canonical visual representation of American women in WWII. Almost nothing the magazine article said about the poster’s original purpose will survive the journey.
Two Weeks in February 1943
J. Howard Miller was a Pittsburgh-based commercial artist who was contracted by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in late 1942 to produce a series of morale posters for the company’s internal War Production Co-Ordinating Committee. He delivered forty-two posters across 1942 and 1943, working from a small studio in the Steel City. The “We Can Do It!” image was one of the series, completed in early 1943.
The poster was printed in small runs at Westinghouse expense and displayed inside the company’s manufacturing plants in Pittsburgh, East Pittsburgh, and a handful of other locations for approximately two weeks beginning February 15, 1943. The intended audience was the existing factory workforce, which was approximately three-quarters male at the time.
The phrase “We Can Do It!” was a Westinghouse corporate slogan, used in internal company communications since the late 1930s. It referred to production targets and management expectations rather than to women’s empowerment or to anything related to the war. The figure in the poster was not labeled or named. She was not associated with the name Rosie. She was a generic illustration of a wartime factory worker.
The poster came down after two weeks and was replaced in rotation by the next image in Miller’s series. It was not reproduced outside Westinghouse plants, not sold commercially, not distributed by the government, and not seen by the general public during the war.
The Other Rosie
Norman Rockwell’s actual wartime Rosie. The May 29, 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post showed a powerfully built young woman seated on a wooden stool, eating a ham sandwich during her break at a riveting station. Her face was streaked with dirt and machine oil. A heavy riveting gun rested on her lap. A copy of Mein Kampf was visible under her right foot, with the spine clearly legible.
The pose was lifted directly from Michelangelo’s prophet Isaiah on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Rockwell had been studying Renaissance painting for years and used the Isaiah pose as the structural reference, then dressed it in 1943 American work clothes.
The model was Mary Doyle Keefe, a nineteen-year-old telephone operator from Arlington, Vermont, who lived near Rockwell’s studio. She sat for two mornings. Rockwell paid her ten dollars for the two sittings. Keefe was actually slim and small-framed in real life. Rockwell exaggerated her musculature and the breadth of her shoulders for the painting, producing the powerful figure that ran on the magazine cover.
The Saturday Evening Post sold approximately four million copies of the May 29 issue. Rockwell licensed the image to the U.S. Treasury Department for war bond drives, where it was reproduced on posters distributed nationally and reprinted in newspapers across the country through 1944 and 1945. The Rockwell painting was the Rosie the Riveter that the war years actually saw.
The Song That Started It
The name came from a song. “Rosie the Riveter” was written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb in 1942 and recorded by The Four Vagabonds, a Black male vocal quartet from St. Louis, in early 1943. The song became a hit on American radio in the spring of 1943, several months before either the Rockwell painting or the Miller poster existed.
The lyrics described a young woman working assembly-line riveting at a defense plant, helping her boyfriend Charlie who was fighting overseas. She was named Rosie in the song because the writers needed a one-syllable name that rhymed with the chorus rhythm and Rosie scanned cleanly with the line “all day long, whether rain or shine, she’s a part of the assembly line.” The choice was musical rather than political.
The phrase Rosie the Riveter had entered the American vocabulary as a generic name for a defense plant worker by April 1943. Rockwell adopted the name for his painting because it was already in circulation.
J. Howard Miller never associated the name Rosie with the Westinghouse poster during his lifetime. He died in 2004, three years after the image had become a feminist icon, having never been interviewed about the poster as Rosie’s source.
The Actual Women
The real story underneath the iconography. Approximately six million American women entered the paid workforce between 1942 and 1945, raising the female labor force participation rate from roughly twenty-seven percent in 1940 to thirty-six percent at the peak in 1944.
They worked in shipyards (the four Kaiser Richmond yards in California employed roughly 90,000 workers at peak in 1943-44, with women making up about thirty percent of the workforce), aircraft plants (the Willow Run B-24 bomber plant outside Detroit employed roughly 42,000 workers at its peak, a third of them women), and munitions factories across the country.
The work was dangerous, often required heavy physical labor in twelve-hour shifts, paid roughly two-thirds of the male wage for the same job, and was understood by all parties to be temporary. The Selective Training and Service Act and most union contracts guaranteed returning servicemen their old jobs back.
When the men came home, the women were laid off. The Willow Run plant went from 42,000 workers in May 1945 to fewer than 8,000 by November 1945. Female labor force participation dropped from thirty-six percent in 1944 to twenty-eight percent by 1947. The women who had built the bombers, welded the destroyers, and milled the artillery shells returned to households, secretarial pools, retail counters, and clerical jobs. The actual demographic event was effectively over by 1947.
The Rediscovery
The poster’s second life began in 1982. The National Archives in Washington had been quietly cataloging WWII propaganda posters for decades, and in late 1981 the curators mounted an exhibition that included Miller’s “We Can Do It!” among roughly four hundred other images. The Washington Post Magazine cover story ran on February 7, 1982. The image had not been seen in any mass-market publication for thirty-nine years.
Through the 1980s the poster appeared occasionally in feminist publications and women’s history textbooks. Smithsonian magazine put the image on its cover in March 1994 with a feature on women’s wartime work. The Smithsonian cover is the moment most scholars identify as the image’s transition from archival curiosity to popular icon.
Through the late 1990s and 2000s, the poster was reproduced on coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, dorm-room posters, t-shirts, postage stamps (a 1999 U.S. Postal Service Celebrate the Century stamp), political pamphlets, and book covers. The 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton featured the image extensively in supporter merchandise. The 2017 Women’s March used it as a primary visual on signs, t-shirts, and posters across more than 600 marches worldwide.
By 2020, “We Can Do It!” was estimated to be the most reproduced commercial image of any U.S. propaganda artifact from WWII, by a substantial margin.
The Wrong Model
The identification story. For most of the poster’s second life, the model was believed to be a young Michigan factory worker named Geraldine Hoff Doyle. In 1984, Doyle had seen a reproduction of a 1942 wire-service photograph showing a young woman at a lathe wearing a polka-dot bandana, recognized herself in the photograph, and concluded (in good faith) that the photograph had been Miller’s source for the poster.
Doyle was widely interviewed through the 1990s and 2000s as the original Rosie. She gave speeches at women’s history conferences. She died in December 2010 at the age of eighty-six and was identified in her obituaries, including in the New York Times, as the model for the poster.
In 2015, a Seton Hall University communication professor named James J. Kimble published the results of a six-year archival investigation establishing that the 1942 wire-service photograph showed a different young woman: Naomi Parker Fraley, who had been working at the Naval Air Station Alameda in California in March 1942 when an Acme Newspictures photographer captured her at the lathe.
Fraley, by then ninety-four years old, had been trying to correct the record privately for two decades. She died in Longview, Washington on January 20, 2018, at the age of ninety-six, finally identified.
Closing
The “We Can Do It!” poster is now the most reproduced image of American women in WWII. It was made for a corporate audience, shown for two weeks to a few thousand factory workers (most of them men) in a single company’s manufacturing plants in early 1943, and then forgotten for thirty-nine years. The image the war years actually used was Rockwell’s. The name came from a song. The actual women whose labor the icon now represents were laid off within eighteen months of the surrender. The model was misidentified for thirty years.
The story is a study in how cultural icons get assembled, and in how thoroughly the eventual meaning of an image can detach from its original purpose. Several of the 1940s pieces in this series share the structure. The New Look reset women’s clothing for explicitly industrial reasons that have largely been forgotten. Brutalism solved a housing crisis through engineering economics that few people now associate with the buildings. Casablanca was wartime propaganda before it was a love story. The Miller poster is the cleanest example.
The image is now exactly what the contemporary audience needs it to be. Almost nothing about that current meaning is what it was when J. Howard Miller delivered the poster in early 1943. The work of cultural memory is to keep finding the images we need. The work of history is to remember that the images came from somewhere specific.