Real Rosie who inspired feminist symbol dies

For most of her life, a waitress from northern California named Naomi Parker Fraley kept a press photograph of herself working a factory lathe in March 1942.

It was only in her final years that this photograph became proof that she was part of American mythology, as the probable model for Rosie the Riveter, the can-do wartime image that became a feminist symbol. Ms Fraley, who died on Saturday at the age of 96, was identified as the likely inspiration for Rosie by James Kimble, a professor of communications, in a 2016 paper. The spirited riveter had many wartime incarnations, attached to several women. Norman Rockwell painted a female riveter in overalls for a cover in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, a rivet gun on her lap and the name Rosie on her overalls. His model was a young telephone operator from Virginia called Mary Doyle Keefe.But there was another Rosie, who appeared with a polka dotted handkerchief on her head, flexing a bicep and looking resolute in posters that went up on the walls of Westinghouse Electric Corporation plants early in 1943. The image, by J Howard Miller, an artist from Pittsburgh, was meant only to deter strikes at the plants. The image resurfaced in the 1980s and steadily became a feminist symbol.

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who had worked briefly in a factory in Michigan in 1942, thought she might be the woman standing at a lathe in a press photograph that seemed to have inspired the poster. The Michigan state senate honoured her and the photograph of the woman at the lathe was widely identified as a shot of Mrs Doyle, who died in 2010.

But the picture was actually of Mrs Fraley, a retired waitress from California who had worked at a factory in Alameda during the war. In 2011 Mrs Fraley and her sister attended a reunion of female wartime workers in California, where she was surprised to see a photograph of herself bearing the caption ‘‘Geraldine Hoff Doyle’’.

She wrote to the National Park Service, attaching the newspaper clipping bearing the photograph, which identified her as its subject. By now Dr Kimble, of Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He found another press clipping, dated March 24, 1942, bearing the caption: ‘‘Pretty Naomi Parker looks like she might catch her nose in the turret lathe she is operating.’’

When he told her of his research, her reaction was ‘‘a sense of relief’’. He added: ‘‘Just imagine walking around with a photo of yourself and everyone else says its someone else. No one would listen to her.’’

Dr Kimble felt it was important to distinguish between history and mythology, although Rosie was a symbol larger than one individual. Mrs Fraley would approve. She told a local magazine: ‘‘Rosie was all of us.’’