Olden Life: Who was Rosie the Riveter?
She’s the enduring image of powerful womanhood – eyebrows plucked, biceps bulging. A red, dotted kerchief is tied about her brushed-back hair. She’s steely and resolute, lipsticked and lovely.
Rosie the Riveter came into the world quietly. The original ‘We Can Do It!’ poster, of a then unnamed Rosie, was produced for Westinghouse Electric Corporation by graphic artist J Howard Miller and displayed in the company’s California factories for two weeks in 1943.
This nameless fictional female machinist was plucked from the production line by songwriters John Jacob Loeb and Redd Evans, who wanted to write a song about women working for the war effort. ‘You pick a name for the alliteration and you go ahead and write it,’ they said. Their song celebrated a woman driving rivets on a bomber factory’s assembly line: ‘She’s making history/ Working for victory/ Rosie the Riveter.’
Three months later, in 1943, the Saturday Evening Post commissioned Normal Rockwell to paint a woman war worker. He produced a red-haired woman in denim work clothes, red-painted fingernails, eating a sandwich on her lunch break. Her penny loafers crush a copy of Mein Kampf. ‘ROSIE’ is written on her black lunchbox, tucked behind an enormous rivet gun. Within months, Rosie was America’s most popular nickname for the thousands of female factory workers in the shipyards and bomber plants.
Rosie the Riveter was well known as a Second World War machinist. But she didn’t rise to international fame until the lean 1980s, when the US National Archives was strapped for cash and licensed Miller’s original ‘We Can Do It!’ poster to raise income. This primary-colours strongwoman image quickly became a symbol of female empowerment on mugs, T-shirts, fridge magnets and posters. A new feminist Rosie was born.
But who was Rosie? For years, it was believed a Michigan woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who’d worked as a metal presser in a factory in 1942, was the model for the original Miller poster.
Recently, however, it’s been revealed that the real Rosie the Riveter was a California waitress named Naomi Parker Fraley. In the Second World War, 20-year-old Naomi worked at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California, where her duties included drilling, patching aeroplane wings and riveting. She tied her hair in a polka-dot bandana. A photo of her taken at the time bears a strong resemblance to Miller’s first poster image.
On 20 January 2018, Naomi Parker Fraley died, aged 96, just two years after her image had been recognised. But Rosie the Riveter lives on. Hillary Clinton paraded images of Rosie in her presidential campaign. Pop icon Beyoncé posted Rosie on her Instagram account. Girls
dress up in copies of her blue boilersuit and red polka-dot headband for parties.
And the circus show I work for, Strongwomen Science, is inspired by her combination of female strength and girlish glamour. Our two women performers – both scientists turned circus artists – pump their arms in imitation of her famous, defiant pose. They wear boilersuits and brightly coloured kerchiefs, a ‘We Can Do It!’ poster propped up behind them. Rosie’s style, along with her spirit, lives on. Strongwomen Science, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 30th-31st July, & Buckingham Palace, 24th-26th August