We Can Do It! (Rosie the Riveter)

1943

Date: 1943 · Place: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Westinghouse Electric internal poster) · Figures: J. Howard Miller, illustrator · Geraldine Hoff Doyle and Naomi Parker Fraley, candidate models · Penny Colman, historian who surfaces the poster in 1994 · Tags: Poster, Wartime, Rediscovery, Feminism 01. Two-Week Factory Poster In February 1943 the Westinghouse War Production Coordinating Committee posts J. Howard Miller's We Can Do It! inside Midwest plants for roughly two weeks. The audience is female line workers. The purpose is to discourage absenteeism, not to celebrate them. Fewer than 1,800 copies ever print. The poster vanishes back into Westinghouse archives by March. Through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s the image is functionally unknown. The wartime woman-in-the-workforce icon of record is instead Norman Rockwell's muscular Saturday Evening Post cover from May 29, 1943, which Westinghouse never used. 02. 1982 Rediscovery as Replicator The Washington Post Magazine reprints Miller's poster in 1982 inside a National Archives feature. Second-wave feminist publishers grab it. By the late 1980s it appears on mugs, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and the cover of Smithsonian Magazine in 1994. The bandana, the bicep, the speech bubble lock into a single readable unit. The image becomes the meme it was never designed to be. Geraldine Hoff Doyle claims herself as the model in 1984; Naomi Parker Fraley produces stronger photographic evidence in 2015. The replicator outlives both candidates. "We Can Do It!" — J. Howard Miller, Westinghouse internal poster, February 1943 03. Posthumous Memetic Life By 2008 the bandana-and-flex composition is on Hillary Clinton campaign merchandise, Beyoncé Instagram posts, and Halloween costume racks. The original Westinghouse purpose (work harder, complain less) is fully overwritten by the audience purpose (women working at all). Rosie is one of the earliest cases of a sleeping image waking up four decades after print as a self-replicating symbol. The lesson is template: a poster's meaning is set by the audience that finds it, not the client that paid for it. Sources • James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson, 'Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter,' Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2006 • Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II (Crown, 1995) • William L. Bird and Harry R. Rubenstein, Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) • Margot McCain, 'The Woman Behind Rosie the Riveter Dies at 96,' The New York Times, January 22, 2018