If you haven't been to the Rosie the Riveter museum in Richmond, it's worth the visit. The history of Kaiser and the Richmond shipyards is incredible. The number of ships produced per day was crazy. It's a nice walk around the Richmond marina as well.
^---I came here to say this. It's a terrific museum -- we basically won World War II because we produced ships faster than the Axis. (And it's nice to see a museum that recognizes the role of civilians in the war effort.)
The Westinghouse "We Can Do It" woman is not Rosie the Riveter, though. No-one associated the label with the Westinghouse poster until the early '80s. And the Westinghouse poster was deeply obscure during the war, unlike the Rockwell cover and the "Rosie the Riveter" song. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter#Westinghouse...
Rosie the Riveter was a general concept and cultural icon. Songs, posters, and more were made about her. Rosie was the cultural representation of "Women entering the workforce as the men went to war".
Naomi Parker is the woman who was photographed, and then her photograph was used to create the (repopularized in the 1980s) Westinghouse "We can Do It" poster, often called "Rosie the Riveter".
You can see the resemblance in the clothes: the polka-dot bandana on the head of the famous 80s picture, which Naomi Parker was wearing in those early photographs...
According to various news sources, Naomi Parker didn't know that she was the inspiration to the Westinghouse picture until 2015.
I was unfamiliar with the name, but it only took a few seconds to guess thats who she was! I knew the poster had to do, at least tangentially, with building aircraft and they used a lot of rivets...
What I didn't know until I read this article is that that actually wasn't the original Rosie the Riveter, but a poster that was discovered in the eighties.
Naomi is the name of a biblical figure who, along with her daughter-in-law Ruth, is among the most fully-fleshed-out women in the Hebrew canon (Old Testament, Book of Ruth). The Ruth story itself gets a lot of play in both the Christian and Jewish worlds, both because of the central loyalty aspect of the story, and because Ruth was to become King David's great grandmother.
