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For those unfamiliar with the name “Rosie the Riveter”, she’s the woman on the popular “We can do it” posters from World War II.


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...


You can hear the original song on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2E613J9m0I

"Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage

Sitting up there on the fuselage..."


> No-one associated the label with the Westinghouse poster until the early '80s.

I assure you, to many born after the '80s it's the Rockwell cover and the song that are obscure.


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.




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