When a copy of the wartime “Rosie the Riveter” poster was rediscovered in the 1980s it became a feminist sensation. Featuring a woman in overalls and a polka-dot bandana, flexing her biceps, it seemed to carry a message about female empowerment that was timeless, yet also timely: “We Can Do It!”
It soon graced T-shirts, mugs and fridge magnets — as well as the human body, in the form of tattoos. It was even restaged for publicity shots, by women as diverse as Beyoncé and Sarah Palin, while Marge Simpson was another recipient of the “Rosie” treatment.
The poster, painted in primary colours by the Pittsburgh artist J Howard Miller, was thought to have been inspired by a photograph of a wartime worker at her lathe, and the American public had accepted the sincere declaration by a Michigan woman that she was the poster girl. Geraldine Hoff Doyle had seen the original photograph and believed it to be of herself, and when she later saw the poster she assumed that it, too, depicted her.
But Geraldine Hoff Doyle was mistaken. In 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 20-year-old Naomi Parker and her younger sister Ada had signed up for work in the machine shop at their local Naval Air Station in Alameda, near San Francisco, repairing aeroplane wings (a job that did, indeed, require riveting skills).
That year there was a hit song about a young woman working on an assembly line: “All the day long, whether rain or shine/ She’s a part of the assembly line/ She’s making history, working for victory/ Rosie the riveter.”
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The name caught the public imagination and a photographer from the Acme press agency came to the Naval Air Station to take pictures that highlighted the strict dress code — no jewellery, hair covered, sturdy shoes — and took one of Parker, attired accordingly, leaning over her lathe. “It ran in newspapers from San Francisco to Washington,” she recalled. “I even got fan mail!” The caption in an Oakland paper declared that the dress code “hasn’t made Miss Naomi Parker any less attractive”.
She cut out the clipping and kept it, but otherwise thought little more of the matter. The “Rosie” phenomenon, meanwhile, was credited with helping to swell the wartime US women’s workforce to 20 million by 1944.
After the war Parker worked as a waitress for many years while acquiring three husbands — she was widowed twice and divorced once — and raising a family. Then in 2011 she and Ada, by then living together again, attended a reunion of wartime women workers at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. There she was stunned to see her photograph captioned as Geraldine Hoff Doyle.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Parker recalled. “I knew it was actually me in the photo.” She wrote to the National Park Service querying the caption and was asked to help them sort out “the true identity of the woman in the photograph”.
When Geraldine Hoff Doyle died in 2010 all her obituaries had lauded her as “Rosie the Riveter”. One woman’s genuine mistake had gone round the world and been accepted as hard fact. But help was at hand for Parker. James Kimble, a professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, had become fascinated — “obsessed”, he admitted — by the story behind the poster.
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In 2006 he had published an article, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster” in the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, so when Geraldine died, acclaimed as Rosie, he was in the perfect position, he recalled, to say: “How do we know?”
His investigations began in earnest. He searched long and hard for the photo with its original caption and finally, through a company in Memphis selling vintage photographs, he found it. The caption read: “Pretty Naomi Parker looks like she might catch her nose in the turret lathe she is operating.” The women wore “safety clothes instead of feminine frills”, the caption continued. “And the girls don’t mind — they’re doing their part. Glamour is secondary these days.”
Kimble tracked down Parker to Cottonwood, California, where she was living with Ada, and in 2015 he visited them. “They were prepared,” he recalled. “They had the photos, they had everything laid out for me, they had all the letters they had written trying to reclaim her identity as the woman in the photograph — it was like a show-and-tell.”
When Parker produced her clipping, Kimble knew he had the right woman. “She had been robbed of her part of history,” he said. “It’s so hurtful to be misidentified like that. It’s like the train has left the station and you’re standing there and there’s nothing you can do because you’re 95 and no one listens to your story.”
But Kimble, if triumphant, was conscientious. What was the evidence that the poster was inspired by the photo of Naomi Parker? Well, the timings were right, said Kimble: “The poster appears in Westinghouse factories in February 1943. Presumably they’re created weeks, possibly months, ahead of time. So I imagine Miller’s working on it in the summer and fall of 1942.” This was, Kimble discovered, before Geraldine Hoff Doyle had even begun her wartime factory work, definitively ruling her out. And the Parker picture did appear in The Pittsburgh Press, so Miller had quite possibly seen it.
“The image carried a timely message about female empowerment
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Whatever the uncertainties about the poster, Kimble had unearthed the truth about the provenance of the photograph. But there was, he felt, a wider significance. “There is a cautionary tale here worth heeding,” he said. “In the age of the internet, stories often multiply and feed upon themselves, citing each other as sources, all distressingly void of independent research.”
Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the third of eight children. Her father was Joseph Parker, a mining engineer, and her mother, Esther (née Leis), raised the family. They travelled around the country until settling in Alameda, California.
In 1942 Naomi married a bricklayer called Joseph Blankenship. She had been going out with his brother, Hugh, but had fallen in love with Joseph. By the time their son, Joseph Jr, came along they were living in Las Vegas — Naomi’s father had invented a machine to collect “black sand”, a source of iron, to contribute to the war effort and the couple had moved to the desert with him to test it (the war ended before it could go into production).
Joseph Jr recalled his mother having a fiery temper. “There were times I saw her throw milk bottles at my dad,” he said. She parted ways with Blankenship, due in part to his alcoholism, and brought up her son alone for a while, working as a waitress to put food on the table.
When Joseph Jr was 15 she asked him: “Would it be OK with you if I marry this man?” He was John Muhlig, who owned a nightclub in Chicago. He had divorced and moved to Palm Springs, where Naomi and Joseph Jr were living, and met her while she was waitressing in a restaurant called Saddle and Sirloin. He died in 1971, and eight years later she was married again, this time to a cook, Charles Fraley, taking on his four sons. He was a minister in the church, and Naomi was also ordained.
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Joseph Jr went on to become an electrical engineer, latterly working on machines making silicon wafer for computer chips.
Fraley died in 1998 and Naomi spent her latter years living with her sister Ada on ten acres of land outside Cottonwood. She was happy to have her own role in the story established beyond doubt. “I didn’t want fame or fortune,” she said in 2016, “but I did want my own identity. The women of this country these days need some icons. If they think I’m one, I’m happy.”
Naomi Parker Fraley, inspiration for “Rosie the Riveter”, was born on August 26, 1921. She died in her sleep on January 20, 2018, aged 96