Naomi Parker Fraley, The Real WWII “Rosie the Riveter,” Born
Naomi Parker Fraley, the model for the now-iconic “Rosie the Riveter” WW II poster, was born on this day.
For decades, there was confusion over the identify of the real model. Fraley was not correctly identified until 2016. Until then, several other women had been regarded as the real model. Fraley’s identify was confirmed in 2016 by Professor James J. Kimble, Associate Professor of Communications and Arts at Seton Hall University, in an article in scholarly journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs.
Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the third of eight children. Her family moved several times, because of her father’s work as a mining engineer. They finally settled in Alameda, California, in the Bay Area. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the 20-year-old Naomi went to work at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, where she was assigned to the machine shop. A photographer took a picture of her working at a lathe, with her hair tied wit her hair in a bun with a bandana for safety. After the war she married, became a housewife, and raised a family.
There were in fact several different versions of “Rosie” during and after World War III. One was the subject of a song, “Rosie the Riveter,” which became a hit record by bandleader Kay Kyser. Another was featured in a painting by the noted artist Norman Rockwell, which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943. A third was a poster displayed at Westinghouse Electric Corporation plants in 1943. The latter, painted by the artist J. Howard Miller, was long thought to be the original version.
Although the “Rosie the Riveter” poster known to Americans today, and assumed to have been a long-standing icon of women workers in the war, it did not begin to achieve that status until the 1980s, when a copy was found in the National Archives. It was taken up by the modern feminist movement, and has since been revised and parodied in many different versions.
Learn more at the American Rosie the Riveter Association web site.
Learn more about the history of Rosie the Riveter.
Read: Donna B. Knaff, Beyond Rosie the Riveter: Women of World War II in American Popular Graphic Art (2012)