AP Postscript Naomi Parker Fraley: The Improbable Icon of Feminism 1921-2018

James J. Kimble is professor of communication and the arts at Seton Hall University.

Naomi Parker Fraley died on the day of the 2018 Women’s March. For countless women who demonstrated at that event, Fraley was an empowering feminist symbol. Less than two years earlier, media reports had named the previously unheralded Californian as the most likely inspiration for Rosie the Riveter’s famous incarnation: J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” poster.

Yet Fraley, who died in January at the age of 96, turns out to have been an improbable icon of the feminist struggle, not to mention the many progressive causes that have embraced her likeness.


There is no doubt that Fraley knew how to drive a rivet. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as Naomi Fern Parker, she ended up near San Francisco with her family by the eve of World War II. The Pearl Harbor attack drew Fraley and her younger sister, Ada, to the nearby Alameda Naval Air Station. They were among the first of scores of women who would staff the base’s machine shop for the going rate of 50 cents per hour. To repair the Navy’s combat-damaged aircraft, they quickly learned how to weld, drill, buck and, yes, rivet.

In March 1942, an Acme photographer visited the sprawling base to document the pioneering women who were capably doing what most folks at the time agreed was a man’s job. The unnamed photographer captured Fraley in profile operating an industrial machine. Her polka-dotted bandanna and coveralls perfectly embodied the spirit of Rosie the Riveter (although that name, coined by songwriters Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, would not become popular until later that year when their hit “Rosie the Riveter” began to gain radio play).

The Acme photo would touch Fraley’s life at two different points. The first, through the spring and summer of 1942, resulted from its initial publication in newspapers and magazines nationwide. The accompanying editorial captions, in retrospect, were demeaning. (One example: “Pretty Naomi Parker is as easy to look at as overtime pay on the week’s check.”) Nonetheless, the picture made her a minor homefront celebrity for a while. As she told me in a 2015 interview, she even received a few marriage proposals in her correspondence.

After the war, however, she set the photo clipping aside, where it would be all but forgotten for decades. Indeed, like many other Rosies, Fraley gladly left all reminders of her industrial work behind to embrace a domestic life. But as her son, Joe Blankenship, remembered in a memorial service eulogy, a rocky marriage with her first husband forced her into a series of hourly jobs, frequently as a restaurant server. Here, an independent, no-nonsense nature surfaced, as in the time at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel when she dumped hot soup on a customer who had dared to grope her.

Yet not even that proto #MeToo moment—nor her 1958 divorce—could disguise a surprisingly traditional outlook on life. As her son recalled, she saw it as her duty, as a proper lady, to highlight her feminine appearance. She also believed that a gentleman was obligated to open doors for a woman, and to offer her a hand when she stepped off a curb. It was, she thought, a matter of respect for both parties.

Fraley’s conventional philosophy also surfaced in her fervent Christian faith. In 1978, from their rural home near Cottonwood, California, she and two of her sisters became ordained ministers who would perform together in a spiritual singing troupe; of the songs Fraley composed, she favored “America, Come Back to the LORD.” Her third husband, Charles Fraley, was also a minister. In nearly 20 years together, they preached widely across the West and even aimed to bring their evangelism to the homeless.

In 2011, by now not only a divorcée but also a two-time widow, Fraley’s 1942 Acme photograph touched her life once again. At a reunion of war-era Rosies, she spied the photo in a historical display. The display proclaimed that the photo had inspired Miller’s famous “We Can Do It!” poster for Westinghouse (a claim, I should add, that remains speculative). It also identified the woman in the photo as Geraldine Hoff Doyle, of Michigan.

Fraley soon discovered, to her dismay, that Doyle’s claim to be the woman in the photo—and, most likely, the unwitting model for the Westinghouse poster—had become a widely accepted truth in the media. And try as she might, Fraley could find no one who would listen to her attempts to correct the record. For four years, until my research into the origins of the poster brought me to her door, she struggled to regain her identity. As she told me in that 2015 encounter, the helplessness she felt was as painful and personal as any identity theft.

Not long after our meeting, though, Fraley did get to reclaim her identity as the woman in the Acme photo. People magazine, ever on the lookout for a celebrity sighting, was eager to follow up on my academic article that had revealed Fraley’s identity as the woman in the 1942 Acme photo and, quite possibly, as the real “We Can Do It!” model. The magazine sent a reporter, a photographer, a lighting technician and a makeup artist to Fraley’s Northern California home. The resulting glamour shot was an intentional echo of the Westinghouse image, with the 95-year old Fraley posing in coveralls and a bandanna next to a banner headline: “Meet the Real Rosie.”

For the last years of her life, then, Fraley was once again able to enjoy a measure of celebrity. To be sure, the struggle to regain the lost identity had been the most important priority to her and her family. Still, she didn’t mind the accompanying fame. As she told People, “The women of this country these days need some icons. If they think I’m one, I’m happy about that.”

And so it was that, on the day she died, Fraley’s name was on the lips of many a demonstrator at the Women’s March in cities across the country. Unbeknownst to those marchers, it made for a strange juxtaposition: a traditional, conservative woman serving as the icon of a host of progressive and liberal causes. Perhaps it’s just as well. Whether or not Naomi Parker Fraley was the real “We Can Do It!” model, her historical legacy is now assured. Her memory, in this divided nation, now belongs to us all.