Produced in 1943 by J. Howard Miller for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's War Production Coordinating Committee, this poster was intended as an internal motivational piece for Westinghouse factory workers — not a public propaganda artifact. It was displayed in Westinghouse plants for two weeks in February 1943 and then largely forgotten until its rediscovery in the early 1980s as a feminist iconographic recovery.
The image depicts a woman in blue work shirt and red bandanna flexing her bicep above the caption 'We Can Do It!' The model has been identified variously as Naomi Parker Fraley, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, and others; the historiographic question is unsettled. The poster was conflated retrospectively with Norman Rockwell's 1943 'Rosie the Riveter' Saturday Evening Post cover, with which it shares no visual lineage but with which it has been merged in popular memory.
The poster is now in the National Museum of American History (Smithsonian). Since the 1980s rediscovery it has become one of the most reproduced images in twentieth-century American visual culture — appropriated across feminism, labor politics, advertising, parody, and political campaign messaging from both left and right. The trajectory from internal-industrial poster to global feminist iconography is one of the most documented case studies in modern image-circulation theory.
