The image shows a determined-looking woman wearing a red polka-dot bandana and blue work coveralls, rolling up her sleeve to flex her right bicep. Above her, bold white text on a dark blue speech bubble reads "We Can Do It!" The woman has painted fingernails, visible eyelashes, and wears a Westinghouse employee badge on her collar10. The poster measures 17 by 22 inches, and no more than 1,800 copies were originally printed5.

Despite its massive modern recognition, this was never meant to be a public recruitment poster. It was one of over 42 internal morale posters Miller designed for Westinghouse, each displayed for just two weeks before being swapped out7. The specific factories targeted were in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where mostly women were making plasticized helmet liners from Micarta, a phenolic resin invented by Westinghouse5. Those workers produced roughly 13 million helmet liners during the war11.

The collective "we" in the slogan almost certainly referred to Westinghouse employees as a whole, not women specifically10. Most of Miller's other posters in the series featured men and promoted management authority and company unity7.

In 1942, Westinghouse Electric's internal War Production Coordinating Committee hired Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller through an advertising agency to create a series of morale-boosting posters4. Miller, who had studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and graduated in 1939, was largely unknown outside this commission5. Professor James J. Kimble later uncovered that Miller was born in 1898 and died in 1985, married to Mabel Adair McCauley7.

The poster project aimed to raise worker morale, reduce absenteeism, direct workers' questions to management, and lower the chance of labor unrest or strikes5. The "We Can Do It!" poster was scheduled for display starting Monday, February 15, 1943, for two five-day work weeks, ending February 287. After those two weeks, it was taken down and replaced by the next poster in the rotation.

The poster had zero public visibility during the war. It was strictly internal to Westinghouse and was not used for recruitment10. As scholars James Kimble and Lester Olson later argued in their 2006 article in *Rhetoric & Public Affairs*, the image functioned more as corporate labor management than feminist empowerment, with "patriotism invoked to circumvent strikes and characterize workers' unrest as un-American"10.

The poster is one of the ten most-requested images at the National Archives and Records Administration5. It appeared on a U.S. first-class mail stamp in 1999 and has been featured at the National Museum of American History9.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have adopted the imagery. Hillary Clinton supporters used it in 2008, Sarah Palin supporters in 20124, and it was reworked for Australia's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 20107.

The Geraldine Doyle / Naomi Parker Fraley identity mystery generated significant media coverage. The *New York Times* published Parker Fraley's obituary in January 2018, identifying her as the most likely inspiration for the broader "Rosie" archetype1. Dr. Kimble's six-year investigation into the poster's origins became a story in itself about myth-making in American culture1.

Norman Rockwell's original "Rosie the Riveter" painting, often confused with Miller's poster, sold for $5 million in 2002 and is now in the permanent collection at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art2.

The academic study of the poster, particularly Kimble and Olson's 2006 paper, shifted scholarly understanding of how wartime propaganda gets reinterpreted. Their key insight was that the "We Can Do It!" poster was not a feminist statement in its original context but a labor management tool, and its modern meaning was entirely constructed decades later10.

The story of the "We Can Do It!" poster is fundamentally a story about how meaning gets invented after the fact. Nothing about the image's original context suggested it would become a global symbol of anything.

### The Wartime Context

After Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, American factories scrambled to increase war production8. The workplace was tense. Management and labor unions had spent the 1930s building up resentment, and the sudden demand for production created friction5. General Motors produced a propaganda poster in 1942 reading "Together We Can Do It!" and "Keep 'Em Firing!" to align labor and management7. Westinghouse followed a similar playbook, commissioning Miller's poster series to manage its workforce. Nearly 19 million women held jobs during WWII, though only about 3 million were new entrants to the workforce; most had previously worked in lower-paying positions6.

The cultural landscape included other, far more prominent "Rosie" imagery. The term "Rosie the Riveter" originated from a 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, which described a tireless assembly line worker6. Norman Rockwell then painted his famous *Saturday Evening Post* cover on May 29, 1943, showing a muscular woman on her lunch break with her foot on a copy of Hitler's *Mein Kampf*9. That painting, not Miller's poster, was the famous "Rosie" during the war. Rockwell's version was used in War Bond drives and became hugely popular, but its copyrighted status limited reproduction after the war9.

### The 1980s Renaissance

When feminist and labor organizations began looking for strong visual symbols in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the uncopyrighted Miller poster was a perfect find. The National Archives had reproduced it as a postcard sometime in the late 1970s11. Connie Field's 1980 documentary *The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter* revived interest in women's wartime labor, though it didn't use the "We Can Do It!" image in its promotion11.

The 1982 *Washington Post Magazine* article brought the poster to wider public attention4. From there, feminist distributors like Helaine Victoria Press and organizations like the Northland Poster Collective and Syracuse Cultural Workers put it in catalogs, on T-shirts, and on postcards throughout the mid-to-late 1980s11. Each reproduction reinforced the (historically inaccurate) reading of the poster as a feminist call to arms.

By 1994, the image was iconic enough to land on the *Smithsonian* cover. By 1999, it was a postage stamp. Academics began studying it seriously. Kimble and Olson's 2006 paper in *Rhetoric & Public Affairs* was the first rigorous analysis of how the poster's meaning had been constructed retroactively10. They documented how the image went from corporate labor management to feminist symbol through a series of misattributions, recontextualizations, and good timing.

### Internet Meme Evolution

Online, the poster's simple visual grammar made it a natural template. The format is highly "exploitable" in meme terms: replace the woman with any character, change the text, and you have a statement. Political campaigns have used it. Brands have used it (including, as one scholar noted, for selling household cleaners10). Cosplayers regularly dress as the poster woman at conventions, with the coveralls-and-bandana look becoming a recognizable costume4.

The image has been remixed for causes ranging from abortion rights to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns to Black WWII welder tributes11. Each adaptation strips away more of the original Westinghouse context and layers on new meaning. This is, in a sense, the defining characteristic of the meme: the gap between what it was (a two-week corporate poster for helmet liner factory workers) and what people believe it was (a bold feminist statement from the Greatest Generation).