Was She Really Rosie?
The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.
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After Mahsa Amini was arrested in Tehran for wearing her hijab “improperly” in September 2022, she was reportedly viciously beaten and died in detention. Angry protests soon erupted in Iran and around the world. In support of them, Ghazal Foroutan, an Iranian graphic artist who teaches at Augusta University in Georgia, created an image inspired by the figure we know as “Rosie the Riveter,” and posted it on Instagram, allowing viewers to share the file for free.
Foroutan’s “Rosie” is an Iranian woman demanding her freedom: she waves her headscarf in her hand; it’s white, an emblem of peace. On her arm she bears a tattoo: “No to compulsory hijab.”
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In fact, as rhetoricians James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson have demonstrated, “We Can Do It” was produced by artist J. Howard Miller as part of a work-incentive campaign for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. One of many genres of propaganda produced during WWII, work-incentive images were designed to promote wartime productivity and ease tensions between labor and management, averting potential strikes.
As JSTOR Daily has previously pointed out, Miller’s image was not a recruitment poster, and the figure it depicted was not named “Rosie the Riveter.” She had no name at all. The image would likely have been identified only by its slogan: “We Can Do It.” Instead, the phrase “Rosie the Riveter” was the title of a 1943 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb as well as that of a 1943 Norman Rockwell cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post.
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