392 We Can Do It !

It has been established that Leeds Postcards made this image accessible and popular throughout the world since publishing and distributing in 1986. well done us!

We Did It !

How an obscure in-house WWII corporate poster became a popular progressive meme

A major World War II feminist/labor icon which has inspired hundreds of modified homages is popularly known as “Rosie the Riveter,” memorialized in numerous posters, magazine covers, t-shirts, coffee mugs and advertisements. This spunky gal is proudly holding up her buffed arm and encouraging us to get it done.

The problem is, she’s not Rosie the Riveter. Her thought balloon says: “We Can Do It!”, and she was produced by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller as an in-house poster by the Westinghouse corporation’s War Production Coordinating Committee in 1942.

It was displayed for only two weeks in their Midwest factories where women were making helmet liners. Ed Reis, Volunteer Historian for Westinghouse, was interviewed in 2003 by California Federation of Teachers publications director Jane Hundertmark, and he explained that Westinghouse made 13 million plastic helmet liners out of a material called Mycarta, the predecessor of Formica (which means “formerly Mycarta”). On the other hand, “Rosie the Riveter” was a snappy and highly publicized national meme.

Even during a war with broad public support such as WWII, the government needed media to maintain patriotic participation in the face of hardship and despair. The Office of War Information (1942-1945) was the principal agency responsible for that task. And when the workforce started to run out of men, the nation needed women.

The phrase, “Rosie the Riveter” had entered the public sphere on the radio as a snappy song with that title by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. In 1944 Republic Pictures released the musical film, “Rosie the Riveter” During the war, the most popular image of “Rosie the Riveter” was a painting by Norman Rockwell that appeared on a cover of a May 29, 1943 Saturday Evening Post.

But how and when did the popular “Rosie the Riveter” term get indelibly linked to an obscure WWII poster image? The most thorough academic analysis of this meme is “Visual rhetoric representing Rosie the Riveter: myth and misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ poster” by James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson, published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Winter 2006. The authors scratch their heads and note that “Thus far the earliest reproduction of (or reference to) the ‘We Can Do It!’ poster that we have found in the postwar years is in a 1982 Washington Post Magazine article that discussed poster reproductions then available from the National Archives.” Well, they were on the right track. Nailing down the details of art history require a lot of digging. As a graphic activist with many connections in the social justice community, I started by looking through mail order catalogs and advertisements in alternative publications – the way people used to learn about new posters before the Internet. What I found was a fascinating confluence of feminist and labor media efforts influencing each other, directly and indirectly.

The key step was made by Helaine Victoria Press, the feminist/labor publishing organization co-founded by pioneers Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Taylor Victoria Poore. They’d met in 1972 and moved to Indiana a few years later.

Circa late 1970s – The U.S. National Archives produce a postcard of the WCDI image. According to a footnote in Kimble and Olson’s essay, the poster is so popular that the National Archives ranks it among its top ten most requested images.

1982-1983 – Helaine Victoria Press begins distributing postcards from the National Archives. HVP co-founder Jocelyn Cohen remembers: “The NA had several propaganda postcards from posters with women and the war effort and we sold those too. But Rosie was the one that sold like hotcakes.”

1985 – Helaine Victoria Press produces their own version of WCDI postcard, from one seen at National Archives, tying “Rosie the Riveter” title to the WCDI image for the first time in the backside caption.

1986 - Leeds Postcards (England) publishes their own edition after successfully carrying the HVP version.(their independent distribution sells it through UK and Internationally and back to the USA via VisionWorks in Greenland Mass.

 

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