In the spring of 2017, millions of women marching in the Women’s March on Washington carried posters of a bandana-clad figure flexing her bicep above the bold letters “We Can Do It!” That image—today almost universally called “Rosie the Riveter”—has become a global shorthand for female strength, feminist defiance, and the idea that war can unlock revolutionary social change. It adorns T-shirts, coffee mugs, corporate diversity slides, and political memes. A 2023 survey by the National Museum of American History found that nearly eight in ten Americans recognized the image, and two‑thirds associated it with women’s empowerment.
There is only one problem: that interpretation is almost entirely ahistorical. The famous “We Can Do It!” poster was never called “Rosie the Riveter” during World War II. It was not a government recruitment poster, nor was it aimed at women. It was produced for an internal company campaign at a single Westinghouse plant in Pennsylvania, displayed for two weeks in February 1943, and then forgotten for nearly four decades. The woman in the poster is not even a riveter—she wears no safety goggles, no protective gloves, and her unbuttoned collar would have violated factory safety rules. More importantly, the wartime propaganda machine that mobilized millions of women into industrial labor had no interest in permanently altering gender roles. As soon as the war ended, that same machine pivoted overnight, urging women back into the home to make way for returning servicemen.
This essay argues that “Rosie the Riveter”—both the actual propaganda of 1941–1945 and its later feminist revival—reveals the profound limits of visual persuasion. Despite the iconic poster’s afterlife, most women did not work in heavy industry; those who did faced systematic discrimination, lower pay, and sexual harassment; and the state’s messaging was always less about liberation than about temporary patriotic sacrifice. By revisiting the historical record—company memos, oral histories, government pamphlets, and the sharp postwar reversal—we can see that the “empowerment” narrative is a late‑twentieth‑century invention. And that invention, ironically, tells us more about the 1980s and 1990s than about the 1940s.
The Strange Afterlife of a Forgotten Poster
The image we now call “Rosie the Riveter” was created by J. Howard Miller, a Pittsburgh commercial artist hired by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s War Production Coordinating Committee. In early 1943, Westinghouse ran an internal campaign to reduce absenteeism and boost productivity among its largely male workforce. Miller produced a series of twenty‑four posters; the “We Can Do It!” design was one of them. It was hung on plant bulletin boards for two weeks, then taken down and never distributed nationally. It was not photographed for magazines, not featured in government films, and not remembered by any Westinghouse employee interviewed in the 1980s. As art historian Charles A. Riley II dryly observed, the poster “vanished from public memory for nearly forty years.”
So how did it become the face of American women in World War II? The answer lies in the 1980s. In 1982, the National Archives included the poster in a traveling exhibition called Posters of World War II. A Washington Post reporter misidentified it as a recruitment poster for female defense workers. Two years later, a reproduction appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s special issue “Women in the 20th Century.” By 1990, the image had been reprinted as a greeting card, a postage stamp, and—most consequentially—a feminist poster. The anonymous worker was retroactively named “Rosie the Riveter,” conflating Miller’s design with Norman Rockwell’s very different 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover.
Rockwell’s Rosie is a far more complex artifact. Painted for the May 29, 1943, issue, it depicts a monumental woman in a denim uniform, goggles pushed up on her forehead, a rivet gun in her lap, and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf crushed under her steel‑toed boot. She eats a sandwich, her pose echoing Michelangelo’s prophet Isaiah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This Rosie is muscular, even intimidating. But she was not government propaganda; she was a commercial illustration, later used for a war bond drive. And after the war, she too faded from public view—until the 1990s, when her painting sold for nearly five million dollars and found a permanent home in the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Today, Miller’s poster is far more famous, largely because it is in the public domain. But its fame rests on a historical mistake. The internal Westinghouse memo that commissioned Miller explicitly asked for “posters to stimulate production” with “no reference to the war overseas.” The phrase “We Can Do It!” was not a feminist rallying cry. It was an efficiency slogan directed at male supervisors, telling them that a temporary female workforce could handle the job—if properly managed. That is a very different message.
What the Posters Don’t Show: The Reality of Women’s Wartime Work
Between 1940 and 1945, the number of working women in the United States rose from twelve million to eighteen million. About six million women entered the workforce for the first time. Those numbers are impressive, but they require careful unpacking. Most of these women did not work in heavy industry. By 1944, women made up 34 percent of the aircraft industry workforce, 25 percent of shipbuilding, and only 14 percent of steel production. The vast majority of new female workers went into clerical jobs—nearly half—or light manufacturing. The iconic image of a woman riveting a B‑17 bomber was statistically exceptional. For every Rosie at a rivet gun, there were three women typing or filing.
Working conditions for those who did enter factories were poor. Women were paid significantly less than men for the same work—on average about 65 percent of male wages. At the Willow Run bomber plant in Michigan, female riveters earned eighty‑five cents per hour while men doing identical work earned one dollar and twenty cents. Union contracts often explicitly maintained separate wage scales. Sexual harassment was endemic. Oral histories collected by the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, reveal a grim pattern. One former shipyard worker recalled: “The men would grab you. They said we were taking their jobs. The foreman said, ‘If you can’t take a joke, go home.’” Another described being followed to her car after night shifts. These experiences never appeared in the posters.
Childcare was another gaping omission. The federal government did fund some childcare through the Lanham Act of 1941, but it was never universal. By 1944, only about 130,000 children were in federally subsidized daycares—less than 10 percent of the children of working mothers. Most women relied on relatives, neighbors, or left older children in charge. A 1943 Women’s Bureau report found that 45 percent of working mothers with children under fourteen had no regular childcare arrangement. The propaganda posters never showed a woman wrestling with a sick child at six in the morning before a twelve‑hour shift. They never showed the exhaustion, the guilt, or the makeshift solutions.
The historian Ruth Milkman, in her influential study Gender at Work, compared employment data from the auto and electrical industries. She found that women were hired only into jobs previously classified as “light” or “female” work. They were systematically excluded from higher‑paying, more skilled positions. And when the war ended, seniority rules and union agreements—many of them written precisely to protect male jobs—pushed women out with remarkable speed. Milkman concluded that the wartime experience was less a revolution than a temporary reallocation within a deeply gendered labor system. The posters, in this view, were not harbingers of change. They were a Band‑Aid on a broken structure.
The Propaganda of Temporary Sacrifice
To understand what the wartime propaganda actually said—not what we remember it saying—we have to look at the government’s own guidelines. The Office of War Information (OWI) was the federal agency responsible for shaping all official messaging. In 1942, the OWI published a pamphlet titled Women in the War. Its opening sentence read: “This is a temporary emergency. Women are needed to fill the gap. When the men come home, women will return to their primary duty: the home.” That was not a side comment; it was the core message.
The OWI explicitly instructed advertisers and poster artists to avoid suggesting that women would keep industrial jobs after the war. A confidential memo from the War Manpower Commission, dated June 1943, stated: “Materials should emphasize that women’s employment is a patriotic duty, not a career opportunity. The post‑war family must be protected.” In other words, the government was careful to frame women’s factory work as sacrifice, not liberation. The nation was borrowing women’s labor, not granting them new rights.
This distinguishes the United States from other belligerents. Nazi Germany’s propaganda initially resisted mobilizing women for factory work at all, clinging to the “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church) ideal. Only after the disaster at Stalingrad in 1943 did Germany reluctantly conscript women, and its posters were notably less heroic—often showing women as grim, duty‑bound figures rather than triumphant workers. The Soviet Union, by contrast, celebrated women as tractor drivers and snipers, but within a communist ideology that already claimed gender equality on paper while enforcing rigid labor conscription. The American approach was more effective at generating voluntary labor precisely because it wrapped industrial work in the flag while promising a return to normalcy. It was a masterful piece of rhetorical engineering: get women to do the work without threatening the gender order.
The labor historian Leila Rupp, in her book Mobilizing Women for War, analyzed hundreds of wartime posters, films, and radio scripts. She found a consistent pattern: women were addressed as wives and mothers first, workers second. Even the most famous recruitment posters—those showing a smiling woman in overalls—almost always included a domestic cue. A woman might be holding a rivet gun, but her hair was perfectly coiffed. She might be standing at a lathe, but her lipstick was bright red. The message was: you can do this work and remain feminine, and it will end soon. The scholar Maureen Honey, in Creating Rosie the Riveter, argues that this dual messaging was not a contradiction but a strategy. By reassuring men (and women) that femininity was intact, the propaganda made female labor palatable. It also made the postwar reversal easier to sell.
The Sharp Pivot of 1945–1946
The moment the war ended, the propaganda machine reversed course with breathtaking speed. In August 1945, the War Manpower Commission released a film called The Veteran Comes Home. In it, a returning soldier searches for work, only to find “a woman at his lathe.” The implication was clear: women were blocking the men who had fought for their country. By November, Good Housekeeping magazine ran an article titled “Why Don’t You Go Home?” accompanied by photographs of tearful children reaching for their mothers. The caption read: “Your job is done. Your family needs you now.”
The federal government’s own Women’s Bureau—the very agency that had helped recruit female workers—released a 1946 report titled The Outlook for Women in Industry. It bluntly advised: “Women are urged to seek employment in traditional fields such as domestic service, retail, and office work. Heavy industry is not a suitable long‑term environment for most women.” The report did not mention the women who had spent four years learning to weld, rivet, or operate a crane. It did not acknowledge the thousands who had been injured on the job. It simply erased them.
The results were dramatic. Between 1945 and 1947, the percentage of women working in heavy industry fell by 80 percent. Some of that decline was voluntary—many women wanted to leave physically demanding jobs. But a large share was coerced. Seniority rules, which favored men who had been in the plant before the war, were reinstated. Union contracts negotiated in 1944 and 1945 explicitly gave returning veterans priority over all female workers. And in many cases, women were simply fired with a letter of thanks and a small severance. A 1947 survey by the Women’s Bureau found that 72 percent of women who had held industrial jobs during the war wanted to keep working—but only 34 percent were still employed in any capacity two years later.
The historian Susan Hartmann, in her early work The Home Front and Beyond, called this “the great pushback.” She argued that the wartime experience did create a lasting shift in attitudes—more women expected to work, more husbands accepted the idea—but the structures of employment remained largely unchanged. Women who returned to the workforce in the 1950s were concentrated in teaching, nursing, clerical work, and retail. The Rosie the Riveter of memory, who supposedly proved that women could do any job, had no place in the postwar economy. She was a memory that the culture deliberately suppressed until the feminist revival of the 1980s brought her back—but in a sanitized, decontextualized form.
The Feminist Reinvention and Its Ironies
When second‑wave feminists rediscovered Miller’s poster in the 1980s, they saw a symbol they desperately needed. The Equal Rights Amendment had failed to be ratified in 1982. The conservative backlash against feminism was in full swing. And here was an image of a strong, unsmiling woman rolling up her sleeve—no apron, no children, no husband in the background. The fact that the poster had never actually been about female empowerment was irrelevant. It looked like empowerment. And in the politics of visual culture, looking like something can be more powerful than being something.
The feminist art historian Maria Elena Buszek has traced this reinvention in detail. She notes that the first reprints of the poster in the early 1980s were sold at women’s bookstores and used in labor union campaigns. By the 1990s, the image had been adopted by mainstream feminist organizations, then by corporations for diversity training, then by advertisers selling everything from jeans to pickup trucks. Each reuse stripped away more historical context. The Westinghouse memo was forgotten. The two‑week run was forgotten. The fact that the woman in the poster was not even a riveter was forgotten. What remained was a pure icon: female strength.
But this reinvention came with ironies. First, the poster’s wartime meaning—that women’s industrial work was a temporary sacrifice—was diametrically opposed to the feminist meaning of permanent capability. Second, the poster’s actual audience (male supervisors) was erased in favor of an imagined audience of empowered women. Third, the poster’s success as a feminist symbol depended on ignoring the millions of women who had been pushed back into low‑wage, precarious work after 1945. The poster became a feel‑good lie: yes, women can do anything, and the war proved it. The messy reality of discrimination, harassment, and postwar expulsion was edited out.
The historian Stephanie Coontz, in The Way We Never Were, argues that this kind of selective memory is not unique to feminism. All political movements reinvent the past. But the Rosie case is particularly stark because the gap between the symbol and the history is so wide. The poster is not a photograph; it is an illustration. It does not document reality; it projects a wish. And that wish, in 1943, was not women’s liberation. It was keeping the factory running until the men came home.
Conclusion: What Rosie Teaches Us About Propaganda
So what can we learn from the strange journey of J. Howard Miller’s forgotten poster? Three lessons stand out.
First, propaganda is not a mirror of society; it is a tool of management. The “We Can Do It!” poster was never meant to change gender roles. It was meant to squeeze a little more productivity out of a temporary workforce. The fact that it later became a symbol of revolution tells us less about the poster’s original meaning than about the hunger of later generations for usable symbols. Propaganda images are not fixed. They are repurposed, often against the intentions of their creators.
Second, visual persuasion has sharp limits. The most famous image of women in World War II did not prevent mass job loss, did not end wage discrimination, did not stop sexual harassment. Posters alone do not change structural realities. The women who worked in wartime factories knew this intimately. They saw the fine print: lower pay, no childcare, no job security. The poster was a promise that the state never intended to keep.
Third, the feminist reinvention of Rosie, while politically useful, came at a cost. It flattened history into a motivational meme. It celebrated an icon while forgetting the millions of women who were discarded after 1945. And it gave us the comforting illusion that a single poster can stand in for a movement. Real change—equal pay, affordable childcare, job protection—requires law and policy and organizing, not just images on tote bags.
None of this is to say that we should stop using Rosie. Symbols matter. But we should use them with historical honesty. The next time you see the bandana and the flexed bicep, remember: that woman worked a twelve‑hour shift for two‑thirds of a man’s wage. She was harassed on the factory floor. She was fired when the war ended. And she never saw her own face on a poster until forty years later, when someone else decided that her labor meant something she was never told it meant.
Further Reading (selected)
· Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II. University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
· Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
· Rupp, Leila J. Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945. Princeton University Press, 1978.
· Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Twayne Publishers, 1982.
· Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. Basic Books, 1992.
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