You know her as Rosie the Riveter, but her real name was Naomi Parker. She was twenty-one years old in 1942 when a photographer captured her at an aircraft plant in Alameda, California. Standing at her workstation operating a grinding wheel, Parker is in overalls, her hair protected by a bandana. The picture was not remarkable in itself, just one of countless similar press images taken in America’s wartime factories. But it happened to be printed in a Pittsburgh newspaper, where it caught the eye of an illustrator named J. Howard Miller. The following year, his poster of a similarly attired
...more
