Becoming Rosie: The Unlikely Story of Helaine Victoria Press and the “We Can Do It” Poster

The now-iconic image of the woman with the flexed bicep and polka-dot bandana didn’t become “Rosie the Riveter” until 1986, when two women printing postcards out of an Indiana garage named it and associated it with feminism for the first time. The true history of the “We Can Do It” image is far from the popular narrative of Rosie as a government recruitment poster that empowered women to take on war work. During WWII, the poster would only have been seen by Westinghouse employees over two weeks in February 1943—it was not widely circulated until it was unearthed from an archive in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here, I examine this image’s transformation from obscure wartime propaganda to international feminist icon, focusing on the untold story of the rural feminist press that helped “We Can Do It” become Rosie.

Lecture presented by Michelle C. Smith, Associate Professor of English at Clemson University