Naomi Parker’s story: Rosie The Riveter
Introduction.
Without being sung for seven decades, the true Rosie The Riveter was a California waitress named Naomi Parker Fraley. Over the years, a group of American women have been identified as a model for Rosie, the war worker of popular culture of the 1940s that became a feminist touchstone at the end of the 20th century. The Mrs. Fraley, who died on Saturday at age 96 in Longview, Washington, filed the most legitimate claim of all. But because her claim was eclipsed by another woman’s, she was not recognized for more than 70 years.
Developing.
Naomi Parker Fraley and her sister Ada de her were one of the former who attended the Alameda Air Naval Station (California) in 1942 to ask for work, and they were immediately employed. The United States had just entered the Second World War after the Japanese attack on the Naval Base of Pearl Harbor, and the women’s workforce became essential. "My father told us that we had to help the country, and there we were", Naomi remembered, explaining her story, which is the story behind the iconic Rosie poster, the riveter of the artist Joseph Howard Miller.
Naomi died in January 2018, in the state of Washington at age 96, and although he was already 75 years after those beginnings riveting pieces of airplanes, it was not known until 2016 that she really was the girl who inspired a sign with several lives. The first, as an interpellation image of the strength of working women with the slogan “We Can Do It!”(We can do it) to help your country. And in the 1980s, turned into a feminism icon precisely rescuing this message of force.
A feminist iconography that has been revisited in this last decade. But you have to return to 1942 when a photographer went to the Alameda base to take images of women’s work to illustrate a report in The Oakland Post-Insquire. Naomi and her sister Ada trimmed the article in which the image of the first appeared, with the photo that realized her identity and explained the reason for her dress in a assembly factory of pieces of pieces of pieces planes. They cut it and kept it. Nothing special, in principle, for this woman, who forgot the article and worked after the war as a waitress.
The years passed until, in 2009, the two sisters went to a tribute to the Rosies, that is, to women who during World War II worked in factories producing on many occasions war material. In fact, the poster made by Howard Miller had been commissioned by the Westinghouse Electric company to lift the mood of its workers.
Include citation with Rosie song by Riveter Song
Rosie the riveter had also popularized during the forties with a famous song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. During the tribute to Las Rosies, Naomi and Ada went around the exhibition mounted in the museum and it was there suddenly they saw the photograph of the Alameda Air Naval Station where Naomi appeared, but with a name that was not his own. For many years, the girl in the photo had been identified as Geraldine Hoff-Doyle, who worked at a Michigan factory for two weeks during World War II.
The sisters sent the documentation they kept to the museum, but without obtaining any response. In fact, it had been Doyle who, in 1982, looking at a magazine, saw the photo that inspired the poster and let her know that she was the portrayed woman. Geraldine died in 2010, when it was still believed that she was the protagonist and without the story of Naomi Parker had come to light. It was from the hand of researcher James J. Kimble as finally public opinion knew who was behind the iconic Rosie.
Kimble set out to thoroughly investigate the story behind the poster, he considered that there was not enough evidence to point out that he was Doyle, until after six years of work he found Naomi Parker. She even remembered that the red handkerchief that she has knotted at the head. And she remembered above all the original photo: "The beautiful Naomi Parker seems to put her nose on her lathe". Kimble had no doubt that the protagonist was her. At least out loud, Naomi Parker Fraley never considered that Doyle had acted with bad faith.
The image appeared quickly in newspapers and magazines throughout the country before attracting the attention of the artist J. Howard Miller, whose 1943 Rosie The Riveter poster has a surprising resemblance to Fraley’s photo, even the exact handkerchief. Fraley did not know his identity on the poster for 30 years until he was informed that his photo had been wrongly identified. “I couldn’t believe it because it was me in the photo, but there was another person’s name in the legend: Geraldine. I was surprised, ”said Fraley to People in September 2016.
However, it was too late to make things clear, since the identity of Hoff Doyle was already grounded as Rosie. "I just wanted my own identity. I didn’t want to fame or fortune, but I did want my own identity, ”said Fraley. That was until 2015, when she met James J. Kimble, a professor of communications at the University of Seton Hall in New Jersey, whose six years of research took him directly to the door of Fraley.
"They had stolen her part of the story. It is so painful to be poorly identified like this, ”Kimble told People at that time. ‘It’s as if the train had left the station and you were standing there and there is nothing to do because you are 95 years old and nobody listens to your story’. The most moving, given the current social climate in Hollywood and in many industries, Fraley’s message about working women still resonates.
“Women in this country these days need some icons. If they think I’m one, I’m happy about that, ”he said. For dr. Kimble, the search for Rosie, who seriously began, ‘became an obsession," as he explained in an interview for this obituary in 2016. His research finally focused on Mrs. Fraley, who had worked in a Navy machine workshop during World War II. He also ruled out the best -known head, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a Michigan woman whose innocent statement that she was Rosie.
Conclusions.
After the death of Mrs. Doyle in 2010, his claim was further promulgated through obituary, including one in The New York Times. The doctor. Kimble, associate professor of communication and arts at the University of Seton Hall in New Jersey, his findings reported in ‘Rosie’ S Secret Identity ’, an article in 2016 in the magazine Rhetoric & Public Affairs. The article led journalists to the door of Mrs. Fraley finally. The confusion about Rosie’s identity is partly due to the fact that the name Rosie The Riveter has been applied to more than one cultural artifact.
The first was a war song of that name, by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. He talked about a ammunition worker who ‘carefully watches the sabotage / sitting there in the fuselage’. Recorded by band leader Kay Kyser and others, became a success. The ‘Rosie’ behind that song is well known: Rosalind P. Walter, a Long Island woman who was a riveter in Corsair combat aircraft and is now a philanthropist, especially a benefactor of public television. Another Rosie emerged from Norman Rockwell, whose cover of the Saturday Evening Post of May 29, 1943, shows a muscular woman in Overol (the name of Rosie can be seen in her lunchbox), with a rivet gun in her lap and ‘ Mein Kampf ‘crushed happily under the feet.
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