J. Howard Miller

The image made the cover of the Smithsonian magazine in 1994 and was fashioned into a US first-class mail stamp in 1999. It was incorporated in 2008 into campaign materials for several American politicians, and was reworked by an artist in 2010 to celebrate the first woman becoming prime minister of Australia. The poster is one of the ten most-requested images at the National Archives and Records Administration. After its rediscovery, observers often assumed that the image was always used as a call to inspire women workers to join the military war effort. However, during the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder. People have seized upon the uplifting attitude and apparent message to remake the image into many different forms, including self-empowerment, campaign promotion, advertising, and parodies. After she saw the Smithsonian cover image in 1994, Geraldine Hoff Doyle mistakenly said that she was the subject of the poster. Doyle thought that she had also been captured in a wartime photograph of a woman factory worker, and she assumed that this photo inspired Miller's poster. Conflating her as "Rosie the Riveter", Doyle was honored by many organizations including the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame. However, in 2015, the woman in the wartime photograph was identified as then 20-year-old Naomi Parker, working in early 1942 before Doyle had graduated from high school. Doyle's notion that the photograph inspired the poster cannot be proved or disproved, so neither Doyle nor Parker can be confirmed as the model for "We Can Do It!".

• Illustration — A propaganda poster from 1942 encouraging unity between labor and management of GM After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government called upon manufacturers to produce greater amounts of war goods. The workplace atmosphere at large factories was often tense because of resentment built up between management and labor unions throughout the 1930s. Directors of companies such as General Motors (GM) sought to minimize past friction and encourage teamwork. In response to a rumored public relations campaign by the United Auto Workers union, GM quickly produced a propaganda poster in 1942 showing both labor and management rolling up their sleeves, aligned toward maintaining a steady rate of war production. The poster read, "Together We Can Do It!" and "Keep 'Em Firing!" In creating such posters, corporations wished to increase production by tapping popular pro-war sentiment, with the ultimate goal of preventing the government from exerting greater control over production.

J. Howard Miller was the American graphic artist who painted the famous "We Can Do It!" poster. He painted posters during World War II in support of the war effort. Aside from the iconic poster, Miller's work remains largely unknown. For many years, little had been written about Miller's life, with uncertainty extending to his birth and death dates. In 2022, Professor James J. Kimble uncovered more of Miller's personal information, setting the birth year in 1898, and the death in 1985. Miller was married to Mabel Adair McCauley. Their marriage was childless; surviving family members are related through Miller's siblings. Miller studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1939. He lived in Pittsburgh during the war. His work came to the attention of the Westinghouse Company (later, the Westinghouse War Production Co-Ordinating Committee), and he was hired to create a series of posters. The posters were sponsored by the company's internal War Production Co-Ordinating Committee, one of the hundreds of labor-management committees organized under the supervision of the national War Production Board. Aside from his commercial work, Miller painted landscapes and studies in oil; Miller's family kept all of his works in their homes.

• Illustration — Another poster by J. Howard Miller from the same series as "We Can Do It!" In 1942, Miller was hired by Westinghouse Electric's internal War Production Coordinating Committee, through an advertising agency, to create a series of posters to display to the company's workers. The intent of the poster project was to raise worker morale, to reduce absenteeism, to direct workers' questions to management, and to lower the likelihood of labor unrest or a factory strike. Each of the more than 42 posters designed by Miller was displayed in the factory for two weeks, then replaced by the next one in the series. Most of the posters featured men; they emphasized traditional roles for men and women. One poster depicted a smiling male manager with the words "Any Questions About Your Work?... Ask your Supervisor." No more than 1,800 copies of the 17-by-22-inch (559 by 432 mm) "We Can Do It!" poster were printed. It was not initially seen beyond several Westinghouse factories in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the midwestern U.S., where it was scheduled to be displayed for two five-day work weeks starting Monday, February 15, 1943. The targeted factories were making plasticized helmet liners impregnated with Micarta, a phenolic resin invented by Westinghouse. Mostly women were employed in this enterprise, which yielded some 13 million helmet liners over the course of the war. The slogan "We Can Do It!" was probably not interpreted by the factory workers as empowering to women alone; they had been subjected to a series of paternalistic, controlling posters promoting management authority, employee capability and company unity, and the workers would likely have understood the image to mean "Westinghouse Employees Can Do It", all working together. The upbeat image served as gentle propaganda to boost employee morale and keep production from lagging. The badge on the "We Can Do It!" worker's collar identifies her as a Westinghouse Electric plant floor employee; the pictured red, white and blue clothing was a subtle call to patriotism, one of the frequent tactics of corporate war production committees.

During World War II, the "We Can Do It!" poster was not connected to the 1942 song "Rosie the Riveter", nor to the widely seen Norman Rockwell painting called Rosie the Riveter that appeared on the cover of the Memorial Day issue of the Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1943. The Westinghouse poster was not associated with any of the women nicknamed "Rosie" who came forward to promote women working for war production on the home front. Rather, after being displayed for two weeks in February 1943 to some Westinghouse factory workers, it disappeared for nearly four decades. Other "Rosie" images prevailed, often photographs of actual workers. The Office of War Information geared up for a massive nationwide advertising campaign to sell the war, but "We Can Do It!" was not part of it. Rockwell's emblematic Rosie the Riveter painting was loaned by the Post to the U.S. Treasury Department for use in posters and campaigns promoting war bonds. Following the war, the Rockwell painting gradually sank from public memory because it was copyrighted; all of Rockwell's paintings were vigorously defended by his estate after his death. This protection resulted in the original painting gaining value—it sold for nearly $5 million in 2002. Conversely, the lack of protection for the "We Can Do It!" image is one of the reasons it experienced a rebirth. Ed Reis, a volunteer historian for Westinghouse, noted that the original image was not shown to female riveters during the war, so the recent association with "Rosie the Riveter" was unjustified. Rather, it was targeted at women who were making helmet liners out of Micarta. Reis joked that the woman in the image was more likely to have been named "Molly the Micarta Molder or Helen the Helmet Liner Maker."

• Illustration — An example of commercial use on a pair of vending machines for bottled water at a WWII Battleship Museum In 1982, the "We Can Do It!" poster was reproduced in a magazine article, "Poster Art for Patriotism's Sake", a Washington Post Magazine article about posters in the collection of the National Archives. In subsequent years, the poster was re-appropriated to promote feminism. Feminists saw in the image an embodiment of female empowerment. The "We" was understood to mean "We Women", uniting all women in a sisterhood fighting against gender inequality. This was very different from the poster's 1943 use to control employees and to discourage labor unrest. History professor Jeremiah Axelrod commented on the image's combination of femininity with the "masculine (almost macho) composition and body language." Smithsonian magazine put the image on its cover in March 1994, to invite the viewer to read a featured article about wartime posters. The US Postal Service created a 33¢ stamp in February 1999 based on the image, with the added words "Women Support War Effort". A Westinghouse poster from 1943 was put on display at the National Museum of American History, part of the exhibit showing items from the 1930s and '40s.