Free Republic

"I had said in that research that almost everything we know about that poster is wrong," Mr Kimble told the BBC in a telephone interview. "So when Doyle died in 2010, and there were all these obituaries, I of course thought, how do we know she's really the model? What's the proof? It was the rabbit hole calling to me." One thing is for certain, after all these years: the woman at the lathe in Alameda, California was Naomi Parker Fraley.

Mary Doyle Keefe, the model for Norman Rockwell’s Rosie The Riveter painting, which was used to help inspire American women to work on U.S. soil throughout World War II, has died at the age of 92. Mary Ellen Keefe, Mary Doyle’s daughter, confirmed that her mother died after a brief illness in Simsbury, Connecticut, on Tuesday. Keefe, who grew up in Arlington, Vermont, which is where she first met Rockwell, posed for the image when she was just 19 years old. At the time of the painting, she was working as a telephone operator. However she became immortalized when the...

Geraldine Doyle, Iconic Face of World War II, Dies at 86By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS Published: December 29, 2010 Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who was believed to be the unwitting model for the “We Can Do It!” poster of a woman flexing her biceps in a factory during World War II — an image that later became a symbol for the American feminist movement — died on Sunday in Lansing, Mich. She was 86. **SNIP** Mrs. Doyle was unaware of the poster’s existence until 1982, when, while thumbing through a magazine, she saw a photograph of it and recognized herself. Her daughter said...