Naomi Fern Parker Fraley (August 26, 1921 – January 20, 2018) was an American war worker who is considered the most likely model for the iconic "We Can Do It!" poster.[2] During World War II, she worked on aircraft assembly at the Naval Air Station Alameda. Though Geraldine Hoff Doyle was initially credited as the subject of the iconic poster, a popular photograph of Fraley operating a machine tool at the Naval Air Station is now believed to be the inspiration.[3]
After the war, she worked as a waitress in Palm Springs, California, and married three times. She died aged 96 in 2018.[4]
Early life
1942 photograph of Naomi Parker
Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. She is the third of eight children to Joseph Parker and Esther Leis.[1][5] Her father was a mining engineer and her mother was a homemaker. The family moved across the country from New York to California,[6] living in Alameda at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor.[6] Naomi and her younger sister Ada subsequently went to work at the Naval Air station, where they were assigned to the machine shop for aircraft assembling duties.[1]
The "We Can Do It!" poster appeared in a few factories in 1943.
In 1942, Parker's photo, taken at a Pratt & Whitney horizontal shaper, appeared in local press on July 5, 1942.[7] The following year, J. Howard Miller's "We Can Do It!" poster was one of a series that appeared in factories at Westinghouse in a worker morale campaign.[6] It is presumed that the newspaper photo was the source of his image.[1]
Meanwhile, Seton Hall University professor James J. Kimble had become interested in the poster, which had become an icon of the feminist movement.[8] He tracked down the original photo and confirmed that it was credited to Naomi Parker in 1942.[3] When he tracked down Parker in 2015 to show her the photo, she still had the original newspaper clipping from 1942.[6] Kimble was certain that Parker was the woman in the photo and considered her to be the strongest candidate behind the inspiration for the poster, but noted that Miller did not leave any writings which could identify his model.[1]
In February 2015, Kimble interviewed the Parker sisters, known as Naomi Fern Fraley (Parker) and Ada Wyn Morford, aged 93 and 91 respectively, and found that they had known for five years about the incorrect identification of the photo, and had been rebuffed in their attempt to correct the historical record.[3]
Later life
After the war, Parker worked as a waitress at The Doll House, a restaurant in Palm Springs, California.[7] She was married three times, first to Joseph Blankenship (divorced), second to John Muhlig (d. 1971),[1] and third to Charles Fraley (d. 1998), whom she married in 1979.[1][5] In February 2017 she moved to the Longview, Washington area before moving into an assisted care home there later that year.[9]
