we can do it!
A well-known, much-appropriated 1943 propaganda poster by artist J. Howard Miller, depicting a muscular young woman in a work shirt and kerchief flexing her right biceps. The poster was created to inspire factory workers at Westinghouse Electric (many of whom, like U.S. war workers generally, were women, due to the pressure places on the male workforce by the military draft).
We Can Do It! is often said to depict the war's most famous (mythical) female worker, "Rosie the Riveter", and to have been used to recruit more women into the war production effort. Neither legend is true. Although Rosie was created in 1942 (as the main character of a popular song about women working for the war effort), Miller did not intend the poster to depict her--the factories where the poster was displayed made helmet liners, not tanks or aircraft--nor was it used for general recruiting. Rather, its purpose was to exhort women (and men) who already worked for Westinghouse to work harder; the woman depicted in the poster is even wearing a Westinghouse employee badge on her shirt collar.
