Naomi Parker Fraley, inspiration for ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ dies at 96

Naomi Parker Fraley, the real "Rosie the Riveter," died Saturday, the New York Times reports.

Though Fraley's name remained obscure for most of her 96 years, her likeness became an iconic symbol during World War II.

A photo of a young Fraley, with arm flexed and head topped by a red-and-white polka-dot bandana, would inspire the 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster designed by J. Howard Miller. Promulgated across the home front during the war years, Fraley's portrait would outlive the war and establish an indefinite place in the American visual lexicon, most recently appearing on posters at Saturday's national Women's Marches.

"The women of this country these days need some icons," Fraley said in a 2016 interview with People. "If they think I'm one, I'm happy about that."

Fraley died Saturday at an assisted-living facility in Longview, Wash., her daughter-in-law confirmed to the Times.

The unsung feminist hero spent most of her life in anonymity on the West Coast. It was 1942 that a newspaperman visited her workstation at the Alameda Naval Air Station and asked to take her picture, which later appeared in the Oakland Post-Enquirer.

That photo would become a sensation when rejiggered by artist Miller into an illustration with the phrase "We Can Do It!"

But on its rise to cultural ubiquity, the poster misidentified its model. Until 2016, the inspiration for Rosie was widely accepted as Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a Michigan woman who innocently claimed the designation for herself from the 1980s onward.

A diligent scholar, James J. Kimble, debunked Doyle's claims in a 2016 paper published in the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs. His investigation led him to an original copy of the photograph taken in Alameda that 1942 afternoon. The accompanying caption clearly identified the woman as Parker.

"There is a cautionary tale here worth heeding," Kimble told NPR. "In the age of the internet, stories often multiply and feed upon themselves, citing each other as sources, all distressingly void of independent research. And Doyle's story, because we now know it isn't true, can, and does, forensically tell us a lot about modern media. And what it says is frankly disturbing."

Kimble met with Fraley at her Redding home in 2015, and the two set out to get the record straightened.

"I just wanted my own identity," Fraley said in the People interview. "I didn't want fame or fortune, but I did want my own identity."

Fraley got her wish just as she rounded her early 90s. In her life she would take on many other identities, including wife, mother, stepmother, grandmother and great-grandmother.