By Jennifer Xiang Rosie the Riveter has not always been the universal symbol for feminism and women's rights that certain movements would have you think she was. Though she lives on in countless reproductions, hangs on many classroom walls, sells as horriblymade Halloween costumes — quite literally the poster girl for that certain era of feminism — she was made to be noticed and then forgotten. The second wave feminists took a relatively little-noticed wartime poster conveying a single government-endorsed message — a poster that was meant to be displayed for two weeks in a single company, Westinghouse, and drawn by a man who was trying to boost the morale of the women working there — into an international icon. She is the profile picture of thousands of #Resist-ers, the face of advertisement after advertisement as if she were the Unicode-approved emoji for feminism. If someone wants to show their character is a feminist and shows Girl Power, put her in a bandanna and a denim shirt, and ignore the implications the context of Rosie's creation has on this. Rosie the Riveter, as her name stands, arose from one magazine, sitting on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. She was illustrated by Norman Rockwell — known widely as the bastion-holder for white American life, who loved to draw 'normal', nuclear families devoted to patriotism and their newly suburbanized life. Rosie is similarly depicted — beyond her butch appearance and factory clothes, she wears the makeup and hairstyle of a middle-class housewife of the time. The American flag flies behind her, flapping in the wind, and Hitler's Mein Kampf is below her feet. She is the All-American housewife of her time, taken out of her home and placed in the factories, out of Rockwell's aspirational, nearly fetishistic ideal of white middleclass life and into his neat ideal of a good woman. She is one who works not necessarily out of personal economic necessity, but to support others — the men abroad fighting the war, the giant companies in whose factories she toils, and America itself. She, together with the Westinghouse Electric girl, are not particularly revolutionary; she is not the empowered woman that people would think of her as. Or perhaps she is: one example, built as propaganda and jingoism, among a sea of other times the feminist spirit has been twisted and co-opted for the purpose of pure advertisement all in the name of some nebulous concept of progress.
It's as old as advertising itself, creating pseudo-movements like the Torch of Freedom, which attempted to convince people that smoking cigarettes was the mark of a truly liberated and independent woman. For as long as some group of people is oppressed, and there is a mass spirit towards liberation, a capitalist society will attempt to appeal to this in the name of social liberalism in the general purpose to Make Money, regardless of whether those companies themselves are a part of that long-standing institution of oppression or not. There are other problems with Rosie, things that didn't age well. Obvious critiques of who is supposed to and implied as standing behind her insistence that this ill-defined "we" can do, the white, traditional womanhood that she, most apparent in the Westinghouse depiction, reinforces, and the lost-in-time notion that this Rosie, and the millions of other women in the industrial workforce at that time, would have to give up their jobs after the war, all abound. Yet even these are glossed over, overlooked when women pose as her and see her as the be-all and end-all of feminism. Rosie's liberation, hidden in her tied-back hair and raised bicep, is supposed to come from serving the very same patriarchal system that has locked her in oppression. She finds her power in helping them, somehow implying that liberation is collaborating with those she is trying to escape from because she was created by those patriarchal structures themselves. The vestiges of her creation are still apparent in how she is positioned today: similarly meaningless as she ever was, the flat “we can do it” a useless platitude, a symbol not of empowerment or liberation but of war-time imperialist need, blended with vague sentimental solidarity that falls apart under a basic understanding of her time.
Even taken out of her time, her rhetoric and her message is left deliberately vague, leaving the viewer to see whatever they want to see in her—not because she was supposed to be a symbol of feminist power, but because she wasn't. Rosie has never been and Feminism can afford to find better symbols and icons.