The woman in the yellow-background We Can Do It poster was never called Rosie during the war, and almost nobody saw her. This episode builds an unconventional biography of a composite icon, beginning with the 1942 hit song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb popularized by Kay Kyser, then Norman Rockwell's May 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover, which gave Rosie a brawny body modeled on Michelangelo's Prophet Isaiah and rested her loafer on Hitler's manifesto. The actual model was Mary Louise Doyle, a 19-year-old Vermont telephone operator paid ten dollars who held a plastic rivet gun and later received an apology from Rockwell for being painted as a giant.

We then untangle J. Howard Miller's Westinghouse poster, an internal morale piece displayed in Midwest factories for just two weeks in February 1943 before vanishing until the 1980s feminist ...