The real - lifetime inspiration behind a timeless World War II image has conk out at age 96,CNNreports . Naomi Parker Fraley was a California aboriginal and a wartime factory actor , but most people knew her as the real Rosie the Riveter .
Her wage increase to icon status start out in the months following the onrush on Pearl Harbor in recent 1941 . Like thousand of women across the state , she took a job in a factory to help the war effort . She was 20 twelvemonth old when she was working in theNaval Air Stationin Alameda , California , patching airplane wings and operating rivet machines . It was there that a lensman touring the station snap the pic that would launch myriad impersonation .
In the picture , Fraley is prove leaning over a automobile in a jump suit with her hair pulled back by a red - and - white polka dot bandana . The photo was shared in numerous newspaper and magazine and eventually adapt by artist J. Howard Miller in the famous 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster .
The trope was originally used as a pecker to boostwartime morale , but has since grown into a cosmopolitan symbol for women ’s empowerment . Rosie ’s unmistakable feeling is still a popular origin of inspiration for artists andcelebrities , but until recently , no one knew the real adult female behind the character reference .
For years , a womanhood named Geraldine Hoff Doyle was mistakenly identified as the woman in the Naval Air Station photograph . Only when a Seton Hall University professor named James J. Kimble unearth the original photo with Fraley ’s name in the caption was the dependable subject confirmed . When he reached out to Fraley with the news in2016 , it did n’t come as a total surprise to her . She had recognized herself in the photograph when she go steady it at a former wartime workers normal a few years earlier , even though the caption distinguish a different cleaning lady .
fit in to her sept , Fraley die in hospice care in Longview , Washington on January 20 , the same day that hundred of thousands of objector get along out for the second annualWomen ’s March .
[ h / tCNN ]
