Rosie: The Making of a Movement

The poster from 1943 titled “We Can Do It!”, by J. Howard Miller, depicts World War II wartime efforts in factories to motivate workers to work harder and follow directions better. The poster illustrates a woman, now culturally known as “Rosie the Riveter”, dressed as a factory worker, holding up her arm to show off her muscles. In giant script at the top, the poster states, “WE CAN DO IT!”. The War Production Coordinating Committee sponsored the poster’s distribution to motivate workers during the war, which was represented in the bottom left corner.

By applying semiotics, “Rosie the Riveter” functions as a sign to create meaning surrounding wartime efforts and eventually feminism. Semiotics aims to answer the question, “what does X mean?” by studying the composition of signs. A sign is anything “that stands for something other than itself”.

Signs are composed of the signifiers and the signified. A signifier is the physical sign itself; so, in this case, the woman dressed as the factory worker is the signifier. The woman represents a physical factory worker during the wartime. The signified is the deeper meaning that the sign represents. For this poster, the signified is increasing work efficiency and wartime efforts in factories. She is a symbol because she illustrates a factory worker who is happily working harder and supporting war efforts.

Furthermore, meaning can be layered and the signified can also be a signifier; this is called connotative chaining. For “Rosie the Riveter”, wartime efforts in factories can also be the signifier, while the broader understanding of Rosie as a feminist icon is the signified. Rosie developed into an icon for the feminist movement, promoting the empowerment of women throughout history. For feminists, Rosie represents an argument for women’s equality by doing man’s factory work while he is away at war.

The woman in this picture is not the original “Rosie the Riveter”. Once feminists saw the woman as a symbol for their movement, they applied this name to her. The name demonstrates the cultural shift of this poster symbolizing wartime effort to symbolizing feminism and women’s equality. Even now, people associate this woman more with the women’s rights movement than with war efforts.

This poster emphasizes the importance of cultural context in understanding the layers of meaning within symbols. In “Documents That Changed the World,” Joe Janes states about the effect of Rosie, “Whoever the woman in the polka-dot turban is… [from] feminist touchstone, to home front solidarity icon, to object of cultural nostalgia…she was never really any of these and yet is now somehow all of them.” The quote demonstrates the power of culturally created meaning on symbols. Society turned this woman into many different meanings; even though none were a part of her original representative. She symbolizes whatever meaning society applies to her.

Miller’s poster carries a lot of symbolic meaning that is created using historical, cultural, and social context. Using semiotics, Miller creates symbols in the poster that demonstrate the importance of wartime effort and a movement towards equalizing women in society. Overall, this poster was less effective for increasing wartime efforts than it was for motivating a whole feminist movement.