Everyone Was Wrong About the Real 'Rosie the Riveter’ for Decades

When news began to spread that Naomi Parker Fraley had died on Saturday, it prompted an outpouring of admiring obituaries, uniformly lamenting the loss of Rosie the Riveter, and lauding that timeless American icon pictured in the “We Can Do It!” poster. Such remembrances were, and are, a well-deserved tribute to an extraordinary woman.

But it almost didn’t happen that way. Fraley might just as easily have died in relative obscurity, her admirers focused on another claimant to the Rosie title.

The story of Fraley’s discovery is a valuable but cautionary tale. It can tell us much about the 24-hour news cycle, our culture’s need to feed the media beast and what happens to the people behind the stories we consume without questioning.