Naomi Parker Fraley
American factory worker, likely the inspiration for the "We Can Do It!" poster
Naomi Fern Parker Fraley (August 26, 1921 – January 20, 2018) was an American war worker who is considered the most likely model for the iconic "We Can Do It!" poster. During World War II, she worked on aircraft assembly at the Naval Air Station Alameda.
Though Geraldine Hoff Doyle was initially credited as the subject of the iconic poster, a popular photograph of Fraley operating a machine tool at the Naval Air Station is now believed to be the inspiration.
After the war, Fraley worked as a waitress in Palm Springs, California, and married three times. She died aged 96 in 2018.
Early life
Naomi Fern Parker was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. She is the third of eight children to Joseph Parker and Esther Leis. Her father was a mining engineer and her mother was a homemaker. The family moved across the country from New York to California, living in Alameda at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Naomi and her younger sister Ada subsequently went to work at the Naval Air station, where they were assigned to the machine shop for aircraft assembling duties.
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This entry incorporates text from “Naomi Parker Fraley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.