Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a World War II factory worker whose bandana-wearing image in a wire-service photo is said to have been the model for the woman depicted in the 1942 “We Can Do It!” poster, died Sunday at a hospice in Lansing, Mich. She was 86.
The iconic wartime poster became an enduring symbol of women’s power from the Rosie the Riveter era.
Doyle was a 17-year-old high school graduate when she took a job at the American Broach & Machine Co. in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1942. It was a time when millions of women across the country were going to work to replace men who had gone to war.
“She had just graduated, and some of the young men had left school to volunteer to fight,” said her daughter, Stephanie Gregg. “A couple had been killed, and she felt she wanted to do something for the war effort.”
Doyle was operating a metal-stamping machine when a United Press photographer took a picture of the tall, slender and glamorous brunette wearing a polka-dot bandana over her hair.
Her photo, according to an account on the Pop History Dig website, was seen by Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller, who was commissioned by the Westinghouse War Production Coordinating Committee to create morale-building posters for Westinghouse factory workers.
Gregg said her mother, who was not as muscular as the woman depicted in the poster, had no idea her photo had been used as an inspiration for Miller’s poster until the mid-1980s.
Doyle worked at the factory for only a couple of weeks. A cello player, she quit after learning that the woman she had replaced had injured her hand on the metal press.
