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“She’s one of the most iconic symbols of womanhood in history, right up there with the Venus de Milo and the Statue of Liberty,” according to Gillian Brockell of the Washington Post. “Sleeves rolled up and hair tied in a kerchief, Rosie the Riveter flexes a biceps before, presumably, turning on her power tools and getting to work on her latest B-17 bomber.

“She was lampooned on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ There’s a Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California, and March 21 has been celebrated as Rosie the Riveter Day since 2017.”

So begins the latest national article attempting to determine the identity of the real Rosie the Riveter.

Between 5 and 7 million women worked defense industry jobs during World War II working as mechanics, welders, streetcar drivers, clerical workers, police officers, chemists and riveters — jobs vacated by young men shipped off to war, according to Penny Colman, author of Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II.

But which of them inspired the icon?

“It’s complicated,” Brockell declares.

The phrase “Rosie the Riveter” made its first public appearance in a 1943 wartime song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. Soon after, artists incorporated the character in their own work, including the famous illustrator Norman Rockwell, who painted an iconic Rosie the Riveter for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in May 1943.

The most famous Rosie the Riveter image is the “We Can Do It!” poster designed by J. Howard Miller. Ironically, the image was not called Rosie the Riveter at the time and didn’t become famous until the 1980s when it picked for a Rosie the Riveter postage stamp in 1999.

In between, the federal government filmed public service announcements with their own Rosie the Riveter, and Hollywood supplied a Rosie for the 1944 film “Rosie the Riveter.”

So which is the real one?

Researcher James Kimble determined in 2016 that Naomi Parker Fraley was the woman depicted in this widely-used photo from early in WWII.

“Since 1994, the New York Times has written at least five obituaries for various Rosies,” Brockell writes. “Take your pick.”

Traditional historians mistakenly named Rosina Bonavita the first Rosie the Riveter. Bonavita always denied being the first, and the claim was debunked when it was determined that both the wartime song and Rockwell’s depiction predate Bonavita’s time riveting warplanes in Tarrytown, NY, in June 1943. Bonavita died in 1994.

Some think Adeline Rose O’Malley, who worked during the war at an aircraft manufacturing plant in Wichita, KS, was the original Rosie. She allegedly got that nickname before the song was written, as early as January 1942. After the song hit the charts, the Wichita Eagle ran a story with her photo in September 1943 claiming her as the “original.”

Rockwell’s model was Mary Doyle Keefe, a 20-year-old telephone operator who was the painter’s neighbor in Vermont. One of the first and most iconic depictions of Rosie the Riveter, the painting shows “Keefe in overalls, semi-flexing while holding a ham sandwich in one hand, a rivet gun in her lap and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ under her foot,” Brockell writes.

“Keefe, who was paid $10 for posing, became a dental hygienist, married, had four children and died in 2015. The painting sold at auction for $4.9 million in 2002 and is now on display at a museum in Arkansas.”

The likely ‘We can do it!’ model was identified in 2016. In a scholarly paper published in the Michigan State University Press following years of research, Seton Hall University communications professor James Kimble determined that a retired waitress named Naomi Parker Fraley was the woman in the Rosie photo widely published at the time.

When Fraley died at 96 in 2018, myriad obituaries touted her as the “real” Rosie the Riveter. The Times even wrote that she had “the most legitimate claim of all.”

“At the end of the day, all of these women answered the call to take wartime jobs, keeping society running smoothly and helping the nation manufacture the materiel needed to win the war,” Brockell writes. “Millions of other women joined them, and all have a rightful claim as a, if not the, real Rosie the Riveter.”