Naomi Parker Fraley

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.

We Can Do It!

The "We Can Do It!" poster appeared in a few factories in 1943. In 1942, Parker's photo, taken at a Pratt & Whitney horizontal shaper, appeared in local press on July 5, 1942. However, her attempts to correct the mistake were ignored.

Seton Hall University professor James J. Kimble become interested in the poster as an icon of the feminist movement. When he tracked down Parker in 2015 to show her the photo, she still had the original newspaper clipping from 1942. She was married three times, first to Joseph Blankenship (divorced), second to John Muhlig (d. 1971),

Death On January 20, 2018, Parker died in Longview, Washington, at the age of 96.