The phrase on the 1943 Westinghouse wartime poster commonly associated with Rosie the Riveter was “We Can Do It!”
The poster was designed by J. Howard Miller for the Westinghouse Electric manufacturing system and was displayed in company factories for a short period in February 1943. Its original audience was Westinghouse workers, not the entire American public.
The woman in the image was not originally named Rosie, and the poster was not initially a national recruitment campaign. Decades later, the image was rediscovered, connected with the Rosie the Riveter symbol, and widely used to represent women’s industrial work during World War II.
A common mix-up links this poster directly to the 1942 song “Rosie the Riveter” or to Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Rosie cover. Those are separate cultural images. The “We Can Do It!” poster became especially influential during the feminist movement and is now one of the best-known images of women’s wartime labor.