The poster in your head is not the one they had. "We Can Do It!" was painted by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for the internal war production committee at Westinghouse Electric. It hung during February 1943 and then came down. It was never a recruiting poster — its job was to push women already on the payroll to work harder — it was seen almost nowhere outside Westinghouse plants, and nobody in 1943 called it Rosie the Riveter. It was largely forgotten until it resurfaced in the early 1980s and became, retroactively, the picture of the entire American home front. The Rosie the wartime public actually knew was a popular song from 1942 and Norman Rockwell's cover for the Saturday Evening Post of 29 May 1943: a big, heavily muscled woman in work clothes on her lunch break, rivet gun across her lap, one boot planted on a copy of Mein Kampf. Even the question of who modeled for Miller is unsettled. Geraldine Hoff Doyle claimed the face in 1994, after seeing the poster on a magazine cover; the researcher James J. Kimble later identified the woman in a related 1942 press photograph, taken at Naval Air Station Alameda that March, as Naomi Parker Fraley — already at a lathe while Doyle was still in high school. And no photograph has ever been proved to be the source of the painting at all. None of which touches the women. They did the work, in numbers no one had planned for, and the argument is only about the picture.

The figure is one of them at the end of a shift rather than on a poster: blue bib overalls over a work shirt, sleeves down, patterned headscarf tied up out of the machinery, plant badge on the bib, lunch box in her hand. What she was building was flown by people like the USAAF WASP service pilot, who ferried the aircraft that came off those lines, and it was crewed by men in spaces like the one on Ball Turret Gunner — a plexiglass sphere hung under a bomber, riveted together by somebody's hands. Britain did the same thing with its own women, including one who ended up on the throne: Princess Elizabeth in ATS uniform, learning to decarbonize an engine.

Model: 10059 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set