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Michelle C. Smith

Michelle C. Smith is an Associate Professor of English at Clemson University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and literature and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Her publications include Utopian Genderscapes (2021), a book-length study of rhetorics of women’s work in nineteenth-century utopian communities, as well as journal articles and book chapters in feminist rhetorics, historiography, research methods and methodologies, and rhetorical theory. Her current research project explores archives and feminist memory by tracing the unlikely trajectory of the WWII-era image popularly known as Rosie the Riveter.

A poster made by Ghazal Foroutan

Was She Really Rosie?

The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.