Greatcoats and Glamour Boots: Canadian Women at War (1939-1945)

Andrea Levan is Co-ordinator of Women’s Studies at Laurentian
University.

Reading this delightful book is somewhat like opening an old album and
finding, among the familiar and expected pictures of your parents’
past, hints that perhaps you didn’t know them as well as you had
thought. This book is in many ways like a photo album, providing
photographs, drawings, official pronouncements, excerpts from diaries,
and transcribed memories relating to the experiences of the
women—almost 50,000 of them—who served in the Canadian armed forces
during World War II. Taken together, these create a rich and evocative
sense of the role of women in the period, and how it was challenged, or
in some cases reinforced, by the war.

One striking feature of that world is its illusion of homogeneity: a
strict moral code preserved one standard of feminine behavior that was
“above reproach.” Differences existed but were ignored: francophones
were expected to speak English; the appropriateness of accepting Native
recruits was questioned, and although Native women did serve,
undercurrents of racism persisted in the way they were treated;
middle-class women were shocked by the coarse language of their
working-class sisters and humiliated by contracting lice.

Women’s right to serve in the armed forces was not easily won, and,
especially in the early days, a myth persisted among the general public
that those women who enlisted were immoral camp followers. In many ways
enlisted women profoundly challenged the values of their day. The joy
they took from the experience, and the freedom that many felt, is made
evident by their comments throughout this book. As the war closed, many
expressed their unhappiness at the thought of returning to the role of
housewife. It is easy to see, in comments such as these, how the
groundwork was laid for the second wave of the women’s movement less
than two decades later.

Yet while it was a liberation of sorts, the experience was also both
monotonous and preserving of the status quo. Women were recruited, for
the most part, not to take on nontraditional jobs but to work as cooks
in hospitals and messes; as clerks, stenographers, and typists at camps
and training centres; as telephone operators, messengers, canteen
helpers, and storewomen. Most had come from occupations such as these
and continued to do them once they enlisted. They were expected to
“free the men to fight,” and in addition, to do the work at
two-thirds to four-fifths of the pay that male recruits could expect.
Both the lack of privacy and the rigidity of military procedures could
be numbing.

Through the voices of the women represented in this book, these years
emerge as a pivotal period for Canadian women, full of contradictions,
challenges, and auguries of the present.