"They're Still Women After All": The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood

Lin Good, a consultant, was Associate Librarian at Queen’s University.

Ruth Roach Pierson teaches feminist studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. In the course of her research, she became intrigued by the discrepancy between the participation of Canadian women in the labour force and the armed services during World War II, and the domesticated, subservient role they assumed in post-war society.

Drawing on first hand accounts and extensive records, Pierson concludes that the changes in the employment of women in the war were not related to the emancipation of women, nor to the consideration of women’s role in society or right to work bychoice. Canada’s war effort determined everything; the recruitment of women resulted from the intervention by government into the labour market to control the allocation of resources for the prosecution of the war.

After 1939 women were recruited for jobs outside the home to free men for military service. Later they were recruited for the armed forces to serve as stenographers, clerical help, and cooks, to free men to fight at the front. Appeals to them were always couched in those terms. Thus, then as later, women concentrated in the low-paying, low-status jobs; moves into traditional male jobs were viewed as temporary until the men returned. This philosophy was accepted by everyone, including women’s organizations which represented mainly the middle and upper classes, and which endorsed the government policy aimed at preserving the sexual division of labour. The changes necessitated by the war were viewed as an aberration in the normal continuum of history.

During the war, propaganda was geared to combat possible permanent role reversal and to protectfemininity; the title of this book for example, is from an article in Saturday Night in 1942. Afterwards, the same effort was expended to get women back into their homes to free jobs for the returning men.

One wartime trend proved difficult to reverse. Married women continued to make up a large proportion of the female labour force even though the overall size of that force was significantly reduced by 1951.

Pierson presents a readable, balanced and persuasive study, focused mainly upon the patterns of government policy in recruitment, job training, and propaganda. As she states, there are many other areas to explore, but this is an important contribution to a part of our history that is too often ignored.