Back the Attack!: Canadian Women During the Second World War - at Home and Abroad

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

World War II broke down many of the barriers that kept women, willingly or unwillingly, in the home and out of the work force. This is an account of the women who surged into the women’s branches of the armed services, munitions and other factories, and service hospitals in the “Fighting Forties.” This they did in spite of determined, often hurtful opposition by traditionalists, including many families, non-working women, certain religious spokesmen, and what one woman describes with some bitterness as “ex-friends,” who would cross the street to avoid acknowledging acquaintance with a woman in uniform. The jobs these women took on were hard, unglamorous, and dirty; but someone had to do them. The overriding ideal was always to “free a man to fight”: to keep the active services supplied with arms, to keep the horrific mountains of paperwork under control, and to do what could be done to heal broken bodies. There were as well the lonely legions of service wives and mothers who stayed at home trying to do the work of two to hold families together. Not all the stories had happy endings; many women found the adjustment to peacetime more difficult than did the returning warriors, for the War probably altered their lives, permanently, more than it did those of men. It was a watershed era. In this collection of original material, drawn from letters, magazine articles, radio scripts (few diaries; servicewomen and nursing sisters were forbidden to keep them), as well as the oral history of contemporary interviews and reminiscences, the hectic war years are recalled to life. Full of fascinating photographs, and a goldmine of wartime lore, this is a convincing work of living social history.