IN THIS ARTICLE, we discuss representations of women's identities as workers in the wartime newspaper, Aircrafter, produced by management at the Canadian Car and Foundry Company Limited in Fort William, Ontario, during World War Il. We argue that Aircrafter functioned as an ideological mechanism by which pre-war, middle-class prescriptions of femininity, emphasizing women's roles as decorative homemakers in the private sphere, survived the challenges of women's war work to shape post-war gender roles. The article demonstrates the efficacy of this ideological mechanism by revealing the comprehensive way in which different rhetorical styles and varied sections of the newspaper -- the front page news and pictures, the editorial page, the women's page entitled "The Feminine Touch," as well as cartoons and pin-ups -- collectively conveyed an ambivalent attitude that both praised and questioned women's war work in traditionally male jobs thus reinforcing pre-war socially prescribed forms of femininity. This research reveals how state policies concerning representations of women workers in government war propaganda influenced a northwestern Ontario war plant and shaped the ideological atmosphere which the women war workers at Canadian Car would have to negotiate as part of their daily working lives.
DANS CET ARTICLE, nous discutons de la representation de l'identite des femmes dans le journal, Aircrafter, publie par la direction de Canadian Car and Foundry Company Limited a Fort William, Ontario, pendant la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale. Nous soutenons que Aircrafter a servi de mecanisme ideologique par lequel les preceptes de feminite, qui insistent sur le role des femmes en tant que femmes decoratives au foyer, ont survecu aux defis que les femmes ont releve dans leurs emplois pendant la guerre pour faconner le role feminin apres la guerre. L'article demontre l'efficacite de ce mecanisme ideologique en revelant la facon dont les differents styles rhetoriques et sections du journal - les nouvelles et les photos de la page couverture, l'editorial, la page feminine intitulee la touche feminine , ainsi que les caricatures et les pin up - ont transmis une maniere de voir ambivalente qui, a la fois, faisait l'eloge des femmes et posait des questions sur leur travail pendant la guerre; alors que ces femmes occupaient des postes traditionnellement tenus par les hommes, renforcant en consequence les notions de feminite socialement acceptees avant la guerre. Cette recherche revele la facon dont les politiques de l'Etat relatives a la representation des travailleuses dans la propagande du gouvernement pendant la guerre ont influence une usine du nord-ouest de l'Ontario et cree une ambiance ideologique contre laquelle les travailleuses de Canadian Car ont du se battre dans leur vie quotidienne.
ACCORDING TO DEBORAH MONTGOMERIE, "[h]istorians have spilled rivers of ink discussing the impact of World War II on women's roles."(1) This scholarship has gone well beyond believing the official wartime propaganda -- that the war revolutionized women's work by laying out the welcome mat for their participation in the paid labour force -- to elucidate the ways in which women's wartime work contributions were being underscored as temporary and unusual at the same time as they were ostensibly being praised. Yet, as Montgomerie argues, "[d]espite the strengths of this scholarship, we are still straggling to understand the specific mechanisms by which such ideological continuity was maintained."(2) More specifically, what were the mechanisms used to ensure that the pre-war ideology concerning gender roles persisted through the war to be largely reinstated in the post-war era?
To date, scholarship on representations of women's work has concentrated on the text created by government and media. By centering our analysis on a different type of text -- a warplant company newspaper -- we wish to extend this dialogue. This paper explores how the wartime newspaper Aircrafter, produced by the Canadian Car and Foundry Company Limited (Can Car) in Fort William,(3) functioned as one such mechanism of ideological continuity through its representation and construction of women's identities as workers within the local context of a northwestern Ontario community and the broader context of the Allied war effort.(4) We argue that the efficacy of this ideological mechanism resided in the comprehensive way in which different rhetorical styles and varied sections of the newspaper -- the front page news and pictures, the editorial page, the women's page entitled "The Feminine Touch," and the cartoons scattered throughout -- collectively conveyed an ambivalent attitude that both praised and questioned women's war work in traditionally male jobs thus reinforcing pre-war women's roles and socially prescribed forms of femininity. These double messages were essential for legitimizing the decision by Can Car management, in keeping with national and international trends, to hire as many as 2,707 women at the peak of war production, (40 per cent of the total 6,760 employees),(5) and to dismiss all but 3 female plant floor workers at the war's end.(6)
The last 25 years of feminist scholarship concerning the impact of World War II on the status of women has recognized the necessity of distinguishing between the narrow, uniform depictions of women's war work found within war propaganda and women's lived experiences.(7) Research focusing on the realities of women's working lives during the war emphasizes the diversity of such experience. It is important to explore how the women workers negotiated the politics of the workplace and how they were situated within such social/historical constructs as gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, family, and region.(8) Whether focusing primarily upon the propaganda or the lived experiences, this revisionist scholarship largely concludes that women's participation in war work did not radically change the social value placed upon women in the labour force either during or at the end of the war; in fact there was a renewed vigour in the post-war era to reinforce the middle-class ideal of the breadwinning husband and housekeeping wife. As Sugiman argues in her analysis of gender politics at a Toronto autoplant during the war years, "[i]n confining women to specific jobs in the plants, in regarding them as temporary labour, and in presenting their employment as a purely patriotic mission, employers never fully relinquished the image of women as secondary wage earners, undeserving of full rights in the workplace."(9)
Canadian scholarship on government and popular media representations of women's war work concludes that pre-war definitions of femininity, excluding women from paid labour, were reinforced throughout the war despite propaganda praising and encouraging women's participation in the workplace. As Ruth Roach Pierson's landmark studies concerning Canadian war propaganda have revealed, "women's obligation to work in wartime was the major theme, not women's right to work."(10) Susan Bland points out that while advertising in Macleans magazine during the war did "not underestimate the contributions and sacrifices made by war workers, we are continually reminded that these women have feminine qualities."(11) According to Yvonne Matthews-Klein, wartime films produced by the National Film Board (NFB) "establish limits to women's full participation in the labour force which arise out of an underlying, and fixed, notion of what is appropriate feminine behaviour...."(12) Matthews-Klein's description of how the post-war National Film Board depicted women also holds true for Canadian propaganda during the war: "women were the object of a complex and confused series of double messages. Flattered and assured of their immense, if undefined power, women were simultaneously trivialized at every opportunity."(13) Despite such extensive research worldwide on the topic of the war's impact on women's actual and prescribed roles in the labour force, the ambiguity of these mixed messages within diverse texts and contexts demands continued unravelling.
Before discussing Aircrafter itself, we will provide a brief description of the inter-war prescribed roles for women and the realities of their work situation during the Depression, and also a brief history of both Fort William and Canadian Car and Foundry to provide a regional context. While the primary focus of this paper is the gendered construction of femininity and women's work in Aircrafter, our analysis also seeks to make visible related dimensions of class and ethnicity. As will be argued below, these are largely masked by the democratic and egalitarian language of the paper which aimed to create a unified work force for the war effort. However, beneath this mask lies a presumption of Anglo-Canadian, middle-class notions of femininity which shape the representations of women and women's work in the newspaper.(14)
Inter-War Prescribed Roles for Women
To recognize in war propaganda the continuity of inter-war gender ideology concerning women and work we must first of all establish the nature of this gender ideology. The call for women to enter wartime industry during World War I resulted in few changes to the middle-class Victorian ideal of women's natural and moral role as guardian of the family and home within the private sphere. In her study of Canadian women's work experience and identity in the context of the small town of Peterborough from 1920 to 1960, Joan Sangster points out that "this sexual division of labour was sustained and reinforced by ideological representations of femininity and masculinity and by an image of the nuclear, male breadwinner family as the ideal."(15) The economic conditions of the mid-1920s allowed this ideal to be put into practice as more men earned a large enough wage to support a family on one income.(16)
The Depression of the 1930s reversed this situation and increasing numbers of married and unmarried women faced the necessity of finding paid labour. Social adherence to the prescribed role of the male breadwinner resulted in public debates concerning women's proper sphere. According to Margaret Hobbs, even many of the defenders of women's place in the labour force argued not for women's right to work, but rather that women had no choice but to work since the Depression interfered with the proper role of fathers and husbands earning the income necessary to keep women in their proper domestic sphere of unpaid labour.(17) Hobbs points out that these defenders of women workers drew upon the same "stock of traditional images of femininity" as those who opposed women as wage earners.(18)
Sangster argues that while women negotiated the dominant images in various ways according to their diverse lived experiences, there were "common factors that shaped their views of work: the exposure of young girls to a rigid sexual division of labour especially in domestic life; a cultural view of extended education being of limited use particularly for girls; and the socialization of children to a familial ideology of obligation and respect for authority."(19) Also included in these social values, and of particular relevance to the later representations of women's war work, was the "image of female technological incompetence and male competence."(20)
The mass circulating magazines which would later celebrate women's war work were the same magazines which during the 1930s reinforced the ideology of female domesticity in the private sphere. Sangster nicely summarizes the ideals of womanhood portrayed in the inter-war popular culture as follows:
The emphasis on fulfillment through heterosexual romance, on domesticity as a female career goal, and the portrayal of motherhood as an expression of women's maturity, indeed as an expression of her natural abilities, were continuing themes in the media throughout the interwar period, despite the dislocation of the Great Depression and an increased incidence of married working women.(21)
It is ironic that, only a decade before the Canadian government was again encouraging women to enter the labour force, the popular culture of the 1930s reinforced the ideology of feminine domesticity, and public debates raged over the right of women to work during a period when economic reality necessitated women's participation in the paid labour force for their own and their families' survival. Canadian World War II propaganda would have to take into account the legacy of fear left by the 1930s that "femaleness itself was a potential cause for suspicion in the workforce of the Depression."(22)
Can Car in Regional Context
While little historical research exists on the status of women in the city of Fort William, it is reasonable to assume that the female population would also have had to negotiate the same dominant ideology of femininity as the small-town women of Peterborough described by Sangster. However, a major regional difference affecting women's work identities and experiences was Peterborough's location in southern Ontario. It was closer to large economic centres, while Fort William remained largely isolated due to its location in the northwestern Ontario region.(23) Canadian women as a whole working in war industry shared in common with the city an ambiguity of representation in Canadian war propaganda. On the one hand, they were praised as essential to not only the Canadian but also the world-wide allied war effort. On the other hand, embedded within this praise was the underlying assumption of their so-called inherent natural state of marginalization from the marketplace, a state to which both would return after the war -- women because they naturally belonged to the private sphere of the home; and Fort William because of its geographic isolation from the largest Canadian and American urban centres. Out of necessity, both had nobly risen to the occasion, but were expected to return to their proper isolated positions after the war.
The importance of the Canadian Car and Foundry plant to the area's economy during World War II made it a key player in the construction of workers' identities around the issues of gender, class, and ethnicity since its large workforce brought together the diverse elements of the community under one very large roof.(24) The Lakehead was hit particularly hard by the Depression in relation to the rest of the country.(25) A major contributor to the Lakehead's economic recovery was war-related manufacturing, especially the re-opening of the Canadian Car and Foundry Plant in 1937. Can Car, based in Montreal, was established in 1909. While the Fort William plant thrived during World War I, a lack of post-war business persuaded the Montreal head office to close the plant from 1921 to 1937.
