To ease fears of the breakdown of differences between men and women, female applicants for war industrial work were assured that the job they were being asked to do would not at all diminish their femininity, but would definitely speed up the return of Canadian men from overseas. Similarly, armed forces public relations assured female recruits that they would not be required to do anything "unwomanly" and that being in the services would not stand in the way of their having dates. Patriotic support-the-war advertising by big companies in Canada applauded women for trailblazing in non-traditional fields, while simultaneously assuring them that things would return to normal once the war was over. Post-war planners also envisioned most women returning to the home after the war, or to job sectors traditionally occupied by women. The demand for household help by moderately well-off and wealthy housewives came together with official fear of unemployment among discharged servicewomen and female war workers; in 1944-45 proposals for raising the status of domestic service proliferated.
On the whole, the expendability of women's labour in the public sphere was nowhere more dramatically illustrated after World War Il than in the armed forces. In the course of 1946, all three women's services were disbanded, although the air force retained a small nucleus of female messing officers under the aegis of the RCAF Medical Services. Only the impact of the Korean War in the 1950s brought the decision to enlist women again in the Regular Forces, first in the air force in 1951, then in the army in 1954, and finally in the navy in 1955. The World War II experience was a clear case of last hired, first fired, and not just of individual women, but of almost an entire group of women. It proved that women could serve as a reserve army of labour for the armed forces just as well as for the civilian labour market.
Canada's ex-servicewomen were not simply turned out into the cold. They were eligible, on an equal basis with ex-servicemen, for almost every feature of the generous veterans' rehabilitation program. The main difference stemmed from the fact that women had constituted only a small proportion of Canada's service personnel and thus far fewer women than men stood to gain from veterans' benefits.
Many factors came together in the post-war world to reduce employment opportunities for women and to return them to positions subservient to, and not in competition with, men. Above all came the reinstatement of male economic primacy and of the husband as breadwinner. Not only was there withdrawal of public supported child care, the "marriage bar" was slid back into place in many sectors. A Dominion civil service circular letter of 17 November 1945, for example, called for renewed enforcement of the pre-war policy of discrimination against married women which required that "any female employee in the public service...upon the occasion of her marriage,...resign her position." At the same time, the few women who had learned skills in non-traditional trades were eased out of work to make room for the men returning from overseas.
After years of struggle and uncertainty, many Canadians, both male and female, looked forward to a return to the "normalcy" of peace. That vision contained nothing of the hunger and despair of the depression. Concocted rather of rosy memories and dreams of a comfortable, home-centred future, it tended to be romantic and conservative. Playing on the human need for security and affection and moulding those war-shaped dreams was the massive propaganda from press and pulpit, appliance ads and employment counsellors, all celebrating women's primary commitment to home and family.
Given all the pressures and the resurrected barriers of the post-war years, it is difficult to determine precisely what proportion of women who had entered gainful employment during the war freely chose to leave it at the war's end. Contemporary studies produced conflicting results. On the basis of questionnaires distributed among women war workers and interviews with employers and business experts, the 1943 government Subcommittee on the Post-War Problems of Women estimated that 45 percent to 55 percent of the 600,000 women who had entered the paid labour force since 1939 would be responding to "the normal urge towards marriage, and home, and family life" and therefore would be leaving their paid job once the war was over. In contrast, one Department of Labour survey, conducted in 1944, of the "post-war working intentions" of 19,710 civilian men and 10,135 civilian women, showed 28 percent of the women intending to quit work after the war in order to take care of a home but 72 percent wanting to stay in the work force. Women's magazines of the day recorded some negative reactions to the prospect of relinquishing wartime gains in job training and opportunities. An ex-servicewoman from Winnipeg writing to the Canadian Home Journal in April 1945 expressed her feeling that sending women back home was "like putting a chick back in the shell, it cannot be done without destroying spirit, heart or mind." But the woman who won the prize from the National Home Monthly in 1945 for the best letter on the subject, "If there's a job in industry for you after the war, do you want it?" expressed a definite preference for domesticity. "One thing I would like to make clear," she wrote, "I do not feel I am sacrificing myself for housekeeping. The thing I wanted most was a husband and a home of my own."
The post-war restrictions on women's gainful employment and the inducements to return to the home took effect. Women's participation in the paid work force, which had risen from 24.4 percent in 1939 to a high of 33.5 percent in 1944, began to slide in 1945 and then plummeted in 1946 to 25.3 percent. The female participation rate reached its post-war nadir of 23.6 percent in 1954. (Only by 1966 had it climbed back up to the 1945 level.) Can we say the war "emancipated" women or elevated women's status? It would seem doubtful, if by those terms we mean a reorganization by society that would allow for a genuinely equal sharing of power and responsibilities between men and women in the public and the private spheres.
Women's increased job opportunities during the war came not as a result of recognition of women's right to work, but rather, because in the time of emergency and acute labour shortage, women constituted a convenient pool of reserve labour both for private industry and public service. Even so, in the stepped up private economy as well as in the armed forces, women on the whole were still used for tasks within domains previously designated as female and hence safely out of competition with men.
The near sacrosanct exclusion or exemption of women from combat was respected above all and the male monopoly on arms bearing went unchallenged. Insofar as women entered the military or took on traditionally male jobs in the civilian world, such as heavy-machine operating, or within traditionally male sectors, such as shipbuilding, it was on a carefully circumscribed basis.
Indeed, the area in which the largest number of women laboured in support of the war was that of unpaid, volunteer work, a traditionally female domain. Within it, women found considerable scope to exercise their great organizational and administrative abilities. Within the public sphere, however, no matter how high a woman's position, there always remained above her a man, if not a hierarchy of men, to whom she was ultimately responsible. Although women's labour in support and service jobs was indispensable, the conduct of war remained in the hands of a male elite.
To a large extent, the mobilization of women for the war effort was a case of manipulation by the state. Patriotic propaganda played a part in recruitment, but so did tax inducements to working wives and government provision of child care to mothers in war industry. Useful as low-paid female labour in the public sphere was, state and society remained convinced that women's primary function was to bear and rear the next generation as well as to keep house and create a home for the male worker. Only for the sake of the war effort and for the duration of the war, was the state willing to finance programs accommodating the domestic responsibilities of women who needed or desired work outside the home. After the war, government and industry halted those programs or cut them back severely. Barriers to married women's employment, removed during the war, dropped back into place in many sectors.
The acute labour shortage of wartime evaporated with demobilization. In job competition, preference was given to ex-servicemen. The return of labour surplus and the coincidence of the post-war baby boom with the withdrawal of state-supported child care conspired to encourage the married woman whose husband was employed to devote herself to childbearing and housekeeping. Advertising on a massive scale promoted the consumption of domestic commodities and romanticized as natural and beautiful the connection of women with domesticity. An improved family allowance system was designed to eliminate a poor mother's need to work outside the home. This set of circumstances also worked to persuade young single women to seek a husband rather than to train for a career or a life of full-time skilled wage work.
In the wake of war's disruptions, many Canadian women and men were left with a strong desire for a return to stability and the sanctuary of the home. It was understood that making a haven of the home was women's work, but this was not a realizable goal for all women. For one thing, the war had robbed many wives of their husbands and many other women of prospective husbands, while the decision of almost 50,000 Canadian servicemen to marry overseas had deprived a comparable number of Canadian women of fiances. Furthermore, once the production of consumer goods was resumed, many married women needed additional income to equip and furnish their homes.
Women's massive mobilization during the war years had done little to secure women in the aggregate a more equal place in the post-war public world or to provide, in the Canadian economy, for the single older woman or the deserted wife or mother or the woman whose husband earned too little. Unemployment insurance, introduced in Canada in 1940, would protect some women in the paid force, and certain individual women, like former CWAC Judy LaMarsh, would be able to use veterans' educational benefits to launch themselves on promising careers, but in the main, working women would continue to be segregated into subordinate, poorly paid job ghettos. The wartime deviations had left intact, if not reinforced, the norm of male as head of household and primary provider; society's sense of indebtedness to the returning soldier, which forced women out of non-traditional jobs, strengthened male economic primacy. A sexual division of labour and a male-female hierarchy of authority re-emerged unscathed. One objective of feminism had been women's achievement of equality with men in rights and duties, opportunities and powers, and the few feminists vocal in Canada during the war had viewed wartime developments hopefully. One could point to the fact that Quebec women were finally granted the provincial franchise in 1940. In most other areas of public life, however, the post-war world proved feminist hopes to have been premature. While some women had gained a new confidence and a new self-image through wartime service, many of them saw their expectations dashed against the re-entrenchment of more traditional expectations of a woman's role within the new post-war world of plastic and penicillin, paperback books and frozen foods. In the meantime, women's contribution to the war effort, so trumpeted when labour was scarce, was allowed for decades to fade quietly from public view.
