Canadian women contributed greatly and in diverse ways to the country's war effort during the Second World War. They served in military uniform, in factories, and in voluntary service organizations. For the first time in Canadian history the three branches of the armed forces were opened to women who were other than nursing sisters. An unprecedented proportion of women left the domestic sphere to enter paid employment in the public and private sectors, and the voluntary labour of women was also mobilized on a vaster scale than ever before. In the course of the war, a few women rose to positions of considerable responsibility and influence.
These developments went on under the shadow of war which brought tragedy to the women whose brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, and prospective husbands, 40,000 Canadian men, were killed in action. Many women also suffered the loss of European relatives to the Nazi racial and political policies of mass murder. The anguish caused by the unspeakable horrors of war and the private and personal experiences, whether of joy or of despair, are perhaps best left to the skillful autobiographer or novelist.
Here, as we review women's participation in Canada's war effort, we will be interested in the larger picture of the changing position and image of women in Canadian society. Did society's expectations of women change? Were prejudices concerning women's role and capabilities undermined? In the name of what cause or principle were changes made? Can we say that war emancipated women or elevated women's status? Or will we conclude rather that the extreme conditions of wartime highlighted and exaggerated society's commitment to a traditional division of labour and hierarchy of authority along sex lines?
The Pre-War Situation
When war broke out in September 1939, the Canadian economy was still in the grip of the Great Depression. Of a population of eleven million, approximately 900,000 workers remained unemployed, an estimated 20 percent of whom were women. The severe contraction of the economy had not, of course, brought adversity to everyone. For middle and upper-class women who themselves or whose husbands or fathers possessed sound investments or had secure professions, it was a time when commodities and services could be bought cheaply. Many housewives were able to afford a new electric washing-machine or vacuum cleaner or to hire domestic help for the first time in their married lives.
Women formerly accustomed to comfort, whose husbands or fathers lost everything in the 1929 crash, experienced the shock of a sudden descent into penury. Of those affected adversely, it would be difficult to say who was hit worst, farm wives on the drought and locust-ridden prairies, wives and daughters of men out of work and on relief, widows, female heads of single parent families, or self supporting mature women who could not find jobs. An implicit "marriage bar" kept married women out of employment in the public service and many sectors of private industry. Teachers, office workers, telephone operators, sales clerks, textile and canning factory workers, and nurses had difficulty finding work. There was unemployment in every preserve of female labour except domestic service. Destitute wives hired themselves out as cleaning women in other women's houses and daughters of jobless fathers took positions as maids in the homes of the more affluent. The demand seemed inexhaustible, but in domestic service, as in other types of work, employers not employees determined wages and working conditions. While having a job was generally better than not having one, various royal commissions revealed that women employed in the textile industry and needle trades were often exploited shamefully through low pay, long hours, and a brutal pace of work. For those who had known the despair of unemployment or the nervous exhaustion of exploitative labour, the war opened new opportunities.
Between September 1939 and mid-1941, military recruitment and war industry took up the slack in the labour market still remaining from the depression. By June 1941, the number of women workers had risen by some 100,000 over the Dominion census figure of 1931, but that increase had "only kept pace with the general upswing in employment". Only thereafter did an unusual demand for female labour outside the home begin to make itself felt.
Women in the Armed Forces
The armed forces were the first to feel the pinch of a threatening manpower shortage. As early as June 1940, National Defence Headquarters began looking into the possibility of putting women into uniform and using them in support staff positions to release men for active service elsewhere. This anticipation on the part of the Canadian armed forces to alleviate manpower shortages by the enlistment of women coincided with the keen desire of thousands women to render service in uniform to their country.
British Columbia women were the first to demonstrate eagerness for military service. A volunteer women's service corps was formed in that province in October 1938, on the model of the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service of the British Army. Women's unofficial paramilitary groups mushroomed with the actual outbreak of war; about 6,700 women were believed to be enrolled in such organizations by 1941. They called themselves the Women's Transport Service Corps, the British Columbia, Alberta, and Nova Scotia Women's Service Corps, the Saskatchewan Auxiliary Territorials, the Women's Volunteer Reserve Corps of Montreal (nicknamed the Canadian Beavers), le Corps de réserve national féminin, la Reserve canadienne féminine, and the Canadian Auxiliary Territorial Service of Ontario. These organizations bombarded the departments of National Defence and National War Services with requests for official recognition. In the end, the Department of National Defence decided to found its own women's corps and to use the volunteer paramilitary groups only as recruiting grounds.
The first armed service to open its doors to women other than to those who were nursing sisters was the air force. The Canadian Women's Auxiliary Air Force (CWAAF) was brought into being by an Order-in-Council dated 2 July 1941, and made an integral part of the air force from the start. In February 1942, it was redesignated the Royal Canadian Air Force (Women's Division), commonly referred to as the WD's. The second service to move was the army. An Order-in-Council of 13 August 1941 authorized the formation of the Canadian Women's Army Corps (CWAC), but its full integration into the Canadian Army (Active) had to wait until March 1942. The last service to admit women was the navy with the establishment of the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS) on 31 July 1942.
Recruiting for the CWAAF and the CWAC started in the late summer and early fall of 1941. In building up the officers' corps of these new women's services, preference was given to officers of the women's unofficial paramilitary groups. Many recruits also came from their ranks, young women drawn by the appeal of military life and its symbols. A 1943 army study revealed that the dominant motive impelling women to join the services was patriotism. But other motives played a part, such as the desire to be near one's man or a female friend, or to escape rural isolation or small-town life and to see the world. Economic motives were important too for those who sought opportunities to learn new trades and skills.
The air force, army, and navy used female labour in the ground crews, behind desks, and on shore in order to release men for combat duty. The mottoes of the women's services tell the story: "We Serve That Men May Fly"; "We Serve That Men May Fight"; "We Are the Women Behind the Men Behind the Guns." The occupations open to women who joined the forces were all non-combattant. The number of occupations, however, increased as the war dragged on. The Women's Division of the RCAF, which began with eleven basic trades, had fifty by February 1943. In the army a few women were eventually assigned to operational duties with coastal defence units. Starting in 1943, CWAC personnel were trained for service with Anti-Aircraft Regiments as kinetheodolite operators (people who tested the accuracy of height-and-range finders and anti-aircraft guns) and broadcasters and plotter-telephonists in gun-operations rooms. Recruitment propaganda, however, could still assure the Canadian young woman that she would not be called upon to serve "on the firing line." You do not pull any triggers or throw any hand grenades.
By March 1945, members of the CWAC were represented in fifty-five different trade classifications in addition to the general-duty assignments carrying no trades pay, such as driver without technical training, laundress, medical orderly, batwoman, canteen helper, waitress, and office orderly. Even among tradeswomen, the overwhelming majority were assigned to office or kitchen duty. Fully 70 percent of the CWAC tradeswomen stationed in North America in March 1945 were employed in the two occupations of clerk (62.4 percent) and cook (8 percent). Almost 90 percent (88.6) are accounted for if one adds the 6.9 percent who were storewomen; 4.5 percent, switchboard operators; 2.7 percent, postal sorters; 2.2 percent, dental assistants; and 1.9 percent drivers with technical training. The remaining 11.4 percent were distributed among the other forty-six trades. The secretary in uniform was the typical CWAC.
The other two services did not deviate in the main from this pattern of female employment. Demand throughout remained greatest for clerical help and cooks. The overwhelming majority of uniformed women employed by the army, air force or navy were assigned to jobs that had already become female niches in the civilian labour market or were extensions of mothering or housework.
Women in uniform, however, did not receive the same pay as their male counterparts. At the time of the formation of the women's services, basic pay for all ranks was set at two-thirds that of men holding equivalent rank. Also trades pay was on a schedule substantially lower than that for servicemen at the same level in the same trades classification. Furthermore, no dependents' allowances were provided to servicewomen. These inequalities in pay and benefits were cause for complaint at the time on the part of female officers and other ranks. There was also public outcry. What made the inequality particularly glaring was that in many instances a servicewoman had stepped directly into a position vacated by a man and was told she was doing as good a job as, if not better than the soldier, sailor or airman she had replaced. Furthermore, while women accepted into the army, navy and air force were not supposed to have dependent children, the complete lack of provision of dependents' allowances hurt "many girls" who had "been contributing to family income."
Evidence that these inequalities were one factor deterring female recruitment made the Department of National Defence sensitive to the criticism. In July 1943 adjustments were made in pay and allowances for women in the services. Basic pay was raised to 80 percent of that paid to men in the same rank, and trades pay was equalized. Furthermore, allowances would henceforward be paid for the dependent parents, brothers and sisters (but not husbands) of servicewomen. Although the new provisions did not remove all inequalities, the armed services were ahead of private industry in narrowing the gap between men's and women's pay and benefits. Nonetheless, a survey carried out in 1944 found servicewomen still aggrieved that their pay was not equal to that of the men they relieved.
But recruiting officers had come up against more difficult obstacles than lower pay. Circulation of rumours impugning the morality of servicewomen was effectively discouraging enlistment. The Wartime Information Board (WIB) made a study of this "whispering campaign" and concluded that "the frequency, persistence and wide distribution" of the rumours suggested "a strongly entrenched prejudice against the Women's services." The WIB explained the "immorality" charge historically, pointing out that sexual respectability was "woman's vulnerable point, the traditional focus of attack by those who resent any extension of her prerogatives." Wearing a uniform, marching, standing at attention and saluting were all traditionally masculine behaviour. The woman who behaved so appeared unconventional and "unwomanly," and it was thus easy to assume that she would have broken with moral convention as well. Officers in charge of recruitment and public relations worked to counteract the rumours by playing up the positive aspects of women's life in the services and by advertising parental approval of a daughter's joining up.
Braving the opposition, which continued into 1945, almost 50,000 women resident in Canada had enlisted in the women's services before their dissolution in 1946: 20,497 in the CWAC; 16 221 in the Women's Division of the RCAF; and 6,665 in the WRCNS. An additional 4,439 served in the nursing services of the three forces. Altogether they represented about 2 percent of the female population in Canada between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. Some servicewomen had been stationed outside Canada in Newfoundland and the United States. The opportunity to serve overseas was reserved for those with the greatest seniority and most outstanding service records. "The first draft of R.C.A.F. (W.D.) personnel proceeded to the United Kingdom in August 1942"; of CWAC, in November of that same year; and of WRCNS, not until late 1943. Starting in May 1944 select groups of CWAC personnel were despatched to operational areas on the European continent to serve in the rear of the Canadian forces taking part in the invasion of Italy and then France and Germany.
Women in the Civilian Labour Force
Lagging behind the military, interest in the availability of paid female labour for civilian war production did not become a subject of study until the summer of 1941. The Labour Supply Investigation Committee which the federal government then appointed reported that as "most of the reserve pool of male workers" was now "exhausted," "the complete mobilization" of the "large reserves of female labour in the country" would "be necessary for the fullest prosecution of the war effort." The advice was heeded and in March 1942 the government of Canada established the National Selective Service (NSS) for the mobilization and allocation of Canadian labour. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, in an address to Parliament, singled out the recruitment of women for employment as "the most important single feature of the program." A special Women's Division of the NSS was created two months later and in September a special registration of women aged twenty to twenty-four was held.
Thus began the first phase of active recruitment of female labour aimed at young single or married women without children. The NSS launched a nationwide publicity campaign to popularize war industrial work for young women and to break down "the general reluctance of employers to employ women at work customarily done by men." The NSS got editors to agree to give space in their publications for stories and pictures of women working in war production. The CBC national network broadcast "a series of dramatic plays; written expressly for National Selective Service around the theme of women war workers." The NSS also began a policy of transferring women workers from rural areas to the centres of war industry, principally in Ontario and Quebec.
The recruiting campaign paid off. At the peak of female employment, in the autumn of 1944, an estimated 1,080,000 to 1 200,000 women were working full time in Canada's paid labour force. These figures do not take account of female part-time workers nor of the 800,000 women on farms who were "doing their full share, with or without personal wages or salaries, to meet farm production schedules." In non-agricultural employment, as of autumn 1943, the largest number of women still found jobs in the service sector, approximately 439,000; 373,000 were in manufacturing; 180,000 in trade and finance; 31,000 in transportation and communication; and 4,000 in construction. The peak in female employment in war industry had been reached in October 1943 when it was estimated that 261,000 women were employed directly or indirectly in war production.
Directly employed were those working in war plants making guns, ammunition, and tanks, in shipbuilding, and in aircraft production. Women were used above all in inspection (for instance, most of the shells produced by the Canadian war industry were inspected by women) and for the "delicate operations." The conventional wisdom of the day held that in such jobs as assembling valves or the tiny parts of fuses, women were "superior to men, because of their smaller, more sensitive fingers, and their capacity for long hours of routine and eye gruelling work." The higher wages attracted women away from other occupations into war industry; there was, for instance, an estimated exodus of 50,000 women from domestic service between 1941 and 1944. The textile and clothing industries complained to government about their loss of women workers. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board responded by designating production in some mills essential to the war effort, and the NSS, by holding drives in 1943 to recruit women for the textile and garment industries in those centres where the labour shortage had become critical. This helped, but the Department of Labour was well aware that long hours, low rates of pay, and poor working conditions were responsible for the difficulties. In general, despite the lip service paid by government and some trade unions to the principle of equal pay for equal work, the average hourly earnings of women in industry in 1944 were only two-thirds those of men (47.9 cents as compared with 71.2 cents).
By mid-1943 there were labour shortages in many areas of the service sector long dependent on female labour. Women had been leaving these not only for the higher paying employment in war industries, but also for enlistment in the armed services. Hospitals, restaurants, hotels, laundries and dry cleaners were clamouring for help, but the "readily available surplus of female labour" had evaporated. In the summer of 1943, the NSS began to seek women with children and other home responsibilities for part-time employment. The aim of an Ottawa campaign was to encourage former female employees of the civil service, now married, to return to part-time or full-time temporary work to overcome the shortage of workers in war departments of government.
While young, single women had been the first stratum of the female labour reserve sought by the NSS, followed by married but childless women, mothers in need of employment, including mothers of young children, took advantage from the start of the increased job opportunities created by the war. It was discovered in September 1942 that many mothers working in Montreal's war plants had told their employers that they were single, because they had been afraid that they would not get the jobs otherwise, By the third year of the war, public pressure for government provision of nurseries and after school supervision of children was growing in Ontario, especially in the Toronto area. There were reports of "car babies"(infants locked in parked vehicles while the mothers or both parents were at work) and concern over "latch-key" children; critics posited a connection between working mothers and juvenile delinquency.
State Provision of Child Care
Aware of the country's increasing dependence on the paid labour of women with young children, the dominion government took steps to make child care available to working mothers for the duration of the war. An Order-in-Council of 20 July 1942 authorized the federal government to co-operate on a fifty-fifty cost-sharing basis with any province interested in establishing day-care facilities for children of mothers in war industries. Only the two most industrialized provinces took advantage of the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement, Ontario signing on 29 July 1942, Québec, on 3 August. Although Alberta signed on 31 August 1943, the agreement was never put into effect in that province.
Even where implemented, the program was slow in getting off the ground and limited in extent. Day nurseries under the agreement started opening in Ontario in January 1943, and in Quebec, two months later. The agreement also provided for day care for school-age children, including supervision during vacations as well as provision of a hot noon meal and supervision before and after school hours during the regular term. Foster parent care was to be arranged for infants and children under two. By September 1945 there were in operation under the agreement in Ontario twenty-eight day nurseries accommodating about 900 children and forty-four school units accommodating about 2,500. At the same time in Québec there were only five wartime day nurseries, all in Montréal, with an average enrolment of only between 115 and 120 children.
As the program had been designed to meet a war emergency, the rationale for the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement was seen to expire with the return of peace. The Québec government abruptly terminated the agreement on 15 October 1945, despite appeals from social agencies, Catholic charitable organizations, Protestant women teachers' associations, and working mothers. The program limped along a bit longer in Ontario, while governments haggled over whether day nurseries were primarily a federal, provincial or municipal concern. In the end, the dominion government took the initiative in terminating the agreement with Ontario on 30 June 1946.
Women's Unpaid and Voluntary Labour
Far and away the largest contribution made by Canadian women to the war effort was through their unpaid labour in the home and what is called volunteer work. Women's unremunerated domestic work was as crucial to the maintenance of most families in wartime as in peace, if not more so. The almost total mobilization of Canadian society for efficient prosecution of the war called upon the cooperation of women as consumers, preparers of food, makers of clothes, and managers of family budgets. Women as homemakers helped the war effort by respecting the limitations that rationing imposed, by preventing waste, and by saving and collecting materials normally discarded for use in war production, After 1942, urban homemakers in particular had to learn to cook with limited supplies of almost everything from milk to molasses. To increase Canada's food production they cultivated victory gardens and canned the crops. While many housewives and mothers had had to practise severe economies during the depression, others who had been better off learned for the first time to remake old clothes into new outfits for themselves and their families and to curtail their buying in the face of production cutbacks of practically everything from brooms to baby carriages. Homemakers saved fat scraps and oils for the ammunition industry and pennies to buy war stamps. As one poster put it, women were to "Dig In and Dig Out the Scrap" and save metals, rags, papers, bones, rubber and glass.
Someone had to collect the salvage and the contributions to victory loans and to distribute ration cards and information on how to practise domestic economies necessary for the war effort. Almost all of that work at the neighbourhood level was performed voluntarily by women. Indeed, at the local level the volunteer work of women, who also worked in or outside the home or both, sustained a vast network of wartime services and activities. The Department of National War Services established a Women's Voluntary Services (WVS) Division in the fall of 1941 to coordinate these efforts. While the Ottawa office served to direct and advise, and to supply government information, the main burden of the program was carried by WVS centres set up eventually in forty-four Canadian cities from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, and in rural areas by women's institutes.
Women's voluntary contribution to the war effort, however, had not had to wait for action from the federal government. Women themselves had taken the initiative. Immediately after the declaration of war, established women's organizations of all kinds turned their attention to war work and new organizations sprang into being for that express purpose.
The core of Canada's volunteer war work, then, was performed by millions of Canadian women organized into thousands of local societies and clubs, orchestrated by the local WVS centres and women's institutes under the direction of Ottawa's WVS. Fifteen of the urban WVS centres used the Block Plan to organize the community for house-to-house canvassing and collection, with a hierarchy of responsibility stretching from block leaders through section leaders and zone leaders to a director of the Block Plan in the WVS office. In the words of the Convener for War Services of the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada, speaking of the war work of Canadian rural women:
They have worked harder at farm work than ever before. They have driven tractors, made hay, picked fruit, raised wonderful gardens and increased the poultry and egg production of all Canada. Yet they have found time to make tons of jam for overseas, clothing for refugees and thousands of articles for the Red Cross.
From 1943 to 1945, the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada raised "over half a million dollars in cash" and made "nearly the same number of garments...for the Red Cross and others." After the war, women's institutes and the WVS centres organized committees to welcome returning veterans and to help foreign "war brides" of Canadian servicemen feel at home in their new country.
Another way in which women voluntarily contributed to the war effort was to help monitor inflation. After the Wartime Prices and Trade Board set price and production ceilings on many consumer items in 1941-42, women's clubs across Canada appointed committees to keep an eye on the movement of prices and availability of goods essential to housekeeping and family care. Women took pad and pencil to food and clothing and hardware stores and made notes of price infractions or commodity scarcities. Once again the initiative of women suggested the establishment of a federal body to coordinate their activities; consequently, the Consumer Branch of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board was brought into being. Canada was divided into fourteen administrative areas, each with a Women's Regional Advisory Committee. Working with these committees at the local level were subcommittees in urban centres with a population of 5,000 or more and corresponding members in smaller communities. In addition, every individual women's organization in towns with more than one was asked to appoint a liaison officer to keep in touch with the local subcommittee. Through this network one million of Canada's three million adult women were mobilized to keep a close watch on the behaviour of price and production restrictions everywhere in the country and report to Ottawa.
Some Women Gain Prominent Positions
A number of women rose to positions of public prominence and responsibility in connection with the war effort. The pinnacle of power for women within the Canadian armed forces was that of head of one of the women's corps. In 1944 these positions were held by Wing Officer Willa Walker, Senior Officer, RCAF, Women's division; Colonel Margaret Eaton, Director, CWAC; and Commander Adelaide Sinclair, Director, WRCNS. Within the civilian government, women attained high positions directing women's branches of federal war departments. For instance, Fraudena (Mrs. Rex) Eaton was put in charge of the Women's Division of National Selective Service in the Department of Labour, and Nell (Mrs. W.E.) West was made Director of Women's Voluntary Services in the Department of National War Services. The identification of certain activities as pre-eminently within women's domain was behind the appointment of some women to wartime governmental positions. The association, for instance, of women with buying for the home and family explains the fact that both in the Department of Agriculture and on the Wartime Prices and Trade Board the position of head of the consumer division was given to a woman. (Laura Pepper was made Chief of the Consumer Section, Department of Agriculture, and Byrne Hope Sanders, Director, Consumer Branch, Wartime Prices and Trade Board.) These women tended to come from the elite of Canadian society, to be professional or businesswomen themselves or married to successful business or professional men, and to have a record of public service.
Wartime also opened the media more widely to the talents of women, as women writers and broadcasters and photographers were given special assignments to help with the mobilization of women for industrial war work, the armed forces, and voluntary services.
Temporary Emancipation
The attainment of prominence by a few women, women's replacement of men in some traditionally male occupations, and women's public involvement in the war effort on such a large scale led some to hail the war as having "emancipated" women. The ceremonial launching of a ship that women workers had helped to build "from the first bolts and staves to the final slap of paint and piece of polished brass" moved journalist Lotta Dempsey to write in 1943:
At that precedent-setting launching the women were helping to launch, as well, the great and final stage of...the significant movement of "women into industry on a complete equality with men."
National Selective Service in 1943 spoke of the war as having "finally brought about the complete emancipation of women." There was an apparent equalizing of the roles of men and women in society. But insofar as this occurred, it involved more of a "masculinizing" of women's roles than a "feminizing" of men's. The war effort moved some women into hitherto male monopolized fields, but not the reverse. Women became truck drivers; men did not become day-nursery attendants. Fashion reflected this development: pants became acceptable attire for women, but there was no adoption by men of items of clothing conventionally female. The extent to which women were becoming like men was a worry to many Canadians. A public opinion survey in 1943 indicated that opposition to women joining the forces was derived largely from the fear that servicewomen would cease to be feminine and sexually respectable.
