Susanna McLeod
Special to Canadian Design and Construction Report
The rhythmic clack, clack sound of marching, the whoosh as train wheels turned, and the echoes of ship horns signalled soldiers rushing to duty in WW2. The men left behinQd jobs, and a fresh segment of workers stepped in. A significant number of women enlisted for duty as well, while others chose to serve on the home front. Tying scarves over their hair, donning work clothes, and learning the trades, women marched into jobs at factories and work yards.
Industrial workplaces were considered “men’s work” in the early 1900s in North America. However, women were already employed for long exhausting hours at factories, sewing sweatshops, and laundries, those jobs considered “women’s work.” Employers desperately needed workers to produce urgent wartime needs and keep national economies afloat. New opportunities emerged for women to learn new skills, earn better income, and make valuable contributions.
The jobs were hard work—manufacturing enormous ships and tanks, building fighter aircraft and bombers, manufacturing military weapons and ammunition, and anything else a nation required. Among many necessary skills needed, women learned to cut steel, to weld, and to rivet.
However, employers had to change their unfounded discriminatory policies against hiring women. (The situation was even worse for black women and men.) “According to the men in charge, women did not have the physical strength, mechanical ability, and emotional stability to do high-paying, skilled factory jobs,” said Penny Colman in Rosie the Riveter (Crown Publishers 1995). The demands of war required an abrupt change of attitude.
By 1941, women “were building dive bombers, making time fuses for high-explosive shells, turning out millions of rounds of machine-gun and small arms ammunition, inspecting aircraft engines, and making rubber floatation bags for planes forced down at sea,” described Colman.
The catchy song, entitled Rosie the Riveter, written by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, was played on the radio in early 1943, sung by an array of musicians. Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint a Saturday Evening Post cover entitled “Rosie the Riveter,” and J. Howard Miller created a colourful poster titled “We Can Do It!” for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, PA. The messages merged, and Miller’s 1942 artwork is now most prominent.
The poster features a woman’s powerful flexed arm, with her hand forming a fist. She wears a red polka-dotted scarf on her head. “Rosie the Riveter” captured imaginations and the pride wartime women felt in their work. No singular person was Rosie. The image was an amalgamation of women, ready to take on the world that needed their efforts.
In Canada, the government developed a registry of women between age 20 to 24 in 1942, women who could fill potential labour shortages. In 1943 to 1944, approximately “261,000 worked directly in the munitions industries, a large number doing tasks traditionally considered to belong to men,” stated Canadian War Museum in “Canada and the War: Life on the Home Front.” Female employees “worked in shipyards and the smelter at Sudbury and made up 30% of the workforce in Canada’s aircraft industry.”
While appreciating American ads promoting “Rosie the Riveter,” Canadian women already had an ambassador, selected a year earlier. (America entered the war two years after Canada.) This living, breathing young woman was employed at a weapons factory: Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl.
Working at the John Inglis and Company factory in Toronto, nineteen-year-old Veronica “Ronnie” Foster was chosen by the National Film Board (NFB) to star in a film encouraging women to register for industrial wartime work. Building heavy equipment such as turbines and tugs (before becoming an appliance producer), the Inglis firm switched to manufacturing wartime machinery including Tribal-class destroyers and munitions, such as the Hi-power pistol, Polsten 20mm autocannon, and Bren Guns.
With pride and enthusiasm, women proved their abilities and skills at industrial workplaces across Canada. At the Inglis plant between 1940-1945, the Bren teams– about half men and half women–produced over 185,000 guns for Allied military forces. “There were around 1,000 female workers at the Inglis plant who worked nine-hour shifts daily, with every eighth day off,” mentioned Jamie Bradburn (TVO Today) Earning between 30 to 40 cents per hour, women in non-wartime earned 22 to 25 cents an hour. Bren guns and other equipment required precision, and women were well-suited to the intricate tasks.
The end of the war brought relief and elation, but also job loss for millions of women working at industrial plants in the United States and Canada. Wartime contracts ended. Veterans marched home, reclaiming their jobs. Laid off or demoted, many women returned to their domestic lives and disappointed lower-paying, less-skilled work.
The wartime female workforce proved that women could readily handle complex technology, participate in heavy industrial manufacturing, and support military services, with skilled expertise. All with pretty scarves tied on their hair.
Susanna McLeod is a Kingston-based writer specializing in Canadian history.
