A Woman's Place Is in the News

Abstract

Through a comparative content analysis, this article examines coverage of women's labor—domestic, volunteer and wage—in commercial and alternative newspapers in Canada during the Second World War. While scholars have written on media representations of women during the war, the lack of a systematic, longitudinal analysis of Canadian newspapers creates methodological and knowledge gaps. Using a feminist media studies framework, this article offers empirical evidence to demonstrate that despite the magnitude and significance of women's wartime labor, the subject received limited news coverage and, moreover, coverage reinforced gendered ideals within and across commercial and labor newspapers. This challenges the idea that either the women's pages or the alternative labor press offered a “space” for more progressive coverage than the gendered representations traditionally found in the mainstream news and, in the process, this article offers ways of thinking about women's labor inclusively, but beyond the historical gendered division of labor.

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Notes on contributors

Tracy Moniz

TRACY MONIZ is an assistant professor in the department of communication studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her areas of research interest include journalism history, gender and media, and writing practice and pedagogy. The research study that informs this article is part of the author's doctoral dissertation, “Women in the Margins: Media Representations of Women's Labor in the Canadian Press, 1939–1945” (Ryerson University, 2012), which analyzed representations of women's labor (domestic, volunteer and wage) in Canadian newspapers during the Second World War. An earlier version of this paper was presented in 2014 at the Fifth Asian Conference on Media and Mass Communication and printed in official conference proceedings.