NOTES
- Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3.
- W.L. Mackenzie King, Canada and the War: Manpower and a Total War Effort: National Selective Service (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1942), 9.
- Canada, Advisory Committee on Reconstruction, Subcommittee on Post-War Problems of Women. The Final Report of the Subcommittee on the Post-war Problems of Women (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1944), 8.
- Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
- The research study that informs this article is drawn from the author's doctoral dissertation: Tracy Moniz, “Women in the Margins: Media Representations of Women's Labor in the Canadian Press, 1939–1945” (PhD diss., Ryerson University, 2012). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication 2014 and published in conference proceedings: Tracy Moniz, “Whither the News?: Problematizing the Gendered Limits of Coverage of Women's Labour in Canada, 1939–1945,” in The Asian Conference on Media & Mass Communication 2014: Official Conference Proceedings (Osaka, Japan: The International Academic Forum, 2015), 299–313.
- See Sandra Gabriele, “Gendered Mobility, the Nation and the Woman's Page: Exploring the Mobile Practices of the Canadian Lady Journalist, 1888–1895,” Journalism 7, no. 2 (2006): 174–96, doi:10.1177/1464884906062604; Janice Fiamengo, The Woman's Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Marjory Lang, Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 1880–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999); and Jeffrey Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada's Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004).
- Ruth Roach Pierson, “They're Still Women after All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 41.
- Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work, 3rd ed. (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89.
- Pierson, Canadian Womanhood, 33.
- Margrit Eichler, “The Connection between Paid and Unpaid Labor,” in Women's Paid and Unpaid Work: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed.Paula Bourne (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1985), 63.
- As a limitation, this study does not directly address issues of class or race. However, it is important to note that volunteerism was especially common among the wealthy or upper middle-class because working-class women employed in factories or on the farm fields needed the income to survive. Therefore, the wealthy or upper middle-class women who didn't need to supplement the family income or who did not wish to work opted to volunteer instead.
- “Women's Voluntary Services Division Report: Confidential Recommendations (Part II),” 1941–1946, Canada, Department of Labour Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, 1.
- “Women's Voluntary Services Division Report: Organization and Work (Part I),” 1941–1946, Canada, Department of Labour Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, 9–11.
- Ibid.
- Pierson, Canadian Womanhood, 39–40.
- Pierson, Canadian Womanhood, 9; and History of the Wartime Activities of the Department of Labour, Employment of Women (Part I), record group 27, 1 file part 10, 8, Department of Labour fonds, Library and Archives Canada.
- Canada, Final Report, 7; and Pierson, Canadian Womanhood, 9.
- Canada, Final Report, 8.
- Pierson, Canadian Womanhood, 23, 61.
- Armstrong and Armstrong, Double Ghetto, 18; and Jeffrey A. Keshen, “Revisiting Canada's Civilian Women during World War II,” Social History 30, no. 60 (1997): 246.
- Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers, 154.
- For a summary of feminist media theory discussing gendered media content, see: Stuart Allan, “The Gendered Realities of Journalism,” in News Culture, ed.Stuart Allan (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 130–56; Carolyn M. Byerly and Karen Ross, Women and Media: A Critical Introduction (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Carolyn M. Byerly and Karen Ross, “News, Feminism and the Dialectics of Gender Relations,” in Mediated Women: Representations in Popular Culture, ed.Marian Meyers (Creskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1999), 383–403.; Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allen, eds., News, Gender and Power (London: Routledge, 1998); David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3–38; Angharad N. Valdivia and Sarah Projansky, “Feminism and/in Mass Media,” in The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Communication, ed. Julia T. Wood and Bonnie J. Dow (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2006), 273–96; Liesbet A. van Zoonen, “One of the Girls? The Changing Gender of Journalism,” in News, Gender and Power, ed. Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allan (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 33–46; Liesbet A. van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (London: Sage, 1994); Liesbet A. van Zoonen, “Gender, Representation and the Media,” in Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed., ed. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammad (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 311–28; Mary Vipond, “The Image of Women in Mass Circulation Magazines in the 1920s,” in The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women's History, ed. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff and Alison Prentice (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 116–24; and Julia T. Wood, Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture. 8th ed. (Australia: Wadsworth Pub., 2009).
- Byerly and Ross, Women and Media, 50.
- See Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer, “Rules of Engagement: Journalism and War,” in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 3–21; Bernadette Barker-Plummer and Cynthia Boaz, “War News as Masculinist Discourse,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 370–74; Oliver Boyd-Barrett, “Understanding: The Second Casualty,” in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 25–42; Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War: Communication and Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: St. Martin's Press Inc., 2000); Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Dafna Lemish, “Guest Editor's Introduction: The Media Gendering of War and Conflict,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no.3 (2005): 275–80, doi:10.1080/14680770500271628; Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (London: Pluto Press, 2002); and Stephen Ward, James B. Murphy, and Aine Donovan. “Ethical Ideals in Journalism: Civic Uplift or Telling the Truth?” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 21, no.4 (2006): 322–37, doi:10.1207/s15327728jmme2104_7.
- Margaret E. Thompson, Maria Suarez Toro, and Katerina Anfossi Gomez, “Feminist Media Coverage of Women in War: ‘You Are Our Eyes and Ears to the World,’” Gender & Development 15, no. 3 (November 2007): 438.
- See Barker-Plummer and Boaz, “War News as Masculinist Discourse”; Linda Grant De Pauw, introduction, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in Warfrom Prehistory to the Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 1–25.; Irma Kaarina Halonen, “Mama, Mama. My Hand Is Gone! Images of Women in War News Reporting,” Nordicom Review 20, no. 2 (1999): 5–18.; and Lemish, “Media Gendering of War and Conflict.”
- Patricia Mazepa,”Battles on the Cultural Front: The (De)Labouring of Culture in Canada, 1914–1944” (PhD diss., Carleton University, 2003).
- For a summary of feminist media studies that theorize about gendered media production, see Allan, “Gendered Realities of Journalism; Carter, Branston and Allen, News, Gender and Power; Michael S. Kimmel, “The Gendered Media,” in The Gendered Society, 3rd ed, by Kimmel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 237–57; Lang, Women Who Made the News; Kay Mills, A Place in the News: From the Women's Pages to the Front Page (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1988); Harvey L. Molotch, “The News of Women and the Work of Men,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 176–85; van Zoonen, “One of the Girls?”; and Mei-ling Yang, ‘“It's a Woman's War Too’: Gender, Race and the Dissemination of Government Propaganda through the White Press and the Black Press in World War II” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000).
- Gertrude Robinson, “Feminist Approaches to Journalism Studies: Canadian Perspectives,” Global Media Journal — Canadian Edition 1, no.1 (2008): 124.
- Ibid., 124, 126, 129.
- Van Zoonen, “‘One of the Girls’?” 36. For discussions of the hard-soft news divide in journalism practice, see Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming. Women and Journalism (London: Routledge, 2004); Lang, Women Who Made the News; Marion Marzolf, Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1977); Mills, A Place in the News; Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (New York: Arno Press, 1936); Molotch, “News of Women”; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).; and Yang, “It's a Woman's War Too.”
- Molotoch, “News of Women,” 181.
- Kimmel, “The Gendered Media,” 238.
- Ibid., 240.
- Patricia Holland, “The Politics of the Smile: ‘Soft News’ and the Sexualisation of the Popular Press,” in News, Gender and Power, ed. Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allan (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 21.
- Mills, A Place in the News, 123.
- See note 6.
- See Lang, Women Who Made the News; Gabriele, “Gendered Mobility, the Nation and the Woman's Page”; Fiamengo, The Woman's Page; Keshen, Saints, Sinners and Soldiers; and Kimberly W. Voss, “Dorothy Jurney: A National Advocate for Women's Pages as They Evolved and Then Disappeared,” Journalism History 36, no. 1 (2010): 13–22.
- Kay Mills, “What Difference Do Women Journalists Make?” in Women, Media, and Politics, ed.Pippa Norris (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 41–55; Linda Steiner, “Gender at Work: Early Accounts by Women Journalists,” Journalism History 23, no.1 (1997): 2–12; and Linda Steiner, “The ‘Gender Matters’ Debate in Journalism: Lessons from the Front,” in Journalism: Critical Issues, ed.Stuart Allan (Berkshire, U.K.: Open University Press, 2005), 42–53.
- Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, eds., (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics. (Aldershot; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 4. See also Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman, and Judith Hattaway, “Introduction,” in Women's Writing on the First World War, ed. Agnès Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
- Cooke, Women and the War Story, 16.
- Cardinal, Goldman, and Hattaway, “Introduction.”
- Comedia, “The Alternative Press: The Development of Underdevelopment,” Media, Culture & Society 6 (1984): 95–102, doi:10.1177/016344378400600202; and James Curran, foreword, The Alternative Media Handbook, ed. Kate Coyer et al. (London: Routledge, 2007), xv–xvi.
- James Hamilton, “Alternative Media: Conceptual Difficulties, Critical Possibilities,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 24, no.4 (2000): 357–58, doi:10.1177/0196859900024004002; and Marisol Sandoval and Christian Fuchs, “Towards a Critical Theory of Alternative Media, Telematics and Informatics 27 (2010): 147, doi:10.1016/j.tele.2009.06.011.
- Sandoval and Fuchs, Critical Theory, 147.
- Curran, Foreword: The Alternative Media Handbook; xvi. See also Maria Dicenzo, “Feminist Media and History: A Response to James Curran,” Media History 10, no.1 (2004): 43–49, doi:10.1080/13688800410001673734; Maria Dicenzo, “Pressing the Public: Nineteenth-Century Feminist Periodicals and ‘the Press,’” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 6, no.2 (2010), http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue62/dicenzo.htm; Linda Steiner, “The History and Structure of Women's Alternative Media,” in Women Making Meaning: New Feminist Directions in Communication, ed. Lana F. Rakow (New York: Routledge, 1992), 121–43; and Michelle Tusan, “Strategies of Dissent: Women's Wartime Political Journalism” in Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain, by Michelle Tusan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 187–206.
- Bettina Bradbury, “Women's History and Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 19 (1987): 36.
- Ibid., 36.
- Sonya Rose, “‘Gender at Work’: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism,” History Workshop 21 (1986): 125, in Bettina Bradbury, “Women's History and Working-Class History,” 35.
- In addition to Toronto, Hamilton and Halifax, the Census of Canada 1941 also ranked Vancouver and Montreal among the major urban centers in Canada during the Second World War. As a limitation, this study does not offer a national perspective by incorporating one commercial and one labor newspaper from Vancouver (to capture a Western Canada perspective) and the same from Montreal. This was not possible because there was no access to independent labor newspapers published in Vancouver and Montreal for comparative analysis with the commercial newspapers published and accessible in both cities.
- Canada, Wartime History of Employment of Women, 73.
- Articles were coded as small, medium or large. A small article ran up to two hundred words, medium articles ran two hundred to five hundred words and large articles surpassed five hundred words. Photographs were coded as “small” if they spanned one column in width, “medium” if they were two to three columns wide and “large” if they were four or more columns wide. To contextualize this, both the commercial and labor newspapers analyzed in the study were considered broadsheets by column width. The commercial newspapers contained eight columns and the labor newspapers ran seven or eight columns wide (depending on the specific labor newspaper). Therefore, the difference between column width (and, concomitantly, photograph size) was minimal when comparing photographs in the commercial newspapers with those in the labor newspapers.
- The labor newspapers in the content analysis did not run letters to the editor.
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972).
- For domestic labor, N=38. For volunteer labor, N=26.
- The nature of historical evidence limits analysis of the sex of the journalist writing about women's labor to observation, and not quantifiable statistics. Newspapers at this time did not include reporter bylines with articles as general practice. Bylines were generally attached to columnists and guest writers and, at times, accompanied articles reprinted from other news sources. Secondary literature supports the fact that most general assignment reporters and editors were male and practically all women's page reporters were female. The Second World War did offer women opportunities to work as general assignment reporters and as editors, but the traditional division of labor within the press still dominated. Precise figures for the total number of women writing general news cannot be quantified within the newspapers sampled because of the lack of evidence (bylines) within the pages of the press to indicate who (a male or a female journalist) wrote a given article.
- See Barbara Freeman, The Satellite Sex: The Media and Women's Issues in English Canada, 1966–1971 (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001); and Lang, Women Who Made the News.
- Mary M. Cronin, “Patriotic Ladies and Gallant Heroines,” Journalism History 36, no. 3 (2010): 138–49.
- Elisabeth Le, Editorials and the Power of Media (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), xi.
- Ibid., 3.
- Mazepa, “Battles on the Cultural Front,” 52.
- Bryan D. Palmer, “Canada,” in Histories of Labor: National and International Perspectives, ed. Joan Allen, Alan Campbell, and John McIlroy (Pontypool, Wales: The Merlin Press, 2010), 211; and Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed.Ava Baron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 10.
- See Joan Sangster and Bryan D. Palmer, eds., Laboring Canada: Class, Gender and Race in Canadian Working-Class History (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2008); Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); and Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
- For a survey of research that suggests a consistency between government and media agendas during times of war, see Judith Raine Baroody, “Theories Related to Media Access,” in Media Access and the Military: The Case of the Gulf War, by Judith Raine Baroody (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998), 15–48.; Boyd-Barrett, “The Second Casualty”; Carruthers, The Media at War; Tawyna Covert, “World War II Mobilization of Women through Magazine Advertising: Intersections of Gender, Class and the State” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2001); Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers; Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972); McLaughlin, The War Correspondent; Piers Robinson, “Researching US Media-State Relations and Twenty-First Century Wars,” in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, ed. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2004), 96–112; Ward, Murphy and Donovan, “Ethical Ideals in Journalism”; and Yang, “It's a Woman's War Too.”
- “First Woman Operator Meets Romance on Sea.” The Halifax Herald, Oct. 27, 1942.
- Paula Poindexter, Sharon Meraz, and Amy Schmitz, eds., Women, Men, and News: Divided and Disconnected in the News Media Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2008).
- This extends an argument made in an earlier publication by the author. See Tracy Moniz, “Femininity in Focus: Representations of Women's Wage Labour in Canadian Newspapers, 1939–1945,” Canadian Journal of Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2015): 1–34.
- “Do War Job, Home Job Too, Women Busy and Keep Fit,” Toronto Daily Star, April 27, 1943; “Girl War Workers Should Eat Substantial Meals,” Toronto Daily Star, March 22, 1943; “Busy Mother Still Finds Time for Nursing Work,” Halifax Herald, Oct. 19, 1943; and “Women Naturally Fitted to Train Youth of Race,” The Hamilton Spectator, Feb. 25, 1944.
- Moniz. “Femininity in Focus,” 25–27.
- “United Nations' Women Carry on at Jobs Their Men Would be doing in Peacetime,” Toronto Daily Star, April 27, 1943.
- “Lace and Frills Give Way to Lathes and Drills,” The Labour News, Nov. 27, 1942.
- Moniz, “Femininity in Focus,” 25–26.
- “A Man Talks to Women.” Toronto Daily Star, Dec. 13, 1943.
- “The Menace of Absenteeism.” The Labour Leader, Nov. 6, 1942.
- Of the ten letters to the editor about women's labor in the commercial press, women wrote seven. Of these seven letters, five letters concerned women's wage labor (71.4 percent), one letter concerned women's domestic labor (14.3 percent), and one letter concerned women's volunteer labor (14.3 percent).
- Lang, Women Who Made the News, 5.
- See Catherine McKercher, Allan Thompson, and Carman Cumming, The Canadian Reporter: News Writing and Reporting, 3rd ed. (Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 2010).
- Moniz, “Femininity in Focus,” 17–18.
- “British Women Build Invasion Barges,” Halifax Citizen, Aug. 20, 1943; “Russ Women Battle—Tried Bomber, Fighter Pilots,” Toronto Daily Star, April 22, 1942; “Principals Are Encouraging Girl Students to Register,” The Hamilton Spectator, May 9, 1941; “Pretty Girls Collect Maple Sap Harvests to Meet War Demands,” Toronto Daily Star, March 24, 1942; and “Women in British War Industry,” Halifax Citizen, July 31, 1942.
- Moniz, “Femininity in Focus,” 19–21.
- For definitions of small, media, and large articles and photographs, see note 52.
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso; rev. ed., 1991).
- Edward Hallet Carr, What Is History? (1961), 2nd ed., ed. R.W. Davies (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 11.