By: Jennifer A. Stephen
Balancing Equality for The Post- War Woman: Demobilising Canada’s Women Workers After
World War Two
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This article discusses how women were seen to not want to work/ provide paid labour
post World War Two by the federal government
o The assumption was that women would return to their household jobs like it was
before the war. Since, the men were coming to return and take their jobs back that
woman were working and sustaining while they were away.
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Women who served in the military were promised rehabilitation, education, financial aid,
and other services equal to the men who also served in the military
o This is important as the state had not given any equal rights to woman prior to
1945 (when the war ended)
o This marked one of the firs beginning steps to equality between women and men
by the government state
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Aptitude testing was a method that was used to put women onto the “right” type of work
that suited them
o This was done because women were always seen as housewives, which never
gave them the chance to have a job. So, after the second World War many men
had died, and women were needed to work and wanted to.
o This is significant as it is an important step in women being in the working force
but it also indirectly de-values women and their potential as these types of testing
were never done on men because they were always the breadwinners of the family
and society
•
Race and class were a factor in entering/ accepting women into paid labour.
o It was much easier for a white (Caucasian) woman to work than it was for a
women of colour more specifically Black women.
o The ideal post-war working women was described to be ideally fit for white
women.
▪ Meaning that ethnic and immigrant women would not be their first choice
and they would have a higher chance of being placed in a lower wage
labour job through the Aptitude tests
o Although, immigrant women were more likely to stay in a low paying wage job,
because they need two household incomes coming in at once since their partner’s
work also had a low pay; in order to sustain a stable economic income. They were
part of the invisible workforce whose labour created the foundational low wage
occupations that the social economy depended on.
o Those women who were to stay in their working professions after the economy
was stabilized, they would be white middle-class women