WW2: Canada's Farmerettes bring in the harvest.
How women turbocharged Canada's industrial-military revolution. A speech to the Empire Club of Canada Foundation.
Good afternoon, everybody! Well, I don’t know what I’m doing here - an old guy asked to talk about girls and young women in the 1930s and 1940s.
THE EXCUSE
The only excuse, I suppose, is that I was around at the time. I was a tiny tot, but I was around and I was conscious in the immediate post-war period. And I grew up on a farm and the farmerettes went to work on farms.
I will talk about the farmerettes of course; but I’ve been asked to take a wider look at the situation of women at the time.
I remember the loose cotton dresses women wore, with a simple cotton belt, since those dresses were cheap and easy to make, casually stylish, comfortable, and textiles, during the war were rationed.
I remember the turban-like headscarf, called a “factory headscarf,” that women wore to protect their hair from getting entangled in dangerous industrial machinery, lathes, drills, rivetters, metal presses, metal cutters. Women during that war even wore worker’s overalls – something that would have been entirely shocking in the years immediately before the war.
As I said, I grew up on a farm. It was in a time before TV and the Internet and iPhones, and social media, superhighways, and cheap flights to anywhere. In those days, distances were real. For a youngster at the time, elsewhere was truly elsewhere - mysterious, beckoning, romantic. Distances and horizons evoked a yearning. A desire for transcendence mystics might call it, or simply, for adventure.
Beyond the Blue Horizon was a top 1930s song, and the biggest hit in 1939 was Judy Garland singing Somewhere over the Rainbow, followed by Glenn Miller’s orchestra playing a very romantic Moonlight Serenade.
I remember the spooky radio shows we listened to – Tales Well Calculated to Keep You in Suspense – broadcast at night that made you want to hide under the covers.
Radio in those days was AM radio – or Amplitude Modulation radio. FM or Frequency Modulation would not arrive until the 1960s.
Unlike FM, AM radio catches static.
So, at night, or during the day, you knew – if say you were, as we were, on a farm – that a thunderstorm was coming from the sharp fuzzy bursts of static - lightning flashes - that interrupted the music.
You could then, if you lived in the open fields, go out and see – in the far distance, to the west, giant steel gray thunderheads lit up by intermittent bursts and forks of rain-soaked light. Storms moved like sea squalls across the land. Space was tangible, carved into the landscape.
AM also receives from greater distances than FM, so you would sometimes, in the Ontario countryside, hear stations from exotic foreign places like Buffalo, New York City, or Chicago.
Bright lights were rare in the country, so at night you saw the stars, the constellations, and the wanderers – or, as we call them, the planets – and out in a field you could, if you were so inclined, wonder at the vastness of the universe.
Things that were far away were – really – far away. I’ll return to this when we look at the farmerettes in the 1930s, before they became farmerettes.
POST-WAR NOSTALGIA - AND ANGER
And I remember the nostalgia many of my mother’s friends felt when they talked about their lives during the war – how during the war they had had a job, their own money, their own independence, their girlfriends, their freedom.
Underlying the nostalgia there was, sometimes, resentment and even anger and an unspoken sense of betrayal.
The farmerettes were in their mid- and late teens when Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939.
Up to 40,000 farmerettes from Ontario and Quebec and other provinces – went to work on farms to keep the nation, the armed forces, and Britain fed during war – when many of the men and quite a few women were away.
So. our teenager was 16 or 17 or 18 when Canada’s war with Germany began in September 1939. What sort of life did she lead?
She was born after WWI. In that war, 60,000 Canadians died. Every little town and village had its monument to the dead. That war ended in November 1918.
She was a child in the frothy, dynamic, crazy – let’s drink champagne and forget the war – boom time of what came to be called the “roaring twenties.”
New technologies – the mass production of automobiles, begun in 1908, moved into high gear, new electric appliances appeared, radio was the magic newest new thing, consumer credit was invented. Here’s a magazine cover from August 1929, just as the boom was peaking, the bubble - on the stock market - was reaching its height.
It was a daring time, an aggressive time: Skirts were short, breasts were flat, necklines were low, behavior was daring, and the dances were wild – the Charleston, the Fox Trot, the Texas Tommy. Among the young cosmopolitan set, the boyish androgynous look was fashionable; among the rich, excess was celebrated. Some women began to move, more quickly, into the professions.
All this came to a thundering stop in October 1929. The stock market crashed. The Great Depression began.
A hit song of 1931-32 was Brother, can you spare a dime? Click and catch the mood.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
So, our farmerette was a teenager during the Great 1929-1939 Depression, a dark gloomy time. Unemployment reached 30%. Breadlines and soup kitchens were everywhere. Prosperous families were reduced to destitution. Men rode the rails – smuggled themselves onto freight trains – in search of work. Many girls and boys forfeited their futures and left school to help their families.
Fashion flipped to conservative. The neckline went up, the hem line went down, far below the knees. The look switched to demure. The daring androgynous flapper, the boyish 1920’s seducer, was a distant memory. The simple domestic girl was the new ideal.
So, what was life like in the 1930s for our future farmerette?
First, let’s make a leap of imagination. Let’s zoom in on a few details of daily life in the 30s before the war.
There was, as I mentioned, no television, no internet, no portable phones. Long distance calls were a rarity; transatlantic calls prohibitively expensive; they only became available to ordinary people in the 1950s. Telephone lines were often, particularly in the country, “party lines” where you shared the line with neighbors. You might pick up the receiver and hear the lady down the road talking about her cow Maisy.
If you wanted to stay in touch, you wrote – you wrote with your hand and a fountain pen in scrawled or elegant cursive script – you wrote a letter.
Without TV, smart phones, social media, the internet, without Instagram and Facebook, relationships were largely face to face. It was a physical world - not disembodied. Your friends were the girls and boys you knew, school mates, and neighbors.
That world was small, perhaps, but it was intense. People related to the people around them, girls hung out in real space in real time with real girls.
Absence, which, it is said, makes the heart grow fonder, was also real, very real.
If a boy or man or woman went off to war – say in Europe or in the Pacific – you would not see them, or hear their voice, for perhaps four of five years.
A small black-and-white photograph would be sacred, like an icon. A handwritten letter would be poured over. A telegram – announcing death or wounding – would be feared.
Washing machines and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners were for the elite. Many houses were heated by burning wood or coal. You chopped wood and you shoveled coal. Your hands got red and rough. I still remember the smell of coal dust in the basement, and the avalanche-like sound of coal tumbling down the coal chute.
Many rural homes didn’t have indoor plumbing or hot water – and on freezing winter nights you might pull on an overcoat and slip out shivering to an old-fashioned outhouse, though such antiquities were becoming rare.
It was a dangerous world – many diseases that have now virtually disappeared were then a true threat and often fatal. Giving birth was dangerous. Scarlet fever, tuberculosis, polio, the flu, pneumonia, often killed young people. My mother’s sister, Margaret, died from scarlet fever. I myself had polio.
I said it was a dangerous world. But, in a sense it was a fearless world. Girls and women – and boys and men – back then were less afraid, I think, than they are today. Certainly, less jaded.
Girls hitchhiked. They stuck out their thumb and got a ride. Some of this spirit endured into the post-war period. In the early 1960s one rainy cold evening in London, England, I met a petite American redhead. She told me that the next day she was going to hitchhike alone from London to Istanbul, then hitchhike back to Paris, and settle down there. “Isn’t it dangerous?” I said. “I have a hatpin,” she said, and pulled it out to show me. It turned out she did use the hatpin, but only once.
Kids, girls and boys, walked miles, alone, to school, often from age five or six onwards.
Kids, girls and boys when they went out to play would often wander far from home before finding their way back.
Anything could be turned into an adventure.
You didn’t need toys or a structured playground; you just needed the world – trees to climb, rivers and ponds to explore, fences to jump over, tin cans to turn into microphones.
I said it was a small world – just intimate friends, maybe a night at the movies for a glimpse of Hollywood and the big world. But it was a much bigger world too than the world is for young people now.
With no TV, no Internet, no Google, no Instagram, no overwhelming continuous flood of images and information, you were freer. You could create your own world, a whole universe. Your world was as big as your imagination could make it.
Imagination could run riot in a way it cannot today.
School?
If she finished high school – more girls finished than boys – our 1930s girl would either get married or go to work. Many girls and boys left school early, to help their families survive.
Very few women went to university.
Going to university was, in any case, a rarity. Just before the war, there were about 33,000–37,000 full-time university students in Canada, and roughly of these 7,500–8,500 – about 20% - were women; this was out of a total population of the country 11 million.
Today we have a 1.5 million university students out of a population of 40 million. If the proportions were the same as in 1939, there would be maybe 150,000 students in universities, not 1.5 million.
Work?
About 600,000 women were working outside home just before the war. Figures are difficult to come by and contradictory, but that meant a participation level of about 14-15%. 85% of women of working age were at home.
If she did work outside the home, the sort of work a woman could do was – with rare exceptions – severely restricted.
About 200,000 of those working were domestic servants – servants in somebody else’s home.
Then there were salesgirls – as they were called – and clerical workers, typists, and workers in light industry – textiles and food packaging mainly.
If the family or the girl had enough money to ensure the right training, she could become a teacher or a nurse.
Career advancement for a woman was almost unknown. Those doors were closed. The boss, almost always, would be a man.
If a woman did have a job, in the depressed 1930s, and if it was a job a man could covet, such as being a teacher, she was often asked to leave it or she was forced out or she was fired so that a man – a man was known as the “breadwinner,” bringing home the bread to the family – could take her place. There are letters where long-time very successful women teachers beg to keep their jobs - mostly in vain.
Jobs were rare. Men had priority.
Also, where women had begun to advance into certain professions in the booming 1920s, that trend was often reversed in the gloomy 1930s.
In that depressed decade, women were discouraged from working, discouraged from “taking men’s jobs.” A woman’s place was “in the home.”
THEN CAME THE WAR
On September 1, 1939, ,Germany invaded Poland. It now became clear that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany had unlimited ambitions of conquest and that any agreements Hitler made were just so many pieces of paper to be torn up. Europe would be conquered or it would be free.
On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. A week later on the 10th of September, Canada declared war on Germany.
GIRLS, WOMEN - GET TO WORK!!!
The Government had been trying to keep girls out of the labor force. Now it reversed its tune: “Get to work girls!!! Join the forces, girls!”
40,000 women joined he army, navy, and air force.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadian women and girls headed off to work.
The famous poster here – Rosie the Rivetter – is American. But the inspiration for Rosie was a real woman, a Canadian gunsmith, Veronica Foster, “Veronica the Bren Gun Girl.”
That a Canadian would be the original was natural. Canada was in the war for more than two years - from September 1939 - before the United States entered, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941.
Veronica was featured in government sponsored films aimed at encouraging women to work in the war industries.
Incidentally, though Veronica didn’t smoke, the government’s film directors wanted her to smoke – it will make her and war work look glamorous, they told her, and that’s what they wanted. Reluctantly she agreed to take a few puffs for the cameras. Times do change.
Soon more than a million women were working – they moved into heavy industry.
They learned, almost instantaneously, skills that had been an exclusive male preserve - to use complex machinery: drills, hand-held and heavy-duty riveters, lathes, welders, soldering irons, sheet metal sheers - you name it.
They built Lancaster bombers, Hurricane fighters, Bren machine guns, they built ships, they manufactured shells and bombs and tanks– it was top speed all the way.
For example, the town of Ajax was created almost overnight out of farmers’ fields to contain one of the biggest munitions factories in the world, and housing for some 9000 workers. 7000 of those workers were women.
Women worked across the whole spectrum. They became communication experts, they coded and decoded secret messages, they worked as meteorologists – weather predictions are crucial for military operations, air transport, and shipping. They became intelligence experts, in Canada and abroad, they worked in espionage, in propaganda in Canada and elsewhere, and they worked as nurses, and sometimes as doctors, as pilots transporting aircraft to forward bases, and truck and ambulance drivers.
Women were everywhere – a backbone of the war effort.
Suddenly, stay-at-home girls and women discovered – in wartime – what it was like to have a job, to have a salary, to have free time and sometimes benefits, to work shoulder-to-shoulder with other women and with men, and what it was to work in a vast collective national and international effort to defeat the Axis Powers – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan.
Of course, if a working woman was a wife and mother she had to balance her work in industry with her work at home – not easy and totally exhausting – but the government did provide childcare support.
In the six years of war, women’s roles were turned upside down. Fashion changed too. Factory kerchiefs – or turbans as they were called – covered and protected the hair. Dresses became simpler. Trousers became respectable. Worker overalls were common. Patching up and recycling was a patriotic duty. Improvisation became the name of the game. But glamor was not neglected – at the upper end, broad shoulders, a strong, slightly masculine, but very feminine look – high, nipped-in waists, and A-line skirts, shaped like an “A,” narrow at the waist and flaring out towards the hem, came in, combining a look of business-like strength and chic defiant elegance.
As I said, Canada declared war in September 1939, September 10 to be exact, a week after France and Britain had declared war on the Nazi Reich.
The farmerettes were – to use a vocabulary from the time gals who had lived through glittering times and hard times and war times.
They had gumption, and grit, and guts and determination and a sense of humor – and fun.
They were part of what has been called the Greatest Generation.
They engineered a miracle.
THE MIRACLE: from ZERO to MAJOR POWER
In the years of the war, Canada went from being virtually zero as an industrial-military power to being a major power. It was, quite simply, a miracle.
Statistics are boring but I’ll share a few statistics here. I’ve simplified, but you’ll get the picture.
Before the war, in 1939:
Canada had less than 20,000 total armed forces – five years later this was 1.1 million
The navy had 3,500 personnel, and 10 old ships – five years later, it counted 400 ships and 100,000 persons.
The army’s fulltime compliment was under 5,000 people, five years later it 750,000 with five overseas divisions.
The air force had 4,000 personnel and 270 mostly obsolete aircraft - a few years later, the RCAF numbered 250,000 personnel (17000 women) with 80 fighting squadrons.
And Canada’s merchant marine, virtually nonexistent before the war, with less than 40 ships, became a major lifeline, with 410 ships (built in Canada) facing the submarine menace, for Britain and for the war effort and the reconquest of Europe.
All this was done in about the time it takes us now to repair potholes in a street.
Building a light crosstown rail system on Eglinton Street in Toronto has now taken more than twice as long as the whole of the Second World War, and it still isn’t finished.
Victory in the war was a result of production victories. This would not have been possible without women - without the 30.000-40.000 farmerettes and without Veronica the Bren Gun Girl and hundreds of thousands like them.
During the war about a third of the manufacturing labor force consisted of women.
Again: The miracle of Canada’s birth as a first-rate industrial-military power would not have been possible without women.
As for the farmerettes – they played their part – they harvested vital food for the nation and for Britain and for the war effort – Armies, as has been said, march on their stomachs. Nations cannot survive without food.
The farmerettes, whose story is brilliantly told in Bonnie Sitter and Colin Field’s marvelous and moving film, We Lend a Hand, make light of it, they joke and say how much fun it was.
But it was also backbreaking work, hard work for very long hours – work Canadians no longer want to do. Mexicans mostly do this work now in Canada.
The film:
Then VICTORY, and PEACE CAME
The Empire Club Foundation Event:
SHE ANSWERED the CALL: How Teenage Girls that Supported the War Effort Changed Canada Forever - Empire Club of Canada
POSTWAR BLUES
Of course – the women who were in the war effort were told to get back to the house, to get married, and to turn their job over to a man.
After all, the man was the bread winner.
After all, a woman’s place is in the home.
Here is a September 1948 post-war magazine cover. It has a warning: “You marry a man’s whole family.”
Women’s participation in the workforce - 14% in 1939 - 24% during the war - fell to 19-20% after the war. By the mid-1950s, about 80% of women of working age were not working outside the home.
It would take more than a decade - the pill arrived in 1960 - for women’s participation in the workforce to return to WW2 levels. By 1976, about 46% of women of working age were working outside the home. By 2025, it had become 61% - 6 out of 10 women of working age are in the workforce, either employed or looking for a job.
As for the farmerettes - up to 40,000 of them - they made a vital contribution to victory, keeping Canada, the Armed Forces, and Britain fed.
If we look at the prosperous, free, and relatively peaceful world we live in today, I think we can see that we owe the farmerettes a great deal - almost everything - for who they were and what they did.
END
NOTE: Special thanks to Gordon K. McIvor, Ph.D. Kent Emerson David Clarke and sponsors Duncan Jackman and Richard Rooney and TMX Group for their support of the event!
Terrific! The combination of hard statistics and observations on day-to-day life is powerful.