6 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. that their ultimate cause would be advanced by channelling their talents and energies into the war effort.

      rights

    2. Middle-class women had been actively agitating since the later 19th century for a variety of social reforms and by 1914 had successfully pressured politicians to enact important legislation in areas such as public health and child labour. At the same time, small but growing numbers of women were attending Canadian universities: by 1900, 11 percent of post-secondary students in Canada were women; the figure would rise to 14 percent by 1919-20.[5] Middle-class women embraced the era’s propensity to join together in clubs, societies, and associations, often religious- or reform-based. By 1914, the broader reform movement, rooted in a maternalist approach to feminism, had largely coalesced around the issue of woman suffrage, with proponents arguing that voting women would clean up the worst social problems of Canadian society.[6] Since women already played active (if often unheralded) roles in Canada’s economy and society when the Great War broke out, they continued to do the same under wartime conditions. However, growing male labour shortages and the anxiety-filled context of wartime earned their efforts a new level of appreciation from Canadian society at large.

      rights after the work stuff

    3. The 1911 census recorded 98,128 female servants, 20,357 female dressmakers and seamstresses, and 5,269 women working in clothing factories; teaching and nursing were other common forms of female waged labour.[3]

      work stuff

    4. More than half the Canadian population lived in rural areas, and farm women not only worked inside their homes, but also engaged in gardening, dairying, and other outdoor work to supplement the family diet and income.

      work

    5. The Great War did not fundamentally transform women’s roles in Canadian society at large, nor did it “liberate” them in any enduring sense. It did, however, accelerate certain trends, such as the movement toward woman suffrage, or women’s entry into new forms of paid employment. It also transformed some women’s lives on a personal level, as they adjusted to the temporary or permanent absence of husbands, fathers, sweethearts, and friends. As women of many combatant nations found, the war offered women a chance to make public – and publicly approved – contributions to the national and imperial cause, and placed their actions under close community surveillance.[1] It disrupted existing relationships, forged new ones, sank some women into despair, and gave others a chance to tackle fulfilling new roles and turn their hands to various forms of paid and unpaid labour. Canadian women’s individual experiences of the Great War were as diverse as Canadian women themselves. At the same time, Canadian women shared with men and women in all the combatant nations the anxiety and grief of the war years, and the desire to commemorate the war’s sacrifices at its end.[2]

      analysis/conclusion

    6. The war years disrupted some conventional gender norms, but did not fundamentally transform them. Women’s labour was vital to the national war effort, and was often presented as having earned women the right to vote.

      conclusion?