Bomb Girls, Gender, and Working-Class History

Working-class women have not fared well in television, factory women especially so. Rarely have we seen blue-collar women coping with a moving assembly line, health hazards, shared showers, and dreary cafeterias. Laverne and Shirley’s work at the bottle plant was one early exception, as were dramas like Cagney and Lacey, or comedies like Roseanne or Grace Under Fire. More common since the 1980s have been stories featuring professional women, usually in the “cop, doc, and lawyer” genres, and English-Canadian broadcasting has not differed significantly from the US in this regard. Even feminist scholarship about television has often occluded discussion of class relations and labour, opting for a more homogenized, liberal feminist analysis.

This absence makes Bomb Girls a novel anomaly, and its wartime setting renders it particularly interesting for historians since the series laid claim to historical authenticity as one of its key selling points. Promotion of the show repeatedly cited its faithful attention to historical research: from its story lines to fashion and music, from material objects to period sensibilities, the show’s website extolled its historical accuracy. It even featured an interview with a former munitions worker who talks about her work, the boarding house experience, and wartime society.

The wartime setting, I believe, provided the producers with the licence to tell the stories of women on the factory floor. Can we imagine someone trying to sell a production company the idea of a dramatic series on women working in an auto parts or fish processing factory today? The idea would likely be given short shrift. Period or costume dramas give us permission to feature themes otherwise seen as mundane, and a quick glance at any Chapters/Indigo “History” section also reminds us that the history of war sells. This is somewhat ironic since one historical interpretation of Canadian women’s role in World War II stresses that many women were drawn into non-traditional work with encouraging state policies and propaganda only to be pushed out of such jobs after the war. In other words, television shows can feature women on an assembly line, even cast working-class women as heroines, as long as this takes place in a temporary setting of World War II.

My analysis of Bomb Girls encompasses such a critical perspective, but it is also appreciative of some of the writing, what the series tried to accomplish, and the themes it attempted to cover. For teaching especially, Bomb Girls offers an excellent opportunity to hold up history as portrayed in mass culture to the scrutiny of evidence and debate. We can ask how contemporary television would compare to popular cultural sources of the time, whether tv writers draw effectively on academic historical interpretations, and we can contrast Bomb Girls to other fictional renditions of war work, such as Jeanette Lynes recent novel, The Factory Voice.¹ Bomb Girls reminds us of the immense potential of popular culture – television, theatre, film or magazines – to engage audiences in ways that we, as academic historians, do not, and it productively raises critical issues about the home front ignored in more celebratory histories of the battlefront.

We also need to situate any critique of Bomb Girls in the political economy context of Canadian broadcasting. In our American-dominated television market, Canadian-themed shows are notoriously hard to finance with any degree of production sophistication. Moreover, these financial realities can lead to compromises demanded by financial backers who are less interested in historical authenticity – and not at all in feminism – and more in ratings and advertising. Funders can ask that scripts be rewritten to please the particular “tastes” they perceive audiences have: they might ask for more romance, fewer factory scenes – and one wonders if any such requests were given to Bomb Girls.

Moreover, historical fiction of any genre inevitably takes liberties with the facts. Fiction, after all, involves fantasy; historical analysis does not. Rather, as professional historians reflecting on popular renditions of women’s history, I think we should look for a historically informed sensibility for the time period being depicted: does Bomb Girls offer a view of women...