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Reviewed by:
  • Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity and the Gendering of Canada’s Welfare State, 1939–1947
  • Laurel Sefton MacDowell (bio)
Jennifer A. Stephen. Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity and the Gendering of Canada’s Welfare State, 1939–1947. University of Toronto Press. x, 300. $29.95

Much of the subject of this book, the mobilization of women in the labour force and military during the war and their demobilization after it, is well known. This monograph examines the policies behind this process in much greater detail, and the role of the women’s division of the National Selective Service and women administrators in the National Employment Service (nes) in contributing to and implementing government policy. The most original contribution of this monograph is Stephen’s examination of the application of psychology to surveying [End Page 379] the labour force, testing applicants for aptitude, and screening females in order to train them to do work they had never done before, and to ensure their respectable behaviour, particularly in the military, as the Canadian Women’s Army Corps was being scrutinized by the public. Later such policy approaches were aimed at getting women to adapt to the new postwar economy when they were not needed or wanted, and to encourage them to take on domestic service jobs (which failed) or traditional female jobs, or to retreat from the market to embrace motherhood. But just as early in the war, women’s employability had been widely scrutinized as a key factor in averting the labour shortages emerging in essential industries, at the end of the war, women’s postwar employment was shaped by emphasis on domesticity, while access to training and employment was more limited for women than for men.

This study discusses the trend of applying social science techniques to labour policies without indicating what the reaction was of the women being tested and evaluated. Stephen talks about the race, class, and gender bias of these administrators but does not evaluate the relative importance of these categories. This reader was struck by administrators’ obvious class bias in particular, which perhaps explains why this generation of workers were organizing unions in their hundreds of thousands, were striking for better pay and working conditions, and at least rhetorically were refusing to return to Depression days after a war for democracy. They sought a new social status and respect. The prevailing ideas about gender by both male and female federal bureaucrats Stephens describes as ‘liberal maternalism,’ which recognized some limited rights for women without challenging the centrality of the domestic role as wives and mothers in women’s lives. The apparent ‘racism’ of administrators, except in obvious cases like the Japanese, seems overstated, in that 1940s Canada had a much less diverse population than today. But such nuances are absent in this study with its broad strokes.

Finally, the book’s style is turgid with words such as discourse overused, and its conclusion is not conclusive. We learn little about the women advisers to the federal government such as Fraudena Eaton and Margaret McWilliams, somewhat more about Olive Ruth Russell, and almost nothing about the women whose working lives preoccupied them. It is neither an analytical study using data to evaluate the impact of the work of these paternalistic female bureaucrats, nor a lively narrative about either the role of these middle-class women or the response of the diverse throng of women enthusiastically joining the labour force and the armed services when government called for their participation. This reader was pleased that the feisty female industrial workers at the end of the war refused categorically to work as underpaid domestic workers despite government pressure, though female bureaucrats expected them to do so. Moreover, despite some programs of the nes at [End Page 380] the end of the war, it was probably better for women that the federal government decided to have local communities through their employers, unions, and employment offices resolve the postwar employment situation. This book notes a trend towards implementing new personnel policies, but it is never clear how significant these approaches were. In the postwar period, most women made their own decisions about what to do, and whether...

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