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  • The recent historiography pertaining to women during World War II has tended to focus on women in either the war industries or armed forces. While the first feminist scholars argued that women experienced a type of second emancipation during this period due to changes in societal attitudes, more recently, historians have contended that women were temporarily treated to certain economic and social benefits during the War because the government and industries were in desperate need of workers. This paper attempts to offer an alternative interpretation of women's experiences during this time, through the investigation of female textile workers in Cornwall, Ontario. Using a dual structural analysis, this study illustrates how male union leaders and company owners often collaborated in maintaining a segregated work force. Instead of experiencing a type of liberation from traditional occupational constraints, Cornwall's female textile workers remained subjugated in lower paying and lower skilled "female" jobs in the mills. Within this industry then, continuity rather than change characterized the experiences of female textile workers during World War II.

  • Over the past two decades, the majority of works written on women's experiences during the Second World War have focused on those middle-class women who temporarily toiled in the war industries. This study attempts to redress the imbalance that exists in this field by examining the lives of working-class women in the textile mills of Cornwall, Ontario from 1936-1946. By relying on the Marxist Feminist dual structural theory, this study attempts to illustrate the centrality of patriarchal capitalism in determining women's lives in the mills during this period. Rather than experiencing a period of financial and social opportunity during the 1940s, as many mainstream scholars contend, Cornwall's female textile workers continued to be relegated to the lower-skilled, low paying, "female" positions in the mills, even during the prosperous war years. This continuation of a segmented work force is attributed to the patriarchal and capitalist structures that in essence were responsible for the women's inferior position in the mills. Rather than remaining passive victims, these women devised certain strategies aimed at resisting these two oppressive forces within the mills. Women were thus often able to establish their own types of organizational structures that occasionally allowed them to stand up against their aggressors in the mills.

Last update from database: 7/7/26, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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