Synthesizing Current Research: Women‘s Higher
Education and the World Wars
ANNE M. E. MILLAR
Abstract
This paper considers the extant scholarship on the impact of the First and
Second World Wars on women‘s higher education in Canada. No published
monograph examines this topic, a reflection of the wider lack of scholarship on women‘s world war experiences in this country. In order to synthesize existing research, scholarship from military history, women‘s history, and the history of higher education is assessed.
Despite the extensive historiography on both the First and Second World Wars, a number of areas remain unexamined by Canadian historians. Many topics, notably the impact of war on women and the family, have garnered attention only recently, in large part due to the influence of social history and second wave feminism. Concentrated in the last forty years, scholarship on wartime women has been predominantly concerned with analyzing the impact of the world wars. Scholars initially emphasized the ways in which these conflicts opened up traditionally male spheres to women and the role this
played in bringing a change in gender norms. Women‘s historians, in particular, have focused on the impact of wartime mobilization on women‘s
labour, while more recently, historians of higher education have added to
these discussions by exploring women‘s entrance into the professions, and by extension, women‘s access to professional training.
There is still much missing from this analysis. To date, there is no published full-length monograph examining Canadian women in institutions
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of higher learning during wartime. American studies have come closer, but there exists a similar lack of scholarship.1 Unpublished M.A. and Ph.D. theses from both countries are more widespread. Influenced by the availability of archival materials and access to university records, a significant number of graduate students have written histories of their respective universities and colleges, many of which explore female students during either war.2
Scholarship on women, higher education, and the world wars is, as
would be expected, primarily dispersed amongst the fields of women‘s and
military history and the history of higher education. Many of the works deal more generally with other subjects, but in the various methods and forms these studies take, they all shed light on the topic. The main purpose of this essay is to discuss and assess the extant scholarship addressing the impact of
the world wars on women‘s higher education, and, where appropriate, its
relationship to wider scholarship. In so doing, the arguments of this essay will be twofold. First, the work on women during wartime needs to be revived and
expanded to include the multitude of women‘s wartime experiences. Second,
scholars arguing for interdisciplinarity need to be reminded that the sharing of work within disciplines is equally, if not more, important. Fields of historical study have come to overlap in their references to this specific topic and will continue to do so as historians focus more intently on the social history of war and conflict. Work is needed to synthesize and coordinate the scholarly research of these three fields.
1. J. Hillis Miller and Dorothy V. N. Brook‘s 1944 work was the first American study connecting the two fields. More recently, Willis Rudy examined the impact of the world wars on Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. See J. Hillis Miller and Dorothy V. N. Brook‘s
The Role of Higher Education in War and After (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944); Willis Rudy, Total War and Twentieth-Century Higher Learning: Universities of the Western World in the First and
Second World Wars (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991).
2. See Nancy Kiefer, ―The Impact of the Second World War on Female Students at
the University of Toronto, 1939–1949‖ (M.A. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1984); Lee Jean Stewart, ―The Experience of Women at the University of British Columbia, 1906–56‖ (M.A.
Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1986); and Mary Ellen Tingley, ―The Impact of War:
Wolfville Women 1914–1918‖ (M.A. Thesis, Acadia University, 1983).
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This historiography is separated into discussions of relevant
scholarship in each field—women‘s history, military history, and the history of
higher education—and is organized generally chronologically in each section. The first two sections examine the growth of interest in this topic, exploring
developments in the fields of women‘s and military history to explain the
roots of this focus. Moreover, they situate discussions of women during the world wars within the larger focus that dominates much of the scholarship. The third examines the field of higher education and the groundbreaking work done by a comparatively small group of historians on the history of women and higher education. These scholars address the influence of the world wars
on women‘s higher education more directly, often in case studies of specific
institutions. It is only by synthesizing the work from these three subfields that
one can begin to understand the relationship of the world wars to women‘s
higher education and professional training.
I: Women’s History
The trend towards social history converged with the feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s to influence a new wave of historical writing concerned with the position of women in North America. Scholars detailed the history of the
struggle for women‘s rights and in so doing identified periods and contexts
that were particularly oppressive or egalitarian for women. Indirectly, the world wars were at the centre of this history. Scholars identified in the wars two critical turning points in the history of women in Canada: first, the
achievement of the two major goals of the first wave women‘s movement—
prohibition and suffrage—during the First World War; and second, the massive entry of married women into the paid labour force during the Second World War, regarded as essential to the liberation of women from the patriarchal divisions of labour.3 In this context, scholarship on women and the
3. Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1988); and W. Lynn, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in
the United States, 1820 – 1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
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wars during the 1970s and 1980s was largely framed by a discussion of their
impact, a debate which Joan Wallach Scott termed the ―watershed‖ theory.4
According to Scott, historians either affirmed or denied that the world wars were major turning points in the history of women and this, she argued, constitutes the central debate in the historiography.5
Canadian scholarship was intent on documenting women‘s expression of a ―feminist consciousness‖ and delineating the emergence of a political and
public female voice.6 Thus, in the 1980s, historians began looking at the First
World War period and women‘s roles in opposition and pacifist movements,
as well as their wider participation in politics.7 They were particularly interested in analyzing the period after the winning of the vote in an effort to explain why first wave feminism did not achieve gender equality.8 Early
scholarship attributed the winning of suffrage to society‘s acknowledgement
of the indispensable work done by Canadian women during the war, but others, including military historians, cautioned that at least in part, suffrage had to be explained in relation to the conscription crisis of 1917 and the
4. Joan Wallach Scott, ―Rewriting History,‖ in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two
World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 23–25.
5. Ibid., 23. 6. This corresponds to studies of American and European women during war and
conflict. See Mary Beth Norton, Liberty‟s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); R. McNair Wilson, Women of the French Revolution (New York: Kennikat Press, 1970); and Darline Gray Levy, Harriet Brandon Applewhite, and Mary Durham
Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789 – 1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1979).
7. See Barbara Roberts, “Why do Women do nothing to end the War?” Canadian Feminist -
Pacifists and the Great War (Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of
Women, 1985); Linda Kealey, A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s –
1920s (Toronto: Women‘s Press, 1979); and Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster, eds., Beyond the
Vote: Canadian Women and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
8. See Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred (Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press,
1983), 146, 7, 12, 148.
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political manoeuvrings of Borden‘s union government.9 Viewing higher education as central to women‘s independence, and recognizing the
importance suffragists placed on higher education, historians measured
women‘s access to higher education as a means of assessing the success of
first wave feminism. For instance, Veronica Strong-Boag demonstrated that women made significant gains in university enrolment after the First World
War and that during the 1920s, women‘s organizations and clubs on campuses
flourished. Yet, she also documented a decline in the percentage of women enrolled in male-dominated fields between 1920 and 1940 and argued that
misogyny and ―anti-woman feeling‖ pervaded Canadian campuses, ―undermining intellectual confidence and self-esteem‖ among women.10 Worse, she argued, women‘s hopes for education quickly shattered during the
economic collapse of the 1930s. Rather than directly linking these gains and losses to the First World War, however, Strong-Boag explored their relation to
suffrage and explained women‘s losses in higher education to declining
feminism.11
Analysis of the impact of the First World War was intertwined with an assessment of the impact of suffrage and feminism, but when turning their
attention to the Second World War, historians focused on women‘s paid
labour. The influence of Marxism and neo-Marxism on historical study
combined with interest in the ―women‘s question‖ to produce a number of
studies on working-class women in the late 1960s, shifting focus away from
9. See Catherine Lyle Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1950), 11.
10. Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English
Canada, 1919 – 1939 (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1988), 23, 26.
11. In her study of Canadian female doctors, Strong-Boag also connected the decline
in feminism to an emerging ―conservative approach‖ amongst the majority of female doctors
and explored the impact of professionalism and maternal feminism on female doctors in the early twentieth century. See Veronica Strong-Boag, ―Canada‘s Women Doctors: Feminism
Constrained,‖ in A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s – 1920s, ed. Linda
Kealey (Toronto: Women‘s Press, 1979).
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―women worthies.‖12 The contemporary context of this scholarship provided further impetus for exploring Canadian topics on gender and labour as the decade witnessed revisions to provincial legislation concerning equal pay and federally guaranteed pay equality under the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. According to Hugh Armstrong and Pat Armstrong, an increasing awareness of the gender inequalities of the Canadian labour force emerged in the late 1960s, establishing a literature which provided an analytical framework for scholarly analyses of the disparities in the marketplace.13 For Canadian and American scholars of women‘s history, as well as labour and economic history, this burgeoning interest developed into a massive—and intertwined—field on women and work in the twentieth century, which emphasized the Second World War as a crisis in the history of women and labour.14
A few studies emerged during the Second World War establishing the
war as a ―watershed‖ in the history of women and labour. Charlotte Whitton‘s
Canadian Women in the War Effort, published in 1942, and Helen Baker‘s
American study Women in War Industries of that same year, drew attention to the number of women entering into war-related work.15 In 1943, Evelyn Steele
12. English Marxist historians such as Eric J. Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson were extremely influential in the late 1960s and early 1970s, helping to give rise to the new labour history. Instead of focusing on the history of trade-union movements, this new history primarily examined working-class history and applied a bottom-up approach to the study of labour. This field also began to integrate questions of gender and race into analyses of class and labour.
13. Hugh Armstrong and Pat Armstrong, ―The Segregated Participation of Women
in the Canadian Labour Force, 1941–71,‖ The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 12, no.
4 (1975): 370.
14. There has been similar, albeit less, interest in the effects of the First World War
on women and labour. See Mary MacLeod, ―Canadian Women War Workers Overseas,‖ The Canadian Magazine 52, no. 3 (1919): 737–751; Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, ―Women during the
Great War,‖ in Women at Work: Ontario 1850–1930, eds. Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and
Bonnie Shepard (Toronto: Canadian Women‘s Educational Press, 1974); and Linda Kealey, ―Women and Labour during World War I: Women Workers and the Minimum Wage in
Manitoba,‖ in First Days, Fighting Days: Women in Manitoba History, ed. Mary Kinnear (Regina:
University of Regina, 1987): 76–99.
15. Helen Baker‘s study is particularly interesting because it argued that women were being utilized more effectively in Canadian war work and proposed that American women could be put to better work assisting the government and private organizations. See Charlotte
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examined women‘s entrance into careers in science and engineering.16 These accounts were optimistic. Take, for example, a portion of Steele‘s work:
The prejudice against women in the realms of science and engineering is disappearing and they are being given the opportunity to come into their own as professional scientists and engineers...the government is urging women to train in science and engineering. Industry, in co-operation with colleges and universities, is offering wide opportunities designed to train women for immediate technical jobs, jobs which had all the potentialities of developing into permanent, postwar careers.17
Wartime and immediate postwar emphasis on the workforce advantages for
women led Glen Cain to caution in 1966 against exaggerating the war‘s
influence.18 The response by American scholars was immense. Arthur
Marwick and Gordon Wright argued women‘s lives were profoundly altered for the better during the Second World War because of the need for women‘s
labour and the role of the state in encouraging women to enter into war
work.19 Chester W. Gregory‘s study alleged that not only did women enter
into the workforce but that this led to greater equality between the sexes. The
Whitton, Canadian Women in the War Effort (Toronto: Macmillan, 1942) and Helen Baker, Women in War Industries (Princeton: s.n., 1942).
16. Evelyn Steele, Careers for Girls in Science and Engineering (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1943) and Wartime Opportunities for Women (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943).
17. Steele, Careers for Girls in Science and Engineering, 15, 19. 18. Glen Cain, Married Women in the Labor Force: An Economic Analysis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966).
19. Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace, and Social Change
1900–1967 (London: Macmillan, 1968); and Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945
(New York: Harper Torch Books, 1968). The academic and popular persistence of the view that the war positively impacted women is evident in later work. For example, see Costello, Virtue
Under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes (Boston: Little, Brown, &
Co., 1986).
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war implanted new ―seeds of social change‖ and ideas which nearly ―created a
20
new woman.‖
In his pioneering work on changes in twentieth-century
American women‘s status, William H. Chafe documented the opportunities
opened up to women by wartime shortages in male labour—better jobs, higher wages, and unionized industries—and argued that the changing work
habits of women made the 1940s ―a turning point in the history of American women.‖21
In the early 1970s, American scholars began to frame the debate in terms of the long- and short-term impact of the Second World War and questioned whether these included a change in conventional attitudes regarding the role of women in society. Eleanor Straub challenged the notion of female agency, arguing that manpower policies sidelined women and that the expertise of female leadership was largely disregarded by organized labour.22 Scholars such as Joan Ellen Trey, Sheila Tobias, and Lisa Anderson believed women were used as a reserve labour force and cast off when their interests did not suit the needs of the government.23 Juanita Kreps, D‘Ann Campbell, Alan Clive, and Leila Rupp added to these discussions with various
20. Chester W. Gregory, Women in Defense Work during World War II: An Analysis of the
Labor Problem and Women ‟s Rights (New York: Exposition Press, 1974).
21. In addition, Chafe suggested that the unprecedented proportion of married women in paid labour altered their perceptions of themselves and helped break the division between the public and private spheres. Paralleling the interpretations of women activists during the First World War, Chafe argued that while wartime gains did not persist into the postwar
period, the contradiction between women‘s changed perceptions and desire to work and society‘s intensified prescriptions about women‘s domestic role helped facilitate the second
wave feminist movement. See William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 8. A revised version of this work was published in 1991: Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
22. Eleanor F. Straub, ―United States Government Policy toward Civilian Women during World War II,‖ Prologue 5 (1973): 240–254.
23. Joan Ellen Trey, ―Women in the War Economy – World War II,‖ Review of Radical
Political Economics 4, no. 3 (1972):40–57; and Sheila Tobias and Lisa Anderson, ―What Really
Happened to Rosie the Riveter? Demobilization and the Female Labor Force, 1944-47,‖ MSS
Modular Publications, Modular 9 (1973): 1–36.
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topical discussions.24 Quantitative evidence pointed to the decline of women, particularly married women, in the workforce in the postwar years, but scholars debated the methods by which women were exited from the labour force; forced lay-offs, discrimination, manipulation by the media, and the ideology that re-established a new feminine ideal in the postwar period were some of the explanations put forth. In 1980, an anthology on women and war, Women, War, and Revolution, edited by Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, analyzed the expectations that were raised in women by war and revolution in a range of conflicts from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. These contributors shifted focus away from government policy and statistics to
concentrate on the responses conveyed in women‘s experiences.25
In Canada, there was significantly less scholarship. Armstrong and
Armstrong‘s 1979 article, ―The Segregated Participation of Women in the Canadian Labour Force, 1941–1971,‖ provided a general context for women‘s
work during the 1940s.26 They challenged American scholars who posited the
world wars as pivotal in women‘s struggle for equality and argued that the growing number of women workers during the war ―camouflaged‖ the relatively static occupational segregation of women‘s labour. Moreover, they
drew attention to the period‘s growing disparity between female and male incomes. Jean Bruce‘s 1985 Back the Attack was the first book to examine
Canadian women‘s experiences during the Second World War. The chief