Beauty on the job: visual representation, bodies, and Canada's women war workers, 1939-1945
Date
2016-09-14
Authors
Van Vugt, Sarah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes visual representations of Canadian women war workers
during the Second World War, examining the intersections of labour, gender, beauty
culture, bodies, media, consumer culture, advertising, class, whiteness, and sexuality
featured in these images. It argues that without considering each of these themes, it is
impossible to fully understand wartime representations of women workers. In examining
these intersections, the dissertation highlights the power of visual representations and
demonstrates the key roles of beauty culture and heterosexuality in munitions plants. By
comparing images of women war workers in nationally-circulated magazines and
advertisements, locally-produced newsletters from three southern Ontario war plants,
archival photos, and newspaper coverage of the Miss War Worker beauty contest, this
study shows that the beautiful woman war worker was a visual icon who symbolized the
tensions, worries, and hopes around labour, beauty, and femininity, in wartime as well as
in the postwar period, when war workers’ presumed next step into white motherhood was
of particular importance to the national project. Women workers were constantly
encouraged and pressured to engage with beauty culture and participate in self-fashioning.
Probing the relationship between how war workers were depicted and what they experienced points to the power of images as well as the opportunities women had to
exercise agency by pushing back against visual ideals as well as by emulating them.
Description
Keywords
Canada, war workers, beauty culture, gender, labour, heterosexuality, women, visual culture, Second World War