By William R. Landry for all women on International Women's Day, March 8, 2012
One way to gauge a nation's progression toward gender equality is to analyze the historical fiction it has produced. According to Finke (1996), fiction is generally less politically coercive than government sanctioned media because authors generally focus on text as an art form rather than maintaining hegemonic agendas. There are, however, exceptions. While analyzing a series WWI and WWII posters, I discovered a female author named J. G. Sime, who, during WWI, was commissioned to use her vaguely feminist fiction to help coerce women who sought freedom from domestic servitude into serving the war effort instead. Her story was reprinted widely during the Second World War due to the effective nature of its propaganda.
Juxtaposing Sime's story with war posters demonstrates how the notion
of gender equality was used to bait hundreds of thousands of women to
join the war efforts. This paper describes common key elements in the
posters that were supposed to have signified the empowerment of women.
Further investigation reveals how phallic symbols and erotic innuendo
subliminally convey the impending sexual liberation of woman workers,
while serving to malign those who wished to maintain the new status once
the wars had ended.
According to Arnheim (1969) the shape of a visual form is not limited
by its physical dimensions but extend to the psychological forces that
instruct the viewer on how to react through preconceptions to its
status. For example, we know that the status of a photo is static, but
that a film involves motion. We adjust our senses respectively to
experience them because we are conditioned to their status. Similarly,
as Nelson (2002) states, "socialization prepares persons for statuses
they either now occupy or will occupy sometime in the future and for the
roles attached to those statuses." He also refutes the media's claims
of being "our best friends and companions" (Nelson, 2002). The shape,
or status of wartime posters makes people believe they are experiencing
important and helpful truths (Jowett, Garth, and O'Donnell, 1999). The
"unidirectional" mood and status of mass media inherent to wartime
propaganda convinced "all the members of a demographic category"
(Nelson, 2002) to rise to the occasion of improved social status, but
did not tell them the status would be revoked. That type of bad form
persists in the federal government to this day; Bill C-10 proposed to
financially penalise films that openly disagreed with its public policy
of anti-gay rights, for example.
Symbols, characters, objects, and even text are considered form. Rather than describing posters individually, this paper describes the key forms they share, thereby exposing their messages.
Image via Wikipedia
However, other posters make implicit suggestions about how women can
best serve their countries. The question of satisfaction is
implicitly sexual, and upon closer inspection of each poster, a pattern
of phallic symbols and erotic innuendo emerges as the women are gripping
or handling equipment in subtle yet sexually suggestive ways, which
alludes to the idea that sexual liberation can be attained by taking
matters into their own hands, so to speak. If men have the capacity to
be "happy and satisfied" away from the company of women, then women
should have this freedom as well by striving to become more like men.
This is definitively illustrated in a poster that states: I Wish I Were A
This "agency-transmitted" gender socialisation falls under the precepts of the "media outlet[...] determin[ing] the specific expectations and skills they wish to endorse." Although Nelson (2002) states that the consequence of this is either "mutually reinforcing or contradictory and conflicting," in this case, it is both; women did find a level of unprecedented liberation and status, though not all of them achieved this by becoming more like men, rather, by promoting the reality of feminist strength. It is the latter group, according to Woollacott (1994), who faced the well-documented and disastrous consequences of post-war vilification. Women who were reluctant to part with the liberation advertised were often labelled as loose and dangerous carriers of sexually-transmitted diseases.
Image via Wikipedia
Sime's story Munitions! (1917), was first published in the federally
funded Saturday Night magazine which according to Keshen (1996)
practiced hegemonic and biased dedication to wartime propaganda. The
story's form is closely linked to the poster campaign; narrative is
replaced with a manipulative form of social realism where nothing occurs
except getting a job manufacturing munitions. Much like the figures in
the posters, the main character, Bertha, is a blank slate - a flat,
stock model with whom the average female reader was expected to
sympathise and emulate. She is living a "half-dead life" (Sime, p.44) as
an "excellent servant" in the "well-ordered house" of domestic
servitude (Sime, p.38). Upon learning of the opportunities provided by
the local munitions factory, she leaves her housekeeping job for a
position at the factory which is "insistent and creative." Bertha labels
those who choose to produce munitions as a means of achieving a "sense
of freedom" as "self-respecting girls," while those who do not must
forgo the possibility of being "extraordinarily happy" (Sime, p.33).
Much like the posters, the story makes vague allusions to the sexual
liberation of the "munitionettes" by hinting at, but never describing
their "masculine" behaviour and the "unprecedented candour" that came
"streaming out" on the bus-ride to the factory (Sime, p.40). Sime relies
heavily on slogan-like platitudes of "[i]t's time we lived," and
"...it's great out there" (Sime, p.42), while downplaying the "noise and
discomfort and strain" of the work as a small price to pay for such
"liberty" and "joy" and "relief" (Sime, p.43).
The story makes no mention of the copious women who became infertile or contracted debilitating illnesses from poison at the factories; who were killed or irreparably maimed in explosions of faulty munitions; who promptly lost their jobs and were relegated back to domestic servitude and second-class citizenship upon the men's return. Most women who tried to resist were quickly denigrated as unfit mothers, unworthy wives, and social rabble-rousers. Many of these feminists were institutionalised, because who but crazy women would want the jobs of men? The women who resisted this hegemonic duplicity have paved the way for true gender equality, yet it is writers like Sime who get touted as part of our literary heritage.
Arnheim, R. (1969). Art and Visual Perception: The Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkely, CA: The University of California Press. Print.
Finke, Ronald A (1996). "Imagery, Creativity, and Emergent Structure : Consciousness and Cognition." 5.3: 381--393. Print.
Jowett, Garth, and O'Donnell. (1999). Propaganda and Persuasion. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. Print.
Keshen, J. (1996) Propaganda and Censorship: During Canada's Great War. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Print.
Nelson, A. (2002). "Development and Socialization in Childhood and Adolescence." In Gender in Canada (2nd Edition). Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall. 112-160.
Sime, J. G. (1917) Sister Woman. Ottawa: Tecumseh Press. Print.
Woollacott, A. (1994) On Her their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Many other posters were described than appear in this blog.