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History General

Pick One Intelligent Girl

Employability, Domesticity and the Gendering of Canada's Welfare State, 1939-1947

by (author) Jennifer Anne Stephen

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2007
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802094216
    Publish Date
    Apr 2007
    List Price
    $49.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802091468
    Publish Date
    Apr 2007
    List Price
    $111.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442685659
    Publish Date
    Dec 2007
    List Price
    $99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442691285
    Publish Date
    Apr 2007
    List Price
    $38.95

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Description

During the tumultuous formative years of the Canadian welfare state, many women rose through the ranks of the federal civil service to oversee the massive recruitment of Canadian women to aid in the Second World War. Ironically, it became the task of these same female mandarins to encourage women to return to the household once the war was over. Pick One Intelligent Girl reveals the elaborate psychological, economic, and managerial techniques that were used to recruit and train women for wartime military and civilian jobs, and then, at war's end, to move women out of the labour force altogether.

Negotiating the fluid boundaries of state, community, industry, and household, and drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Jennifer A. Stephen illustrates how women's relationships to home, work, and nation were profoundly altered during this period. She demonstrates how federal officials enlisted the help of a new generation of 'experts' to entrench a two-tiered training and employment system that would become an enduring feature of the Canadian state.

This engaging study not only adds to the debates about the gendered origins of Canada's welfare state, it also makes an important contribution to Canadian social history, labour and gender studies, sociology, and political science.

About the author

Jennifer A. Stephen is an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University.

Jennifer Anne Stephen's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Sir John A. Macdonald Book Prize - Canadian Historical Association