Pick One Intelligent Girl: Employability, Domesticity and the Gendering of Canada's Welfare State, 1939-1947 »

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

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 both recruit and train women for wartime military and civilian jobs, and then to achieve precisely the opposite effect - that is, to move women out of the labour force altogether - at war's end.

Negotiating the fluid boundaries of state, community, industry, and household, and drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Jennifer 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 intervenes in 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.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     3
'I Want You to Pick One Intelligent Girl': Mobilizing Canada's Womanpower     18
The National Selective Service Women's Division and the Management of Women War Workers     38
The Psychologist at War: Assessing and Recruiting for the Canadian Women's Army Corps     66
Preparing for the Peace: The Demobilization of Women Workers     99
'An Aptitude Test Is in Your Best Interest': Canada's Employment Charter for Women Veterans     129
The Return to Domesticity: Canada's Womanhood in Training     163
Conclusion     205
Notes     225
Bibliography     267
Index     293