{"id":587,"date":"2015-12-07T19:59:12","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T00:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/10-7-gendered-roles-after-the-wars\/"},"modified":"2020-10-08T14:31:16","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T18:31:16","slug":"10-7-gendered-roles-after-the-wars","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/10-7-gendered-roles-after-the-wars\/","title":{"raw":"10.7 Gendered Roles after the Wars","rendered":"10.7 Gendered Roles after the Wars"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_585\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 10.9 Gendered roles and ideals of normalcy were transmitted through primary-school readers like the Dick and Jane books (produced in the United States but reprinted in Canada in French, and in corrected English in the 1950s).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nGendered roles in modern Canada have passed through a period of significant change since the interwar period, especially during the 1960s. As the work of historians Veronica Strong-Boag, Mary Louise Adams, Magda Fahrni, Elise Chenier, and others illustrate, the politics of home life and gendered family regimes was dominated by a complex set of forces following demobilization in 1945-46 and into the late 1950s. Housing shortages were experienced in many parts of Canada; the peacetime restoration of domestic goods production and consumption took a decade longer in Canada than in the United States. But the desire to impose, immediately after the war, a regime of normalization, of bread-winning fathers and homemaking mothers, persisted throughout the 1950s. It was driven in part by a new family formation manifest in the baby boom between 1939 and the late 1950s. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau have described this as an \u201cinterregnum period,\u201d an extended era of post-war adjustment that lasted to the mid-1950s.[footnote]Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-War Canada, 1940-1955 <\/i>(Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen\u2019s University Press, 2003).[\/footnote] Historians situate changes in gendered roles and demographic patterns in the context of shifting historical forces which shaped the masculine and feminine lives of men and women and their \u201cbaby boomer\u201d children.\r\n\r\nFor the parental generation, the dark shadows of the Great Depression and the devastation of the war years motivated the search for security \u2014 for jobs, for homes, and for a restoration of feminine domesticity supported by masculine providers \u2014 and a nationwide drive towards a better life. This was especially true for many newcomers from war-torn Europe. Such hopes, however, were based on older models of gender relations arising in the era of industrialization, some of which were already dated and challenged in the period from 1914-39. The re-mapping of gender roles as Nazism was defeated and the Cold War loomed can thus be approached as a generational as well as a gendered social historical script.\r\n\r\nThe societal urge for post-war normalization and security in Canada led many towards a search for \u201chome\u201d as both a public-realm cultural ideal and a private-life aspiration. Explanations for origins of the baby boom itself invariably point to a postwar-gendered and generational search for security through domesticity. The gendered family regime of mothers, fathers, and children in the 1950s thus had deep historical roots yet was shaped by a quest for normalization in its context as a postwar measure. Security through normalized gendered roles was a classed (middle) and ethnically specific (white) ideal found and promoted in television advertisements and many sitcoms of the era. It was also a cultural backdrop to the public discourse that often cut across class and ethnic differences. Imposed from above through state policies and embraced from below by many Canadians, gender roles were shaped in the 1950s and early 1960s by conformity to a nostalgic sense of the past \u2014 one that was open to challenge.\r\n\r\nEarly postwar patterns in gender roles were marked by patriarchal norms. This was especially true as a new generation of fathers and mothers began to form their own families in search of what both American and Canadian journalists, writing for the middle classes, referred to as the \u201cgood life.\u201d As I have suggested elsewhere, some wives balked at the patriarchal power (sometimes called \u201chegemonic masculinity[footnote]On this topic, see R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt. \"Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept\". Gender and Society<\/em>, 19, 6 (2005): 829-859.[\/footnote]\u201d by theorists today) it imposed, but few fathers did. Postwar family life was, as Strong-Boag puts it, an \u201cambivalent\u201d experiment: many wives, mothers, and homemakers who reached maturity at this time (marriage ages were comparatively younger in the 1950s) did not look back on their home dreams with bitterness, but many other women did.[footnote]Veronica Strong-Boag, \u201cHome Dreams: Canadian Women and the Suburban Experience, 1945-60\u201d,\u201d\u00a0Canadian Historical Review<\/i>\u00a072:4 (December 1991): 24-34.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMen\u2019s experiences of postwar domesticity were not without problems. Notions of \u201cmasculinity in crisis\u201d\u2014 modern men facing a challenge to their identities as men, to cite a prominent example, had been a perennial concern across many decades \u2014 though each era, since the 19th century, generated its own mythologies about how men suffer in the modern age. In the 1950s, mid-century modern men seemed to face three crises in parables of woe that found considerable space in publications, not only in popular magazines like Maclean\u2019s<\/i> and Chatelaine<\/i>, but also in some of the leading sociological publications of the day, most notably Crestwood Heights:<\/i> <\/i>A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life<\/i> (1956). A particular triad of social forces was seen as standing against the modern man as a self-disciplined, autonomous, inner-directed, assertive being: modern bureaucracies and the modern factory system; family togetherness, which prescribed a new dictate for fathers \u2014 play with your children as if you were, almost, one of them; and, possibly worst of all, moms as matriarchal menaces, who exerted too much pressure on sons \u2014 some of whom, it was feared, would become homosexual as a result. This last challenge to manhood was, of course, also a critique of womanhood; a mixing of messages endorsed the maternal housewife while condemning her at the same time.\r\n\r\nWith respect to lived experience, these cultural myths and storylines reflected little in terms of the enduring inequalities in gendered roles in the private and public spheres. Following the immediate postwar forced exodus of most women in non-traditional jobs, there was a slow and then accelerating return to the workforce by married women. By the early 1960s, women comprised one-third of the paid workforce. Full-time earnings, however, stood at only 59% of men\u2019s for the same labour categories and at just 54% for part-time female workers. Despite the challenges to their masculinity that most men were supposed to be facing, work-time studies of women\u2019s labour in the home as homemakers revealed an even more gender-skewed expectation that women were responsible \u2014 as an essential characteristic of their gendered role \u2014 for most infant child care and most housework.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_586\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"Assembly<\/a> Figure 10.10 Postwar women could find pink-collar jobs in teaching and nursing but also in industry, where they were valued for fine work \u2014 but not so much that they were paid as much as men. Women at Canadian Marconi in Montreal, ca. 1949-58.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhat stands out in histories of the postwar period, at least to the rise of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s, was the equation of heterosexuality with what the state and society considered normal gender relations. Deviance in this respect is considered in Section 12.7<\/a>.\r\n\r\nConnections between sexuality and gender roles are complex. They continue to be debated by historians today. Gender roles, if approached as shifting social and cultural responses to sexual differences, consistently demonstrate historical categories and powers that connect the body to boundaries of class, age, and ethnicity. In 2014, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its Better Life Index<\/em>, indicating that Canadian women spend, on average, some 254 minutes per day cooking, cleaning, and caring for children, compared to 160 minutes for men performing the same tasks. These 21st-century trends have deep historical roots in gender roles defined more by patriarchy than by equal partnership. Histories of the struggle for women\u2019s rights and the gendering of experience are one means for challenging those persistent norms. Now more than ever before, these confrontations with histories of inequality become apparent in legislation and official policies that embrace still-wider notions of gender and identity. In this sense, the translation of historic roles and restrictions into [pb_glossary id=\"1820\"]postmodern[\/pb_glossary] constructions of gender roles in Canada is part of a continuity of transformation, and not only a landscape of change.\r\n\r\nIn the decade of the first postwar generation, as Bryan Palmer observes, the turbulent sixties brought with it a \u201cgeneration gap\u201d in social mores and gender roles between young women and men in Canada, as elsewhere \u2014 but this came later, as the postwar generation of baby boomers reached maturity in the late 1960s.[footnote]Bryan Palmer, Canada\u2019s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era<\/i> (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). [\/footnote]\r\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\r\n