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If You Can Walk, Talk, Creep, or Crawl — Apply Here!

It’s in Their Blood

Thousands of women worked in wartime factories during the Great War in Britain. They toiled under distressing conditions, enduring long shifts and tolerating dirty, dingy, dangerous work. “Life may appear hard to us,” a female war worker lamented, “but we go on. No one notices whether we are tired or not, and in this brutal fact lies the hope of endurance. A little sympathy would cause what is generally known as a ‘swound’ among the loaded fuses, or instant collapse into the bullet crate. It is amazing what we can do when there is no way of escape but desertion.”1 Moreover, during the First World War, women grew tired of the inconsequentiality of their lives. “We were sick of frivolling, we wanted to do something big and hard, because of our boys and of England,” one woman said. “When the dreaded telegram came at last and everything was grey and bitter, we gave up talking and made our way to the lowest level — the gates of the nearest ammunition factory.”2

When Canada entered the Second World War, women had a legacy of stoicism and martyrdom from which to draw: a war still fresh in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ minds and hearts. In some sense, it could be said, “it was in their blood” for patriotic Canadian women to give their all to war work.

Working in a Man’s World

The Second World War brought women’s employment in Canada to the forefront of industry. Seemingly overnight, women by the hundreds of thousands entered the workforce of industries that were previously male-dominated. In addition to a sense of patriotism, many factors drove women to seek work. For professional women, with men off to fight, the war provided an opportunity to progress in their career within patriarchal organizations. Other women found it a struggle to make ends meet on the small stipend their husbands fighting overseas sent home. Others worked because their menfolk were jobless from the economic effects of the Depression. For young, single women, war work offered the prospect of travelling away from home. City life looked romantic, exciting, and novel.

During peacetime, a company had the luxury of growing its workforce gradually, with new employees carefully selected to meet the requirements of the job. New hires could settle in, and slowly, but surely, become more productive as the days, weeks, and months passed. In times of war, when the company’s purpose became one of maximum production that not only had to be attained, but maintained, this fundamental relationship — on which victory or defeat rested — became crucial. The relationship that existed between an employee and her employer was one of the most important within a wartime organization. Harmony and co-operation were at the heart of working well together.

War, Ammo, and Feminine Pads

GECO opened its Women’s Division Employment Office on May 4, 1941.3 Bob and Phil Hamilton made a strategic decision to hire a female personnel manager. In countless wartime factories across the nation, the mostly male-dominated management knew little about hiring and managing women. The traditional view that women belonged in domestic roles translated into a tendency to set low expectations for them in the factory. GECO’s personnel director, Grace Hyndman, as a woman, recognized the huge potential within the girls she hired. She had three months to create an employment policy for hiring in an industry geared for battle. She interviewed and graded thousands of applicants, expecting to hire five thousand women.4

Grace, along with GECO management, including Dr. Jeffrey and Florence Ignatieff, recognized that while men saw no problem eating their lunch on a dirty bench on the shop floor, women would not flourish under such rudimentary conditions. Industry experts suggested women might tire more easily than men do, and not be able to lift and carry heavy loads.5 They might be more sensitive to noise, dirt, odours, and fumes.6 They would need easier access to washrooms, and perhaps being more fastidious than their male counterparts, need larger cloakrooms, storage lockers, and more pleasant lunchrooms.7 Grace felt women thrived and worked more diligently under female supervision. Matrons in charge of change rooms, washrooms, and rest rooms, would set a standard for the women to follow.8 There were health and safety issues, too. For example, it was decided that salt tablets and plenty of water should be provided to women since they might fatigue with loss of salt through perspiration.9 Adequate lunch and rest periods were essential, along with reasonable hours of work.10 Data had shown women found it harder to adjust to shift changes, and absenteeism might be greater than “normal” due to women calling in sick “to catch up on their sleep.”11 For women who worked on night shifts, adequate transportation and safety measures would be important. Outside activities to build morale, health, and a sense of community and belonging could help promote a happy team of women.12 GECO strove to accommodate each of these unique considerations for their female employees, and met or exceeded most.

In addition to meeting workers’ physical needs, Grace had to consider women’s emotional well-being, too. Who would make the best GECO employee? How best to persuade her to work willingly with explosives? What could the company offer to keep her happy, motivated, and committed? A working woman, unlike a man, had not only her job responsibilities with which to contend, but also worried about feeding her family, keeping house, and providing care for her children.

GECO operators prepare bullets for tip lacquering. Courtesy of Archives of Ontario.

GECO issued booklets that sold the “perks” of working for a munitions plant to women.13 The plant needed these pamphlets, especially during the plant’s early days, due to widespread rumours that factory work was unfit for women, and that employers gave little regard to women’s health and safety.14 Jack Kennedy wrote in History of the Department of Munitions and Supply: Canada in the Second World War that “welfare and women’s organizations expressed considerable alarm about the adverse social effects of the employment of women in war industries.”15 The rumours became so pervasive, the government invited the media and women’s welfare agencies to get involved to help quell the tales and educate the public.16 In the end, the rumours were unfounded; in fact, some experts suggested the maddening stories were the work of seditious persons.17

GECO’s hiring brochure read in part:

The General Engineering Company at Scarboro offers an exceptional opportunity to women who want to do a vital war job. The ammunition filled in this Plant plays an important role in the defense of Britain and her allies, and makes our ships, guns, tanks and planes into effective weapons to invade and conquer the Axis’ countries.

Fortunately, this filling of fuses and other ammo is a job at which women excel. Their quick, skillful fingers are ideally suited to the fine operations which include most of the jobs in a filling plant.18

GECO’s Bomb Girls

A large-scale employment campaign for female fuse-fillers commenced in September 1941.19 GECO’s hiring objective was to interview, hire, and train munitions workers in the shortest time possible. In addition to an employment office set up on Danforth Avenue, the company erected another employment booth at Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue.20 In a bit of fun, someone nailed a sign scribled in crayon to the booth: “If you can walk, talk, creep, or crawl, apply here!”21

During its initial hiring campaign, GECO received twelve thousand, predominantly Anglo-Saxon applicants;22 the vast majority had no industrial experience and had relatives on active service.23 Due to security requirements, war plants in Canada could hire only British subjects.24 Grace looked for workers who were of average intelligence, in good health, patriotic, could manage home responsibilities, had the ability to get along with others, and perhaps most importantly, had agile fingers for the delicate and intricate task of packing fuses with high explosives.25

New hires were given a half-day’s training and then put to work.26 Their training outlined employee services and opportunities, the myriad rules and regulations of GECO, safety standards, firefighting techniques and anti-sabotage procedures, the nature of the work to be done, respect needed for the materials they would be handling, and the importance of quality and quantity of production.27 They also met their foreman and workshop supervisor, who provided specific fuse-filling training, which they’d be involved in.28

“From offices, stores, factories, schools, and homes, from universities,” wrote editor Ross Davis in the April 11, 1942, issue of GECO’s employee newspaper, “have come the recruits for a swiftly expanding army of overalled women who by their amazing aptitude in mastering unfamiliar tasks have become a vital factor in our wartime industrial front, and have brought us in sight at least of the total production for total war towards which we are progressing.”29

GECO’s new recruits were reminded that men’s lives — for many, their loved ones overseas — hung in the balance.