A Woman's Right to Charm and Beauty': Maintaining the Feminine

How a military engages with gender is most evident when it attempts to integrate women as soldiers into its armed forces. Focussing on the internal military media, this paper examines the Canadian Army's efforts during World War II to create a women's corps which exuded an image of femininity and respectability. RESUME Comment I'armee s'y prend-elle avec la question des hommes et des femmes est encore plus evident lorsqu'elle tente d'integrer les femmes en tant que soldats dans ces forces armees. En se concentrant sur les medias militaires internes, cet article etudie les efforts de I'armee canadienne durant la Deuxieme Guerre mondiale pour creer un corps compose de femmes qui exsuda une image de feminite et de respectabilit6. Labour shortages during World War II generated a rapid expansion of women's public roles as they moved into paid employment in fields that had been considered masculine according to conventional ideology. Feminist historians have argued that enthusiasm for women's patriotic war efforts was soon dampened by concerns for the maintenance their femininity (Anderson 1981; Campbell 1984; Pierson 1986; Summerfield 1984). These historians have suggested that the rhetoric of government mobilization propaganda and mass media coverage emphasized the temporary and subordinate nature of women's wartime contributions while simultaneously highlighting those aspects of women's war work which were perceived as innately feminine. Other scholars have argued that government propaganda and the mass media served to inform the general public of the wartime ideal of femininity (Bland 1983; Dabaki