How They Saw Us : Women at War

In this film about a factory seamstress, there is the substitution of glamor for genuine job satisfaction and advancement. The film was made in 1955.

During World War I Canadian women watched a half-million of their men march into the unknown. With the outbreak of World War II they once again shouldered the tasks of maintaining the home front and providing the support needed by the fighting men.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers. Rosies of the North traces the story of a group of women whose lives were changed by their experiences. They describe with wit and humour their role in the production of the Hurricane and Helldiver fighter planes. The film also tells the remarkable story of Elsie MacGill, Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry, the first woman in Canada to graduate with an engineering degree and the first woman in the world to design an airplane.