A Woman's Place Is in the News

Abstract

Through a comparative content analysis, this article examines coverage of women's labor—domestic, volunteer and wage—in commercial and alternative newspapers in Canada during the Second World War. While scholars have written on media representations of women during the war, the lack of a systematic, longitudinal analysis of Canadian newspapers creates methodological and knowledge gaps. Using a feminist media studies framework, this article offers empirical evidence to demonstrate that despite the magnitude and significance of women's wartime labor, the subject received limited news coverage and, moreover, coverage reinforced gendered ideals within and across commercial and labor newspapers. This challenges the idea that either the women's pages or the alternative labor press offered a “space” for more progressive coverage than the gendered representations traditionally found in the mainstream news and, in the process, this article offers ways of thinking about women's labor inclusively, but beyond the historical gendered division of labor.