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CANADIAN ENLISTED WOMEN: GENDER ISSUES IN THE CANADIAN ARMED FORCES BEFORE AND AFTER 1945
Except for two short periods in the twentieth century, when Canada was at war, the regular units of the Canadian Armed forces (CF) have been closed to women; this circumstance did not change until the early 1950s, when the three divisions of the Canadian military (Army, Navy and Air Force) adopted independent policies for the recruitment and enlistment of women. The perceived unsuitability of women for military service, because of their alleged physical weakness and emotional instability in the face of danger, is an assumption which has been misused to justify the exclusion of women from active military duty. And yet, there have always been women who wanted to enlist. During World War II, Canadian volunteers demanded the right to serve in an official capacity, and because all available men were needed to fight, women's divisions of each of the Army, Navy and Air Force were created. Notwithstanding the efficiency and precision with which these enlisted women performed their tasks, each of the women's divisions was dispersed at the end of the war. With the exceptions of widows and single women, enlisted women were discharged and sent home to keep house. Since those early post-war years, stereotypes about women being unfit for active military service have been proven both unconstitutional and inherently wrong. And yet, the CF is only slightly closer to accepting women on an equal basis with men at the end of the twentieth century than it was at the beginning. The CF has been forced to end discrimination against women in its recruitment and training policies, and officially it has been working towards that end since a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decision of 1989. Unofficially, however, the top brass of the CF has surreptitiously worked towards keeping women out of the CF, especially the more specialized trades. A comparison of official reports, where improvements in opportunities for women in the CF were documented in the Annual Reports of the Department of National Defence (DND), with unofficial reports, suggests that the real status of enlisted women in the CF has changed little in the last hundred years.
Perhaps in defence of the CF, it must be stated clearly that...