From Reel to Reality: Canadian Military Women’s Representation in Early National Film Board films, 1939-1945.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores Canada’s significant societal transformation during the Second World War by analyzing the representation of military women in two National Film Board (NFB) films. Following Canada’s entry into the war on September 10, 1939, the demand for male recruits led to a labour shortage, opening unprecedented employment opportunities for women. These changes disrupted traditional gender roles, which had confined women to domestic responsibilities while men worked outside the home. In 1941, women became eligible for military service, marking a pivotal moment in Canada’s evolving social norms. Simultaneously, the Canadian government established the NFB, which was tasked with shaping public opinion through cinematic propaganda, including addressing societal concerns about shifting gender roles. This research focuses on two NFB films directed by Jane Marsh, Wings on Her Shoulder (1943) and Proudly She Marches (1943), as case studies to investigate how Canadian cinema reflected and responded to wartime social changes. It examines the ideological messages in these two films, particularly themes of femininity and subordination, while also contextualizing these portrayals within broader media representations. By comparing the depiction of women in the Canadian Armed Forces in these films with contemporaneous advertisements in magazines like Chatelaine and Maclean’s, this study highlights how Marsh’s films, while propagandistic, could be interpreted as progressive for their time. The primary purpose of this thesis is to examine the representations of military women in wartime films, analyzing how their portrayals conformed to and diverged from pre-war societal norms, and how these depictions were used to influence public opinion by presenting women in new social roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".