Keeping the Home Fires Burning

Vancouver  1988  49:00

Combining original Canadian wartime propaganda, interviews with women workers, original footage and photographs, musical soundtracks and dramatization, KEEPING THE HOME FIRES BURNING explores the unique experience of Canada’s working women during World War Two.

Part 1: Women and Work
This section highlights non-traditional work in the aircraft, shipbuilding and wood industries in British Columbia, while reminding us that women continued to do the vast majority of traditional service jobs. Deploying personal memory and humour, women describe their sometimes rocky integration into the labour force as well as their changing conciousness towards themselves, other women, and work both during and after the war.

Part 2: Women and Unions
The 1940 s were a time of rapid growth for British Columbia s trade unions. Not surprisingly, women were swept up in the tide of industrial organization, serving as organizers, stewards and executive members. The reasons for and results of women’s union activity emerge through agit-prop dramatization based on the workers theatre of the era and personal testimony.