As the Second World War wound down, Ottawa assumed wartime working women would return to homemaking—the women had other ideas “Whether I marry or not, I want to have a job,” Alison Lindsey told a CBC Radio panel on “The Servicemen’s Forum” broadcast from HMCS Stadacona docked in Halifax on March 22, 1945. The war was winding down and the show’s discussion topic that day was the role of women after the war.  The number of women toiling in Canada’s wartime labour force peaked in the fall of 1944 at 1.2 million, nearly a third of Canadian workers. Ottawa’s Advisory Committee on Reconstruction reckoned the majority would revert to “the normal urge towards marriage, home, and family life” when the conflict ended. Leonard Marsh’s 1943 report for the committee backed the prospect, proclaiming...