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This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty-eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the 'healthy' female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on issues related to the return of rural people of the U.S. serving in war to their homes. If these people want to establish a home on the land, society should not force them, directly or indirectly, to urban existence or industrial work. The farms should not be used as a dumping ground during a period of economic stress, but the country's intelligence and ingenuity must be put to work in order that living on the land be both desirable and profitable. Agricultural economists, like Dr. T. W. Schultz of the University of Chicago, who advise a cityward migration, lack vision and imagination, and prefer misery in the city to fundamental security and independence in the countryside. Such economists still repeat the old worn-out phrase of over-production when hunger stalks the world and malnutrition reigns in the country. If the country's democracy is to continue, it must have more small businesses, small factories, small towns, small farms, small schools, and small churches.