Proudly She Marches

This short film from WWII focuses on the increasingly important roles women occupy on the various war fronts. In England, their more active jobs include ferrying planes from factory to airfield and operating anti-aircraft guns. In Russia, they are fighting on the front lines as well as acting as parachute nurses, army doctors and technicians. In Canada women have joined active service auxiliaries, and thousands labour day and night in factories turning out the tools of war. From the Canada Carries On series.

From the Canada Carries On series, this is a tribute to the women of Canada for their part in the World War II effort. The Canadian Women's Army Corps and homemakers alike were called upon to do their part. From careful budgeting in the home to services rendered overseas, women's work was integral to the well-being of all.

This short archival film from WWII depicts how the women of Winnipeg opened a volunteer bureau and enlisted 7000 women into the war effort. Through a variety of activities, these women extended and maintained social services during the war.

This short archival film documents the Woman's Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force of 1943, 9,000 strong, an able corps trained for service at home and overseas. Their aim is to prepare themselves for an important role in the flying field after the war, when Canada's civil air power will prove an essential factor in the air communications of peacetime civilization. Part of the World in Action series.

They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.

This short documentary is part of the Canada Carries On series of morale-boosting wartime propaganda films. In Home Front, the various WWII-era social contributions of women are highlighted. From medicine to industrial labour to hospitality, education and domesticity, the service these women provided to their country is lauded.

This short documentary, produced by the NFB for the Department of Munitions and Supply, profiles Canada’s World War II-era munitions factories, which produced explosives in vast quantities. Looking at a typical munitions plant, we learn about the science behind the explosives, the strict safety precautions required in these workplaces, and the methodical work of the plant’s largely female wartime labour force.

This wartime short is a musical recruiting film for the Canadian Women's Army Corp.

This feature documentary examines its own genre, which has often been called Canada's national art form. Released in the year of the NFB's 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower's take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945), in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a "hammer to shape society". All 500 of the films produced by the NFB until 1945 are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks in it for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining, and unexpectedly disturbing.

This film illustrates the struggles of Canadian prairies women to achieve a more just and humane society within the farm movement and at large. During the early 1900s, women on the prairies looked for ways to overcome their isolation. Out of the resulting farm women's organizations grew a group of women possessing remarkable intellectual abilities, social and cultural awareness, and advanced worldviews.

This feature film in two parts is an exploration of the women’s suffrage movement. Spearheaded by women like Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women's Social and Political Union, the Suffragettes realized they would have to become radical and militant if the movement was going to be effective. There followed many demonstrations, and imprisonments until the women’s vote was finally granted, in 1918 (Britain) and 1919 (Canada, except Quebec.)