Chapter 21: Visualizing Work
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Advertisements like these for farm equipment encouraged late nineteenth-century farmers to embrace modern technology and to leave the drudgery of “the old way” behind them. At the same time, however, these hand-drawn advertisements appeared when technology for photographs to be reproduced in print already existed.
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These four photographs were taken to illustrate various stages in the production of paper at the E. B. Eddy paper mill in Hull, Quebec, in the early 1950s. As a workspace, the mill was a theatre for all sorts of sensory, embodied experiences, and yet still photographs can only hint at what those might have been. In the context of Nicolas Kenny’s chapter on Montreal’s industrial landscape (Chapter 13), however, we can imagine what workers’ bodies might have felt in environments such as paper mills.
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These photographs, depicting a day in the life of a Black train porter, were created in the late 1940s or early 1950s as publicity material for Canadian National Railways (CN). In this period, rail companies were beginning to feel the commercial pressures from new modes of transportation as airline and automobile travel expanded. In particular, the infrastructure of auto mobility offered more flexible options for working-class families who sought new spaces of leisure.
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These photographs and advertisement visually represent the feminization of clerical work that took place through the first half of the twentieth century alongside the emergence of new technologies that transformed the everyday practices of office work. As both Kate Boyer (Chapter 15) and Jennifer Stephen (Chapter 17) explain, working women in these decades were routinely seen as a threat to the “normal” order of things on the job, whether in offices (Boyer) or wartime factories (Stephen). Regulating women workers was therefore high on the agenda of employers.
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Service stations were (and remain) significant sites of labour in Canada, but they were also regular sites of consumerism as both men and women drove cars, purchased gasoline, and required maintenance and repairs for their vehicles. While both men and women were understood to be consumers at service stations, it was men who were usually depicted in advertisements and in popular culture as doing the manly work of car repair. Indeed, as Jennifer Stephen (Chapter 17) shows, right through World War II, there was widespread understanding that women were not “fit” physiologically and mentally to be mechanics.
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