In the summer of 1940, as German bombers hammered England and the Battle of Britain hung in the balance, the Royal Air Force faced a desperate shortage of fighters. Hawker Hurricanes were being shot down almost as fast as they could take off, and Britain needed help it could not produce at home. That help came from an unlikely place: Fort William, Ontario, a lumber town on the shore of Lake Superior with no road connection to the rest of Canada worth risking. There, the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, a minor operation with a couple hundred workers, was about to become the biggest aircraft builder in the Dominion.
The key figure in that transformation was Elsie MacGill, a 33-year-old electrical engineer from Vancouver who had defied the expectations of her era at every step. She had been the only woman in her engineering classes, had survived polio, and had already designed a successful training plane when Canadian Car hired her as chief engineer in 1938. The press loved her, eventually dubbing her the Queen of the Hurricanes. When the Royal Air Force came looking for someone to build their fighters, Elsie and Canadian Car were ready.
Building those fighters required workers, but the men were going off to war. So the call went out to women, and they came by the hundreds. Margaret Cook was just 16 when she walked through the gates, starting at 30 cents an hour. Many of the new hires came from the poverty of the Dirty Thirties, where a widow’s allowance might be $50 a month and a girl counted herself lucky to earn $10 a month doing housework.
One woman remembered taking her first paycheck home, signing it over to her mother, and watching her cry at the first real money she had saved in a long time. At first, only about 200 people built that first Hurricane, and it flew by January 1940. A year later, 3,000 workers were turning out 20 planes a week, and 500 of them were women. The men on the shop floor did not welcome them.
The women were made to feel like intruders, and the men would race to the time clock ahead of them, forcing the women to line up behind and then miss the streetcars. Some of the men openly resented their presence. But the women had a blunt answer to the hostility: the plant needed them. As one worker put it, we made them understand we were taking the place of the men who were at war.
They needed us. It was as simple as that. The women proved themselves on the job. They soldered fuse panels, riveted sheet metal wings, and welded frames.
Some proved steadier welders than the men, a fact that did not go over well. They often learned faster from other women than from male instructors, one of whom screamed at his trainee so badly she could not learn a thing from him. Yet the pay gap remained. Women were supposed to receive equal pay for similar work under government policy, but in practice, men were often paid more automatically, and the women accepted it because they were afraid of losing their jobs.
Elsie MacGill was everywhere in the plant, and she was unmistakably the boss. To many workers, she seemed cool and distant. She did not communicate much with the women on the floor, and when she came down and found work she did not like, she once slit a plane cover with a knife to make her point. Reporters gave her all the credit, which grated on the men who were working just as hard.
Some workers stood in awe of her. For the women, she was a breakthrough, proof that a woman could rise to the top of engineering. As one worker put it, she was like almost the first man on the moon for the women. By the middle of 1942, the Hurricane was being phased out as a front-line fighter.
Canadian Car had built 1,400 of them, enough to replace Britain’s Battle of Britain losses twice over. With the orders stopping, the plant needed a new plane. The Americans, now in the war after Pearl Harbor, could not keep up with their own production demands, so they came to Canadian Car. The new aircraft was the Curtiss Helldiver bomber, so new that the design was still being finalized.
The blueprints kept changing as engineering orders flooded in from St. Louis. Constant modifications meant constant retooling, stretching everyone to the breaking point. Over the course of the program, 10,000 engineering orders called for 50,000 changes.
The pressure finally broke the plant’s leadership. The plant manager, E. J. Soulsby, was dismissed, and the axe fell on Elsie MacGill as well.
The official reason given was that she was not on schedule with the Helldiver, though there were rumors of other causes. Both were marched out the main gate and terminated. Hardly a week later, Elsie and E. J.
announced their wedding. The plant was stunned. Rumors that they had been seeing more of each other than they should have spread through the shop floor. In those days, such a relationship was considered scandalous, and the union of the two fired executives became the talk of the factory.
Elsie later took it in stride, part of her long-range plan had been to open her own consulting office anyway. The Helldivers rolled out anyway. The first one came off the line in July 1943, just as trains began arriving with thousands more workers, mostly women from the prairies. The company had to build its own barracks to house them.
Over the next year, the workforce grew to 7,500 people working three shifts, and about 3,000 of them were women. The factory was deafening, filled with the scream of drills and the rattle of riveting, with aluminum dust hanging in the air like diamonds in the sunlight. The women worked double shifts, dreamed of riveting at night, and went to dances whenever they could. Factory romances were common, and the plant was full of young people making the most of wartime life.
The war ended faster than most had dared hope. By early 1945, it was clear the Allies would win, and suddenly the women who had built the planes became a liability. The propaganda machine reversed course and began pushing women back toward the home. Layoffs began before V-J Day.
The servicemen coming home had top priority for jobs, and the women understood that. Many of the prairie girls were devastated; their first jobs had been taken away, and nothing else was offered. Of the thousands of women who had worked the shop floor, the company kept just three. Elsie MacGill had been gone for two years by then, but she did not disappear from public life.
She took on women’s rights wherever she went. In 1968, she was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and she helped found the National Action Committee to ensure the commission’s recommendations had real impact. She worked relentlessly, phoning allies every night with instructions on what to write and whom to contact. Her efforts helped change the legal and economic landscape of the country.
The women who had worked under her remembered her as proof that a woman could do anything, even against all odds. The 1,400 Hurricanes and 800 Helldivers built at Canadian Car helped win the war. But for the women who built them, the experience was transformative. They had done something worthwhile, and they knew it.
They had proven themselves in a man’s world, earned real money for the first time, and learned that they could do anything they put their minds to. Decades later, Margaret Cook, who had waited 60 years to get back into a Helldiver cockpit, finally climbed into the gunner’s seat of the plane she had helped build. She could not help but cry.
She had done her part, and the world had changed because of it.