Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl

[Jon Skagfeld]

What follows is a direct quote from the Toronto Sunday Sun dated 09 Oct 05.

It has some relevancy to fairly recent posts on this Forum.

"The search continues for Veronica Foster, a lady who came to symbolize a bold generation of Canadian women. During WWII, as many as 750,000 women left so-called traditional workstations, in homes and offices, and assumed jobs in munitions factories. They went to work building tanks, planes and weaponry, so that men could be free to join the nation's armed services.

So powerful was the phenomenom, that Veronica Foster became a kind of poster girl for Canadian women on wartime assembly lines.

"Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl", proclaimed a poster, showing her at work at the John Inglis manufacturing plant on Strachan Ave. in Toronto in 1941. She would soon be regarded as Canada's equivalent of "Rosie the Riveter" south of the border.

More than that, Ronnie Foster represented a social movement in this country. According to wartime journalist Lotta Dempsey, women in war work represented "the honest to goodness equality of Canadian women and men in all the work of this country."

Ted Barris, author of the book Days of Victory:Canadian Remember 1939-1945 (Thomas Allen, Publishers), wonders if Ronnie Foster or those who might have known her are still around."

The above from a column, "The Way We Were" by Mike Filey, noted Toronto historian.