Donald F. Davis & Barbara Lorenzkowski

Donald F. Davis and Barbara Lorenzkowski. A Platform for Gender Tensions: Women Working and Riding on Canadian Urban Public Transit in the 1940s. The Canadian Historical Review.

In this original article on women’s occupation of public space in the public transit system during the Second World War, Davis and Lorenzkowski offer a fresh angle of view on women’s wartime experience. They place gender at the centre of their analysis showing new ways in which, during wartime, some gender norms were broken, albeit temporarily. They are to be praised for their subtle and complex interpretation of how this very ordinary experience of riding buses offered a challenge to traditional values and ideas about women’s nature.