JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I think that this pamphlet could stand without comment, but, well, here it goes anyway:

Here’s an extraordinary title from the Found-Absurd/Surreal Department:  What Can the Women Do?  was published by the Extension Department of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia in 1940.  It is a odd, uncomfortably-phrased work that seems completely antiquarian today–and yet the work is only 75 years old, well within the lifespans of 10% of U.S. citizens alive today.  That such a question would and should be asked within the space of the lifetime of millions of grandparents is remarkable, and brings the past bursting into the present. This question did not die here in 1940, but would continue for several decades more.

The other point here is that this is only 20 years after women were granted the rights to vote in the U.S., and in some ways was an advancement in showing the number of different sorts of occupations open to women besides her job as housewife and mother.