Veronica foster biography
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The story of Veronica Foster, Canada’s precursor to Rosie the Riveter
Features & Columns
By 2020/11/04
Before Rosie the Riveter, there was Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl.
Veronica Foster was just 19 when she began working in the John Inglis and Company factory in Toronto’s Liberty Village — now home of the JAZZ.FM91 studios — during the Second World War. The plant was making heavy appliances and machinery until the war prompted the company to shift its operations to manufacturing Bren light machine guns for the British and Canadian militaries.
The National Film Board chose Foster to be the poster girl for a government campaign designed to attract women to work in factories. It made her a national icon, representing nearly a million Canadian women who worked in manufacturing plants during the war.
Foster was also featured as “Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl” in a photo story in Star Weekly magazine. The most famous photo from that shoot showed her relaxing by an assemble
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Before Rosie the Riveter, there was Canada’s ‘Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl’
When one thinks of feminist imagery associated with the Second World War, the persona of “Rosie the Riveter” invariably comes to mind. hona industrial war workers — usually wearing a bandana or head scarf, with sleeves rolled up ready to tillverka weapons to take on the Axis — were used in recruitment posters, propaganda films, newspaper articles, and other forms of media to encourage women to join the war effort. The era gave women a chance to demonstrate their skills and abilities in realms outside the domestic and the other traditional jobs many had been confined to, and, for many, the desire to shake the system up endured after the war ended.
While the image of “Rosie the Riveter” was American, one of its inspirations came from Toronto. During the war, the John Inglis and Company plant on Strachan Avenue produced thousands of Bren light machine guns — weapons that were cheap and easy to manufacture,
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The Second World War ushered in many changes to the Canadian workforce. While men were crossing the Atlantic to serve their country, women were needed in the factories to fill the spaces they had left behind.
And so the Canadian government, together with the National Film Board of Canada, found a face that would rally millions of women into factories.
Veronica Foster worked for John Inglis Co. in Toronto, assembling Bren light machine guns. Her natural beauty made her the perfect model for the national propaganda poster campaign, and she became “Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl.”
In her most famous photograph, Ronnie sports curve-hugging overalls while effortlessly exhaling smoke from her cigarette as she admires her recently assembled Bren gun.
As the perfect blend of femininity and female liberation, Ronnie became the subject of public infatuation, so much so that the United States decided to create its own female war icon. And so Ronnie’s head scarf and can-do attitude was transferre