In the years before the First World War, western Canadian women, like their counterparts across Canada, did not experience the same formality in daily life and gender relations as in Victorian times, but men and women still occupied "separate spheres." For the most part, women were still bound to and accepted their traditional roles as housewives, farm wives, or ladies of leisure. In 1911, women constituted about ten percent of the labour force and a large number of those gainfully employed were in domestic service. Women could still not vote either in provincial or federal elections and the Canadian women's suffrage movement was still a struggling imitation of its British original. Urban poverty was a chronic presence in cities in the West and across Canada.

A serious setback for the country was the sudden collapse of the economic boom which had begun in 1896. By the autumn of 1913, Canada was in the grips of the worst depression in two decades. Tens of thousands of urban workers became unemployed and many western farmers, in debt and cut off from their banks, abandoned their farms to move to the cities. The most direct cause of the depression was a sudden decline in British investment capital that had financed the commercial, industrial, and real estate expansion of the previous decade. For a dozen years, Canadian and, specifically, western Canadian prosperity rode the wave of Britain's capital investment that had sustained an orgy of railway construction, vast immigration, and exploitation of Canada's wheat and natural resources. By 1913, however, inflation was rising, investment was dwindling, and the prices of Canada's major exports such as wheat, lumber, newsprint, and base metals were dropping steadily. The Laurier boom was over, and the grandiose era of railway-building was threatening Canada with economic collapse.

But the onset of the First World War helped Canada repair its economy and women played no small part in this economic resurgence. Large numbers of Canadian women entered the workforce since recruiting took men away from the workplace and war production demanded more labour. In the West and across Canada, on farms, in factories, and in offices, women filled positions previously occupied by men. In 1916, women organized the Women's Emergency Corps to recruit women willing to work in munitions production in order to free men to enter the armed forces. Those men who were able to enlist, but did not, were often subjected to a "white feather campaign" in which women would pin a white chicken feather on nonenlisted men's lapels to expose them as "cowards."

In spite of the fact that women were entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, they continued to earn wages considerably lower than men doing the same jobs. In addition, they faced discrimination and lacked the support of labour unions which generally refused to unionize women, seeing them only as temporary workers for the duration of the war. Furthermore, there were no daycare facilities to enable women with children to enter the workforce. Despite these drawbacks, by the end of the First World War, tens of thousands of women across Canada filled jobs previously closed to them.