REAL Women of Canada

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PROFESSOR KATHRYN MCPHERSON When war broke out in 1914 there's no expectation that Canadian women would serve in any active combat role in the military, but it was expected that women would play a key role in the domestic war-time economy and interestingly, women were well poised to do this because for the twenty years or so before the war broke out Canadian women had been forming all sorts of organizations. Some of them were very local and others were much more national/international which were poised to take action during the war and they did. So this network of women's organizations leapt into action. PROFESSOR MOLLY LADD-TAYLOR Women in the United States as in Canada became very involved in a number of aspects of war work. With their victory gardens in their backyard, with the diet and with conserving materials and so there was a big effort around "food will win the war". They actually had to produce supplies so women knit and they sewed and they canned fruit to be sent overseas. They also volunteered to be farmerettes to take off the harvest so to replace the many, many men who had left the agricultural regions to enlist. Canadian women also raised money. In 1917, the IODE collected 1.5 million dollars to send to the Red Cross and other agencies that were providing supplies for Canadian troops. As the war progressed we were responsible for collecting something called Sphagnum Moss which is a natural product that the Red Cross wanted for dressings - 20 million by the end of the war. And this was all produced by the volunteer labor - mostly women - going out collecting and drying and packaging it and sending it overseas. Nobody really anticipated when war broke out that the amount of first aid supplies and medical attention that was going to be needed was really unanticipated. There were a number of ways that women were able to take advantage of the war as a way to get government to recognize women's contribution to society. 3,000 Canadian women trained as voluntary aid detachments. They took Red Cross courses, Saint John's Ambulance courses and about 1,700 of those women went overseas to serve. Canadian Nurses served in hospitals in Africa, in the Middle East as well as in military hospitals at the Western Front and they did a range of things so there certainly was a strong administrative role the Canadian nurses had to fill. They had to get the hospital set up manage the supplies, take care of paperwork of tracking all these injured men that came through. They're also especially in the Eastern theatre of war was a problem with sanitation and dysentery so there was a disturbing number of soldiers that died from non-military battles. Some nurses were decorated who survived the war and then nurses who were killed during the war were also decorated. Over 30 nurses were killed during the war including 14 Canadian nurses who died when the Llandovery Castle ship was torpedoed. Another important element of Canadian Nurses' experience in the war was that they were given officer status. They couldn't carry guns but otherwise they had officer status and that meant were technically in command of the male soldiers that they oversaw. They were understood to be in this elite corps of the Canadian military. Neither the American nor the British services offered that status to their nurses. PROFESSOR JENNIFER STEPHENS War provides states with a very powerful incentive to improve public education, to improve public health and to living standards. Women, on average, really benefited in a lot of ways from the First World War. This is partly because there had been a strong women's movement prior to the war and they took advantage of the war years. During the war, most suffragettes who had been peace activists prior to the war, the vast majority ended up siding with the war. Certainly the senior commanders were increasingly concerned about the poor state of health, the malnutrition, the rotting teeth, the illiteracy... And the United States Children's Bureau declared the second year of the war, 1918, to be Children's Year and involved a massive mobilization campaign where women all over the country ended up participating in infant health clinics. So although on the one side we can see this as a sort of standardization imposing a certain notion of health and beauty throughout the population, there's a lot of evidence that women faced with high rates of infant and also maternal mortality were really seeking this kind of health care and the activities of the Children's Bureau during the First World War led to the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921 which was the first federal social welfare measure passed in the United States providing healthcare for women and children. Feminist pacifists were frustrated by the enthusiasm that many in the women's movement showed for the war. The war fractured the women's movement in important ways. In her 1945 autobiography Nellie McClung, who was one of Canada's foremost and most articulate and most often quoted in the press. Feminists recalled "The Fall of 1914 blurs in my memory like a troubled dream. The war dominated everything. Some of my friends were pacifists and resented Canada's participation in a war of which we knew so little. Chief among the Empire's defenders among the women was Miss Cora Hind. Her views were clear-cut and definite. We were British and must follow the tradition of our fathers. She would have gone herself if women were accepted. Miss Hind saw only one side of the question and there were times when I envied her though I resented her denunciation of those who thought otherwise. The old crowd began to break up and our good times were over."