Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (review)

If what might be labeled the "first wave" of scholarly histories of the "Spanish" flu pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s paid particular attention to exploring the spread and deadly impact of the disease and getting it recognized as a topic worthy of serious study by historians, the "second wave" of histories has been able to build on this foundation by putting particular aspects of the pandemic under lenses reflecting the authors' own fields of interest. It is into the latter category that the book under review falls.

That it appears in a studies in gender and history series and that the author, Esyllt Jones, identifies herself as a labor historian by inclination and an immigrant to Canada by experience are good indicators of the lenses she brings to bear on her subject, the Spanish flu of 1918–19 in Canada's third largest city, the cosmopolitan and booming Winnipeg. Thus, four of the book's seven chapters focus on these aspects of the epidemic's effect there—the gendered experience of women who volunteered for nursing and relief work, the response of organized labor and of individual members of Winnipeg's working class (especially its women), and the short- and long-term impact of the calamity on families. Running through all four of these chapters is another theme: that, in the face of a disaster that claimed nearly 1,300 lives in a population of 180,000, the city's working-class and diverse immigrant communities possessed agency and were not just passive victims of the epidemic or hand-wringing recipients of aid from the Anglo-Canadian middle class who ran Winnipeg. In short, they were not beholden to the bourgeoisie for their survival.

Basing this conclusion on a close, discursive (and perhaps inductive) reading of the city's mainstream English-language newspapers; the immigrant press, published in languages as diverse as Yiddish, Ukrainian, Icelandic, and German; and the records of official and unofficial nursing and relief organizations and welfare institutions,¹ Jones sees the epidemic in Winnipeg as not only a brief and traumatic episode in the city's history that illuminated the strains, interclass friction, and struggles of everyday life and death there. She conceives of it too as a historical actor in its own right that exacerbated existing tensions (especially those between labor and capital, which culminated in the Great Winnipeg Strike of 1919) and transformed the lives of individuals and families forever. The latter point should be noted by historians, for they are often inclined to seek the impact of big public episodes only in the public sphere. Stressing the inadequacy of such a limited perspective, Terence Ranger has argued that, "an accumulation of . . . private histories will eventually redeem the neglect of the [1918–19] pandemic in official public historiography."² To this task Jones's book contributes significantly.

The numerous private histories that she includes powerfully and poignantly tell of the experience of flu widows and orphans. That she found their tales in the hitherto unexamined records of the Children's Aid Society, the Winnipeg Children's Home, and the Manitoba Mothers' Allowance Bureau is a great tribute to her ability as a historical tracker, for, by the time she wrote this book, few such sources were available elsewhere. By then almost everyone with first-hand memories of the pandemic had died—one significant disadvantage that works in the second wave of Spanish flu histories share. Indeed, this is so significant a watershed in writing about the pandemic that such works might equally well be described as the first postmemory histories of Spanish flu.

Jones uses these private histories to very good effect in the text, recreating for the reader images of how the epidemic could shatter families and individuals psychologically, financially, and emotionally. For example, she cites a letter from the unmarried...