Expanding the Narrative: A First World War with Women, Children, and Grief

Canadian historians who have focused on the experience of those who served overseas have crafted a narrative that is perhaps surprisingly positive. But a trajectory of a colony proving itself on the battlefield to the approbation of other nations and its own citizens tells only part of the story. War is not solely the interest of the military historian. It is a key site in the negotiation and construction of gender norms, and it offers important insights into the relationships between citizen and state, including the relative obligations of sacrifice and those of security and individual freedom. Reactions to and experiences of war are shaped by a multitude of factors including class, ethnicity, religion, region and gender. One of the most exciting developments of the last few decades has been the broadening of military history to encompass and try to understand the experiences of groups beyond “the men who march away.”

In line with developments in other fields of history that use new methods of inquiry to incorporate and understand new subjects, military historians have taken interest, in the last two decades especially, in the methods and subjects of social, intellectual, economic, and cultural history, in an effort to access the broader experiences of the war. As well, historians from other subfields have extended their analyses to wartime behaviour. This expansion has enriched all of the disciplines involved. Robert Rutherford’s Hometown Horizons, in delving deeply into the complexities of race, class, and gender on the Canadian home front, serves as one important example.¹ As military history has expanded to include analysis of the social and cultural implications of conflicts on different groups in society, much recent work has been preoccupied more by the home than the war front. This evolution of interest has given a more nuanced picture of the war. It was an event that touched on most aspects of life, though was less of a watershed perhaps than had been thought, and a crisis to which Canadians responded in heterogeneous ways.

It is impossible to give a full accounting of the Canadian historiography of the First World War and the domestic elements of the home front in a short article. A few themes, however, stand out. One particularly visible thread in the effort to understand the influence of the war on Canadian society has been efforts to look at the experiences of women. This has yielded fruitful insights and challenged historians to use innovative methods to access under-documented individuals and groups. Illustrative of some of the difficulties of accessing women’s experiences are some recent biographies of female participants in the First World War. Susan Mann has done insightful work here in illuminating the lives of individual women and, through them, of important aspects of women’s broader experience. In her work on Clare Gass and Margaret Macdonald, a nurse and the matron-in-chief of Canada’s overseas nursing service during the First World War respectively, she has offered insight into the motivations for participation, experience of the war, and some of its effects on those involved.²

The subtitle of her monograph on Macdonald – Imperial Daughter – refers to Macdonald’s sense of herself and motivations. It is a useful reminder. We still forget that, for many Canadians, the patriotism surrounding the war emphasized duty to Britain more than an explicitly Canadian loyalty. This effort at approaching imperialism on such a personal level, as part of the lived experience of a keen advocate rather than abstract ideology, is one of the book’s strengths. As it was for many men and boys, militarism was a part of Macdonald’s imperialism.³ She described herself as having “a yen for wars.” It is a startling statement, which Mann balances by positing reasons for war’s appeal to a woman of her time, from the idealistic – the appeal of serving a nation or cause rather than an individual – to the more mundane – military service offered clearer status than civilian nursing, and greater variety of work. The Great War, for some of those involved, was liberating, at least for...