Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief (review)

The willingness of soldiers to put themselves in harm’s way for an intangible good, freedom and democracy, for example, or some more religious goal, is and has been a key aspect of wartime rhetoric. The soldier’s altruism, however, is not the only form of selflessness that communities lionize. The soldier, a young man for most of history and this study, was somebody’s child, sent off by someone in the name of that higher cause. Suzanne Evans’s Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief takes a broad geographical and temporal focus to examine the way that societies have used maternal love and sacrifice as ultimate evidence of the righteousness of their cause.

Evan’s introduction explains her motivations for this study. While a young mother herself, she was struck by an image of the ‘Intifada smile’: the serene pride of a mother who had just lost her child to martyrdom. Such a response seemed to go against all natural instincts, yet ‘the stories of women who publicly rejoice in the death of a child in support of their community have been told for centuries in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Sikh traditions.’ She also shows that it has, once upon a time, had a very clear place in Canadian society. This study is a useful, provocative effort to trace these connections.

Evans examines the social construction of the mothers of Canadian soldiers during the First World War and compares it to those of martyrs from religious traditions. She looks especially at the socially appropriate response of the mother of a soldier who had been killed. The image she finds is of one not broken and bereaved, but serene, tearless, and proud, the sacrifice of her son in a higher cause testament to the fact that she had raised him well, and testament as well to her own selflessness. It is a disturbing image, but, as she shows, also widespread enough to be iconographic. Evans discusses the importance ascribed to the maternal bond and shows how this response has been used politically to rouse other members of a society to stronger efforts in pursuit of a common cause.

The major focus of the book is on the Canadian experience, specifically during the First World War. Evans examines the widespread recognition of it as a ‘holy war’ fought in the name of Christian, democratic, and pacifist ideals. She shows how mothers were encouraged to serve as recruiting agents for their own families, and how their stoic responses to their children’s deaths were publicized to shame others into their own, albeit lesser, sacrifices. She discusses the way that the limited franchise granted to women in 1917 was based not on war service, as is popularly thought, but on the notion of maternal sacrifice, and the subsequent sense that these new voters would support conscription and Borden’s Union Government. Evans goes on to discuss how notions of maternal sacrifice and bereavement have shaped both war memorials and Remembrance Day ceremonies after the wars.

The generalized, cross-cultural focus has weaknesses as well as strengths. There is a sense of incompleteness at times; the emphasis on showing linkages across time means that images have been marked out for inclusion at the risk of a certain loss of context. It is not a long monograph, and carrying a theme forward from the Maccabees to Canadian peacekeepers will result in some overgeneralizations. The effort to include a vast chronological and cultural spread also leads, at times, to some jarring transitions. The discussion of the efforts of the War Graves Committee to shape and control bereavement and the memory of the First World War, for example, slides rather suddenly to peacekeeping and Canada’s self-identity as a peacekeeping nation. But this is perhaps a historian’s quibble, less significant for scholars in religious studies, where...