An Officer and a Lady: Canadian Military Nursing and the Second World War (review)

Published in the series Studies in Canadian Military History in association with the Canadian War Museum, Toman’s book includes five chapters, twenty-nine photos, seven tables, and an index. Based on twenty-five personal interviews and thirty previous interviews with nursing sisters, archives, 1,145 military records, and audiovisual collections, this book is the result of considerable and meticulous work, a true gift to the nursing profession. Yet it is a real pleasure to read with its moving passages and revealing humorous anecdotes.

We first discover how underemployment associated with the Great Depression pushed so many civilian nurses to rush to enlist; military nursing was offering regular, full-time, and decently paid work. The author’s analysis also shows that, contrary to what had been suggested in the literature, this rush was not responsible for the Canadian nursing shortage of the 1940s. Toman convincingly demonstrates how the Canadian armed forces constructed the nursing sister rank as a unique all-female military force performing women’s work (nursing) as opposed to men’s work (combating). Nurses were selected, trained, and supervised to behave both as officers and as ladies. As officers, at least twelve of them died while on active duty, two were made prisoners of war in Japan, and many more were injured or exposed to occupational hazards such as malaria, lice, scorpions, and toxic substances. As ladies, they were expected to participate in social events such as dances at headquarters as part of their duties to boost the soldiers’ morale, and could be subjected to sexual harassment.

Toman reveals how military nurses facilitated the expansion of medical technologies (particularly blood transfusions and the use of penicillin) and nursing within the armed forces. Nurses also assumed expanded roles and took on some of the responsibilities of physicians and orderlies whenever these health workers were unavailable or ‘whenever those expanded roles reinforced their value to the larger military-medical system.’ Having experienced an unusual degree of professional autonomy on the front lines, very few military nurses engaged in hospital practice after the war; the vast majority of those left nursing, and the ones who remained in the profession avoided the resumption of traditional roles. Also, most nursing sisters seem to have accepted the temporary nature of war work, considering this experience as a relatively brief stage of life prior to marriage. Yet the author states that ‘all of those interviewed for this research counted their military service as one of the highlights of their lives.’ Filling a gap left by feminist and anti-militarist historians, who have contributed to represent military nurses as either stereotypically female or oppressors within the military system, Toman reveals some silenced truths such as derogatory treatment and remarks from British nursing sisters who regarded their Canadian counterparts as ‘colonials,’ power struggles within military medical units, alcohol abuses, and loose sexual behaviour.

Although written from a feminist perspective, this book does not develop a central thesis; rather, it describes with nuance how at least 4,079 civilian nurses were selected and transformed into military nurses and how gender intersected with class, ethnicity, and race in the process. It documents the multiple aspects of their exceptional experience: personal, social, professional, and military.