Our female soldiers of yesteryear

At the age of 98, Margaret LeBas Howe attended an International Women’s Day dinner. What she heard there annoyed her.

Attendees marvelled at length about the extraordinary progress feminists had made — since the 1960s. That didn’t exactly sit well with Howe, who did a tour of duty in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium during the Second World War during her time with the then newly established Canadian Women’s Army Corps ( CWAC). And yet, the modern feminists in the room seemed to think that progress emerged out of a temporal vacuum.

“It seems like a whole lost generation and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t tell their daughters,” she told the London Free Press. Howe, now 100 years old, is about to publish her first book, a partautobiography detailing some of her time in the corps, titled Call Me Ma’am.

Indeed, oft forgotten in the latest debates about equal pay and reproductive issues is that much of the revolution that has granted modern women better access to education and career prospects was born not in the ’60s, but rather in the ’40s.

Global war drew an unprecedented number of women into the workforce and even to the front lines. CWAC enlisted 50,000 women across the country to serve in roles that would allow more men to fight. Most of these women worked as cooks, clerks and laundresses — but they also served in technical fields.

Howe worked as an army examiner, conducting psychology tests for fellow female recruits.

The corps gave a whole generation of women a sense of their own competence and mastery outside traditional domestic domains. By the end of the war, women could re- ceive training and experience in 55 trade categories. The war gave them opportunities to perform valuable work — work that they would never have been able to obtain as civilians.

In 1945, Margaret Haliburton, a member of the Women’s Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force who monitored German U- boat traffic from her military radio station in Moncton, N.B., was among the first to learn that Adolf Hitler had died.

Just as importantly, these opportunities gave women a way to serve their countries as they watched male compatriots suffer the wounds and ravages of warfare.

“( I) suffered pangs of patriotism each time ( I) saw a recruiting poster, still at this time for men only,” she wrote in her book.

The shame of this era was that it was so short lived. When the war ended, women were expected to return to their old roles as mothers, caretakers and helpmates. All the better to make room in the workforce for the returning men.

But the frustration of this generation of hard- working women would not be squandered. Instead, it found new life in their daughters who fought for the opportunities that their mothers had been denied. And even though that revolution has been an imperfect one, it was to be the beginning of the end of countless generations of squandered human potential.

By the ’ 60s, CWAC was folded into the Canadian Armed Forces proper and women have served alongside men in the military — including at times in combat roles. So much of our understanding of the military is centred on male mythologies. Given that men have tended to sacrifice their lives in war in far greater numbers, this is perhaps perfectly understandable. But women have not been passive observers to some of our country’s finest moments. The grit, physical bravery and fortitude of the women of that generation — including, of course, the nurses who waded through unimaginable levels of horror and gore — have too often been overlooked.

Howe’s book should be one welcome addition into what we hope will grow into a library of such stories. Stories that set an example of service rendered, obstacles overcome and accomplishments attained for many future generations of Canadians.

MUCH OF THE PROGRESS OF THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT TOOK PLACE IN THE ’40S, NOT THE ’60S.