Women and war, as told by ‘The Best of It’
Making The Best Of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland During the Second World War Edited by Sarah Glassford & Amy Shaw UBC Press $89.95 (hardcover) $34.95 (epub) 298 pages
Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw first co-edited “A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service,” concerning women’s experience in the First World War. This is both the obvious and organic follow-up.
“Although the Second World War is clearly its own unique event and era, it is also deeply and inherently connected to the First World War. In fact, the two are sometimes seen as elements of a larger period of geopolitical strife in Europe, separated by a two-decade pause in the fighting,” the book states.
Its materials are broadly researched, as well as distilled and curated from original voices: poems, letters and interviews.
“Whether produced by schoolgirls or homemakers, war charity volunteers or members of the armed forces, office clerks or factory workers, the memoirs and oral histories of female Canadians and Newfoundlanders tend to be upbeat in tone,” the book says.
There was a spirit of all hands on deck (hence the title). Which is not to say these women were blindly optimistic.
“Canada made its own declaration of war on Germany, Italy, and Japan thanks to the greater independence it gained through the Stature of Westminster (1931); however, Newfoundland’s participation in the war was still directed by Britain, and was automatically included in their declaration of war … Collectively, Canadians and Newfoundlanders faced the outbreak of the Second World War with disappointment and reluctance: memories of the previous war were too fresh for any other response. Yet, they also possessed a clear sense — one that only grew stronger as the war progressed — of being on the right side of history.”
In the First World War, women volunteers had been restricted to the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). But, in the years in between, the feminine sphere had expanded: for example, many women achieved suffrage in several Canadian provinces and Newfoundland (in 1925). And the “cultural proscriptions that had long curbed the enlistment of women into the armed forces had begun to weaken in 1939 …”
While the importance of the military nursing sisters in the Canadian and British forces in the First World War had not been forgotten, as the Second World War loomed, women in different provinces, anglophone and francophone, began organizing in paramilitary groups.
“Keen to play a more active role than that offered by voluntary or paid work, they created military-style hierarchies, bought or made their own uniforms, and trained themselves in skills such as military drill, orienteering, marksmanship, and auto mechanics,” the book notes.
Despite such efforts, and some intense lobbying, women were still not admitted into any fields involving combat. But labour shortages and a growing awareness that defeating the Nazis and Axis Powers would require “total war” eased some social niceties and gender divisions and opened office and garage and airport hanger doors. Between the Women’s Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF (WD)), the Canadian Women’s Army Corp (CWAC), and the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS), women acted as mechanics, cooks, clerical help, telephone operators, coders and signallers. The WRCNS, also called Wrens, were particularly active in Newfoundland, but Newfoundland women joined all three groups.
Not to mention women’s vital significance on the home front, in a conflict that affected every family, every household.
The editors do take care to include and reference Newfoundland, and the specific circumstances here. For example, “the governor’s wife, Lady Walwyn, spearheaded a 1939 revival of the First World War-era Women’s Patriotic Association of Newfoundland (WPA) [which] co-operated closely with other organizations, such as the Canadian Red Cross.” Newfoundland’s strategic location also saw American forces established in several bases across the island and in Labrador via the Britishamerican land lease agreement, ensuring a massive influx of American troops. So nearly a thousand Newfoundland women “were recruited to act as hostesses, entertaining American servicemen at dances, parties, sports events, dinners, and outings for United Services Organization (USO) operations in Newfoundland; others were recruited as performers for travelling USO shows.”
In the selected bibliography, two of the 14 pages cite Newfoundland sources, and Newfoundland people and events are also represented in the archival photos.
The book’s dozen chapters, each from different authors, are organized around four subjects: “children, childhood, and parenting”; women’s experience on the home front, especially considering religion; overseas humanitarian work and its “unique opportunity for adventure and travel,” through, for example, the Canadian Red Cross Corps, who “often worked closer to the battlefield than most volunteers”; and “new perspectives on women in nursing, the military, and paid war work.”
The work is thorough and, thanks to its sources, has some colour.