Where Once Our Mothers Stood We Stand

As the body of First World War literature continues to grow, women’s experiences of this period remain largely obscure.This innovative collection addresses the invisibility of women in this literature, particularly with regard to Canadian and Newfoundland history. Drawing upon a multidisciplinary spectrum of recent work – studies on mobilizing women, paid and volunteer employment at home and overseas, grief, childhood, family life, and literary representations ?– this book brings Canadian and Newfoundland women and girls into the history of the First World War and marks their place in the narrative of national transformation.

Death on Two Fronts, part of The History of Canada series, examines the tragic trans­formation of Newfoundland’s political culture between 1914 and 1934. For many people throughout Canada and the rest of the world, 1914 was important because it marked the beginning of the First World War. While the year became significant for the same reason in Newfoundland, it was not originally so. Newfoundland’s economy depended on the sea, and the seal hunt was vital. During the spring of 1914, seventy-seven men of the S.S. Newfoundland died and many more were injured when they became lost on the ice fields, locally known as “the front,” off the north­east coast. What became known as the Newfoundlandsealing disaster galvanized popular discontent against mercantile profiteering and recklessness on the seal hunt, and influenced Newfoundland politics. The Great War muted this discontent and fostered a nationalist political culture founded on notions of honour, sacrifice, and patriotism—particularly after the mass deaths in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. This nationalism was easily shaken, however, in the post-war economic crisis that plagued Newfoundland, frustrating more progressive attempts to deal with economic and social problems, and led to the collapse of responsible gov­ernment in 1934. Although sealers had died in 1914 and soldiers fell in the years of the Great War, it was liberal democracy in Newfoundland that was the final casualty in the bitter struggles over the meaning of these events.

With her linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the Great War. This book tells the story of the nearly 2,000 women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” overseas and at home. Well-educated and middle-class but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit. Their struggle to secure a place at their brothers’ bedsides reveals much about the tensions surrounding amateur and professional nurses and women’s evolving role outside the home.

Women in Atlantic Canada won the right to vote and to run for office only after long, vigorous, and exhausting campaigns for the Great Cause. We Shall Persist explores the distinctive political contexts and common problems characterizing these efforts. Despite uneven progress – and class and racial inequities within the movement itself – most nonindigenous women achieved enfranchisement following the First World War. This victory curbed the most blatant political misogyny and prepared the way for other rights, such as improved social assistance and access to birth control, marking a crucial step in the still-unfinished march toward full gender, race, and class equality.

"The history of women in Canada is one of starting out struggling to feed and clothe their families and ending up writing the great Canadian novel. Inspiring Women charts women's course from subsistence to cultural production.

The twentieth century witnessed both the formation of Newfoundland as a self-conscious national entity and the construction of distinct and self-aware middle and upper classes in its capital city. This interdisciplinary collection examines the key roles played by women in the creation of this state and society, and the essential influence that gender, ethnicity, and religion played in class relations. Shifting class relations were formed in the salient political events of the first half of the twentieth century in Newfoundland: the First World War, the suffrage movement, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and finally Newfoundland's contested entry into the Canadian Confederation. Creating This Place shows how upper-, middle-, and working-class worlds were established in the everyday work of women, as well as the ways in which the complex social boundaries of the period were constructed. Individual chapters explore issues such as women's work in religious and voluntary institutions, their struggle for voice, suffrage, and political change, work of domestic servants, and the construction of "proper" women and mothers through denominational education. Creating This Place adopts an innovative perspective on Newfoundland and Labrador that focuses on the often overlooked lives of urban women. Contributors include Sonja Boon (Memorial University), Linda Cullum (Memorial University), Margot Duley (University of Illinois at Springfield), Vicki Hallett (Memorial University), Jonathan Luedee (doctoral candidate, University of British Columbia), Bonnie Morgan (doctoral candidate, University of New Brunswick), Marilyn Porter (emerita, Memorial University), Karen Stanbridge (Memorial University), Helen Woodrow (Educational Planning and Design Associates and Harrish Press Publications).