Canadian Nurse's Role In The Second World War

As Canada entered the Second World War, the nation felt the challenges of labour, struggling to meet military production quotas to provide supplies and troops to British forces and allies in Europe. Despite the King administration invoking The War Measures Act, the government was unable to maintain needed production due to a lack of manpower, minimal productive capacity and poor relations between unions and management. By 1941, the Canadian government recognized they needed to mobilize all available resources to keep the economy active. This meant utilizing the underlying source of labour in Canadian women, encouraging women to enter the workforce resulting in unprecedented numbers, and filling roles left vacant by men who had gone to fight

Throughout the gruelling conditions and traumatizing encounters the women faced as military nurses, they were still constrained to strong societal expectations of femininity that hospital training schools and military routines maintained. The goal to maintain contemporary femininity versus masculinity, working closely with the military men they disciplined the nurses to embed their image as distinct "officers" and "ladies." Canadian nurses were the first women to be classified as military officers in 1904, but this was done so carefully to ensure that the women would never outrank or hold more authority than the men, creating specialized titles of nursing sisters and matrons for lower class positions. Despite the undeniable importance of the military nurses, the military was adamant that their positions were temporary, regardless of the wishes of the

On the home front, the National Selective Service Women’s Division campaigned to recruit women, coming as a welcomed venture by Canadian citizens with more than 400,000 unemployed men and women following the Great Depression. The decision was focused on the tasks of contributing their efforts towards fighting the war and ensuring that the call for female labour was temporary, acting to secure the withdrawal of women from the industries once the war ended. Women travelled across provinces to reach Quebec and Ontario for the opportunity to work in the war plants but were met with deplorable working conditions which led to poor employee retention. The women sent to the plants by the National Selective Service dealt with limited transportation options, inadequate housing, poor quality meals, restrictions on recreation and negligence from the government agency, these inadequacies resulted in protests, transfer requests and women leaving the