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BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
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Description
During the Second World War, more than 4,000 civilian nurses enlisted as Nursing Sisters, a specially created all-female officers’ rank of the Canadian Armed Forces. They served in all three armed force branches and all the major theatres of war, yet nursing as a form of war work has long been under-explored. An Officer and a Lady fills that gap. Cynthia Toman analyzes how gender, war, and medical technology intersected to create a legitimate role for women in the masculine environment of the military and explores the incongruous expectations placed on military nurses as “officers and ladies.”
Contributor Notes
Cynthia Toman is an assistant professor of nursing and Associate Director of the Associated Medical Services Nursing History Research Unit at the University of Ottawa.
Editorial Reviews
With Toman’s study, we have the first critical historical analysis of Second World War nursing sisters. Toman’s purpose is to ‘shift the analysis away from stereotypical portrayals as angels and heroines’, to examine the nursing sisters in the ‘masculine military domain’ of Canadian wartime hospitals overseas. […] Toman fully achieves her goal, providing an interplay between ‘gender, war, and medical technology’, drawing on a wide range of oral and official evidence, including twenty-five personal interviews with veteran nursing sisters, and another thirty gleaned from archival collections across Canada, in addition to other personal and published sources. […] The photographs distributed throughout give faces to the voices, and illustrate both the medical and human drama of the war.
— International History Review, Vol.XXXI, No.1
Toman’s work is a timely addition to the social history of the military. … By incorporating nursing sisters into the narrative of military history, Toman has “balanced out traditional accounts of war as political and military strategies.”
— H-Canada
