Elaine Tilly, Jean Gow, Claire Sandey, and Irene Griffiths work for the Naval Reading Service in 1942.NS Archives/Courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives
- Title: The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won The Second World War
- Author: Lezlie Lowe
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Nimbus
- Pages: 248
On the Halifax waterfront, near piers which once welcomed newcomers’ boats, steps from the farmers’ market, stands a multi-figure monument surveying the slate-coloured Atlantic’s endless froth. The Volunteers/Les Bénévoles was unveiled in 2017 – and seems to have been on author Lezlie Lowe’s mind ever since, inspiring her new book of the same name. The city’s first-ever monument to women, it is a celebration of their contributions during the Second World War: work that, traditionally, has been historically ignored and oft-invisible.
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Lowe, a nationally lauded journalist, picks up where the statue left off and attempts something like a magic trick: Recording an undocumented history, capturing the unseen contributions of women in wartime Canada. In the preface of The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won The Second World War, Lowe quotes historian and author Will Durant, who describes civilization as “a stream with banks”: The stream is flowing with battles and other world events while the banks are the everyday stuff such as homemaking and family rearing. “In The Volunteers, I’ve worked to write the story of the banks,” Lowe writes.
From the soft soil of Durant’s metaphor to the rocks of Halifax’s waterfront, Lowe’s argument is clear: Without the women of Halifax, the story of the Second World War wouldn’t be the same.
Across 248 pages, Lowe combines interviews, historical facts and her own family’s ties to both the city and the era into a tight, hessian weave. You need never have stepped foot on what Lowe describes as central Halifax’s “kidney-shaped peninsula” to appreciate the author’s sense of place, but those familiar will thrill in reading how the country’s fastest-growing metropolis (according to the 2021 Canadian census) didn’t even have traffic lights when the war began.
Lowe’s penchant for details borders on the fanatical. She quotes from what feels like every book ever written about Halifax’s role in the war (and there are a lot of them), along with archival issues of Chatelaine and scripts from radio broadcasts in the early 1940s.
A training day for members of the Halifax North (Women’s) Division of the St. John Ambulance Brigade in September 1942.NS Archives/Courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives
The picture presented? A sleepy city shaken rudely awake by the alarm of war, with a population swell that crested at 64 per cent as military members, merchant sailors, dockyard workers and their families flooded Halifax. Overnight, “Halifax was volun-told to take on the star part as the most important port in North America,” Lowe writes. The city felt “like New York; it was like Mecca,” says one of Lowe’s interviewees, as enlisted people from all over the Commonwealth arrived. Alongside the sudden cosmopolitan flair and three big dances a day, mass homelessness ensued as there were not enough beds to house the human influx. Pressure from the crush was tangible: “Sometimes during the war, Haligonians would turn on their water taps and dribbles would come out,” Lowe writes.
This is where Lowe’s heroines enter. She’s quick to remind her readers that the bulk of women in the war effort weren’t Rosie The Riveter types. Instead, millions of homemakers and caregivers saw the scope of their work expand from a focus on their family to a focus on their nation: An expectation explicitly stated by the federal government and of even greater import in Halifax, thanks to its key role. “They added onto their existing labour load, contributing to the war effort and to society’s effort bit by bit, most by way of simply meeting the moment. Women fed, clothed, entertained, visited, accompanied, lodged, soothed and more,” she explains.
Workers in the magazine department of the Naval Reading Service in 1940.NS Archives/Courtesy of Nova Scotia Archives
The quotidian nature of these acts mean they weren’t well-captured in the stacks Lowe pored over at the public archives, making her extensive interviews with Halifax women who came of age during the era vital from both a factual and a narrative sense.
Her chatty tone combined with the many voices of those who were there means The Volunteers feels more like pulsing oral history than a stale record of the past. It helps reflect on a history that is repeating itself today in light of the war in Ukraine, with everyday people filling gaps left by the government: In an empty shopping mall in Przemysl, Poland, volunteers are coming together to care for refugees (who are mostly women, children and the elderly, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky banned men of military age from 18 to 60 from leaving Ukraine), dispensing hot meals, medical care and children’s toys.
While most of what Lowe proffers will hardly feel like news to anyone who’s taken a gender studies elective, her palpable rendering of emotional labour’s value (and the way society expects women to take on this work) will help those new to the concept quickly grasp the gravity.
Society needed these women – until it didn’t. Lowe proves it, with stats and quotes that show that our collective memory of war paving the way for women’s entry into the workforce is a false narrative.
If the bacchanal of mid-1940s Halifax is felt in headlines boasting the city had “10 guys for every gal,” as the war dragged on, so did the issues of an unprepared port’s sudden key role in the war. The party air cooled into the damp fog the city wears like a cloak. But the volunteers who kept Halifax running smoothly never stalled, never wavered: As Lowe knows, a woman’s work is never finished – and now, nor is its legacy.
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