An Officer and a Lady: Canadian Military Nursing and the Second World War

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. Linda J. Quiney, University of British Columbia, 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.” Kristin Burnett, Lakehead University, H-Canada