Woman uses hammer to tap 25-pounder field gun case at a munitions plant (prob. Robert Mitchell Co.) Montreal (March 1941). Nicholas Morant / National Film Board of Canada /Photothèque / Library and Archives Canada, e000760279
After reading Donna Coates’s article The Best Soldiers of All: Unsung Heroines in Canadian Women’s Great War Fictions
from Canadian Literature 151, use your own library resources and search Canadian Literature’s website to find articles concerning Canadian war fiction. Consider the following prompts and questions as you research:
- Search specifically for articles, novels, plays, or poems, that focus on the experience of war from a female perspective. Are they given as much attention as male accounts of the front? Why, or why not?
- When did finding a female voice in twentieth century war history become a pressing issue in scholarship? Are there any articles concerning the need for a female perspective? Why is it important to diversify perspectives of history?
- How are contemporary Canadian writers responding to gaps in history?
This research will help you understand how diversifying history provides a greater understanding of the event and how history can be controlled to privilege certain perspectives. In what other ways does the Canadian war experience still need to be diversified?
Works Cited
- Coates, Donna.
The Best Soldiers of All: Unsung Heroines in Canadian Women’s Great War Fictions.
Canadian Literature 151 (1996): 66–99. Print. (PDF)
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