| Canadian nurses volunteered for military service in overwhelming numbers during the Second World War (1939--1945), comprising a second generation of military nurses known by rank and title as Nursing Sisters. Prevailing discourses portray them as 'extraordinary women,' patriots, heroines, feminists, and technological change agents. A small, diffuse body of literature documents their enlistments and postings but we know relatively little regarding how multiple identities and variables intersected to shape their experiences.; This research examines Canadian military nurses' work from a feminist perspective through the lens of medical technology and discourse analysis, analyzing how variables such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation, marital status, and age intersected to shape their experiences during the Second World War. Based on oral histories, military records, professional literature, and archival sources, I ask: Who enlisted as Nursing Sisters? How did the military transform them into military nurses? What influenced decisions concerning where and how they served? In what technological and military contexts did they practice? How did these contexts shape the nursing care of soldiers? What influenced the transfer of technology to nurses? How did these experiences shape wartime and postwar civilian nursing practice? How did shared experiences as military nurses and as soldiers influence postwar identity as Nursing Sisters?; War enabled the transformation of at least 4381 civilian nurses into Canadian Nursing Sisters who served 'for the duration.' They were posted to England, Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean, Hong Kong, and military hospitals across Canada, in Newfoundland, the United States, and South Africa. They worked in military general and specialty hospitals, hospital ships and trains, prisoner of war and internment camps, casualty clearing stations, field dressing stations, and field surgical units. Medical technology legitimated their presence within a complex military-medical-technological system while gender shaped their presence there as professional nurses, professional soldiers, and quintessential women. I argue that medical technology, gender, and war situated the Nursing Sisters as an expandable and expendable feminine workforce for the military, legitimated their presence at the frontlines of both war and medical technology, and facilitated the formation of a symbolic community and a social memory as military nurses. |
