ABSTRACT
Heroes of a Different Sort:
Representations of Women at Work in Canadian Art of the First World War
Kristina Huneault
1994
During the First World War Canadian artists began
to demonstrate a broader cognizance of working women's involvement in the social and
economic fabric of the nation than had previously been apparent. Working either
independently or under the patronage of the Canadian War Memorials Fund, artists
represented women at work in fields and munitions factories, as nurses and as Red Cross
volunteers. From a contemporary perspective, many of these works seem to challenge the
conception of a passive and domestic femininity prevalent at the beginning of the century.
When placed in their historical context, however, the disruptive potential of the artworks
is largely dissipated by the discourse of patriotism into which the artworks were
received--a discourse that functioned to isolate the perception of women's economic
activity within the limited struggle of the war effort. Characterized by this negotiation
of contending ideologies of femininity and patriotism, representations of women at work
created during the War occupy shifting positions simultaneously inside and outside of the
perimeters of femininity set out by the conventional sex-gender system.
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