During the Second World War, more than 4,000 civilian nurses enlisted as Nursing Sisters, a specially created all-female officers’ rank of the Canadian Armed Forces. They served in all three armed force branches and all the major theatres of war, yet nursing as a form of war work has long been under-explored. An Officer and a Lady fills that gap. Cynthia Toman analyzes how gender, war, and medical technology intersected to create a legitimate role for women in the masculine environment of the military and explores the incongruous expectations placed on military nurses as “officers and ladies.”

Dr. Cynthia Toman, historian and retired professor from the University of Ottawa, taught in the School of Nursing with cross appointment to the Department of History. She was associate director and then director of the endowed Associated Medical Services Nursing History Research Unit. Her research focuses on the history of nursing and, specifically, the history of Canadian military nursing. Her major books, published by UBC Press, include Sister Soldiers of the Great War: The Nurses of the Canadian Army Medical Corps (2016) and An Officer and a Lady: Canadian Military Nursing and the Second World War (2007). Awards include the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Governor General’s Gold Medal, the American Association for the History of Nursing’s Teresa E. Christy Distinguished Writing Award, and the Canadian Historical Association’s Hilda B. Neatby Prize. Toman was a guest curator for the 2005 “History of Canadian Nursing Exhibit” at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Museum of History) and consultant to Historica Canada for a “Historical Minute” on First World War Canadian Nursing Sisters.

Cynthia Toman's profile page

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.

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.”

H-Canada