This Small Army of Women: Canadian Volunteer Nurses and the First World War

With her soft linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the First World War. This Small Army of Women draws on diaries, letters, and interviews to tell the forgotten story of the nearly two thousand women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to do their bit at home and overseas.

Middle-class and well-educated but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britains nursing deficit and filled gaps in Canadas domestic nursing ranks. Their dedication and struggle to secure a place at their brothers bedsides reveals much about womens contributions to the war effort, the tensions between amateur and professional nurses, and womens evolving role outside the home.