Synthesizing Current Research: Women‘s Higher Education and the World Wars ANNE M. E. MILLAR Abstract This paper considers the extant scholarship on the impact of the First and Second World Wars on women‘s higher education in Canada. No published monograph examines this topic, a reflection of the wider lack of scholarship on women‘s world war experiences in this country. In order to synthesize existing research, scholarship from military history, women‘s history, and the history of higher education is assessed. Despite the extensive historiography on both the First and Second World Wars, a number of areas remain unexamined by Canadian historians. Many topics, notably the impact of war on women and the family, have garnered attention only recently, in large part due to the influence of social history and second wave feminism. Concentrated in the last forty years, scholarship on wartime women has been predominantly concerned with analyzing the impact of the world wars. Scholars initially emphasized the ways in which these conflicts opened up traditionally male spheres to women and the role this played in bringing a change in gender norms. Women‘s historians, in particular, have focused on the impact of wartime mobilization on women‘s labour, while more recently, historians of higher education have added to these discussions by exploring women‘s entrance into the professions, and by extension, women‘s access to professional training. There is still much missing from this analysis. To date, there is no published full-length monograph examining Canadian women in institutions Strata Anne M. E. Millar of higher learning during wartime. American studies have come closer, but there exists a similar lack of scholarship.1 Unpublished M.A. and Ph.D. theses from both countries are more widespread. Influenced by the availability of archival materials and access to university records, a significant number of graduate students have written histories of their respective universities and colleges, many of which explore female students during either war.2 Scholarship on women, higher education, and the world wars is, as would be expected, primarily dispersed amongst the fields of women‘s and military history and the history of higher education. Many of the works deal more generally with other subjects, but in the various methods and forms these studies take, they all shed light on the topic. The main purpose of this essay is to discuss and assess the extant scholarship addressing the impact of the world wars on women‘s higher education, and, where appropriate, its relationship to wider scholarship. In so doing, the arguments of this essay will be twofold. First, the work on women during wartime needs to be revived and expanded to include the multitude of women‘s wartime experiences. Second, scholars arguing for interdisciplinarity need to be reminded that the sharing of work within disciplines is equally, if not more, important. Fields of historical study have come to overlap in their references to this specific topic and will continue to do so as historians focus more intently on the social history of war and conflict. Work is needed to synthesize and coordinate the scholarly research of these three fields. 1. J. Hillis Miller and Dorothy V. N. Brook‘s 1944 work was the first American study connecting the two fields. More recently, Willis Rudy examined the impact of the world wars on Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. See J. Hillis Miller and Dorothy V. N. Brook‘s The Role of Higher Education in War and After (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944); Willis Rudy, Total War and Twentieth-Century Higher Learning: Universities of the Western World in the First and Second World Wars (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991). 2. See Nancy Kiefer, ―The Impact of the Second World War on Female Students at the University of Toronto, 1939–1949‖ (M.A. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1984); Lee Jean Stewart, ―The Experience of Women at the University of British Columbia, 1906–56‖ (M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1986); and Mary Ellen Tingley, ―The Impact of War: Wolfville Women 1914–1918‖ (M.A. Thesis, Acadia University, 1983). 25 Strata Anne M. E. Millar This historiography is separated into discussions of relevant scholarship in each field—women‘s history, military history, and the history of higher education—and is organized generally chronologically in each section. The first two sections examine the growth of interest in this topic, exploring developments in the fields of women‘s and military history to explain the roots of this focus. Moreover, they situate discussions of women during the world wars within the larger focus that dominates much of the scholarship. The third examines the field of higher education and the groundbreaking work done by a comparatively small group of historians on the history of women and higher education. These scholars address the influence of the world wars on women‘s higher education more directly, often in case studies of specific institutions. It is only by synthesizing the work from these three subfields that one can begin to understand the relationship of the world wars to women‘s higher education and professional training. I: Women’s History The trend towards social history converged with the feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s to influence a new wave of historical writing concerned with the position of women in North America. Scholars detailed the history of the struggle for women‘s rights and in so doing identified periods and contexts that were particularly oppressive or egalitarian for women. Indirectly, the world wars were at the centre of this history. Scholars identified in the wars two critical turning points in the history of women in Canada: first, the achievement of the two major goals of the first wave women‘s movement— prohibition and suffrage—during the First World War; and second, the massive entry of married women into the paid labour force during the Second World War, regarded as essential to the liberation of women from the patriarchal divisions of labour.3 In this context, scholarship on women and the 3. Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); and W. Lynn, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). 26 Strata Anne M. E. Millar wars during the 1970s and 1980s was largely framed by a discussion of their impact, a debate which Joan Wallach Scott termed the ―watershed‖ theory.4 According to Scott, historians either affirmed or denied that the world wars were major turning points in the history of women and this, she argued, constitutes the central debate in the historiography.5 Canadian scholarship was intent on documenting women‘s expression of a ―feminist consciousness‖ and delineating the emergence of a political and public female voice.6 Thus, in the 1980s, historians began looking at the First World War period and women‘s roles in opposition and pacifist movements, as well as their wider participation in politics.7 They were particularly interested in analyzing the period after the winning of the vote in an effort to explain why first wave feminism did not achieve gender equality.8 Early scholarship attributed the winning of suffrage to society‘s acknowledgement of the indispensable work done by Canadian women during the war, but others, including military historians, cautioned that at least in part, suffrage had to be explained in relation to the conscription crisis of 1917 and the 4. Joan Wallach Scott, ―Rewriting History,‖ in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 23–25. 5. Ibid., 23. 6. This corresponds to studies of American and European women during war and conflict. See Mary Beth Norton, Liberty‟s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); R. McNair Wilson, Women of the French Revolution (New York: Kennikat Press, 1970); and Darline Gray Levy, Harriet Brandon Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 7. See Barbara Roberts, “Why do Women do nothing to end the War?” Canadian Feminist- Pacifists and the Great War (Ottawa: Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, 1985); Linda Kealey, A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s– 1920s (Toronto: Women‘s Press, 1979); and Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster, eds., Beyond the Vote: Canadian Women and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989). 8. See Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred (Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, 1983), 146, 7, 12, 148. 27 Strata Anne M. E. Millar political manoeuvrings of Borden‘s union government.9 Viewing higher education as central to women‘s independence, and recognizing the importance suffragists placed on higher education, historians measured women‘s access to higher education as a means of assessing the success of first wave feminism. For instance, Veronica Strong-Boag demonstrated that women made significant gains in university enrolment after the First World War and that during the 1920s, women‘s organizations and clubs on campuses flourished. Yet, she also documented a decline in the percentage of women