ABSTRACT
TH E N E W C A N A D I A N WA R Museum (CWM) opened in Ottawa, Canada, on 8 May 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Today, the museum offers opportunities to understand the politics and policy of confl ict from a Canadian perspective and to learn what it is like to be under fi re. Visitors meet women and hear the stories of nurses, service personnel, even children and young mothers, but always in the context of the fi ghting. Before the opening, as a staff historian at the museum, I did once suggest to my male colleagues, in the context of the Second World War exhibitions, that it would be interesting to recreate a living room in the exhibition space with a radio in a corner and newspapers and letters lying around. In the background, visitors would be able to hear the voices of women of different ages discussing absent men and current dalliances alongside recycling challenges, the diffi culties of ‘making do’, and knitting circles, the sorts of things you read about in wartime fi ction written for women. No one dismissed my idea, but it was not realized either. These radically different views of what war can be in a museum setting are at the heart of this essay. In it, I will outline challenges faced by the CWM in terms of building up a picture of the total woman at war that could lead to the exhibition described above. My subject centres on the conundrum of reconciling the past with the present as it relates to gender expectations and the subject of confl ict. I will suggest that some redress is possible if we introduce gender as a category of analysis. I will do this within the context of an ongoing project initiated by the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization on women and war. My prime focus will be on the twentieth-century war art collections for which I am the responsible historian. 1
At the Canadian War Museum, we have historically positioned the conduct of war as a primarily masculine activity. This has been a result of the fact that, like many others, this museum developed within a set of specifi c impulses. These centred on honouring service and sacrifi ce, glorifying past accomplishments, and encouraging enlistment. More often than not, this discourse resulted in military history exhibitions and collections in which men dominated. The current population of Canada, however, is slightly more than half female, which means that a signifi cant number of people, if not actively fi ghting, are reacting, supporting, or objecting to war in ways that museums have less thoroughly documented and displayed. Part of the post-war reassessment and recovery of a greater female presence in the majority of
historical fi elds, as well as art history, has led in recent years to an expectation of a far greater female presence in museum displays than military history has traditionally supported. If we look at war from the outside in – from a sociological perspective, for example – the role of women, as half the population, is of course more prominent. How do we facilitate this perspective in war museum and gallery exhibitions, when past collecting habits, which determine the artefactual content of most displays, have not been oriented towards documenting a female-oriented of history? Moreover, how does a curator or historian accommodate and acknowledge the wider view in these circumstances?
