War Widows
Two views of women from the home front
Athena: Phil White
Canadian War Museum
Peggy Nichols: Paragraphs in Paint
Canadian War Museum
Pegi Nicol MacLeod. Courtesy Legion Magazine
Her expression, it's all about anxiety, excitement...the edge of something.... That smile, well...it's only half there. Standing on a wood-block floor, her duffel bag lies next to her feet. She's sporting Oxford shoes, a smart uniform of knee-length skirt, shirt, tie, and a fitted jacket. Her off-the-shoulder regulation hair looks windblown. With her eyes falling into the shade of her peaked hat, one can only guess what she's thinking about.
At 21 inches high and cast in bronze, Athena's not quite the real thing—or the ancient Greek goddess of War—but she sure "looks just like we did!" says Laura Sashaw, a former member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps (CWAC).
She first presented herself for inspection by real-life CWACs at a ceremony where veteran CWACs gave the Canadian War Museum (CWM) over $40,000 towards the fundraising campaign for a new building. The statue is part of Athena, an exhibit of about twenty black and white photographs, around 16" x 24" each. Culled from the National Archives, the photographs are stock in trade propaganda images, promoting the roles Canadian women took on in CWAC. Housed in a corner of the museum, with the prints projecting out from a wall in accordion fashion, the CWAC apparently had little presence in previous CWM exhibits.
Made by Phil White, artificer at the CWM, Athena the statue, is the culmination of about a month's work . White's job is to create artwork for exhibitions. For Athena, his first sculpture in bronze, he painstakingly researched his subject. He didn't have far to go—his mother was in the CWAC from 1942 till the end of the war.
"Talking to people...the most common thread was the idea of getting away," White observes. The forties can hardly be described as a heyday for women's rights let alone opportunities for women. "[The CWAC]...was seen by a lot of women as an opportunity to get out and do something different," White adds, "get away from home and go off on a big adventure." Athena is the first of a series of Second World War figures that White continues to develop.
"For a young girl who'd never been away from home in her life, had never been outside the city of Windsor, it was quite a thing to go into a camp," recalls Sashaw. A CWAC from 1942-1946, she was all of 18 when she enlisted. "It had originally been a men's training camp, and they just moved the men out and the women in, with nothing done to make it more livable," she adds. I asked her if they put the toilet seats down. Through great peals of laughter, she replied, "Yes! They did manage to do that!"
Long before any combat role was considered appropriate for women, CWAC came into existence on 13 August 1941, only to be disbanded after the end of the war in 1946. During that time, 21, 624 women joined the Corps. New CWAC recruits, eager to participate, were offered roles that freed men to go to the Front—motor mechanics, stenographers, cooks, typists, quartermasters, telephone operators, and messengers. Some were posted overseas in the U.S., Britain, Italy and North Western Europe, and in London, some CWAC personnel were killed during the Blitz.
"We were losing friends, boys and girls that we'd gone to school with, and that's what we were - just boys and girls." Sashaw recalls the news from the European Front. "You were getting the lists printed in the newspaper—so and so was killed or so and so was MIA (missing in action), and that's...you just felt so bad. It was up to you to do your bit."
"Entering the Gas Hut during Basic Training at Camp Vermillion, Alberta." A line of CWACs in uniform, march through the frame from right to left, wearing gas masks. With their faces obscured, still, they look so serious.
By observation and with no photographers identified, it is likely the photographers belonged to a government propaganda unit/s. Some stock-in-trade techniques are in evidence here—the use of low angles, for instance, to make the subjects appear heroic and larger. Often shot with magnesium flash bulbs in quite dark or dimly lit surroundings, the images evince a larger than life quality, emphasized by the size of the prints and the women appearing in harsh blasts of light.
Paragraphs in paint: the Second World War Art of Pegi Nicol MacLeod features about thirty paintings by the late artist. Born in Listowel, Ontario, in 1904, she went to the Ottawa School of Art and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Commissioned by the National Gallery in 1944 to create paintings of the Canadian women's services, her subject matter eventually would include the CWAC, the Royal Canadian Air Force (Women's Division), the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service, naval training in New Brunswick and post-war events and atmosphere in New York city. She died of cancer at the young age of 45 in 1949.
In her painting MacLeod achieves that much sought after quality: transparency. Looking at her images, rich with vivid colour, her ability to communicate the very essence of her subject moves the viewer right into the world of the image. She is the mistress of gesture, however deceptively simple, regardless of the medium she used—predominantly oil on canvas and watercolour on paper.
After basic CWAC training in 1945, Margery Schrie found herself posted to the Chemical Warfare Laboratories in Ottawa. At 19, she was "secretary and assistant to a man who had his Ph.D. but [was] automatically a major." Schrie "... was allowed at times to go around and see the experiments [...] and I think if I'd perhaps been exposed to that early in my life," she adds softly, "I would have probably chosen science to go into. It was fascinating." The only woman at the facility, "[We were] like a large family...." Schrie recalls, and after the day's work, she fondly remembers "[...]a lot of parties, sleigh rides - things like that."
MacLeod depicted everything she saw—mess halls, parades, bars, beauty parlours. "When Johnnie Comes Marching Home", a massive oil painting at 122 x 112 cm, literally brims over figures all caught up in post-war celebration. With larger figures of women, leaning out of windows, pondering the scene like cherubs at the top, the bottom half seethes with men and women drinking, dancing, laughing - exuding a sense of release after the end of war.
Standing back from the work, the amount of detail is mesmerizing. On closer inspection, MacLeod's technique becomes evident. She worked the paint, scoring it, creating depth, and used a mere dab to suggest a detail that on stepping away, starkly unmasks itself.
In this the pictures edge closer to being more documentary than the Athena photographs. Through attention to detail, gesture, and a closer relationship with her subjects, MacLeod has captured that elusive yet crucial element—emotion.
Her passion for her subject matter roars through the images. In an article about her work in the mid-forties, MacLeod wrote, "[...]only a modern escapist could avoid being stimulated by the sight of a parade of blue Dianas of the Air Force [...] behind a motorcycle policeman clearing a path through the traffic on a merchant street in Ottawa. What a subject[...]!"
What a legacy.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
At 21 inches high and cast in bronze, Athena's not quite the real thing—or the ancient Greek goddess of War—but she sure "looks just like we did!" says Laura Sashaw, a former member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps (CWAC).
She first presented herself for inspection by real-life CWACs at a ceremony where veteran CWACs gave the Canadian War Museum (CWM) over $40,000 towards the fundraising campaign for a new building. The statue is part of Athena, an exhibit of about twenty black and white photographs, around 16" x 24" each. Culled from the National Archives, the photographs are stock in trade propaganda images, promoting the roles Canadian women took on in CWAC. Housed in a corner of the museum, with the prints projecting out from a wall in accordion fashion, the CWAC apparently had little presence in previous CWM exhibits.
Made by Phil White, artificer at the CWM, Athena the statue, is the culmination of about a month's work . White's job is to create artwork for exhibitions. For Athena, his first sculpture in bronze, he painstakingly researched his subject. He didn't have far to go—his mother was in the CWAC from 1942 till the end of the war.
"Talking to people...the most common thread was the idea of getting away," White observes. The forties can hardly be described as a heyday for women's rights let alone opportunities for women. "[The CWAC]...was seen by a lot of women as an opportunity to get out and do something different," White adds, "get away from home and go off on a big adventure." Athena is the first of a series of Second World War figures that White continues to develop.
"For a young girl who'd never been away from home in her life, had never been outside the city of Windsor, it was quite a thing to go into a camp," recalls Sashaw. A CWAC from 1942-1946, she was all of 18 when she enlisted. "It had originally been a men's training camp, and they just moved the men out and the women in, with nothing done to make it more livable," she adds. I asked her if they put the toilet seats down. Through great peals of laughter, she replied, "Yes! They did manage to do that!"
Long before any combat role was considered appropriate for women, CWAC came into existence on 13 August 1941, only to be disbanded after the end of the war in 1946. During that time, 21, 624 women joined the Corps. New CWAC recruits, eager to participate, were offered roles that freed men to go to the Front—motor mechanics, stenographers, cooks, typists, quartermasters, telephone operators, and messengers. Some were posted overseas in the U.S., Britain, Italy and North Western Europe, and in London, some CWAC personnel were killed during the Blitz.
"We were losing friends, boys and girls that we'd gone to school with, and that's what we were - just boys and girls." Sashaw recalls the news from the European Front. "You were getting the lists printed in the newspaper—so and so was killed or so and so was MIA (missing in action), and that's...you just felt so bad. It was up to you to do your bit."
"Entering the Gas Hut during Basic Training at Camp Vermillion, Alberta." A line of CWACs in uniform, march through the frame from right to left, wearing gas masks. With their faces obscured, still, they look so serious.
By observation and with no photographers identified, it is likely the photographers belonged to a government propaganda unit/s. Some stock-in-trade techniques are in evidence here—the use of low angles, for instance, to make the subjects appear heroic and larger. Often shot with magnesium flash bulbs in quite dark or dimly lit surroundings, the images evince a larger than life quality, emphasized by the size of the prints and the women appearing in harsh blasts of light.
Paragraphs in paint: the Second World War Art of Pegi Nicol MacLeod features about thirty paintings by the late artist. Born in Listowel, Ontario, in 1904, she went to the Ottawa School of Art and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Commissioned by the National Gallery in 1944 to create paintings of the Canadian women's services, her subject matter eventually would include the CWAC, the Royal Canadian Air Force (Women's Division), the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service, naval training in New Brunswick and post-war events and atmosphere in New York city. She died of cancer at the young age of 45 in 1949.
In her painting MacLeod achieves that much sought after quality: transparency. Looking at her images, rich with vivid colour, her ability to communicate the very essence of her subject moves the viewer right into the world of the image. She is the mistress of gesture, however deceptively simple, regardless of the medium she used—predominantly oil on canvas and watercolour on paper.
After basic CWAC training in 1945, Margery Schrie found herself posted to the Chemical Warfare Laboratories in Ottawa. At 19, she was "secretary and assistant to a man who had his Ph.D. but [was] automatically a major." Schrie "... was allowed at times to go around and see the experiments [...] and I think if I'd perhaps been exposed to that early in my life," she adds softly, "I would have probably chosen science to go into. It was fascinating." The only woman at the facility, "[We were] like a large family...." Schrie recalls, and after the day's work, she fondly remembers "[...]a lot of parties, sleigh rides - things like that."
MacLeod depicted everything she saw—mess halls, parades, bars, beauty parlours. "When Johnnie Comes Marching Home", a massive oil painting at 122 x 112 cm, literally brims over figures all caught up in post-war celebration. With larger figures of women, leaning out of windows, pondering the scene like cherubs at the top, the bottom half seethes with men and women drinking, dancing, laughing - exuding a sense of release after the end of war.
Standing back from the work, the amount of detail is mesmerizing. On closer inspection, MacLeod's technique becomes evident. She worked the paint, scoring it, creating depth, and used a mere dab to suggest a detail that on stepping away, starkly unmasks itself.
In this the pictures edge closer to being more documentary than the Athena photographs. Through attention to detail, gesture, and a closer relationship with her subjects, MacLeod has captured that elusive yet crucial element—emotion.
Her passion for her subject matter roars through the images. In an article about her work in the mid-forties, MacLeod wrote, "[...]only a modern escapist could avoid being stimulated by the sight of a parade of blue Dianas of the Air Force [...] behind a motorcycle policeman clearing a path through the traffic on a merchant street in Ottawa. What a subject[...]!"
What a legacy.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, 1999
