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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers' Families in the Great War (Vancouver: UBC Press 2004)
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| WHAT HAPPENS at home when men go to war? Well, women sleep alone and children rest unfathered but women and children and dependent parents can also go unfed, unclothed, and unsheltered in an economic system that skews property control and definition of wage-worthiness along gender lines. Under a system of compulsory service and even under one relying on reservists, this is an egregious insult perpetrated by the government. Under a system of volunteer service, the men who would be soldiers share in the insult. Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that one could nullify an insult by refusing to take it. From a rich and powerful family, no matter her good will and good work, Mrs. Roosevelt could have little idea of how powerless the powerless can be. |
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This book has nothing to do with Eleanor Roosevelt. It has to do with the fight for, creation of, and seeing through of a system of relief for Canadians left to fend for themselves when their designated breadwinners went off to engage in that terrible lapse in human judgement, World War I. Even if one takes as gospel that the prevailing spirit was that it would all be over in a few weeks, there is an unseemliness about the haste with which men who had accepted the obligations that underlay their claims to economic favouritism let those obligations drop. The beginning of Morton's book relates stories of Canadian, British, and foreign reservists answering the call of the fight in much the same spirit as Jack London's men's men answered the call of the wild. True, soldiering was paid work and, true, systems could be put in place to siphon off subsistence for dependents but the reality was that the money was never enough, did not flow smoothly and did not always get to those entitled to it. |
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This is a book about the establishment of a national bureaucracy that has morphed into our current systems of social welfare. In style, it inhabits the world of political history. Prominence of place is given to those who can be named. From the top, the names are those of politically and socially active men and of socially active women. From the bottom, the names are of those who show up in the records of the top group. Morton chooses the cast of the former according to their performance within the power grid; he chooses the latter according to the didactic value or human interest of their situation. This is not a book of numbers and generalizations; it is a book based firmly in the theory that some individuals make history and others experience the making of it. |
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The Canadian Patriotic Fund had as its slogan the phrase, "Fight or Pay," the idea being those who did the first deserved to have their systemic obligations shouldered by those who didn't. It was a charity that wanted to avoid characterization as such, only partially because it wanted to inspire donors' patriotism, not their pity. There were other compelling reasons to avoid the word "charity." Necessity for charity is a sign that a society is not doing too well. At a time when spirits needed to be kept up, it was a stigma that seemed un-affordable. Charity was something that went to society's failures, a designation at odds with the story the nation told itself about families doing their bit back home for their heroes. And then there was the idea that charity was naturally debilitating, that people got used to it and never got off it, and that that was no way to guarantee a stronger, better Canada either during or after the war. Certainly the unpleasant reality of this last fear still dogs even those of us who support strong social support systems. |
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The struggle for change for women that grew out of this, characterized as a necessity for "rights," justified as a necessity for the injection of maternal power into the world outside the home, is well documented in other works, coming at this period from an entirely different angle. What is fascinating and very valuable about Morton's work is that a scholar coming at the question from an entirely different point of view — that of the military historian — proves the validity of the work of many women's historians. In short, the emergency of disappearing men ripped the veil off all promises that the stronger sex would make support of the weaker sex and their mutual children its primary responsibility. Even the men who were sending other men off to war could see that this was not only unfair but dangerous. Bald social inequity spawns dissent and even revolution. Those who would remain in power needed to do something about it. The Patriotic Fund was launched in a world very aware that it must negotiate a solution that gave just enough to ward off change, not to be a change. The control mechanisms necessary to accomplishing this are still with us. |
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So is the split between the women who can find a crack in the façade of patriarchy to make individual gains and the women who cannot and perforce fall under the overarching control not only of men but increasingly, gallingly, of other women. Morton establishes clearly that the Patriotic Fund gave Helen Reid, one of the first women graduates from McGill, a wonderful opportunity to advance her own career. Seeing as part of her job was the offering of the "alms of good advice," she must have been resented highly by women who found themselves stripped of help from government aid for insurrections so slight as taking in a male boarder to make ends meet. And of course women who could not prove legal marriage were left to lie in the beds they made. There is much work to be done on the quite justified resentment many women have for feminism, a movement in which I include myself. Historians have certainly laid the groundwork for this. What is needed is the political will to face the victimization of women by women, not by particular women like Reid but in the general abandonment of the feminine aspect undertaken by women who seek power within the patriarchal system, again myself included. |
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Morton's work here is supported by extensive research. His work is always meticulous and I have no reason to think it anything but bad luck that, in leafing through, I found almost immediately an error in fact that I could only identify because I had just been sent a manuscript for the series I edit that explores one long forgotten and undeservedly obscure woman's life for the very first time. Morton would only have been able to identify her through sources that would hardly have cared to be precise. His work here exposes many women's stories to public view and historical scrutiny. I would suggest it to students looking for ideas for a thesis topic. I also recommend it to historians of women, historians of social structures and, not least of all, to military historians who sometimes forget to factor into their calculations the role women and children play in war. |
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Janice Dickin
University of Calgary |
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