Museum tour examines the role of women in military conflicts

By Lethbridge Herald on November 7, 2024.

Former Galt Museum curator Wendy Aitkens has created “Highlighting Herstory,” a new tour starting next Wednesday at the Lethbridge Military Museum inside Vimy Ridge Armoury that tells the story of the roles played by women in military conflict. Herald photo by Al Beeber

Al Beeber – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – abeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

A new tour starting next Wednesday at the Lethbridge Military Museum inside Vimy Ridge Armoury is going to be “Highlighting Herstory.”

The tour, created by former Galt Museum curator Wendy Aitkens, tells the story of the roles played by women from Lethbridge and beyond during wartime from the Boer War in South Africa to the Korean Conflict.

The tours will run every Wednesday and can be booked by contacting Aitkens at 403-715-2778 or by email at lwatke@telus.net.

Aitkens conceived and developed the tour when she decided to follow up on stories contained in The Chinook Souvenir Booklet of 1944 which honoured the closing of the No. 8 Bombing and Gunnery School that was situated at the Lethbridge airport.

Aitkens investigations led her to insights about the women who served not only in the military in various capacities but who also took on important roles on the homefront as their husbands, fathers, brothers and other young men served overseas.

“We don’t talk enough about women in the museum proper so I decided I would see what I could find in the way of information about women from Lethbridge and southern Alberta and I found some incredible stories which is not always easy when you’re looking for history about women,” said Aitkens Wednesday.

The tour looks at the contributions women made from their own communities, which Aitkens said were “pretty significant.”

Women volunteered for such agencies as the Red Cross and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire which was started by a Canadian Margaret Poulson Murray, the IODE which by 1914 had a chapter in Lethbridge.

A lot of Canadians went to the Boer War including eight women and Aitkens says she can’t imagine them “trying to be nursing people in the heat and the intense drama, the lack of materials and so on.”

Little information is known about the women who served during the First World War except for Mrs. Elizabeth McKillop. McKillop played an important role with the IODE and became known as the Mother of Lethbridge, said Aitkens, because she met the trains of returning veterans. Many veterans were discharged early, mainly because of injury and health and McKillop would meet them, making sure their families were present and got to where they needed to be or got whatever they needed.

Lethbridge, said Aitkens, had an internment camp at the grounds of the Exhibition where 600 men considered enemy aliens because of their last names and uncertainty about their allegiances were held in poultry barns.

And while these men who were taken from area coal mines and elsewhere to the camps were well cared for, Aitkens said, their families had no income or supports. Aitkens said she believes they would have gone to McKillop and a ladies aid organization she started or the IODE.

In 1914, the Canadian Patriotic Fund started and a lot of Canadian women were involved with that. They would find families of serving members to check on their wellbeing, seeing if they needed clothing, rent or other things.

During the First World War there were enough women who worked for the war effort as civilians “they proved themselves. Their men went to war, they ran their businesses, they ran their farm, they were taking up all the slack that the young men leaving had left and they proved that they had value and that value actually led to the right for suffrage.

Women also played a role in the design of the Lethbridge Cenotaph, she said.

When the Second World War began, women wanted to serve in the military and hadn’t been allowed previously.

“It took quite a bit of convincing,” said Aitken. A lot of pressure was put on Canada and the Canadian military because the country wasn’t utilizing 50 per cent of its population to help out, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret being examples of women joining the fight in their own way in England.

The Canadian Auxiliary Territorial Service, and because of pressure from women in this country, the Canadian Womens Army Corps then started and women began training including in the use of gas masks and numerous trades, Aitkens said.

Aitkens tour highlights the efforts and accomplishments of many women including Doctor Margaret O’Meara who earned her medical degree in 1943 and became the first female doctor in the Canadian military in 1943. O’Meara settled in Lethbridge and became the first female doctor in this city.

Also mentioned is a serving member named Barbara Bright who was sent from the airport to the U.S. border to sign the papers before the U.S. joined the Allies in the Second World War to take possession of bomber that were delivered to Canadian forces, those bombers which were hooked up to an Oldsmobile – since discovered recently by Dale Leffingwell – and towed across the 49th parallel to Alberta where they were flown elsewhere by Canadian pilots.

Elsie MacGill is also discussed on the tour, McGill who was an aeronautical engineer known as Queen of the Hurricanes” for her work as chief aeronautical engineer at the Canadian Car and Foundry in Fort William, Ont. where she oversaw production of 1,451 Hurricane fighters for the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force.

Also mentioned on the tour is Lillian Parry for whom a street in the Legacy Ridge subdivision in North Lethbridge and others including a group of women from the Crowsnest Pass whose fundraising efforts earned them the chance to name a Canadian minesweeper which they called the HMCS Blairmore.