What was it like to be a soldier's wife in Canada during the First World
War? More than 80,000 Canadian women were married to men who left home
to fight in the war, and its effects on their lives were transformative
and often traumatic. Yet the everyday struggles of Canadian war wives,
lived far from the battlefields of France, have remained in the shadows
of historical memory. Anxious Days and Tearful Nights highlights how
Canadian women's experiences of wartime marital separation resembled and
differed from those of their European counterparts. Drawing on the
letters of married couples separated by wartime service and the military
service records of hundreds of Canadian soldiers, Martha Hanna reveals
how couples used correspondence to maintain the routine and the
affection of domestic life. She explores how women managed households
and budgets, how those with children coped with the challenges of what
we today would call single parenthood, and when and why some war wives
chose to relocate to Britain to be nearer to their husbands. More than
anything else, the life of a war wife - especially a war wife separated
from her husband for years on end - was marked and marred by unrelieved
psychological stress. Through this close personal lens Hanna reveals a
broader picture of how war's effects persist across time and space.
