The long-awaited narrative history of the women who volunteered in Nova
Scotia during the Second World War by award-winning journalist and
author of No Place to Go.
"I was home cooking carrots because my mother was off winning the
war."-- Patricia Timbrell, whose mother, Amy Jones, along with her
friend Una Smith, established and ran the Central Magazine Exchange,
which distributed four million used magazines and 30,000 packs of cards
by June 1942 alone for troop and merchant ships in Halifax Harbour.
Halifax women won the Second World War -- but not in the ways you might
have been told. We all know the stories of Canadian women during the war
who trained as machinists, welders, and streetcar drivers to fill the
shoes of men who answered the call. We know how women kept the home
fires lit while their husbands, brothers, and fathers fought.This is not
that story.
The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War is the untold
story of Halifax women who geared up in a flash to focus on the comfort,
community connections, and mental health of Halifax's exploding
population of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and merchant mariners. They did
a job no government could have organized or afforded. They did it
without being asked. And they did it with no respite from their daily
duties.
Thoroughly researched and compellingly told, and with a dozen archival
images, The Volunteers examines the untold stories of the hardworking
women whose unpaid and unacknowledged labour won the Second World War.
