Nurses

New Brunswick nurses proved invaluable in the fight against influenza, providing medical care and emotional support to suffering patients. By 1918, approximately fifteen percent of New Brunswick women and girls, aged ten and up, were in the workforce outside the home (Tulloch, We, the Undersigned, xvii). However, it remained far from the norm. With the rise of nursing schools and the implementation of formal standards in Canada during the 1880s and 1890s, nursing became a career option and graduates from such training programs received credentials (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 16). In New Brunswick, the Saint John General Hospital began to train nurses in 1888 (Tulloch, We, the Undersigned, xvii). According to historian Shawna M. Quinn, nursing was an appropriate profession for women since New Brunswick society largely viewed a woman’s “natural calling” to be tending to the health and well-being of others as it was “inherently feminine” (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 15).

During the war, women with formal and informal training could, and were encouraged to, step up to assist their province, country, and empire. During the war, nursing was the only means in which a woman could be close to the action near the front lines (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 8). Many trained nurses travelled overseas to offer their skills and tend to the wounded. When there were not enough professional nurses, Britain drew upon the Voluntary Aid Detachments (V.A.D.s), volunteer women who received basic training from the St. John Ambulance, to assist with the overwhelming war cases (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 32). This combination of both trained and volunteer nurses abroad also applied to the treatment of the sick at home.

Back in New Brunswick, women assumed greater public roles during the war and the pandemic. To compensate for the dearth of male workers, women increasingly laboured in factories and on farms (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 7). The V.A.D.s, alongside professional nurses, tended to influenza patients throughout New Brunswick by assisting in hospitals or performing home visits. Female contributions did not go unnoticed, ultimately helping New Brunswick women receive the right to vote on 15 April 1919 (Tulloch, We, the Undersigned, 63). Despite their political emancipation and increased public respect, many women left the public sector to return to their domestic duties after the war (Quinn, Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War, 150).

The correspondence and newspaper articles featured in this collection focus on an area of the pandemic often neglected in the historical record: the role of women. New Brunswick women devoted great amounts of time, energy, and emotional labour as nurses. Despite the contagious nature of the virus, many women assumed brave faces to assist their stricken communities, providing comfort to the dying and acting as examples of resilience to the living.

To learn more about nursing in New Brunswick, or women’s history more broadly, please consult Shawna M. Quinn’s Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War and Elspeth Tulloch’s We, the Undersigned.