PART THREE IN A SERIES ON SAINT MARGARET’S AND THE GREAT WAR
Conspicuous on the parish’s 1914-1918 Honour Roll – because they’re the only ones whose first names are listed – are the only three women on the list: Dr. Ellen Douglass, Eva Morkill and Winnifred Stinson. The latter two were nurses who served with Canadian Army Medical Corps, Morkill in France and Stinson in England. But who is this Dr. Ellen Douglass?
Dr. Ellen Douglass was one of the two female general practitioners in Winnipeg in the early decades of the 20th century, the other being Mary Crawford. Originally from New Brunswick, she obtained her medical degree in Toronto in 1905 and then pursued postgraduate studies in New York, London, and Baltimore, before setting up her practice in Winnipeg in 1909. Dr. Douglass was a very well-known figure in the city, as an indefatigable advocate for women’s rights, public health, and a wide variety of other causes. She was phenomenally busy. Her involvement in civic, national and international organizations was too extensive to begin listing them here – but she seems to have been president or honorary president of a very great number of them. She ran (unsuccessfully) for city council. Her mentions in Winnipeg newspapers are pretty constant from the time of her arrival in the city until her death in 1950, at her home at 136 Sherbrook Street.
Dr. Douglass’ approach to expanding women’s rights – and I take this to be both strategic and genuine – was to consistently frame the issue in terms of expanding women’s societal responsibilities. Toward the end of her life she was still stating in public lectures that “women haven’t shouldered their responsibilities yet” and that “indifference is the unpardonable sin of this age.” Thirty years earlier, in the First World War, she’d had exactly the same message. She argued that the nation needed conscription and that extending the vote to women was the way to achieve it. She also advocated giving factory jobs to woman in order to free up men for the front and for farm work. “Dr. M. Ellen Douglass Avers Men Should Be Turned Out of Factories” reported the Tribune.
She approached both the Canadian and Royal (i.e. British) Army Medical Corps to enlist as a medical officer. As a Tribune story from after the war would recount, “Dr. Douglass offered her services at the outbreak of war to both the Canadian and Imperial authorities, but was curtly told that there was no place for women doctors in the army.” The Canadian military also had no Women’s Auxiliary during the First World War. Even in Britain, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was only established toward the end of the war. Women who wanted to support the war effort had a pretty limited set of options, and none of them except for nursing had any standing within the official structure of the Canadian military.
Dr. Douglass saw an opening, and characteristically, took action. She began organizing first aid workshops. Then in a July 1915 meeting of the Winnipeg Women’s Rifle Association (also founded by her) attended by over 200 members, she launched the Winnipeg Women’s Volunteer Reserve or WWVR. She was unanimously voted its Colonel-in-charge at that founding meeting. The WWVR had no official standing within the military. The powers-that-be in the military were totally uninterested in Dr. Douglass’ initiative or in any possibility of a women’s auxiliary. The WWVR was a women’s militia, self-organized and self-led. Dr. Douglass modelled it on a similar initiative in Vancouver, which in turn had been inspired by a Women’s Volunteer Reserve in Britain. And I think it’s fair to say that it was an outworking of her operating principle that women’s rights would expand only as their responsibilities expanded. In that founding meeting of the WWVR, Dr. Douglass said that “in light of her professional experience, women could undertake first aid and stretcher work with more endurance than men” – this was the spirit of the WWVR.
Dr. Douglass described the WWVR in recruitment literature as organized “for the purpose of training a body of young women to handle the work back of the firing line or to serve in any capacity that the Militia or Government might consider practicable during this fearful crisis in our Empire’s history. Each week two military drills have been held. There were classes in signalling, motor, telephone, and telegraphy, first aid and stretcher work, sanitation, camp cooking, and hospital dietetics.” In August 1916, the WWVR held a two-week training camp at Gimli, with a drill sergeant from the army. “There were 35 tents on the shore of Lake Winnipeg, canteen, orderly room, kitchen mess tents, sleeping tents and a hospital.”
Finally, in spring of 1917, Dr. Douglass received a commission to go to France and to recruit nurses from Canada to accompany her. She served in the Royal (as opposed to Canadian) Army Medical Corps – I gather because the Canadians still wouldn’t have her. The nurses she recruited (largely from St. John’s Ambulance brigades, I think) went overseas with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. They departed at the end of September, 1917.
But Dr. Douglass herself doesn’t seem to have worked alongside the nurses she recruited. According to the Tribune story from after the war, “the Imperial war office gave her a choice of a dozen different positions, the very office that had independently refused her two and a half years ago. She chose the W.A.A.C.” This is, on the face of it, somewhat surprising. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps wasn’t a medical or nursing corps; they largely did physical labour. Her ambition had been “getting to a base hospital.” Now that she was finally offered that opportunity, she turned it down in order to take up a non-medical role, a senior position in a women’s auxiliary something along the lines of her WWVR, except on a much grander scale and at perhaps the key British depot in the war.
“Early in 1918, Dr. Douglass went to Calais to take charge of an area of 20 square miles with three camps in the town and five outlying, about 1,200 girls in all. She conducted sick-parades every day and inspected the outlying camps. Transportation was almost lacking the first few months and she walked an average of ten miles a day. Owing to the rigid inspection there was a very small percentage of illness, she said, and the girls were so devoted to their work that it was hard to get them to report sick.”
The St. Margaret’s parish Queen Mary guild, which knit for the troops, sent the same Christmas parcels to Dr. Douglass and to two nurses serving overseas (presumably Eva Morkill and Winnifred Stinson) that they sent to the parish men on the front: a pair of socks, a trench cap, wristlets, fruit cake, raisins, chocolate and gum, cigarettes, and a greeting card.
Dr. Douglass was in Calais for about two years, remaining beyond the end of the war to help with the demobilization effort. She returned in December 1919. The Tribune story I’ve been referring to was based on an interview upon her return. “She expresses unbounded enthusiasm for the splendid women she worked with.” “The girls will never be the same again, Dr. Douglass thinks. Many worked who had never worked before, and they will not be content to do nothing.” “‘Girls with the spirit and pluck they showed, will adapt themselves anywhere,’ she said. ‘Every one of these women replaced a man, and they were really and truly soldiers as much as any man going overseas.’”
After her return, she gave a talk at St. Margaret’s on “Women’s War Work at the Front,” an event hosted by, of all things, the parish Men’s Association, which had been founded by A. W. Woods upon his return from the war.
-GM