Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class and Militarism in Ontario, 1902-1914‪.‬

Mike O'Brien, "Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class and Militarism in Ontario, 1902-1914," Labour/Le Travail, 42 (Fall 1998), 115-41. IN MANY CULTURAL and historical contexts, warfare has been seen as a quintessentially masculine activity. The qualities of aggressiveness, bravery, and loyalty which "make" a soldier seem in many ways to define the very category of the "masculine." The soldier's trade, then, would seem fertile ground for the study of gender identities and ideologies. Yet remarkably little has emerged in the way of serious historical work on this question. Nor, for that matter, have labour historians given much attention to the participation of working-class men in military organizations. The present study will, however, attempt a preliminary step in the direction of understanding the interaction of gender, class and soldiering in a specific, and perhaps unexpected, context. While the term "warlike" hardly fits the Canadian self-image, military service was viewed by many Canadians in the early 20th century as a vital part of male citizenship. In particular, the years between the end of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 and the onset of World War I in 1914 witnessed a major upsurge of interest in war and the military, constituting what one historian has called the "Moment of Canadian Militarism." (1) This flourishing of Canadian militarism (2) was centred primarily in the province of Ontario, Canada's largest and most heavily industrialized, and thus most proletarianized, province. The interaction between masculinity and military service in Ontario, with particular regard to working-class participation in Canada's citizen Militia, forms the primary focus of this paper.