“Those Splendid Girls” on Indigo’s list of top picks for non-fiction

Congratulations to Island Studies Press and author Katherine Dewar for her book, Those Splendid Girls: The Heroic Service of Prince Edward Island Nurses in the Great War, making into Indigo's top picks for non-fiction!

In Those Splendid Girls, Katherine Dewar tells the story of the more that 115 women from PEI who served as nurses in the First World War. They were full-blooded, complex women living in a tumultuous time in our history, doing their duty on distant battlefields. The author was granted rare access to personal scrapbooks, letters, private diaries, and wartime photo albums of Island nurses. By combining their voices and experiences with their military records, Dewar delivers this riveting story of mud, blood and courage that tells the story of Canadian nursing in the First World War.

At war's end, many Island nurses were unwilling to swap their wartime autonomy and authority for housework or poorly paid nursing positions on PEI; instead, they accepted senior appointments in nursing schools and in hospital administration, most often in the 'Boston States' and in California, and through these, made lasting contributions to the profession of nursing in North America. Those Splendid Girls features a 35-page biography section detailing each nurse's life: her family, education, military service, plus work and family after the war.
Ed MacDonald, History professor at UPEI, comments: '[this book] does more than restore a measure of gender balance to our understanding of that shattering conflict; it tells a ripping good yarn about women at war.'

Those Splendid Girls contains many wartime b/w photos reproduced for the first time. The book is available at all bookstores, and also at: http://thosesplendidgirls.ca