"Those Splendid Girls" book available October 18

Over 115 Prince Edward Island women 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. Their courage, and the courage of all Canadian nurses, is saluted in a powerful new book about wartime nursing called Those Splendid Girls, published by Island Studies Press at UPEI.

Author and nursing educator Katherine Dewar, was granted rare access to personal scrapbooks, letters home, private diaries, and wartime photo albums of Island nurses; by combining their voices and experiences with their military records, she 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 life after the war.

Ed MacDonald, Professor of History 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, black and white photos, reproduced for the first time. The book is available October 18, and readers can preview it at: http://thosesplendidgirls.ca

For more information, please contact Joan Sinclair at ispstaff@upei.ca