In the Midst of Alarms: The Untold Story of Women and the War of 1812.

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

A classic question is, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” Until now, few have asked what Mommy was doing at the time. Graves steps into that omission with a social history light on battles and heavy on the behind-the-scenes women’s work. In a sweeping examination that includes American, Canadian, and British women, high-society ladies, officers’ wives, and camp followers, urban and rural, and black, white, and aboriginal women, she builds, layer by layer, a portrait of what it meant to be female during the three years the War of 1812 raged back and forth across the Canada–U.S. border.

Graves is more researcher than writer. In this work she draws material from diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and archival records to describe the world as North American women experienced it in the early 19th century.

From high-society balls to labouring onboard ship, in the barracks laundry or in the field hospital, Graves touches on the many functions women filled during the conflict and the hardships experienced by those left behind when husbands enlisted. Famous names profiled include Dolley Madison and Laura Secord.

Drilling deeper, she then zeroes in on women on the front lines, whether campaigning on the frontier, under siege in a fort, fulfilling the role of spy or messenger, feeding the cannons and firing muskets, even being taken prisoner, and the victims of rape and pillaging. To complete the story there’s the war’s aftermath: surviving and rebuilding following the burning and looting, relief payments to widows, and notes on where some of the women are buried.

The text is supported with extensive amounts of additional material, including maps, a bibliography, drawings, portraits of many women, a chronology of war events, recipes, extracts from a gardener’s journal, notes on meals, and more.

That the style of the text is uninspired — dull, actually — is overshadowed by the extensive, carefully documented research. The book is bulging at the seams with minute details such as women’s names, dates, ages, activities. Numerous quotations anchor their experiences to reality, and the extensive citations support the book’s role as a valuable reference and resource document.