No Life Like It: Military Wives in Canada

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s.

It is surely extraordinary that two books on Canadian military wives
should appear in the same year. The Canadian Forces are being slashed in
numbers, bases, and budgets, while at the same time the army in
particular is overextended in peacekeeping. These two books, in their
different ways, demonstrate that the military’s malaise inevitably
reaches into the home.

Dianne Collier’s book is much the less substantial of the two. This
is an anecdotal account that is as much a
“how-to-survive-in-the-military” guide for wives as it is an
assessment of the difficulties they will face. The plentiful anecdotes,
however, demonstrate, to no one’s surprise, that rank has its
privileges, that separations caused by overseas postings inevitably
impact severely on family relations, and that the general, nonmilitary
public simply does not understand either the military or military
spouses.

The Harrison and Laliberté volume, on the other hand, is a more
serious sociological study, the result of a pairing between an academic
and a military spouse. Its conclusions parallel those of the Collier
book, but its most interesting chapter is that on the Gulf War. Clearly
there were many servicemen and their spouses (there are servicewomen and
their spouses too, but no one writes about these individuals) who
thought of the military as a secure job, not as one of which
war-fighting was a part. Against this attitude was the much more
hard-headed one of senior commanders who bluntly told the authors—and
presumably their soldiers and dependents—that their task was to fight
if and when necessary and that the home comforts of spouses and soldiers
were of no concern to them in such circumstances. Support groups sprang
up in consequence, helping wives and children over the difficult days.

The two books make very clear that all is not happy in the PMQs
(Permanent Married Quarters), where many military families still live.
That spouses are organizing to fight for their rights, that two books
appear simultaneously, is the clearest demonstration of that fact.