Exploring Masculinity in the Canadian Army Officer Corps, 1939-45

Abstract

This essay examines how Canadian army officials revealed changing and often-competing notions of masculinity as they assembled an officer corps during the Second World War. It explores a wealth of primary sources to show how military officials returned repeatedly to representations of an army officer as a man. What kind of man? That question was difficult to answer. Army officials drew upon prevailing ideas of socialization theory to codify the manly traits they thought young men needed to be successful officers. Such innovations sought to ease the lingering tension between social privilege and merit as the measure of an army officer. Those tensions persisted, however, leaving thousands of young officers to negotiate often-competing forms of masculine practice. They borrowed from the masculine ideals of an older generation, but as the war progressed, these men drew upon a more sceptical, temperate, even anti-heroic persona that permitted them a surprising range of masculine behaviour.