Throughout much of history, the role women played is often left ignored regardless of their impact. Whether it be literary contributions, wartime efforts, or the building of Toronto, women's roles in changing the course of history is a topic that is crucial to explore. This evening at the Clio Book Club we invite you to join historian Elizabeth Gillian Muir, author of An Unrecognized Contribution: Women and Their Work in 19th Century Toronto, and historian Barbara Dickson, author of the Heritage Toronto Book Award-nominated title Bomb Girls: Trading Aprons for Ammo, a unique look at the women working in Canada's largest munitions factory in Scarborough to aid the war effort to win the Second World War. Joining these two authors will be special guest Timothy Christian, celebrated author of the new book Hemingway's Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway. This event will be hosted by author and Gemini Award-winning TV host Christopher Heard.
An account of the women working in high-security, dangerous conditions making bombs in Toronto during the Second World War.
What was it like to work in a Canadian Second World War munitions factory? What were working conditions like? Did anyone die? Just how closely did female employees embody the image of “Rosie the Riveter” so popularly advertised to promote factory work in war propaganda posters? How closely does the recent TV show, Bomb Girls, resemble the actual historical record of the day-to-day lives of bomb-making employees?
Bomb Girls delivers a dramatic, personal, and detailed review of Canada’s largest fuse-filling munitions factory, situated in Scarborough, Ontario. First-hand accounts, technical records, photographic evidence, business documentation, and site maps all come together to offer a rare, complete account into the lives of over twenty-one thousand brave men and women who risked their lives daily while handling high explosives in a dedicated effort to help win the war.
Women in nineteenth-century Toronto were integral to the life of the growing city. They contributed to the city’s commerce and were owners of stores, factories, brickyards, market gardens, hotels, and taverns; as musicians, painters, and writers, they were a large part of the city’s cultural life; and as nurses, doctors, religious workers, and activists, they strengthened the city’s safety net for those who were most in need.
Their stories are told in this wide-ranging collection of biographies, the result of Muir’s research on early street directories and city histories, personal diaries, and other historical works. Muir references over four hundred women, many of whom are discussed in detail, and describes the work they undertook during a period of great change for Toronto.
A stunning portrait of the complicated woman who was Ernest Hemingway’s fourth wife, exploring the tumultuous years of their marriage, and evoking her merry widowhood as she shapes Hemingway’s literary legacy.
Mary Welsh, a celebrated wartime journalist during the London Blitz and the liberation of Paris, meets Ernest Hemingway in May 1944. He becomes so infatuated with Mary that he asks her to marry him the third time they meet, even though they are married to other people. Eventually, she succumbs to Ernest’s campaign and, in the last days of the war, joins him at his estate in Cuba.
Through Mary’s eyes, we see Ernest Hemingway in a fresh light. Their turbulent marriage survives his cruelty and abuse, perhaps because of their sexual compatibility and her essential contribution to his writing. She reads and types his work each day and makes plot suggestions. She becomes crucial to his work and he depends upon her critical reading of his writing to know if he has it right.
We watch the Hemingways as they travel to the ski country of the Dolomites; commute to Harry’s Bar in Venice; attend bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid; go on safari in Kenya in the thick of the Mau Mau rebellion; and fish the blue waters of the gulf stream off Cuba in Ernest’s beloved boat Pilar. We see Ernest fall in love with a teenaged Italian countess and wonder at Mary’s tolerance of the affair.
We witness Ernest’s sad decline and Mary’s efforts to avoid the stigma of suicide by claiming his death was an accident. In the years following Ernest’s death, Mary devotes herself to his literary legacy, negotiating with Castro to reclaim Ernest’s manuscripts from Cuba and publishing one-third of his work posthumously. She supervises Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest, sues A.E. Hotchner to try and prevent him from telling the story of Ernest’s mental decline, and spends years writing her memoir in her penthouse overlooking the New York skyline.
Her story is one of an opinionated woman who smokes Camels, drinks gin, swears like a man, sings like Edith Piaf, loves passionately, and experiments with gender fluidity in her extraordinary life with Ernest. This true story reads like a novel, and the reader will be hard pressed not to fall for Mary.