Summary
The women in this study were made visible in part because they lived through devastating moments during a particularly destructive war. But a deeper and broader view of their lives shows that those events—while important—were only small parts of much larger stories. Military histories that focus solely on dramatic scenes of suffering and loss obscure other experiences and actions of women that provide much deeper insights into the ways that the war shaped life in Upper Canada. Conversely, social histories of the province describe women’s participation in households, economics, and society with no reference to the life-changing events that took place between 1812 and 1815. The stories, evidence, analysis, and conclusions presented in the modules that follow are situated between these two types of histories.
Women’s actions during traumatic moments of loss and displacement serve as an important point of departure from which the rest of their lives can be examined. How well women coped with and responded to deaths of family members, loss of personal and commercial goods, and destruction of their homes determined whether their families and communities could survive a brutal war on the frontier. Yet those actions were not separate from the work they had been doing before the war to ensure the daily survival of their families nor the more difficult task of rebuilding their lives in the postwar decades. The challenges that women faced and overcame during the War of 1812 were part of a continuum of experiences and actions that had roots in the American Revolution and grew to shape Upper Canada in the nineteenth century and beyond.