Mélanie Morin-Pelletier

Mélanie Morin-Pelletier, « ‘The Anxious Waiting Ones at Home’: Deux familles canadiennes plongées dans le tourment de la Grande Guerre, »  Histoire sociale/Social History XLVII, 94 (Juin/June 2014) : 353-368.

In her article, Mélanie Morin-Pelletier plunges us into the history of emotions by examining the intimate correspondence of a mother to her son and a wife to her husband during the First World War. Moving from everyday Montreal to a farm in Alberta, Morin-Pelletier provides us with the testimony of two women, one an urban mother and the other a rural wife, both anxious and determined to reassure son or husband who had left for the war front. The analysis of these two rare collections of letters, written in English, reminds us of the richness epistolary sources can bring to a better understanding of the feelings of women, men and children in relation to the past. This article illustrates that the work done by women on the homefront was at the same time practical and emotional because the impact of the war had changed the lives of families and increased the responsibilities of women on a daily basis. Finally, this convincing and moving article is a very good example of bilingual research and writing.