Source: The Way to Her House, George Metcalf Archival Collection , Canadian War Museum, 19760148-058. This booklet, produced by the YMCA, advised soldiers on issues of sex and morality.
By Allison Lynn Bennett
Sexual control is inherent to empire. Colonial authorities and doctors understood sexuality as key to maintaining white superiority. Reproduction and health were the focus of eugenic measures that played on gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes. As a settler colony, Canada imagined itself as “British”, or “white”, and therefore regulated the sexual lives and behaviour of both white and non-white subjects, especially women. Here, I explain how imperial desire for a white Canada centred on gender, sexuality, and race, was largely directed towards women through morality and health policies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Prostitution and the spread of venereal disease (VD), primarily syphilis and gonorrhoea, were major social problems gripping the British Empire in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The British military—who embodied the cause of empire—especially suffered from high rates of VD as troops were known to access prostitutes in garrison and port towns. Britain responded with the first Contagious Diseases (CD) Act in 1864 and subsequent amendments to include all of Britain. The CD Acts not only legalised prostitution to benefit servicemen and sailors but instituted a double standard by which women were blamed as the vectors of VD. In Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, Philippa Levine states that from the 1850s to 1880s, similar CD legislation was enacted throughout the Empire to limit the spread of VD and its negative impact on military efficiency within the colonies; Canada was not exempt.[1]
In 1865, two years before confederation, the Province of Canada issued the The Contagious Diseases Prevention Act of 1885 to limit the spread of VD within naval and military bases in port and garrison towns such as Montreal, Toronto, and Kingston. Continue reading
When we talk about the First World War, it is usually in national terms. In Canada, there is discussion of national mobilization efforts and the federal government’s implementation of programs and policies to support the war effort. These efforts, though, took place at a local level. Battalions within the Canadian Expeditionary Force, for instance, were typically distinguished by where they were from – 
