Graduate Students

Finlay, C. - M.A

My Heart is more with the Land, than with 'Military Affairs': How Ontario Agricultural College and Manitoba Agricultural College Students Negotiated their Masculinity in the First World War - Dr. Catharine Wilson, advisor        

         Throughout World War One young men attended the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC) and the Manitoba Agricultural College (MAC) to receive education in the most up-to-date science, technology, and business theories behind efficient agriculture. The students faced criticism for their attendance at the school during the worldwide conflict and the patriotism and masculinity of the young men were explicitly questioned. I will argue that during WWI the men enrolled at OAC and MAC felt a cultural and masculine inferiority that was driven by the sense of rural decline, the increasing emphasis placed on urban-centred modernity, and the criticism they faced both from themselves and from others that they chose not to fight alongside Canadian soldiers. Through the medium of the student publications, the OAC Review and the MAC Gazette, it can be seen that students attempted to compensate for this sense of inferiority by reasserting their cultural and masculine superiority through emphasizing the manly roles in their institutions' scientific agricultural developments, the professionalization of agriculture, the inherent nobility of farming through its enhancement of national wellbeing, their involvement in campus military drill and athletics, and their essential role in the wartime participation in food production for Canadians at home and abroad. The war memorials at both colleges illustrate the collective historical memory of the colleges and their search for meaning following the devastating war.