Pin, CWAC Cap Flash

Credit LineGift of Evoda Pickering, London, Ontario, 2017.

Object number2017.016.013

Label TextEvoda Gandolfo Pickering owned these materials, which illustrate the end of her schooling and her transition into the military as a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps in the late 1940s and into the Korean War (1950-1953). The last women to demobilize from the CWACs after the Second World War left the service in August 1946. This saw the end of the CWACs. The two other women’s branches of the military, the RCAF-WD and WRCNS, also demobilized and ceased to exist post-Second World War. But as the Cold War intensified in 1948 with the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, the western powers, Canada included, began to rearm. Canada realized that if recruiting targets were to be met, the women’s services had to be re-established. Government documents explained that the “recruitment of women in peace time can fill vacancies for which it is difficult to recruit men, and at the same time build up reserve cadres which would ease mobilization.” Evoda falls into this group and with her clerical training from the Sacred Heart Commercial School, was able to enlist in the Reserve Force to provide clerical services.

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