Shared Experience: CWAC Beauty Parlor #1
Pegi Nicol MacLeod
CWAC Beauty Parlor #1
watercolour crayon on paper
63.2 x 48.6cm
CWM 19710261-5749
In September 1944 MacLeod wrote to a friend: “It is unfair enough to leave out the mothers of soldiers, the nurses, the factory girls. What an obvious flaw to neglect also the women in the armed services.” In 1944 and 1945, she recorded some of the 21,600 women who served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, both on and off duty. Images such as CWAC Beauty Parlour # 1 can be viewed as confirming the femininity of women at a time when there was public fear that women’s participation in the war effort would result in a loss of their femininity by doing “men’s work”.
Paintings
- The sleeping soldier
Francis Lymburner - Battle of Arakan, 1943
Anthony Gross - Recruit's Progress: Medical Inspection
Carel Weight - Potato Peelers
Leonard Brooks - Tocumwal - loading the train
Yosl Bergner - Dream of the latrine sitter
Sidney Nolan - Soldier
Russell Drysdale - A Bofors Gun, Algiers
Henry Carr - 2/10th Australian Commando Squadron: wash and clean up
Ivor Hele - Smoko time with the AWLA
Grace Taylor - Early Morning P.T.
E.J. Hughes - CWAC Beauty Parlor #1
Pegi Nicol MacLeod - Ballet of wind and rain
Colin Colahan - Fatigue
Ralph Walker - Crowds dancing, Kings Cross, Sydney
Donald Friend