What, light, then, does Elsa Brandstrom's story shed on the women's movement in the aftermath of the First World War more generally?rnIn a recent book, the Canadian scholar Jonathan Vance notes that the two denning characteristics of the Canadian warrior during World War I were "his youth and his attachment to a mother figure".73 In the case of German and Austrian POWs in Russia, it is tempting to cast Elsa Brandstrom in this role as "mother figure"; in popular remembrance she stood side-by-side with the grieving soldiers' mothers who had sacrificed their son's lives for the higher cause of the fatherland, except her surrogate sons were not the warriors who had died a hero's death on the battlefield, but defeated men who wasted away in enemy captivity or eventually came home, broken and disillusioned. Yet to do this would be to reduce Brandstrom unfairly to a straightforward "feminine" maternal role - and her role was in fact more complex than thisThus she refused to bow down before male-dominated hierarchies, and where necessary, created her own independent organisations for helping POWs. She retained her patriotic and pro-German credentials while undertaking expeditions to the rival nations engaged in war.
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