Adam Prudhomme
Editor
With Remembrance Day approaching, Trinity United will be hosting a pair of screenings of local filmmaker Dale Morrisey’s Heroines in the Storm miniseries, Oct. 25 and Nov. 8, both starting at 2 p.m.
The series focuses on the contribution of women made during WWII. The first date will feature the second film in the four-part series while the Nov. 8 screening will show episode three.
The screenings will be a follow up to a similar event held last year, when Trinity United showed episodes one and four of the series, following by a Q&A with Morrisey. Last year’s event was a big success, prompting organizers to do it again, this time completing the series.
The four-part series was produced by Morrisey’s Wandering Journalist Productions and based on book by local author Sherry Pringle Extraordinary Women Extraordinary Times.
“It’s the women who took part in the women’s auxiliary portion of the arms services in Canada and in Britain,” Morrisey said of the second episode of the series. “Their stories I think are really interesting for a number of reasons. One because the war took the way we viewed women in society and sort of flipped it on its head. In Canada at least for the beginning of the war, we had the luxury of sort of dragging our feet when it came to having women serving in the armed forces and doing certain tasks versus what the Brits did. We looked at them differently than in Great Britain. That was interesting to explore.”
Despite dropping what they were doing to serve their country, women were treated much differently than their male counterparts who joined the war effort. Along with dealing with overt sexism while serving, women also often found themselves having to deal with criticism from their own families.
“History is littered with stories like that or women who went overseas and they would get letters from their mothers and their siblings, but not from their fathers,” said Morrisey. “They would get letters from siblings but not from their parents. Their parents would shun them completely because they just didn’t think that women belonged there.”
Despite their harsh treatment, women would ultimately play many critical roles in helping the Allies to victory. Though their stories were largely ignored for decades, in recent years there’s been a shift in the way history is re-told.
The third episode looks at the harsh realities of WWII, exploring what went on in German concentration camps and Japanese internment camps as well.
“It’s been something I’ve been really fortunate enough to work on with Sherry Pringle,” said Morrisey. “This is inspired by her wonderful book Extraordinary Women, Extraordinary Times. Without that backbone of her book, that sort of jumpstarts a lot of this. To have her support on this and work in partnership with her on this was just wonderful.”
First released in 2020, the miniseries has gained a steady following over the years and this coming January it will be made available to all PBS affiliates across the United States.