Thousands of others became ill. The flu affected families throughout the city. Working-class neighbourhoods faced the greatest devastation, and immigrants suffered the most. Having wealth meant better living conditions and sanitation, which limited the spread of disease. It also meant that those who did become ill had greater access to health care. The flu killed entire households, orphaned children, and made single parents of many adults. Working class and immigrant men and, especially, women faced a difficult future. They lacked the resources the city’s wealthier residents had to improve their lives.

Influenza fueled the momentum toward the social upheaval of 1919. Mutual assistance within working-class neighbourhoods during the crisis deepened social solidarity, while the slow and inadequate response of government left people angry. The state’s unwillingness to involve labour in decision making on public health issues also frustrated workers. Bans on public meetings in the last days of the epidemic led many to conclude the restrictions were meant to frustrate labour organizing.

Working-class and immigrant women played a crucial role caring for the sick. Much of this work went unnoticed. Male labour leaders responded in a traditional way, assuming women would serve as mothers and caregivers while men acted as breadwinners. Even the many politically empowered, middle-class women who volunteered during the crisis were unable to shake the patriarchal norms of the era.

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Ethel Johns

Children’s Hospital cared for youngsters who became sick, or whose parents were ill or had died during the epidemic. The hospital’s Director of Nursing, Ethel Johns, was praised by her bosses for her “efficient, innovative and aggressive” running of the facility. They credited her <--caption-->with fostering “the splendid spirit of the nurses, students and domestic staff during this trying time.”* But Johns ran into trouble in 1919 when she welcomed strikers who delivered milk and showed up to repair serious damage caused by a storm. The hospital’s Board of Directors and Women’s Guild, who sided with the Citizens’ Committee, demanded her resignation. Ethel Johns was forced to leave Winnipeg to find work. She became one of the best known and most highly respected nurses in the western world.

* Harry Medovy, A Vision Fulfilled: The Story of the Children’s Hospital of Winnipeg (1979), p. 136-137