The History Program at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus presents its Winter 2022 People Make History Lecture Series, featuring author Kate Armstrong, the first woman admitted as a cadet to the Royal Military College of Canada, in Kingston, Ontario.
In 1980, Kate Armstrong was an ordinary young woman eager to leave an abusive childhood behind her when she became the first female cadet admitted into the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. As she struggled for survival in the ultimate boys’ club, she called on her fierce and humorous spirit to push back against the whims of a domineering and patriarchal organization. Later in life, feeling unfulfilled in her post-military career, she realized that finding her true path forward meant she had to go back to the beginning and revisit the truth of what she had experienced all those years ago.
Kate Armstrong is the award-winning author of her memoir The Stone Frigate: The Royal Military College’s First Female Cadet Speaks Out published in 2019 and was named as winner of the 2020 Ontario Historical Society Alison Prentice Award for best book on women’s history and as a finalist for the 2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in Nonfiction. She served thirteen years in the military as a Logistics Officer and later worked for two decades in the corporate world of electricity trading, before fulfilling her dream to become a writer. Armstrong is an alumna of several nonfiction residency programs at Banff Centre for the Arts and Sage Hill Writing. Armstrong is currently at work on her first novel. She lives in the mountains near Nelson B.C. with her husband, Rick, and their three black labs.
The biannual lecture series, generously supported by the estate of Mary Stedman, invites witnesses and participants of historic events or moments to tell their stories. Past guest speakers have included Degrassi co-creator Linda Schuyler, former lieutenant-governor James Bartleman, polio survivor Catherine Bell, Hiroshima survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Setsuko Thurlow and more.
By sharing their memories, the guest speakers are invited to bring history alive and make critical links between past and contemporary times.