A Female Economy: Women's Work in a Prairie Province, 1870–1970 by Mary Kinnear (review)

452 letters in canada 1999 Art, directors and curators found themselves entrusted with extraordinary but also highly conflicted cultural responsibilities. Trying to reshape American taste without at the same time offending their local boards and communities, curators and directors staged Matisse's work with extreme care and precision, clamping down on all possibilities for misinterpretation. Those curators and directors stand out as early doctors of spin, working the media and its instruments to assure that their Matisses promoted the right message. Not that Matisse himself watched from the sidelines as these diverse interpretive communities fought over the meaning of his art. Those who take exception to O'Brian's kind of analysis might claim that Matisse's reception bears little relation to the true nature of his art B that Matisse's art differs from its social effect. But O'Brian will have none of this, and let it be said he makes a very strong case. Matisse emerges from these pages as at once manufacturing and controlling his own reputation, critically intervening in a shifting field through the works he allowed to be sold, through his choice of subject, and through his carefully scripted appearances in the New World. As for O'Brian himself, the social art history has often been practised as a form of political criticism, a process of laying bare the structure and machinery behind art's ideological complicity with dominant groups and cultures. O'Brian offers nothing so crude, but we find a trace of this emancipatory impulse in the plaintive note that emerges as his book concludes. After the modernism wars receded from American culture, and after his canonicity seemed assured, the Matisse that survived at once nurtured and was sustained by a consumerist cult of pleasure. Matisse's`stream of Arcadias,' as O'Brian terms them, his `painted idylls' and `relentless ' images of `female figures at rest' fully `accord' with the `ascendant values' in American culture. Perhaps we can read in this closing statement the critic's disappointment, frustration, but also resignation. With the triumph of marketplace culture, there seems little avenue but quietly to rehearse the terms and conditions of our continuing mystification. (MARC GOTLIEB) Mary Kinnear. A Female Economy: Women's Work in a Prairie Province, 1870B1970 McGill-Queen's University Press 1998. xiv, 216. $55.00 In her most recent book, Mary Kinnear provides a century's overview of women's work in the province of Manitoba. Following upon earlier works, including Margaret McWilliams: An Interwar Feminist (1991) and In Subordination : Professional Women, 1870B1970 (1995), Kinnear appears to have revisited some of her earlier published work and fashioned a text that might appeal to undergraduate audiences searching for a straightforward humanities 453 narrative synthesis. While there is some new archival research in the notes, a significant proportion of the material is drawn from either the author's own published work in the 1980s and 1990s or that of other scholars in the field. To be sure, this is a valuable synthetic work which explores the major categories of women's paid and unpaid work between 1870 and 1970. Beginning with a chapter that describes the basic demographic, economic, ethnic, and cultural features of Manitoban society and its women, Kinnear turns in the subsequent chapters to role prescriptions, education and training, homemaking, farm work, paid labour, and public service work. By and large the portrait she paints of women in this prairie province resembles similar portrayals of women's experiences elsewhere in Canada. What distinguishes Manitoba from the rest, however, is interesting and raises questions about the comparative histories of women across Canada. Unfortunately, Kinnear does not attempt such additional breadth here. That the province was largely rural and agricultural for a large part of its history clearly places farm women's experiences at the centre; likewise its dynamic population growth, fuelled by waves of immigration, also shaped the nature of women's work. Farm women, Kinnear argues, were subject to push and pull factors when it came to field work. Women were called upon to do subsistence activities including field work only at particular times of crisis once the pioneering stage of farming had passed. Their domestic work increased, however...