Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada by Barbara M. Freeman (review)

The first female journalists in Canada did not publicly endorse a woman’s right to vote. In fact, as Barbara M. Freeman notes in Beyond Bylines, the issue of suffrage was overshadowed in their newspaper columns by commentary on fashionable standards of female attire.

Granted, these standards assumed greater importance as societal roles for women began to change in the late nineteenth century. Instead of wearing constricting corsets and skirts that nearly swept the floor, women sought clothing that promoted health and well-being. To that end, female journalists were expected to guide their readers to appropriate choices. But they did so with caution. Newspapers relied on advertising for revenue, and so, writes Freeman, while female journalists might promote practicality in dress, they were not in a position to support an ‘outright revolution in women’s attire.’

And yet a handful of journalists were prepared to rock the boat gently – and, in some cases, not so gently. In this meticulously researched collection of seven essays, Freeman, a former broadcaster and long-time journalism educator at Carleton, uses a case-study approach to consider female media workers who ‘reached beyond the glory of their personal bylines’ to push boundaries and further the feminist cause.

No one is more suited than Freeman to examine the subject. She led the way for journalism historians in Canada with her seminal 1989 biography of female pioneer Kathleen Blake Coleman (Kit’s Kingdom), which illuminated the life and work of the most famous woman journalist of her era, a daring writer who transcended the restrictions that bound most female journalists in the late 1800s, when women first entered the profession.

Like most female journalists of her era, Kit Coleman wrote for the newspaper’s so-called Women’s Page, which blended serious commentary with society news, domestic tips, snippets of poetry, and fashion coverage. Women had mixed feelings about writing for the page, and those sentiments were never more magnified than in their fashion coverage. They felt ‘laced in’ intellectually, according to Freeman, but feared that if they ‘let down their hair’ they would be a threat to the commercial interests of the newspaper for which they worked.

Freeman’s collection of essays, not intended as a chronological history, nevertheless moves progressively through time. It begins with a look at Agnes Maule Machar, who wrote for the leading public affairs periodicals in the nineteenth century and intrigued Freeman with her keen ability to advocate persuasively for women’s rights while addressing an audience of primarily male readers.

Freeman also looks at four women writing about fashion in the Toronto daily press in the late 1880s; she gives in-depth treatment to suffragist and peace activist Francis Marion Beynon, woman’s page editor for the Grain Growers’ Guide, a weekly publication that represented Prairie farmers and took liberal positions on women’s rights and conscription prior to World War I; she considers lesbian media workers, often marginalized, who contributed to feminist periodicals in the late twentieth century; and she reconstructs the career of Elizabeth Long, pioneer supervisor of women’s programming at CBC radio, who hired a stable of talented women commentators to take up the cause of women’s rights while providing homemaking tips and childrearing advice. Freeman ends the book with an essay on contemporary aboriginal film-maker Alanis Obomsawin, now retired from the NFB, whose powerful documentaries address Native rights and women’s identities.

Freeman states in the introduction to the book that she did not intend to write a comprehensive history of women media workers. Rather, she notes, she sought to highlight only a few women as a way of encouraging other media scholars to do the same. Much as she opened the door for scholars interested in our journalistic foremothers with her biography of Kit Coleman, Freeman has succeeded in opening the door even wider by considering a range of female media workers from different eras and backgrounds in...