Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918

Canadian Women in Print, 1750—1918 is the first historical examination of women’s engagement with multiple aspects of print over some two hundred years, from the settlers who wrote diaries and letters to the New Women who argued for ballots and equal rights. Considering women’s published writing as an intervention in the public sphere of national and material print culture, this book uses approaches from book history to address the working and living conditions of women who wrote in many genres and for many reasons.

This study situates English Canadian authors within an extensive framework that includes francophone writers as well as women’s work as compositors, bookbinders, and interveners in public access to print. Literary authorship is shown to be one point on a spectrum that ranges from missionary writing, temperance advocacy, and educational texts to journalism and travel accounts by New Woman adventurers. Familiar figures such as Susanna Moodie, L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, Pauline Johnson, and Sara Jeannette Duncan are contextualized by writers whose names are less well known (such as Madge Macbeth and Agnes Laut) and by many others whose writings and biographies have vanished into the recesses of history.

Readers will learn of the surprising range of writing and publishing performed by early Canadian women under various ideological, biographical, and cultural motivations and circumstances. Some expressed reluctance while others eagerly sought literary careers. Together they did much more to shape Canada’s cultural history than has heretofore been recognized.

Introduction

Carole Gerson

Carole Gerson introduces the concepts in her book, announcing her intention of tracing the broad field of publication by early Canadian women by calling attention to the various social, cultural, and material conditions that propelled them onto the printed page, whether they were professional writers or one-time authors. Specifically, the book addresses the actual living and working conditions of women writers in order to reconstruct their engagement with print within the terms of their lived experience.

1

Women and the Broader Contexts of Print

Carole Gerson

Gerson opens with an examination of women’s work in the book trades, from those who set type as printers’ daughters and widows in the eighteenth century to the female bookbinders who sought unionization in the nineteenth century. This chapter then slides from the material side to the social context by considering many ways that women were involved in both fostering and controlling access to print. In the early nineteenth century, educated immigrants like Anne Langton helped to organize pioneer reading groups. Many women who lived in established communities participated in middle-class literary societies for the entertainment and enlightenment of their own social circles, while some residents of cities regarded the establishment of public reading rooms for the underprivileged as a route to social reform. Early in the twentieth century, women’s literary groups were dedicated advocates for public libraries, and professional librarianship became an attractive area of employment for women. Recognizing that not all women writers sought affirmation in print, Gerson concludes this chapter with a brief discussion of manuscript culture.

2

Beginnings to the 1850s

Carole Gerson

Gerson's second chapter summarizes many “firsts” in Canadian women’s literary history, beginning with the first European publication of writing from women of New France in the seventeenth century. After the American Revolution, nodes of female authorship developed at three specific sites in the remainder of British North America. In the Maritime colonies, Loyalist Deborah How Cottnam, Canada’s first notable woman poet, was followed by a later generation of writers that included Sarah Herbert. In Montreal, literary interests occasionally enabled French and English women to cross paths, but not in the pages of the era’s most significant periodical, the Literary Garland. The city’s major pre-Confederation writers included Rosanna Leprohon, Mary Ann Sadlier, and the American-born Foster sisters. Upper Canada, the third region Gerson discusses, was also marked by a pair of immigrant sisters, Catharine Parr Strickland Traill and Susanna Strickland Moodie, whose literary community included Frances Stewart and Rhoda Ann Page. No overview of Canadian women writers of the pre-Confederation era can omit Maria Monk, whose notoriety for her supposed authorship of stories of abuse in a convent set her apart from other literary communities and provides a fitting conclusion.

3

Strategies of Legitimation

Carole Gerson

Chapter 3 analyzes women writers’ self-representation in prefaces — primarily to poetry — and contrasts the negativity of tropes of apology with positive claims of moral and national value. While the diffidence of one-time authors seems sincere, professional writers, from Anna Jameson to Sara Jeannette Duncan, played ironically with the convention of affected modesty.


4

The Business of a Woman’s Life

Carole Gerson

Chapter 4 examines various genres of women’s writing in relation to their motives and the financial side of authorship, writing being one of the few areas where women could hope for economic equality. While book publishing was seldom financially viable in nineteenth-century Canada, women writers who first built their audiences through journalism achieved some economic success and public acclaim. Many books were financed by authors; others were issued posthumously to commemorate a deceased writer. Toward the end of the century, ambitious young women who sought professional literary careers sold their work in the United States.

5

Canadian Women and American Markets

Carole Gerson

Chapter 5 examines the careers of those women writers who migrated to the United States, in contrast with those who exploited American literary markets while staying home in Canada.

6

Periodicals and Journalism

Carole Gerson

Chapter 6 shows how the rise of women’s journalism offered specific opportunities that coalesced in the founding of the Canadian Women’s Press Club in 1904.

7

Stretching the Range: Secular Non-fiction

Carole Gerson

Chapter 7 explores how, in conjunction with their entry into professional journalism, women also became prominent authors of non-fiction, specializing in domestic education, botanical writing, and stories about animals. History proved the most attractive nonfiction genre, reflecting the era’s conviction that historical awareness underpinned national identity. The expanded presence of women in print served many interests, and large groups of women entered the public sphere in the name of causes that were not equally progressive.

8

From Religion to Reform

Carole Gerson

Chapter 8 recognizes the many women who were active in denominational writing and publishing. The linking of temperance with women’s suffrage shows the difficulty of applying later notions of advancement to earlier social movements: two of the major reformers of the era, Agnes Maule Machar and Nellie McClung, were drawn to radical social analysis through their commitment to conventional Christian values of service.

9

The New Woman

Carole Gerson

Chapter 9 addresses the New Woman in two incarnations — as living author and as fictional character. Historical New Women abounded in Canada’s relatively flexible social structure, proving their mettle as undaunted journalists and intrepid travelers, yet few such adventurers appeared in fiction by Canadian women and most of these characters suffered for their daring.


10

Addressing the Margins of Race

Carole Gerson

The final chapter looks to the twentieth century through writers who addressed the margins of race. Beginning with Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Canada’s first significant Black woman writer, discussion then turns to Aboriginal writers — represented most prominently by Pauline Johnson — and concludes with the different modes of identification developed by the part-Asian Eaton sisters, Edith and Winnifred. Winnifred Eaton Reeve, like L.M. Montgomery and other career writers of her generation, cannily exploited her personal history and the popular genres of her era to prosper as an internationally successful celebrity.


Conclusion: Observations on the Canon

Carole Gerson

Gerson presents some final observations on women writers, drawing attention to the distorted notion of the presence of women in Canada’s literary history. Most notably, the notion that Canada has produced an unusually large number of women writers.