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While generalizations about early Canadian writing abound, there are few enumerative studies based on quantitative data, in large part because the bibliographic record remains uncertain. Given the mobility of Canadian writers and their propensity for foreign publication, it has always been difficult to define who counts as a Canadian author and what counts as a Canadian book. Such difficulties notwithstanding, two studies offer a good general picture of women’s output in several specific areas. Anne Innis Dagg has identified and categorized a corpus of 965 non-fiction books issued by English-Canadian women before 1946. Her compilation shows that numbers vastly increased after 1885, with fifty-eight titles published up to that year, and 205 in the following three decades. The most prominent subject areas are those associated with the better-known literary writers of the period: travel and description (20.5 percent), history (18 percent), autobiography (13.5 percent), and biography (12 percent). Most of the remaining subjects are also inflected by gender: religion and morality (9 percent), social issues (9 percent), education, including textbooks (7 percent), and homemaking /advice (3 percent). Dagg found just eleven books issued before 1916 that she classified as “science and medicine,” accounting for 4 percent of Canadian woman-authored titles published before 1916.1 A different classification scheme prevails in Clara Chu and Bertrum MacDonald’s study of women’s contributions to Canadian writing on science and technology before the First World War, which cites 248 works by 145 women: fifty-seven (23 percent) monographs and 191 (77 percent) journal articles. The larger size of this corpus is due to its inclusion of texts about Canada by foreign authors, and of sixteen travel narratives that contain somewhat scientific descriptions of the “natural history, geology, 125 seven  Stretching the Range: Secular Non-fiction anthropology, or geography of an area.”2 In their research, Chu and MacDonald discovered several authors not noticed by Dagg, including Eliza Maria Jones of Brockville, who issued two of their study’s five monographs on agriculture. Although 145 may seem a sizable number, Chu and MacDonald note that most of the women in their study issued only one work, and that women comprise just “1.4 percent of all currently-known authors of works on Canadian science and technology”3 active before 1915. They found that women authors’ favoured subject areas involved ethnographic observations associated with travel and settlement, or topics that reflected domestic life or common feminine pursuits such as botany, natural history, and agriculture, including apiculture. Here too, literary authors prevail; two of this study’s most prolific writers are Catharine Parr Traill and Annie L. Jack. The role of such writers was primarily to popularize science and technology, sometimes for the public at large and sometimes specifically for a female audience. Dagg’s data confirm that in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, women maintained the foothold they had earlier established as authors of memoirs and autobiography, genres that became increasingly attractive to those with unusual stories to tell, ranging from Charlotte Fuhrer’s sensational Mysteries of Montreal: Being Recollections of a Female Physician (1881) to Emma Albani’s engaging and detailed account of her international operatic career in Forty Years of Song (1911). As well, increasing numbers of books reflected women’s accelerating involvement in social issues and their wider range of travel (topics discussed in Chapters 8 and 9). Women’s expanding intellectual and social spheres at the end of the nineteenth century also yielded an enlarged print presence in such fields as religion, history, and biography. While women were slowly entering traditionally “masculine provinces,” their impact on the prevailing “gender division of literary labor”4 should be seen as an evolving adjustment rather than an abrupt transformation, a pattern demonstrated in their changing involvement in education. At the turn of the century, women’s writing of occasional textbooks, which they had been doing for many decades (as discussed in Chapter 4), became more authoritative. For example, well-educated Gertrude Lawler, who prided herself on receiving the same salary as a man while teaching at the newly founded Harbord Street Collegiate Institute in Toronto,5 edited two Shakespeare plays for high school use, with her credentials well displayed on the books’ title pages.6 As well, women became influential in shaping pedagogical theory and practice. After Aletta E. Marty’s book, The Principles and Practice of Oral Reading (1904), was authorized for high school use by 126 breaking new ground after 1875...

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