Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

Letters to the Woman’s Page Editor: Reading Francis Marion Beynon’s “The Country Homemakers” and a Public Culture for Women

Letters to the Woman’s Page Editor: Reading Francis Marion Beynon’s “The Country Homemakers” and the Public Culture for Women Katja Thieme Research on women’s suffrage constitutes an increasingly diverse academic field, producing studies not only on the history and politics of different national suffrage movements but also on suffrage theatre (e.g., Stowell), literature (Green; Petty), marketing (Finnegan; Morrisson), sexuality (Kent), and fashion (Behling). Although some attention has been paid to suffrage debates in non-European countries (including China, Japan, and South America),1 by far the greatest degree of English-speaking scholarship continues to concentrate on British and American suffragists. This focus is the result of the fact that these were powerful countries and influential cultures, and is also a reflection of the diversity of archived material available for the study of the suffrage movements in them. Both movements left behind considerable records, including pamphlets, correspondence, minutes, yearbooks of regional and national suffrage organizations, and a rich record of print runs of various suffrage magazines.2 By comparison, scholarship on Canadian suffrage has been less prolific, partly a result of the relative absence of documents. Canada did not have the same breadth 215 216 K at J a t h i e M e and intensity of suffrage activities, nor did it have, therefore, the same level of newspaper reporting or courtroom documentation. Of the organizations that were formed and the campaign activities that were carried out, relatively few documents remain. Aside from a very small number of magazines,3 the Canadian suffrage movement produced very few of its own printed documents. The most extensive record that remains can be found in the various woman’s pages of local newspapers, a number of them edited by outspoken suffragists,4 and in the suffrage commentary that was published in newspapers and magazines. In spite of the paucity of archival materials or archives, we can find useful ways of approaching what we have preserved for the benefit of the cultural and historical record on women’s political interventions. Indeed, the very lack of such documentation demands that we find new ways of reading to compensate for gaps in the record. Although the documents on Canadian suffrage might not support the same degree and diversity of study that is being produced about other national suffrage movements, researchers can nevertheless take a range of approaches that may illuminate and challenge what we already know about Canadian suffrage debates.5 From a rhetorical perspective, for example, the women’s suffrage movement gives us insight into the discursive formation of new subject positions and the rhetorical process of social and political change. One site where women shaped increasingly public and political subject positions for themselves was the woman’s pages, especially those where readers played a large role by sending in letters and reports. My essay focuses on the woman’s page in the Grain Growers’ Guide, edited between 1912 and 1917 by Francis Marion Beynon. I approach this material with questions that have become prominent in rhetorical studies of women’s writing. How were women called forth to speak, and what were their motivations to participate in public debate? How did woman’s page editors shape the conditions under which they themselves and other women could articulate their concerns? Following from that, how did suffragist editors like Beynon create the situations in which they and other women could speak publicly and politically about issues such as women’s suffrage? Recent rhetorical scholarship provides particularly useful ways in approaching suffrage discussions in Canadian newspapers and magazines. Rhetorical research looks with great interest at texts that literary study might deem ephemeral or supplementary. These are the kinds of texts that are often the only record of activities by marginalized or historically forgotten persons and groups: personal and professional correspondence, petitions, minutes of meetings, reports of various associations, the technical documents produced in various trades and professions, ledgers, inven- L e t t e r s t o t h e W o M a n ’ s Pa g e e d i t o r 217 tories, and scrapbooks. Rhetorical scholars look at these texts differently, and asks different questions than those conducting historical or sociological investigation. For instance, scholars of rhetoric are interested in the sense of need or motive that calls people to speak in certain situations, in the kinds of speech and textual forms—the genres—that are...