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Reviewed by:
  • Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People
  • David Frank
Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People. Peter Campbell. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Pp. 400, $44.95 cloth

A student reading the pages of the labour reform and radical press in Canada in the era from the 1910s to the 1930s will be struck by recurring references to Rose Henderson, variously described as a juvenile court officer (or judge), a school trustee, a feminist agitator, a peace activist, a champion of labour, a sociologist, a PhD and lecturer on social conditions, a Victorian moralist, Marxist, Wobbly, and Bolshevist, an Anglican, Methodist, Baha’i, and Quaker, and on the whole either a [End Page 147] doctrinaire radical or a naive reformer. Some of these descriptions are not inaccurate, at least for particular moments in her life, for Rose Henderson participated in her own ways in several of the great social movements of the early twentieth century. She experienced her life in episodes of intense engagement with a wide range of social issues, and the difficulty for historians has been that she was not fully identified with a single activity or organization. She appears instead as a victim of the kind of ‘biographical zoning’ that fails to recognize individuals, perhaps especially women, who strike out in new directions, cross boundaries, and build alliances.

Very little is known about the first half of Henderson’s life, except that she was likely born in Ireland in 1871 and then emigrated to Montreal at a young age, raised a daughter, and was widowed in 1904. When she entered public life, she did so as a middle-class woman of means who became an advocate for the interests of working-class children. Her appointment as probation officer for the juvenile court in 1912 made her one of the few female public officials in Montreal. Writing for publications such as Woman’s Century and The Labor World / Le monde ouvrier, she emerged by the end of the war as a vigorous proponent of social reconstruction. As a maternal feminist, she expected that the ultimate achievement of the franchise and the participation of women in public affairs would ‘engender’ a more responsible state and cultivate higher standards of citizenship. Her opposition to conscription during the war was only one of the stands that defined her views, as she came to consider militarism a desperately unsuitable foundation for civilization and to see organized labour as the natural allies of women in creating a just society. By the end of 1919 Henderson had been forced to resign from the juvenile court, but her trenchant anti-capitalist social commentary made her known across the country. In election campaigns she worked hard to mobilize women to vote for labour candidates, and Henderson herself ran for Parliament in Montreal in 1921 and New Westminster in 1925. Among other involvements farther afield, she participated in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and did a stint with the Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. By the time she published ‘Woman, the Backbone of Capitalism,’ one of a series of articles for the One Big Union Monthly, Henderson was advancing a progressive maternal feminism featuring an optimistic class analysis of the prospects for women to become ‘mother, wife, teacher, and companion in the truest sense of these terms.’ After she moved to Toronto in 1929, her attention turned especially to the public schools as the site where young people would acquire the character and values they [End Page 148] needed to become fit citizens of an emancipated world. Elected as a trustee in 1933, she campaigned against corporal punishment and cadet training in the schools and sought out allies on all sides for these and other causes. Her local concerns included the dangers of beverage rooms and movie theatres, but the horizons of ‘home and school feminism’ also extended to her support for the Canadian Youth Congress and participation in the World Peace Conference in 1936. Politically, Henderson was among those who welcomed the formation of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, and she took the new party at its word in welcoming affiliations from organized labour...

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