A Great Restlessness: The Life and Politics of Dorise Nielsen (review)

In the winter of 1940 Dorise Nielsen living on a bush farm in northern Saskatchewan when she received an overseas telegram from her mother in London. The news? She learned that she had just been elected to the Canadian House of Commons. Until now very little was known, even among specialists, about Canada’s third woman member of Parliament. As a woman of the left from a rural constituency, Nielsen at first seemed to be the natural successor to Agnes Macphail, who was defeated in the 1940 election; indeed, the new mp was assigned Macphail’s office on Parliament Hill and the services of Macphail’s secretary. Nielsen was a striking presence in the House, and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King took an interest in the new mp, but he was soon warned to keep his distance on the grounds that she was a Communist. Nielsen had not announced such an affiliation and did not fully emerge until 1943, when she endorsed the new Labor-Progressive Party (which described itself not very secretively as ‘the party of Canadian Communists’). Thus in addition to her distinction as an early woman mp (and the first to be raising children while in office), Nielsen may also be identified as Canada’s first Communist mp.

Doris Winifred Webber was born in North London, the fifth child in a relatively successful working-class family; her father died when she was six, but she eventually received enough education to graduate from a teachers’ college and was recruited by the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf to teach school in Norbury, sk. When she married Peter Nielsen in Saskatchewan in 1927, she also changed her first name to Dorise; in short order she was raising three children (after losing one infant to dysentery) and was managing a marginal rural household; her husband was more likely to bring in an income from hunting than from farming; by 1937 they were on relief. Nielsen’s political activism emerged in this context of rural working-class poverty. In 1934 her husband was a poll captain for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, and in 1935 she campaigned for the ccf in North Battleford; her political mentor, Bob Paul, was the ccf provincial candidate in the area in 1938. After the loss of that contest, Nielsen and Paul created a local united front, known as the United Progressives, that assembled ccf, Social Credit, and Communist supporters behind Nielsen’s candidacy. Once elected, she was an ally of the ccf members on most issues, and much of her focus was on domestic matters, especially those that involved the conditions of rural producers and the welfare of children and women. In the 1943 debate on family allowances, for instance, Nielsen insisted that payments be directed to the mothers rather than the male heads of households. After the 1943 by-elections, she deferred as the Communist spokesperson to Fred Rose, the new lpp mp for Cartier. Nielsen did not win re-election in 1945 (the seat went to the ccf) and moved to Toronto to take on assignments for the party and related organizations. By the 1950s, however, the Cold War was taking its toll. Nielsen had already left Canada once before she accompanied her partner, a mining expert, to assist the revolutionary cause in China in 1957. There she started a final career as a foreign specialist engaged in translation and editorial work. She lived through the traumas of the Soviet-Chinese split and the Cultural Revolution, only occasionally in contact with friends and comrades. Her death in 1980 went almost unremarked in Canada, her name barely familiar to the latest generation of Canadian leftists.

Faith Johnston’s well-written narrative is driven by a persistent curiosity and brings a compassionate intelligence to the story. Certainly there are many insights here into the variety of ‘paths’ and overlapping ‘formations’ on the left, to borrow Ian McKay’s heuristic, and Nielsen is a...