Canadian Women In Print, 1750–1918 (review)

Forensics—who did what to whom and how—is to real-life murder mysteries what archival research is to feminist literary criticism. The archival researcher must become a sleuth given the gender politics ruling the largely public sphere of the book trade and the behind-the-scenes role of women, so often eclipsed by literary and cultural histories, the oft-hidden base of what Carole Gerson calls “the print culture pyramid” (p. 28). As chief sleuth, Gerson leads a team of assistants through multiple libraries, patiently sifting through documents in dimly lit rows, weighing details, and absorbing the importance of dust prints left by foremothers—whether poets, nuns, teachers, travelers, novelists, journalists, temperance workers, editors, mothers, botanists, diarists, librarians, book binders, or suffragists. Carole Gerson is Canada’s lead detective in the field of women’s writing, and Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 could not have been written by anyone else, as it attests to her astonishingly wide, yet precise, knowledge of women’s roles all along the line of production. The materiality of the pursuit is not just the actual sleuthing but also the sort of questions asked. Gerson interrogates the training and incomes of the women who bound the books but were squeezed out of the male-centered unions for typesetters, the role of widows who took over the family businesses of book-making in their husbands’ names, and the way early women settlers supplemented the family income by writing. She explores the emergence of the often childless and unmarried New Women who followed the book trade to American cities or broke into journalism in the hopes of more lucrative ways to get into print; she even investigates the motives of polemical writers who used print culture to advocate for religion, temperance, or other social causes. Sleuthing unearths telling details about these women’s salaries, pseudonyms, prefaces, publishing strategies, struggles with agents, obstacles, and quiet defiance—the strategies that covered their tracks as well as the strategies that imprinted some of their names in popular or literary canons, from the better known figures of Lucy Maude Montgomery, Pauline Johnson, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Catherine Parr Traill, Nellie McClung, Anna Jameson, and the Eaton sisters to the now lesser-known Agnes Maude Machar, Kit Coleman, and May Agnes Fleming. Also revealed is how bestselling popular authors like Marshal Saunders or literary stars like Isabella Valancy Crawford died impoverished, despite their successes.

This recovery work stages a haunting union among generations of women. Gerson’s own dust prints in the form of style and focus appear beside those of the foremothers and beside those of other cultural workers, from librarians to research assistants to designers of databases to fellow professors. The choice to set the overall parameters of the study from 1750 to 1918 could have been better explained to my taste, and the style is dry as dust in places, but the content is always informative. The choice to divide the book into ten finely honed chapters, each with its own angle of vision on the print industry rather than a linear chronology, works well. My favorite chapters were those on the broader contexts of print in the form of actual book production and trade; on the business of a woman’s life and the dollars-and-cents of managing a writing career; on Canadian women and the American market with the pull of the dollar, not to mention writing for Hollywood; on periodicals and journalism that explained both the rise of the profession among women at the turn of the century as well as the relative monetary worth of writing literature for periodicals rather than books; and on the New Woman with its explanation of shifting gender construction and how it affected both writerly and life choices.

Gerson explains that unlike works by most feminist literary historians, she shaped chapters around collective contexts rather than individual writers (p. xiii). Hers is not a cultural or a conceptual history but rather a print culture history...