Making Up the State: Women in 20th Century Atlantic Canada (review)

Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton’s Making Up the State is a collection of 14 essays that interrogate various aspects of women’s relationships with the state in 20th century Atlantic Canada. The compilation brings together a wide range of case studies that investigate not only how the state and its various actors regulated women’s lives in the region, but the myriad ways women responded to these changes, engaged in political and social activism, expanded their rights, and challenged the state. As the editors note in their introduction, however, the articles also illustrate “the ad hoc character of state formation” in the region over the course of the century, and force scholars to confront new questions about women’s relationship to the state. (9) Contributors raise important questions about the state’s adherence to separate spheres ideology, women’s participation in and interactions with the formal political sphere, and the role personal faith played in shaping women’s activism throughout this era. What emerges is an important collection of scholarship that expands the historiography of state formation and women in Atlantic Canada, complementing the editors’ previous 1994 collection, Separate Spheres. Several contributors to this current collection stand out as particularly adept at examining women’s relationships with the state over the course of the 20th century.

Making Up the State is divided into four thematic sections. An untitled first section features Sharon Myers’ examination of Prince Edward Island’s Minnie McGee. After her 1912 murder conviction McGee was bounced between federal penitentiaries and Falconwood Hospital, the province’s mental asylum. Federal and provincial jurisdictional conflicts coupled with legislative gaps, exacerbated in this case by a poorly funded medical system, illustrate critical flaws in the state’s power and its regulatory structure. This case reveals how these fissures impacted citizens’ lives and highlights the fractured nature of the state in the early 20th century.

Women’s interactions with and participation in the formal political system are explored in part two, “Electoral Politics.” In her case study of women from Woodstock, New Brunswick, Shannon M. Risk reveals how organizations such as the Red Cross, iode, and Women’s Institutes served as important platforms for women. Despite their exclusion from the formal political sphere, women were drawn together as activists through these organizations, and they wielded considerable influence in advancing issues such as suffrage and women’s education in rural areas that were so often ignored by male politicians. Sharon MacDonald’s article explores the life of Mary Russell Chesley, a prominent Nova Scotia suffragist and peace activist, and one of the most vocal and influential feminists of her time. MacDonald highlights Chesley’s work with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a group which played a critical role for women to promote numerous causes in the early part of the century. Chesley’s activism was fuelled by her personal faith. MacDonald argues that historians must be attuned to “the role of spiritual faith in radical social movements” (54) to fully understand the intersection between religion and activism, a neglected area of study. Risk and MacDonald’s essays also broadly illustrate the importance of examining the rural women’s interactions with the state, a topic which the editors note in their introduction is frequently overlooked.

Part Three, “Women and Policy,” explores different facets of state program and policy development. Barry Cahill’s examination of the Nova Scotia Barristers Society’s 1915 admission of its first female lawyer to the bar illustrates how a professional self-regulating body shaped provincial state policy. The Society, unlike its counterparts in most other provinces, did not prevent women from being called as lawyers and simply accepted their applications for articles. The provincial government followed suit in 1917 when it amended the Barrister’s and Solicitor’s Act to reflect the decision already taken by the Society which, as the profession’s regulator, retained sole jurisdiction over bar admissions. Cahill provides an interesting comparison between...