In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada
  • Shannon Stettner
Beyond Bylines: Media Workers and Women’s Rights in Canada. Barbara M. Freeman. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. Pp. 328, $85.00

Through case studies, Beyond Bylines explores how several media workers negotiated the boundaries between professionalism and activism to advocate for women’s rights. Using exhaustive archival sources and oral history interviews, Barbara M. Freeman illuminates how these individual women – mainstream and alternative print journalists, radio broadcasters, and a documentarian – campaigned for a variety of issues including higher education for women, women’s suffrage, abortion rights, and Aboriginal rights.

In the first three chapters, Freeman looks at women’s print journalism from the 1870s until the First World War through the work [End Page 692] of Agnes Maule Machar, Francis Marion Beynon, and a handful of journalists whose columns appeared on fashion pages of major newspapers. She then explores the feminist reach of CBC radio broadcaster Elizabeth Long, with attention both to the gender discrimination Long encountered and her efforts to recruit and train other female broadcasters. In the final three chapters, Freeman examines the activist journalism of women working in alternative media who advocated for abortion rights during the Abortion Caravan and lesbian identity and sexuality in the feminist periodicals Kinesis, Broadside, and Pandora, as well as the push for Aboriginal rights through the documentaries of Alanis Obomsawin.

One of the strengths of Freeman’s analysis lays in the careful contextualization of her subjects. In her study of Agnes Maule Machar, for example, she illuminates that what some scholars criticize as Machar’s limited or moderate feminism makes sense when considered within the particular social milieu of late nineteenth-century Kingston, and as complicated by Machar’s maternal feminism, her Christian social reform beliefs, and her nationalism. Moreover, Freeman suggests that it was Machar’s moderation – she did not believe in a socialist or feminist revolution – that made her ideas harder to dismiss. Freeman’s efforts to contextualize her subjects, along with the inclusion of new archival research, nuance our understanding of some of these previously studied women.

As Freeman relates in the early chapters, the generation of advertising revenue, in this case via the ‘women’s pages’ of newspapers, opened spaces for female journalists. And yet, the need to retain both the audience and the advertisers often limited the content the journalists could include. So, for example, much like Doris Anderson’s Chatelaine learned to balance the subversive with the traditional, Toronto’s fashion journalists of the late nineteenth century offered more fashion advice than the ‘intellectual fare’ both the journalists and many readers craved. Still, the journalists managed to address a number of issues such as dressing and living more healthily through dress reform. They did so within the confines of the male-dominated editorial and advertising worlds, illuminating through their work how women’s fashion was tightly tied to their roles.

While the entire book is well written, accessible, and likely to appeal to a broad audience, the final three chapters are especially engaging. In the chapters on the Abortion Caravan and the lesbian journalists, in particular, this extends from the incorporation of oral history interviews, which provide an additional layer of interest to the material. For the Abortion Caravan, Freeman examines the public relations efforts [End Page 693] of Kathryn Keate and Barbara Roberts, ‘young journalists in training’ (124), who negotiated issues of objectivity and neutrality alongside their activism for the national abortion rights campaign. She focuses on Keate and Roberts because they continued to pursue careers as journalists after the Caravan. This chapter is carefully crafted as Freeman is able to trace the women’s individual efforts to garner media coverage of the event, which were important to the Caravan’s success, without losing sight of the fact that the Caravan (including the publicity surrounding it) was very much a collective effort. Her chapter on the portrayal of lesbian identity and sexuality in feminist periodicals is a fascinating examination of how the debates within these publications both shaped and reflected the ‘counter-public sphere’ (159) within which these presses operated. In the chapter on Alanis Obomsawin’s documentaries...

pdf

Share