Attitudes in Canadian Women’s History 1945–1975

Review Article: Attitudes in Canadian Women's History 1945-1975 MARGARET W. ANDREWS Over the past thirty years, the writing of Canadian women's history has been used to a remarkable degree as propaganda to encourage readers either to emulate women of the past or to correct injustices inflicted upon women. The message in this propaganda has, until recently, been different for Canada's two leading cultures: in English Canada, it was that women should change their position in society; in French Canada, that they should maintain past traditions. But in both, the process of describing the past has brought historians to reveal, implicitly, aspects of themselves which give insight into the culture and society in which they were writing. In recent years the differences between women's history written in the two cultures has narrowed considerably . Until the 1970s, Canadian women's history written in English was largely devoted to "Great Women" and a "Great Event," the enfranchisement of women. In developing these two themes, the writers of women's history attempted to enlarge the notion of womanhood. They portrayed women as super-beings, simultaneously complete as women and successful in men's ways - able to invade the world of masculine work without abandoning their uniquely feminine characteristics and responsibilities. However, a preoccupation with sexually-based distinctions and sexual stereotypes pervades their writing and shapes their interpretations.1 Female subjects of biography in these years were women believed by their biographers to be of national stature, commonly those who succeeded in areas which were traditionally preserves of men. For example: E. Cora Hind (1861-1942), the authority on agricultural and marketing questions for the Winnipeg Free Press, was an expert with an international reputation. Journal ofCanadian Studies Emily Murphy (1868-1933), the first woman in the British Empire to be a police magistrate, was one of five (all women) who instituted a succesful action for recognition of women as "persons" under the British North America Act. Agnes Macphail (1890-1954) was the first woman to sit in the Canadian House of Commons, and was a delegate to the League of Nations. Helen Gregory MacGill (1864-1947) was British Columbia's first woman judge and a crusader for law reforms.2 The consistent choice of subjects active in traditionally male areas suggests that the biographers themselves believed these to be of greater importance than the traditionally female. The Clear Spirit, a collective biography of twenty Canadian women, reflects the same prejudice in a less extreme form. Of the twenty women, nine worked in fields viewed traditionally as men's, five in fields long shared by men and women, and only six in fields traditionally considered to be women's. These proportions suggest that the collection reflects not so much the real past as feminist hopes for the future, a proposition supported by the editor's admission that nurses and teachers were omitted although there were a "multitude of candidates.''3 Along with their desire to show women as successful competitors of men, biographers had a determination to show that women did not forfeit their femininity in the competition. Those women who remained single are shown as warm and charming people with hosts of devoted friends, even suitors.4 Agnes Macphail's biographers took care to point out that, although she seemed a mannish spinster in tailored serge in public, she was very different in private - a ''young woman who glowed and laughed and danced with her friends. "5 Perhaps most significant of all in its acknowledgement of the desire to hold fast to female privileges is the biographers' consistent description of women in such terms as "always a lady, gentle, dignified."6 Those Great Women who married are depicted at considerable length as able to assume the role of career woman without abandoning that of wife and mother.7 They are uniformly shown as supportive wives, although the portrayals vary. At one extreme is Elizabeth Waterston's picture 69 of L.M. Montgomery's (1874-1942) unquestioning acceptance of a wife's duties: The new life would have its new routines: running the manse, helping with parish work, women's groups, choirs, Sunday school. New duties would be added, a...