Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing by Ruth Panofsky (review)

Toronto Trailblazers comprises biographical vignettes of seven women and their significant early contributions to the publishing industry in English Canada during the twentieth century. Ruth Panofsky asserts that the story of publishing in Canada is a story of women; it is also an obscured story, often eclipsed by narratives focusing on male colleagues and figureheads. Of course, women's roles in print culture have been recognized as essential, but, by comparison, leading female figures have garnered little acknowledgement. For her part, Panofsky wishes to lay the foundation for the expansion of scholarship about women in English Canadian publishing, by relating the stories of Irene Clarke, co-founder of Clarke, Irwin & Company, Eleanor Harman, assistant director of the University of Toronto Press, and others. In presenting the stories of key women in mainstream publishing houses, she reveals the network of female labour and leadership that undergirds a vast and varied industry, one which was centred in Toronto, where many publishers established their national headquarters.

Panofsky structures her work well, sticking to a loose chronology that builds a vivid historical narrative, while weaving together the disparate, yet connected women. Indeed, Panofsky's organizing theory, which is to avoid an ambiguous metanarrative incapable of capturing the complexity of the power of the press, a fascinating proposition. It forces the reader to think about the activity of producing and consuming books as interactive and interdependent processes that cannot be described by a linear paradigm of production which "commences with the writer's idea and proceeds straightforwardly through composition to publication and reception" (22).

Given its biographical focus, the book provides useful insights and evidence into (select) women's everyday lives and roles in book publishing, which can be used to understand larger trends and wider contexts. Her work touches on cultural, labour, and commercial history, and provides the necessary ingredients for more focused studies. The intricate and connected community that Panofsky captures and describes reiterates the importance of close biographical research. It also verges on the innovative through its almost affective focus on the shared experiences and vocational tribulations of women workers. Panofsky's dramatis personae include a major publisher, several scholarly and trade editors, and a literary agent. Her choice of subject and focus reminds scholars that degrees of separation between academic and trade publishing, in which historical literature was and is intricately implicated, are terse and acute. Therefore, Panofsky's insight can act as a self-reflexive tool for historians grappling with their oscillating roles as public intellectual and private scholar. Through interviews and archival research, Panofsky demonstrates the close connection Canada's cultural producers had with systems of capital, nationalism, and imperialism.

Panofsky builds on her previous scholarship, which focused on the Macmillan Company of Canada and reported on the lives of other notable women in publishing, including Ellen Elliot and Gladys Neale. However, the overly commemorative tone of the book detracts from its critical analysis. Overall, the work offers a basic assessment of the women's interaction with the concepts of feminism and nationalism, but which could have gone further to situate the women in their specific social and cultural contexts. For example, while Panofsky points out the nationalist aspirations and tendencies of several women, she neither fully explores the ramifications this had on the cultural objects they produced nor the ideas about the nation they helped to circulate.

Panofsky's selection of women also invites reflection. Early on, she points out that the women she has chosen were "white, middle-class, educated, and mobile, free to move in search of fulfilling work" (16). It is good that Panofsky is aware of the privilege these women carried. However, identifying the particular positionalities of her subjects and their racial and class biases leaves race as an essential category of historical analysis that is unaddressed. Although Panofsky knows about important publishing enterprises that centred upon women of colour, she placed them outside the scope of her project (23).

Toronto Trailblazers...