Compelled to Act: Histories of Women's Activism in Western Canada ed. by Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford (review)

Compelled to Act is a wide-ranging collection of essays on women's activism in Western Canada. From the suffrage movement to the peace activism of the Alberta branch of the Voice of Women and Indigenous activism in 1980s Saskatchewan, this collection provides insight into diverse forms of activism.

Nine of the ten essays were originally presented at the 2016 conference "History of Women's Political and Social Activism in the Canadian West." As Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford indicate in their introduction, however, the edited collection published in 2020 differs from the conference in a few significant ways. Global events and a resurgence of women's activism in Canada and abroad have shifted the political terrain in which historians of women's activism live and work. Curiously, the conference was "more diverse in geographical and racial representation than this volume" (4), and we might further ask whether the collection shares the conference goals "to highlight regional scholarship and give student scholars a forum to share their research" (5). While Compelled to Act succeeds in the first instance as an exciting model of regional scholarship that will invigorate readers to reconsider the importance of region to histories of gender and activism, it is less successful in providing a forum for student scholars. Of the fourteen contributors, twelve completed their dissertations prior to 2016, many of them are well-known tenured professors, and only one of the fourteen was still a graduate student at the time of publication.

The book's regional focus raises important methodological questions. How have regional stereotypes of conservativism and religiosity obscured both more radical and more everyday forms of resistance, often leading to a situation in which Western Canada is under-analyzed in national histories of activism? How have activists resisted, negotiated, been constrained by, or otherwise been in relationship with regional politics, family life, and organized religion?

Glimpsed throughout the book are various answers to the knotty question of how we define activism. Which actions are radical enough to be properly activist? Allyson Stevenson and Cheryl Troupe's essay on the development of Indigenous women's political activism, for example, emphasizes how these more organizational forms of activism are rooted in everyday resistance, in discussions around kitchen tables and within familial and community relationships. Pushing the question even further: do movements even need to be radical or progressive to be called activist? Carol Williams' chapter on pro-life activism and resistance to both the Calgary Abortion Information Centre and the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre, indicates that pro-family, conservative movements can also be examined through the vocabulary of activism.

Other chapters address journalistic activism or advocacy, at times using the terms interchangeably. Stephanie Bangarth discusses female Nisei journalists who used their columns to discuss race and gender, advocating for and advising their Japanese Canadian and Japanese American readers, who were incarcerated during the Second World War. Her essay analyzes columns that were more directly political and columns that provided fashion advice, thus blurring the definitional boundaries between activism, advocacy, and "lifestyle" advice.

In other words, these essays on activist movements and on the biographies of activist women are, unsurprisingly, complicated and messy. That is the beauty of them. They ask hard questions about what people were willing to compromise, or moments when their ideals fell vastly short of what we would like their ideals to have been. Erika Dyck and Karissa Patton begin their chapter by reminding readers of the "parallel histories of birth control activism and eugenics activism" (198). In a chapter on how women intervened on the picket lines during the 1932 Crowsnest Pass strike, Laurel Halladay concludes that they did so in ways that relied on gendered assumptions about women and emotionality, and about their roles within working-class families. In Cynthia Loch-Drake's chapter, we are confronted by Ethel Wilson, a unionist who...