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8. From Religion to Reform
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Women and Denominational Publishing After 1875, the yearbooks, reports, newsletters, and periodicals generated by Canada’s expanding religious print culture documented a steady stream of activities led and recorded by women. While women’s growing comfort with public print is frequently associated with feminist advancement , the establishment of women’s organizations with their own executives and newsletters just as often served a conservative ideological agenda. In the words of American historian Candy Gunther Brown, “in recovering women’s religious fiction, it is all too easy to confuse the adoption of imaginative styles for doctrinal liberalization [and] the narration of secular experience for secularization.”1 Nonetheless, church activity of any sort could provide a beachhead in advancing the status of women, as illustrated by an 1876 incident involving Agnes Maule Machar, who was already well on her way to becoming one of the country’s major public intellectuals. The lively narrative style adopted by the unidentified secretary for the Second General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada betrays his own amusement as he dutifully recorded the events preserved in the Presbyterian Record under the title “Women’s Rights.” “It is curious to notice how debates sometimes arise in the most unexpected manner, from small beginnings ,” he opens, “and the readiness with which members spring to their feet on the slightest deviation being proposed from their preconceived ideas of propriety.” He then recounts that when “[t]he name of Miss Machar of Kingston was read as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Juvenile Mission to India ... Mr. Laing, Dundas, objected stoutly to the name of any lady appearing in the Assembly Records. He maintained it would be establishing a 139 eight From Religion to Reform precedent wholly unwarranted by scripture, and the practice of the Church. It was not to be tolerated.” Numerous indignant delegates (all male) leapt to Machar’s defence by citing women who played important roles in the Bible: “By whom did St. Paul send his epistle to the Romans? Was it by Titus or any man? No, it was by a lady.... Let us beware that we do not despise our Phoebes and Susannahs.... Women were found last at the cross and first at the grave.... Had the Assembly not already appointed female missionaries and were their reports not before us?” In the face of such massive opposition from men who recognized their indebtedness to the handmaidens of their denomination, the obnoxious Mr. Laing withdrew his objection, “provided it was not regarded as a precedent.” Machar’s nomination was then “sustained by acclamation,”2 and the frequent appearance of her name in print would become one of the hallmarks of the intellectual life of Victorian Canada. A similar spirit of assertion against narrow-minded men informs L.M. Montgomery’s oft-reprinted comic story, “The Strike at Putney ” (1903). Without overt reference to classical precedent, the women of a small-town Presbyterian auxiliary become lesser Lysistratas when they exercise their previously unacknowledged power by withdrawing their regular services for the church (running socials and Sunday school, playing the organ, and singing in the choir) until the men permit a visiting female missionary to speak from the pulpit.3 The massive involvement of women in church-based printing and publishing can be projected from a few tip-of-the-iceberg examples of initiatives in the realm of periodicals that addressed the major Protestant denominations of late nineteenth-century Canada. In 1878, sisters Margaret and Jane Buchan launched the Baptist serial, Canadian Missionary Link (Toronto), which Jane managed until she died in 1901.4 Equally dedicated was Charlotte Geddie Harrington, who edited the Message (Halifax ) for the Presbyterian Women’s Foreign Missionary Society from 1895 until her death in 1906.5 In 1886, a female associate editor joined the management of the Outlook, the official missionary organ of the Methodist Church in Canada. This was followed by Miss S.E. Smith’s founding of the Palm Branch (St. John, New Brunswick), a publication of the Methodists’ Woman’s Missionary Society, which was aimed at “Sunday Schools as well as Circles and Bands” and continued under female editorship as its circulation grew to 6,330 in 1916.6 In the early 1890s Florence Ada Kinton was associate editor of the Salvation Army’s Canadian edition of the War Cry (Toronto).7 While periodicals are often noted in church histories, we know much less about the many individual women who put their efforts into more 140 breaking new ground after 1875 [34...