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Reviewed by:
  • Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–65
  • Valerie Korinek
Cameron Duder ,Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–65 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2010)

Cover art is not normally within the purview of the book reviewer. But in this case, praise for Cameron Duder’s Awfully Devoted Women must begin with the striking cover image of Frieda Fraser literally and metaphorically paddling her own canoe. Taken in 1936, on a camping trip in northern Ontario, the photo captures Fraser’s muscular naked back, cropped hair and hint of a smile as she canoes across a northern lake. Doing historical justice to this moment is the purpose of Duder’s book. And it is a tour de force of painstaking research, careful analysis, and compelling findings, as Duder expertly weaves such singular moments into a compelling narrative of women who desired women. Decades before Winnipeg artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan took back the wilderness as Lesbian National Park Rangers (http://www.fingerinthedyke.ca/rangers_mov.html) we have this memento of Fraser’s entourage paddling into the heart of Canadian Shield country, and successfully disrupting Canadian history in the process.

Duder, an independent historian and scholar, has amassed a terrific collection of archival, print, and oral histories, to produce this important work – the first comprehensive study to document the history of lesbians in Canada prior to the mid-sixties. Well versed in the transnational literature of lesbian histories, this book provides a welcome addition to both gendered and sexuality histories. Conversant with contemporary scholarly debates about sexual identities and challenges inherent in writing histories of people who never claimed such “identities” (as explicitly lesbian actors) Duder’s study eschews these debates in favour of concentrating on historicizing the lived experiences. Tracing the development of sexological literature, and the histories of romantic friendships amongst women, Duder provides an excellent model for other historians of sexuality to follow. In part one, Duder historicizes the “awfully devoted women” of the pre-World War II era. Working from private documents, novels, and extant media sources, he carefully reconstructs the language of upper-middle-class women’s same-sex [End Page 204] desires. Whether physician Frieda Fraser and her partner Edith (Bud) Bickerton Williams, or social reformer Charlotte Whitton and her partner Margaret Grier, the correspondence reveals the intimate nature of those relationships. Significantly, Duder had access to new sources about Whitton, as her final personal files were released to researchers in 1999. What, many have wondered, did Whitton want to keep secret in those files? The answer is a bit more complex than anticipated. Not surprisingly, she clearly wanted to protect her relationship with Grier. But she was also keeping her own personal failure secret, since Whitton’s work commitments kept her from Grier’s bedside when she died. The grief, anger and despair expressed by Whitton at this irrevocable situation were the source of some of her darkest days and clearly haunted her long afterwards. The portrait that emerges from this additional archival material is one of a grieving widow. Classifying the Whitton and Grier partnership as a same-sex marriage in all but name seems conclusive now that these missing pieces of the puzzle have been revealed.

While a number of previous scholars, both in the American and Canadian historiography, have resisted “labeling” women like Fraser and Williams, or Whitton and Grier, without conclusive proof of sexual activity, Duder’s work illustrates the flaws in such debates. First, it overlooks the class, gendered and racial conventions elite and middle class women operated under, particularly with respect to explicit sexual discussions and/or writings about sexual activity. Secondly, it illustrates that the evidence we do have has been purposefully coded so as to allow the writers their freedom of expression, at the same time it prevented random readers from de-coding the true meaning. Duder encourages others to adopt careful readings, to look for repetitious coded phrases (such as “awfully devoted women” used to denote lesbian couples) and to be alert to the full possibilities of language. In doing so, his assertions that these relationships were sexual seems a logical conclusion to make. Impressively, in both...

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