Review of The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada, by Janice Fiamengo (University of Toronto Press, 2008) 252 pp. paper $25.95 Bibliography, Indexed. black-and-white-photographs.

   

This study, by an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, deals with six women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Their poetry, journalism, essays, and speeches display ferment, spirit, assertiveness, and moral confidence.  They deal with the Issues of the New Woman, the Labour Question, maternal feminism, and matters of faith.

 

The germ of the project was the “ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production Conference”, to which Fiamengo contributed “Baptized with tears and sighs: Sara Jeannette Duncan and the Rhetoric of Feminism”, published by the University of Alberta Press, in 2005.

 

Women began to be hired by Canadian newspapers in the 1880s; women were attracted to journalism because, as an occupation, it was: respectable, clean, and public. (p. 125) The election act barred convicts, lunatics, and idiots, as well as women.  In 1918, Canadian women finally won their federal vote.

 

In a Critical “Introduction: Strong Statement, Trenchant Ideas, Promising Plans”, Fiamengo alludes to The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925, by Mariana Valverde (1991) and Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada, by Jennifer Henderson; Practising Femininity, by Misao Dean (1998); Liberation Deferred: The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, by Carol Bacchi, (1983), and other reference sources.

 

In Chapter One, “Agnes Maule Machar, Christian Radical”, the critic agrees with Machar (1837-1927), also known as “Fidelis”, to dispense with the notion that linked work and higher learning with “unwomanliness.” Machar wrote novels, For King and Country (1874) (about the War of 1812); Marjorie’s Canadian Winter ((1892); Roland Graeme: Knight: A Novel of Our Times (1892), and a collection of short stories, Stories of the British Empire (1913); as well as for Canadian Monthly and National Review (1872-8), Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly and National Review (1878-82), and  The Week (1883-96). “Part of her rhetorical and political effectiveness involved erasing the distinction between the social and the spiritual.” (p. 37) she supported the Salvation Army and opposed the exploitation of factory workers, such that women were exposed to alcohol, dissipation and sexual immorality.

 

In Chapter 2, “The Uses of Wit: Sara Jeanette Duncan’s Self-Fashioning”, the critic deals with “Woman’s World” columns in the Toronto Globe during the mid-1880s by Duncan (1861-1922).  She explored the Woman Question, attending meetings incognito, and published under the pseudonym “Garth Grafton”.  She used parody, invective, metonymy, and comic scenes.  “The verbal concision, structural elegance, and syntactical complexity--- as well as the sardonic assessment of American republicanism---are characteristic.” (pp. 74-5) She also wrote for the Washington Post, the Montreal Star, The Week, and the Indian Daily News, (the last- mentioned was edited by her husband.)  She represented the New Woman in Canada, worked as a literary editor and was a parliamentary correspondent.  She produced interviews, book reviews, sketches, travel articles and tirades. In addition to books of non-fiction, she wrote novels, A Daughter of To-day (1894) and Set in Authority (1906).  She praised poet Pauline Johnson’s poem “Brant: A Memorial Ode.”

 

In Chapter 3, “’This graceful olive branch of the Iroquois’: Pauline Johnson’s Rhetoric of Reconciliation”, the focus is on Duncan’s interview with Johnson (1861-1913), which was published in the Globe, at a time when many Anglo-Canadians anticipated: “with relief”, the “eventual disappearance” of aboriginals. (p. 90)  Johnson was born a Mohawk on the Six Nations Reserve, where she was raised.  Johnson said she wished to “upset the Indian Extermination and Non-education Theory.”(p. 89) The banning of the potlatch and institutionalization of residential schools are the backdrop for a vocabulary (of “dusky”, “exotic”, and tomahawk as weapon) which is “degrading” to Johnson, as well as the sexism of uniting “Red and White in ‘one common Brotherhood’.”

 

The critic examines newspaper accounts of Johnson’s performances, summarizing many reviews.  She analyzes  Johnson’s verse, such as “The Reinternment of Red Jacket”(1884),  “A Cry from an Indian Wife”(1885),  “Brant, A Memorial Ode”(1886);  and prose pieces “My Mother” (1909), “Catherine of the Crow’s Nest (1910), “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1893); “As It Was in the beginning” (1899), “A Pagan in St. Paul’s Cathedral” (1906) and “We-hro’s Sacrifice” (1907), all of them fiction. 

 

In Chapter 4 “Gossip, Chit-Chat, and Life Lessons: Kit Coleman’s Womanly Persona, Fiamengo introduces Kathleen Blake Coleman (1856-1915), as not only belonging to the first generation of Canadian newspaper women, but also as being “probably the most famous of them in her day.” (p. 120) Coleman wrote a regular column “Woman’s Kingdom” for the Toronto Daily Mail, from 1890 to 1911, and produced a syndicated column, traveling widely. She was the first woman war correspondent, when she was sent to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War of 1898 and a founding member if the Canadian Women’s Press Club, in 1904.  She married a bigamist and supported two children. She once dressed as a man and counseled a woman whose son cross-dressed.  In “A Woman’s Page”, she wrote advice columns with anonymous correspondents, but distained recipes and household hints. She overcame criticism of her work as “bad” writing, due to testimonials from her “fans”. She promoted journalism as a profession and disputed the assumption that writing was a relatively easy job “accessible to anyone with a pen.” (p. 134) She opposed birth control and abortion.  She wrote that “no woman worth knowing is without enemies.” (p. 129) She believed in the equality of men and women, that emancipation of women was inevitable, but worked for the Conservative Mail, which officially opposed suffrage.

 

In Chapter 5, “Heroines and Martyrs in the Cause: Suffrage as Holy War in the Journalism of Flora MacDonald Denison” (1867-1921), Fiamengo portrays Denison, a columnist for the Toronto Sunday World, from 1909 to 1913, as a leading activist in the Canadian suffrage movement and is revealed to be the mother of playwright Merrill Denison.  She was separated from her husband and left responsible for supporting her son.   After she attended the International Suffrage Alliance Conference in Copenhagen, she served as president of the Canadian Suffrage Association, from 1911 to 1914.  She championed Emmeline Pankhurst, as “a woman willing to give her freedom or her life for the sake of principle...one we will all want to see and hear.” (p. 154) There is a distinction made between:  “suffragette” and the more moderate “suffragist”, although Denison is associated with both public and private manifestations.  She scorned the church’s concern with “race suicide” (abortion or birth control) and religious hypocrisy.   Her column of storytelling, sensationalism, sentence fragments, incomplete observations, and anecdotes, was titled “The Open Road towards Democracy.”  She stated: “Men need women in politics; women need men in the home.” (p. 162) She praised Elizabeth Fry for prison reform.  She produced one novel and left another incomplete.

 

In Chapter 6, “Nellie McClung and the Rhetoric of the Fair Deal”, we learn McClung (1873-1951) published an edition of her speeches as In Times Like These (1915).  She had the qualities of organization, expression, and development.  She used parody, aphorisms, and witty rebuttals “to revivify” suffrage rhetoric. “The smaller the man the more disposed he is to be jealous.” (p. 203) The critic examines McClung’s published essays in terms of rhetoric, as well as her speeches, as “tactics demonstrating her ability to craft a revolutionary program of emancipation from the restrictive domestic sphere established in conservative discourse.” (p. 178) She combined humour, anecdotes, aphorisms, irony, emotional appeal, and logic. As an orator, she used gestures, modulations of voice, and a blend of humour; denunciation and pathos, according to newspaper accounts.  She used language familiar to her audience, freshening it, revitalizing clichés, redefining overused words; and enlivening standard phrases with her wit, humour, and command of anecdote. She manipulated the words of her opponents.   She wrote two novels Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), and The Second Chance (1910), and a collection of short stories The Black-Creek Stopping House (1912).

 

In the “Conclusion”, the critic compares all six writers in relation to maternal ideology, Christian discourse and social values. 

 

The cover illustration of rapt travelers (engrossed in reading pages from a broadsheet while riding on the Canadian Pacific Railway) is apt, since it appeared in What Actual Settlers Say of the Canadian North-West (Montreal, circa 1888).

 

This is a valuable resource for schools of journalism, programs of Canadian Studies, Departments of English, Canadian and American Literatures, as well as Women’s Studies.

 

                                                 

Anne Burke