| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 50

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Catherine A. Cavanagh and Randi R. Warne, eds., Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women's History (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000)

BUILDING ON THE SUCCESS of their interdisciplinary collection of articles on women in Alberta, Standing on New Ground (1993), editors Cavanaugh and Warne's most recent publication extends the geographical boundaries of their purview to all of Western Canada. Telling Tales brings together eleven contributors, each furnishing a single article; only three of the articles had previously been published. The temporal band of this compilation encompasses the 1880s to roughly the 1940s. The editors' claim to focus on women of both minority and dominant cultures promises a welcome addition to the history of the Canadian West.	1
The first three articles study the "imperial gaze": colonials' perceptions of Natives. Myra Rutherdale examines the interplay between approved gendered scripts of masculinity and femininity against the daily demands of the mission field in the Canadian North-West. Using missionary correspondence, letters and memoirs, she convincingly reveals the fluidity of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Missionary wives were to act as role models to Native women, teaching them to adopt imperial women's ways; single missionary women had greater freedom in renegotiating gender roles as necessity required them to do more "men's work" for basic survival. They legitimated their transcendence from prescribed roles through their higher calling — service to Christ. In this way, though they challenged gender expectations, both missionary wives and single female missionaries remained true to their role as agents of the Empire. Sarah Carter's previously published article analyzes shifting representations of Native peoples in Fort McLeod, Alberta, during the early settlement period. Using an eclectic range of sources, Carter demonstrates that racialized and gendered representations of Native women as dissolute and dangerous served to solidify social boundaries and hierarchies and also justified the use of force against indigenous peoples. Nancy Pagh approaches non-Native perceptions of Natives through the accounts of British female tourists. Using two travel diaries from the 1880s and 1890s, and two more from the 1920s and 1930s, she traces the shifts in feminine travel discourse about Native women from condescension to a more ambiguous mix of connection and distance. Once Native women were no longer a threat to the imperial project, she argues, they could be romanticized as a dwindling culture, allowing for a sympathetic portrait, one in which gender connections sometimes overrode race differences. A striking feature of this article is the interesting source material and one hopes for more analyses of such travel diaries.	2
Although the editors purport to offer a "cross-cultural/multicultural" approach, these three articles are not about First Nations women; all three consider non-Natives' perceptions of Natives. Native women do not have a voice. We do not learn about Natives' understandings of missionary women, European settlers, or female travellers. Their stories remain untold. This is especially problematic as the editors speak to the multicultural theme as a highlight in this edited collection, even stating in their introduction: "women's history in western Canada predates the arrival of Europeans." Readers who are led to believe from this statement that Aboriginal women will be highlighted in this collection will be disappointed. Indeed, few articles study non-White women.	3
Three chapters consider change and continuity in the lives of non-White and immigrant women. Sherry Edmunds-Flett contributes a short article on 19th-century African Canadian women on Vancouver Island. The racism this community sought to leave behind in California followed them, and they remained an isolated and vulnerable working-class community, albeit one that was able to build a strong solidarity. This piece deals with an important subject in Canadian history that has remained largely unexplored, but the article is little more than a somewhat haphazard litany of activities and events in the lives of a handful of African Canadians on Vancouver Island. One looks forward to a more comprehensive and cogent analysis on this subject. Frieda Esau Klippenstein's article on Mennonite domestic servants in Winnipeg between the 1920s and 1950s uncovers the complexity of gender, ethnicity, and class relations. Responding to the need of Winnipeg's élite families for domestic servants, immigrant Mennonite farm girls fashioned themselves into domestic workers so as to support their families. Female domestic work was accepted by Mennonites as "mission" work, and thus rendered respectable. Mennonite Girl's Homes were developed in response to the difficulties and abuse some of these young women experienced. Although these homes were established and run by female Mennonite leaders, male church leaders seized the reins of the refuge homes. In this way, the mission work of Mennonite girls was configured so as to reinforce rather than weaken gender roles. While Klippenstein relies on oral history, Frances Swyripa turns to criminal court records in her study of sex and gender in Alberta's Ukrainian Bloc Settlement between the wars. Previously published in 1995, this is a fascinating study of the complexity of immigrant women's responses to domestic violence and sexual assault, wherein they sometimes invoked the informal traditions of their community, other times welcomed outside intervention, and frequently attempted to manipulate the law to their own ends.	4
Two articles study well-known élite women. Catherine Cavanaugh presents Irene Parlby as a middle-class British woman who immigrated to Western Canada because it afforded her the opportunity to negotiate the disabilities imposed on her by her sex. Although Parlby came to see herself as a Western Canadian, her public persona of Alberta legislator remained that of "imperial daughter," a civilizing influence in the untamed West. Through her study of Parlby, an atypical woman to be sure, Cavanagh both challenges the construction of British immigrant women as unrelenting advocates of British imperialism and scrutinizes notions of the West as inherently liberating. Cavanagh concludes that British women were both "bound and free as they adapted to their new circumstances in Canada." Gertrude Telford, an Ontarian who migrated to Saskatchewan, was an educated woman of privilege who also confronted both resistance and acceptance in her attempts to locate a position of power for herself in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Ann Leger-Anderson's exploration of Telford's marriage and family life reveals that Gertrude Telford's public ambitions were thwarted by her own internalized notions of acceptable womanhood, her marriage, and the political culture of the CCF. This study successfully illustrates that even those with relative social privilege, working within an ideologically progressive community, were bound by prevailing gendered and classed scripts.	5
Two articles contribute to our understanding of women's daily lives. Utilizing women's diaries and memoirs, Sheila McManus considers women's descriptions of their work against the public representation of that work in the women's pages of farm newspapers and the records of the United Farm Women of Alberta in the early 20th century. The conditions of rural life demanded that women expand their labour beyond the private sphere, but this participation was downplayed by the press or altogether ignored. Many women might have entered the masculine space of the fields regularly, but the appropriate division of labour and gender hierarchy was maintained for public perception and record. Using similar sources, Nanci Langford also analyzes the daily lives of women on settlement frontiers in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, sharpening her focus on the experiences of childbirth. Homesteading women faced an isolated, lonely, and rough existence, and birthing was a risky business. In this previously published article, Langford demonstrates that studying pregnancy and childbirth focus our attention on the social costs of settlement, challenging western myths of heroic individualism and manly triumph over nature.	6
Despite the editors' commitment to studying "the West" as a singular entity, all ten of the aforementioned articles situate themselves within various locales of Western Canada, and none cross provincial boundaries. A singular Western sensibility fails to materialize. The exception is Beverley Boutilier's political analysis of the role and image of western women in the founding of the Victorian Order of Nurses by the National Council of Women of Canada. Boutilier demonstrates that national concerns took precedence over regional issues, thus politicizing the attempt to spread medical aid to western women. Boutilier's study suggests the ways in which regional identities divided women and weakened them politically.	7
There are many positive features to this collection: most of the articles tease out the tensions between the rhetoric and the realities of women's lives; interesting and innovative sources are employed; women's layered and sometimes contradictory identities are unveiled; and women's resistance to oppressive conditions is explored. Yet, as mentioned, the editors disappoint in their attempt to develop a "Western" collection, and their claim to multiculturalism is lean. However, the most serious drawback to this collection is its datedness. A check of the endnotes in the articles reveals that, in all but one article, the most recent reference is to 1994, and several have nothing beyond 1991. Both the editors' introduction and Leger-Anderson's indicate an inclusion of more recent work. Yet the freshness of the introduction is revealed in the endnotes only, as the body of the introduction suggests a limited understanding of some of the current and rich literature in western women's history. One is left with a collection of articles lacking vitality and inspiration. The collection feels stalled, as though the editors searched unsuccessfully for several years for a publisher and, when UBC Press thankfully came on board, the introduction was updated in the most painless, superficial manner, a current article was tacked on, and the original pieces retained. One is left with an earnest, but stale, collection.	8
Diane Purvey University College of the Cariboo

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