Kym Bird - Redressing The Past - The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920-McGill-Queen's University Press (2004)

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Redressing the Past

The Politics of Early English-
Canadian Womens Drama,
18801920
kym bird

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For the committee of women in my life: Thelma Florence

Bird, Janice Mae Bird, and Mary-Ruth Wright. All things
good and sweet are rooted in the embrace of your love.
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prélim.fm Page vii Monday, January 12, 2004 1:35 PM
Contents
List of Illustrations iv
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Feminist Politics and the Recovery
of Womens Drama 3
1 Leaping into the Breeches: Liberal Feminism in
Sarah Anne Curzons Laura Secord and
The Sweet Girl Graduate 17
2 Performing Politics: Propaganda, Parody,
and the Mock Parliament 59
3 Mothers of a New and Virile Race!:
Liberalism and Social Purity in the Life and Plays
of Kate Simpson Hayes 92
4 Instructive and Wholesome: Domestic Feminism,
Social Gospel, and the Protestant Plays of
Clara Rothwell Anderson 138
Conclusion 194
Appendix 199
Notes 215
Bibliography 239
Index 257
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prélim.fm Page ix Monday, January 12, 2004 1:35 PM
Illustrations
Sarah Anne Curzon, within a few years of her death in

1898 / 29
From the original manuscript of Laura Secord, 1925 / 37
Parliamentary agenda for February 1896 mock
parliament / 60
The Pavilion at Allan Gardens, Toronto (circa 1884),
venue of the mock parliaments / 63
The Pavilion, circa 1890s / 64
Evidence of collective creation, February 1896 mock
parliament / 73
Program of the 1896 Toronto mock parliament / 79
Stage plan for the 1896 mock parliament / 80
Kate Simpson Hayes, Regina 1889 / 97
Kate Simpson Hayes, probably taken during her trip to the
Yukon, circa 1908 / 101
Immigration advertisement placed by Hayes in a British
paper circa 1912 / 112
Playbill for Hayess A Domestic Disturbance / 116
Playbill for Hayess TOther from Which / 117
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x Illustrations
Clara Rothwells extended family during the 1880s / 143

Benjamin Rothwell and his second wife, Marian Britton,
taken some years after their marriage in 1888 / 145
Clara Anderson and her young family, circa 1910 / 148
Andersons trademark, the old woman in the rocking
chair / 153
The women of the MacKay United Church congregation,
circa 1950 / 154
Andersons correspondence / 157
Clara Rothwell Anderson, circa 1926 / 158
Clara Rothwell Anderson, circa 1930 / 159
The cast of Aunt Susan Tibbs of Peppers Corners,
1919 / 173
Playbill for An Old Time Ladies Aid Business Meeting at
Mohawk Crossroads / 184
The cast of The Young Village Doctor, circa 1922 / 187
prélim.fm Page xi Monday, January 12, 2004 1:35 PM
Acknowledgments
I owe so much to so many who assisted and encouraged this project in

all its manifestations: my strong, funny, creative, gracious, and beauti-
ful mother, Thelma Bird, for her unwavering desire to see me succeed
and for never expecting me to get married and have children!; my dear,
dear sisters Jan and Mary-Ruth, for the love and laughter they bring to
my life; Francesco Pontuale, for his companionship, his intelligence,
and his expertise, and for keeping me rooted and loving me through-
out; my former supervisor, Robert Wallace, for his patient care and
guidance during the first incarnation of this work as a F h@ dissertation
at York University. I would like to thank Diana Cooper-Clark, whose
magic has charmed every aspect of my career, Ed Nyman my title is
his Victor Shea, and William Whitla for the fantasy, Marcia Blumberg
for her love of theatre, and Paul Halferty for his love of me!
Without writer and researcher Anton Wagners ground-breaking
and
, this work, quite simply, could not have been done. I also wish to
thank the good, the kind, and the encyclopedic Richard Plant at the
Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto, for all
of his assistance, and particularly for helping me unearth Clara Ander-
sons family. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Patrick B. ONeill at
Mount Saint Vincent University for making available to me texts from
his collection, for his support and correspondence, for his insights into
Regina Theatre, and for his knowledge of Hayes. Among the library
staff who have supported this research, Mary Lehane, manager of the
Resource Sharing Department, York University, is pure gold: she
prélim.fm Page xii Monday, January 12, 2004 1:35 PM
xii Acknowledgments
M?JK

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Once open the books, you have to face the underside of everything
youve loved the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag even
the best voices have had to mumble through, the silence burying
unwanted children women, deviants, witnesses
Adrienne Rich
Introduction

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Sarah Ann Curzon de-
scribed her motive for writing Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 in a
laconic preface: To rescue from oblivion the name of a brave woman,
and set it in its proper place among the heroes of Canadian history.
Curzon noted a paucity of Canadian history in general. Something in
its teaching, she surmised, caused Canadians to think that their coun-
try had no historical past. Curzon intended to fill this lack with
womens stories.

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Laura Secord was the first self-consciously feminist dramatic text writ-
ten in nineteenth-century Canada. Its preface was the first call for a

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5 Introduction
Some of these plays were a form of political agitation like petitions,

pamphlets, exhibitions, and lectures written with the intention of par-
ticipating in womens emancipation from the constraints of a patriar-
chal society and widening the purview of their social and professional
roles. All take as their subject issues of gender and politics that operate
within the two major feminist ideologies of the woman movement: lib-
eral or equality feminism, and domestic or maternal feminism.
Their purpose is by and large didactic and political; they set out to con-
struct a new role for women. They touch upon the movements greatest
struggles, such as suffrage, access to higher education, property and
prohibition, and are aligned with related movements, like Social Gospel
and Social Purity, in which womens politics were cultivated.
In the broadest terms, I argue here that these plays, the conditions un-
der which they were produced, the lives of the women who wrote them,
and the genres they employ are expressive of womens contradictory re-
lation to politics within the woman movement. On the one hand, they
struggle towards social and political emancipation, and on the other,
they affirm patriarchal structures and the ideology of separate spheres
In Curzons preface, drama and history are not in an oppositional

relation of fiction and fact but complementary: was writ-
ten to recover the actions of a heroic woman for a national history.
Curzons drama takes its material from the neglected or forgotten
historical record and serves the purpose of educating those in the
present about the past. Her history has the same pedagogical and
political agenda. Despite its reification of dominant imperialist histori-
ography, Curzons preface presents a feminist challenge to the contem-
porary absence of a national history by addressing both the form and
aesthetics of conventional constructions of the past constructions
that, by and large, focus on masculine political and military history,
omitting the role of women in the national project. Categories like
drama and story emphasize the of history: if history is rec-
ognized as a construction, it can be fashioned in different forms.
Although many of the historical papers Curzon wrote enact the pa-
triarchal tradition of praising the brave deeds of valorous men in bat-
tle, her preface suggests that what constitutes history or a historic act is
determined by the gender position from which it is written. Womens
contributions to the historical record require an alternative, affective
aesthetics, as the phrase to a womans mind suggests. They call for
pathos on the part of the historian and, in the case of ,
a recognition that, unlike the masculinist record commemorating
violent acts in which life is taken, feminine history is characterized by

the transfer onto the public/male sphere of the private virtues of duty to
ones family, maternal care, and nurture that governed middle-class
womens lives.
The principles underpinning Curzons recuperation remain over-
determined by the master categories implicit in language like great
and woman. Greatness establishes a timeless, transcendent standard
of judgment that, even among the category of texts designated as
womens writing, uncritically adopts the metaphysics established by
patriarchal history and drama. It asserts a hierarchy of values that priv-
ileges patriarchal law, identity, and nationalism. Woman is a univer-
sal subject position outside of history and culture and beyond class and
race. Hence, Curzons recuperative strategy leaves unchallenged the pa-
triarchal paradigm within liberal humanism. Yet one cannot discount
her project based on a contemporary feminist awareness of the weak-
nesses like universalization inherent within an essentialist position.
In the 1980s, in a book largely critical of liberal feminism, Toril Moi
argued that it still remains politically essential for feminists to defend
women as women in order to counteract the patriarchal oppression
that precisely despises women as women (Moi 13). Nearly two de-
cades later this remains true: it is still necessary to recover texts by
women in order to contradict patriarchal biases against womens writ-
ing, especially when one is working in a discipline such as Canadian
womens drama that has not produced any substantial bibliographic
work since the early 1980s.
The spirit of this recovery owes much to a liberal feminist aim sim-
ilar to Curzons own to see womens contributions to culture ac-
corded some measure of equality with mens in historical discourse. But
it is not governed, implicitly or explicitly, by the desire to construct a
womens canon of great dramatic works to place alongside that of men.
It owes a good deal to radical feminism, whose aim it has been to re-
store a female perspective [to literary history] by extending knowl-
edge about womens experiences and contributions to culture (Greene
and Kahn 2). For this reason I am only incidentally interested in relat-
ing womens drama to the dominant dramatic tradition made up of
texts by men. This too would be a worthy exercise, but it would not
empower contemporary women to define drama through their own po-
litical issues and history or to understand the ways in which it has con-
tributed to their political and social emancipation.
The approach of my study has also been significantly influenced by
materialist feminism, particularly its critique of patriarchy and the sex-
ual division of labour through the elaboration of the relation between
drama, ideology, and the material practices of the woman movement,
Social Gospel and social reform. I critique the essentializing propensi-
7 Introduction
ties within liberal and radical feminism by problematizing woman as

an empirical entity and the logic of inclusion based on a homogeneous
gender identity, underscoring the role of class and history in creating
the oppression of women (Case 82). This book focuses as much on
the conditions in which women wrote and produced their dramas as on
dramatic texts themselves. My interest in history, biography, and poli-
tics is founded on the materialist feminist belief, as Sue-Ellen Case con-
tends, that womens experiences cannot be understood outside their
specific historical context, which includes a specific type of economic
organization and specific developments in national history and politi-
cal organization (ibid.).
Curzons plea for a womens history was properly answered only
during the renaissance of the womens movement in the 1960s, when
second-wave feminists began to raise questions about the place of
women in Canada [and] the absence of women from analysis became a
challenge to historians (Prentice et al., 2nd ed. 1). The research of
Ramsay Cook, Wendy Mitchinson, Carole Bacchi, Linda Kealey, and
Veronica Strong-Boag retrieved the voices and mapped the social and
political landscape of the early woman movement. The ground-
breaking work of Alison Prentice, Paula Bourne, Gail Cuthbert Brandt,
Beth Light, Wendy Mitchinson, and Naomi Black came to fruition in
the first Canadian womens history, published in 1988. The recovery of
a womens literary past began in earnest somewhat later, in the late
1980s and 90s. Lorraine McMullen, Sandra Campbell, Carole Gerson,
Carrie MacMillan, and Elizabeth Waterston provided us with a rich
and various compendium of early Canadian womens prose writing in
a variety of genres.
Canadian womens dramatic works have not enjoyed the same re-
vival. To be fair, such work is intrinsically ephemeral. Some plays were
never written down, others were not published, and of those that were,
few copies circulated. Many have simply disappeared, but their traces
can be found in newspaper accounts, letters, and dairies. It will surprise
most readers that women of this period, like Sister Mary Agnes, wrote
over forty plays, Alice Maude Smith wrote at least thirty, and Ann
Botham MacDonnel, among her other works, wrote two volumes of
plays for children. Among the richest sources for early womens dra-
mas are the , Patrick ONeills Checklist of Cana-
dian Dramatic Materials, and Ann Saddlemyers Circus Feminus. If
Anonymous is a woman, and from the subjects of her works it looks
suspiciously as if she is, she wrote many more plays than I have in-
cluded in my bibliography. Curzons plays have been reprinted. A good
many plays by women are collected in the Canadian Collection at
Mount Saint Vincent University Library in Halifax. But still more are

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9 Introduction
had been politicized by modern playwrights such as Shaw and Ibsen,

and used the stage and celebrity to raise womens consciousness in the
struggle for womens rights and womens emancipation (ibid.).
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Canada had also entered
a period of intense theatrical activity. According to Richard Plant, ap-
proximately forty theatres with a capacity of 1,000 or more were
opened between 1873 and 1892 (152). Many cities, small and large,
boasted theatrical venues, and in some years there were over 300
companies touring the country (1512). The touring circuits that
brought companies to these venues, however, were mainly American,
and featured British and American shows and stars. In the absence of a
home-grown professional theatre, aspiring Canadian actresses (and
there were many) went abroad, usually to New York and London.
There was, nevertheless, an alliance between drama, theatre, and
womens emancipation. Not actresses, but women activists and play-
wrights, realized that dramatic texts and stage performances were a
powerful, persuasive means of drawing attention to womens issues.
This alliance was the by-product not of the professional theatre but
of political and amateur theatrical traditions with long-established
roots in Canada. Political theatre had a substantial history in this coun-
try by the end of the nineteenth century. It can be said to date back to
the first play composed and performed in North American, Le Théâtre
de Neptune (published in France in 1609), which celebrated French im-
perial power in the New World. In the eighteenth century, Robert
Rodgers, George Cockings, and Edward Winslow all wrote memorable
political plays. ! But it was the proliferation of print media in the nine-
teenth century twenty news sheets in 1813 grew to 291 newspapers
in 1857, with many other short-lived ventures in the years between
(Plant 150) that really sustained and fostered satirical political drama
in this country. Some political satires were staged the most controver-
sial was The Provincial Association; or, Taxing Each Other (1845),
which incited a riot at its performance in Saint John, New Brunswick.
However, most were closet dramas, published in papers and pam-
phlets. Curzons Sweet Girl Graduate, with its attack on the ideology
of separate spheres that denies women access to university, belongs to
this tradition.
Laura Secord is written in the less popular nineteenth-century genre of
historical drama. Like similar plays of its kind, most notably Charles
Mairs Tecumseh (1886) and Catharine Nina Merritts When George the
Third Was King (1897), Laura Secord is a Loyalist drama; but its femi-
nist politics also deliberately challenge a patriarchal view of history and
galvanized womens participation in historical recovery. Both Curzons
plays had a material effect on political actions mounted by women.

The mock parliaments are also political satire. Developed as propa-

ganda, they are a form of agitprop that was used by suffrage organiza-
tions to increase public awareness (while generating a little money) of a
whole host of womens issues, particularly the right to vote. They too
proved to be very effective political tools.
The plays of Kate Simpson Hayes and Clara Rothwell Anderson be-
long to the tradition of amateur drama that became prevalent in the
early twentieth century [and included] childrens plays, and educa-
tional, temperance, and religious dramas, [and] humorous dramatic
sketches (Plant 154). Their plays were nevertheless also political.
Hayess comedies helped to launch Reginas first Literary and Musical
Association; some were staged at the town hall and the North West
Mounted Police barracks. and pro-
pound a domestic feminist belief in womens maternity and moral su-
periority within the ideology of Social Purity. Andersons plays were
put on by the Ladies Aid of MacKay Presbyterian Church in Ottawa
and bought by similar organizations in other churches, which staged
them to raise money for parish projects. Their particular brand of com-
edy mixes domestic feminism with the Social Gospel.
In order to draw connections between politics and genre, I use such
contemporary theorists as Marta Straznicky, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric
Jameson, Jake Zipes, and Northrop Frye. In differing ways, their work
allows me to specify how the codes and conventions of several dra-
matic sub-genres function in relation to, and repeat the contradictions
within, the politics of feminism in the plays. Straznickys work on
womens closet drama provides me with a means of drawing connec-
tions between the politics governing Curzons life and writing and the
dialectic of the private/public split implicit in her plays. I use Hutch-
eons conceptualization of postmodernist parody and satire to establish
a reading practice based on parody and irony that exposes the contra-
dictions within the formal and ideological critique of the mock parlia-
ments and Andersons character-sketch entertainments. I use Jameson
and Zipes to discuss the ways in which Hayess fairy tale inculcates the
ideology of Social Purity, and Frye to establish how the deep structures
of comedy both serve and challenge the politics of domestic feminism.
The woman movement out of which this body of plays emerges was
initiated during a transitional age in Canadian history. As Mariana
Valverde writes:

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The woman movement was the preferred term for womens activism
at a time when most involved in womens politics would have been re-
luctant to adopt the appellation feminist, as it implied a quite ex-
treme degree of commitment to womens issues (Prentice et al., 1st ed.
170). It embraced a whole host of organizations to address womens
growing dissatisfaction with both their own position in society and
what they considered social deterioration in the wake of industrializa-
tion and immigration. As Valverde says of Social Purity, it was a by-
product, in many ways, of a newly developing urban bourgeoisie, cer-
tain sectors of which initiated a philanthropic project to reform or re-
generate Canadian society (15). The woman movement was formed
in the wake of womens en masse transition from their homes into the
paid labour force. Working-class women took on jobs in factories and
domestic service, and middle-class women joined the professions of
teaching, nursing, social work, journalism, law, and medicine. Among
the movements number was a growing body of educated women
[who] were sensitized to the need for public action. A great many of its
eventual proponents (one estimate says one in eight) became involved
in womens organizations that initiated a wide array of social, eco-
nomic, and political reforms (Prentice et al., 1st ed. 211).
In general, the feminist politics of these societies fell into two over-
lapping categories: liberal and domestic. While these ideologies are dis-
tinct, even oppositional, women often had no difficulty subscribing to
both at the same time; Most accept[ed] both types of feminist argu-
ments, emphasizing one or the other as seemed most useful or appro-
priate, apparently without feeling any contradiction (Prentice et al.,
2nd ed. 190). Liberal feminism operated in the British philosophical tra-
dition of Mary Wollstonecraft (17591797), Thomas Paine (1737
1809), and John Stuart Mill (18061873). The first generation of Ca-
nadian feminists appeared in the 1870s and 80s, according to Linda
Kealey, and demanded the same rights and privileges for women as
those accorded men (Not Unreasonable 9). These feminists recog-
nized womens need for personal autonomy, an increased role in the
public sphere, and educational and occupational equality. Important
among this first group were suffrage organizations including the To-
ronto Womens Literary Club, the Dominion Womens Enfranchise-

ment Association, the Canadian Suffrage Association, the National

Equal Franchise Union, and the Manitoba Political Equality League, as
well as professional associations like the Canadian Womens Press
Club. These liberal-leaning organizations called attention to aspects of
womens rights in the public sphere such as enfranchisement, post-sec-
ondary education, and access to the professions.
The other ideological position developed somewhat later but ulti-
mately had a stronger influence on the movement. Domestic feminism,
sometimes called maternal feminism, evolved out of the Protestant,
evangelical reform movements of the later nineteenth century. It ac-
cepted the ideology of separate spheres but claimed that womens natu-
ral maternity and moral superiority justified their participation in the
public sphere. The Christian reform agenda of these organizations fo-
cused public attention on temperance, health and hygiene, prostitution,
pernicious literature, truancy, household management, and child-
rearing practices (Prentice et al., 1 ed. 182). Proponents of this politics
IJ
included more conservative organizations like the National Council of

Women, rural farm womens societies like Womens Institutes, and the
highly influential Womens Christian Temperance Union, as well as
many societies associated with individual churches.
The prevailing nineteenth-century ideology against which women in
both camps fought was one of separate spheres. As Joan Kelly puts it,
the industrial world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
construed society as divided into two sociosexual spheres. The bour-
geois conception of a private and a public domain, a domain of work
and of leisure, also separated the sexes. Settling women and men into
their respective spheres of home and work, it defined the place and
roles of the sexes as separate and complementary (52). In nineteenth-
century Canada, this fundamentally middle-class ideology represented
the status quo for women. It was one that persisted. As late as 1929 the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, which pronounced
women persons and therefore eligible to hold political office, still
felt it necessary to refute the ideology of separate spheres when it de-
clared the exclusion of women from all public offices [to be] a relic
of days more barbaric than ours (quoted in Cook and Mitchinson 1).
Separate spheres of labour were the product of nineteenth-century
capitalism. Cottage industries gave way to the contingencies of an in-
dustrial economy: men went out to work and women were left at home
with children. As the century progressed, separate spheres hardened
into natural roles. Mans place was outside of the home, as wage
earner and provider. Womans place was the home, and her primary
function was wife, mother, and homemaker (5). The middle-class
ideology of womans proper sphere became the measure of respect-
13 Introduction

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15 Introduction

The Anvil,
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chap_01.fm Page 17 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:36 PM
1 Leaping into the Breeches:

Liberal Feminism in Sarah Anne
Curzons Laura Secord and
The Sweet Girl Graduate
The clearest admission of Sarah Anne Curzons commitment to liberal

feminism came in a paper she read before the Wentworth Historical So-
ciety in 1891, when she declared: For twenty years I have been up-
holding the doctrine of the equal rights of woman as a human being
(106). Perhaps the most radical of all political positions within the late
nineteenth-century woman movement, liberal feminism, or equality
feminism, as it was then called, was concerned with social justice for
women, especially the access of women to political representation and
post-secondary education (Prentice et al., 1 IJ ed. 169). Although some
proponents argued the similarities between women and men, most, like
Curzon, held two opposing views simultaneously. They believed in
equality and argued for womens equal social and political status with
men, while at the same time they espoused gender difference by idealiz-
ing womens maternal nature in order to justify their right to partici-
pate in the public sphere (Kealey, Not Unreasonable 7).
Curzon was a pioneering activist at a time when all women were de-
nied suffrage, professional work, and education, when their social roles
were devalued, their contributions to culture were ignored, and their
second-class status was a political, cultural, and biological fact. She
took a leadership role in campaigns for suffrage and post-secondary ac-
cess. She edited the first newspaper womens page devoted to these is-
sues. Her liberal feminism also informs her other political passion,
Canadian nationalism and imperial unity, in the service of which she
wrote many articles, stories, and poems. The historical project that lay

at the heart of the imperial federationist recovery of a Canadian

heritage became in Curzons hands a feminist strategy: a way of posi-
tioning women within the narrative of Canadian history.
Curzons liberal view is unquestionably the dominant politic in her
life and work. It is nevertheless circumscribed by her class and race as
well as a foundational belief in womens maternity. She aligned herself
with the dominant, Anglo-Protestant cultural elite. As her writing bears
out, the women whose rights she claimed and whose history she recov-
ered belonged to this same general social group; they were the found-
ing mothers of an imperial, British-Canadian heritage. At crucial
moments in her configuration of history and her defence of womens
rights, her liberalism is also qualified by the domestic feminist belief
that womens special ability to nurture was the moral ground upon
which they staked a claim to social and political involvement. Curzon
stakes this claim by reinvoking the feminine and by mapping the pri-
vate virtues that characterize it onto the public/male sphere.
The tension between the liberal and the domestic, the public and the
private, is expressed in Curzons biography, which is at once high pro-
file and shrouded in secrecy. But it is in her plays, their genre, and their
ideological positions that these oppositions are most readily apparent.
Laura Secord (1887) and The Sweet Girl Graduate (1882) are closet
dramas, written to be enjoyed in the confines of the domestic space.
They associate themselves not with the theatre but with the classical
arts of poetry and history. Yet Curzon used her dramas to make direct
interventions into the public debate on the woman question. In each
case, they had a powerful social impact. Laura Secord was a highly sig-
nificant contribution to nineteenth-century Canadian herstory. Al-
most one hundred years before womens history emerged as a distinct
field in Canadian academies, Curzons preface to the play demanded
that attention be paid to the part that women played in establishing
Canada as a nation. The Sweet Girl Graduate entered into the heated
debate on womens admission into University College, Toronto, and
helped to resolve it in womens favour.
As liberal feminist texts, both plays positioned themselves in opposi-
tion to prevailing views of women as either docile and passive or dan-
gerous, seductive, and sexual. In order to move beyond these negative
stereotypes, the plays posit an ontological state outside of gender, a
third term (in Marjorie Garbers idiom) in which differences based
on the masculine and the feminine are collapsed (11). In the figures of
the neighbour in Laura Secord and the student in The Sweet Girl
Graduate, Curzons plays offer a space of possibility where women
achieve equality with men and take their place alongside them as he-
roes in history and as scholars in the academy (11). In each play, how-

ever, these same figures also reinscribe the natural association between
women and the feminine by rationalizing womens public acts as exten-
sions of their maternity.
The philosophical tradition of liberal feminism in which Curzon locates

herself is usually said to begin with Mary Wollstonecrafts
(1792) and was later taken up in America by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (18151902), Susan B. Anthony (18201906),
and Margaret Fuller (18101850).
asserted that if
women received the same education as men, they would become their
equals in all respects. The product of late eighteenth-century rational-
ism, Wollstonecrafts text applied the principles of natural rights, es-
poused by revolutionary thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke
and activists of the French Revolution, to the social and political ine-
qualities suffered by women. In response to Rousseaus
(1762), in
which he represented women as biologically weak, passive, subordi-
nates to men,
argued for womens natural equality
with men. It held that virtue, the highest human good, was based upon
reason, which emanated from human divinity (12). Men and women, it
argued, had the same capacity for divinity and reason. Their apparent
differences stemmed from the false system of education for women,
like that espoused by Rousseau, which represented them as primarily
emotional and sexual in character (7). Women spent their youth devel-
oping male-defined feminine accomplishments and libertine notions
of beauty and sacrificed their strength of body and mind upon the
altar of their sexuality (10). To counter womens intellectual ignorance,
moral frailty, and degraded circumstance,
called for
womens right to an education comparable to that of men.
The liberalism espoused in Wollstonecrafts text, nevertheless, did
not dispense altogether with biologically determined gender roles. It ac-
cepted womens maternal function as primary care-givers for children
but translated Rousseaus notion of a civic personality into an ideal
citizen-mother who was also rational, industrious, and above all a
companion to her husband rather than a lover (B. Taylor 213).
Womens natural, maternal character, however, did not confine them to
strictly domestic concerns. Men, on the other hand, were obliged to de-
velop sexual restraint equivalent to that of women and to cultivate
their domestic affections, genuine delicacy, chastity, and modesty
(Wollstonecraft 1223).
Like Wollstonecraft, Curzon argued that, if allowed to cultivate
themselves as scholars, as professionals, and as electors, women would
use the power of their newfound individuality to fulfill their gendered
duties as citizens (Boutilier 57). In a wonderful and wide-reaching

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The object of Imperial Federation, according to Carl Berger, was the

development of a Canadian nationality combined with an equally de-
cided desire to unify and transform the British Empire so that this na-
tionality could attain a position of equality within [the empire] (49).
Nationalism and the equality of Canadian heroes warriors, states-
men, intellectuals, and artists were the subject of a lecture by biogra-
pher and one of the original members of Canada First, Henry James
Morgan (18421914). In it he recovered from the annals of history a
compendium of great men representative of the national character
(50).
The urgency to recover a Canadian Loyalist history became the tacit
subject of many of Curzons papers and addresses. She wrote articles
and poems on incidents of Loyalist military history, including the War
of 1812, the Battle of Queenston Heights, and the Battle of Lundys
Lane. In the opinion of Charles Mair (18381927), another of the
founders of Imperial Federation and a literary peer whose dramas on
Brock and Tecumseh worked within the same Federationist politic,
few Canadian women have done so much to keep alive the memory of
our glorious dead (McMullen, 1076). Lady Edgar, the
president and co-founder of the Womens Canadian Historical Society,
paid homage to Curzon as one who with all her strength fanned and
kept alive a true Canadian spirit in our midst, and fostered an in-
tense love for the motherland, believing that Imperial Federation was
the best system of colonial development(3).
What Morgan attempted to do for Canadian men in 1866, Curzon
essayed on behalf of women a decade later: to rescue from oblivion
the name of a brave woman, and set it in its proper place among the
heroes of Canadian history ( , preface). In her Wentworth His-
torical Society address, Curzon claims that in the crucial job of nation-
building, men and women share equal responsibility. Together, she
tells us, men and women built up this noble country by whose name
we call ourselves; together they must preserve and develop it; and to-
gether they will stand or fall by it. Curzons dramatic and literary
work as well as her journalism helped create serious scholarly aware-
ness of British military victories in Canada and in casting the War of
1812 as the war that Loyalist women helped to win.
Curzon held an honorary membership in the Lundys Lane Historical
Society and belonged to the auxiliary of the York Pioneers of Toronto.
In the 1880s and 90s she often reported in and
on the activities of the Wentworth, Lundys Lane, and Nia-
gara Historical Societies, for whom she also gave lectures and read her
poetry.% Yet according to Boutilier, she was aware of the peripheral

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one of a beleaguered but powerful mother who capably defends her

home and children against American ascendancy.
In the representation of Canada as mother, Curzon transfers the vir-
tues of self-sacrifice, maternal care, protection, and succour for her
children that exemplify womens strength within a domestic feminist
framework onto the public male sphere of battle and war: She fought
for every foot of ground she holds. And when the invaders were driven
ignominiously back to their own territory, she says, Canada set her
house once more in order and turned again to her task of providing for
her children and opening out a future for them(109). Curzon con-
structs Canada as synonymous with home, which in turn is associated
with a chain of feminine signifiers including domesticity, maternity, and
morality. Man alone, she writes, cannot make a home, and without
homes there can be no country; home is the incentive, the anchor, the
object of nation-building, and hard, rough, and discouraging though
the pioneers task be, woman has never shrunk from her share in it
(106). By feminizing Canada, Curzon locates the work of nation-build-
ing within the proper authority and control of women: the domestic
sphere, motherhood, and children. Conceived of in this way, nation-
building requires the maternity of women and, by extension, their so-
cial, political, and military involvement. Curzon believes that the coun-
trys duty to defend home and children is synonymous with womens
duty to protect the wider social order. To invert the 1970s slogan the
personal is political, Curzon holds the political to be personal, and
war, which is almost universally considered a masculine pursuit, the
particular purview of the mother.
Curzons liberal feminism involved the fight for womens equal polit-
ical and social status. But, like Wollstonecraft, she did not redefine the
relation between gender and sex altogether. She contested the private/
female and public/male dichotomy that distinguished nineteenth-
century middle-class life, but did not eliminate it. Instead, she argued
that female virtues, particularly maternity, should be transferred into
the male world of work and politics.
The private/public split in Curzons writings is reflected in the relative

secrecy in which she shrouded her own domestic life. While a consider-
able amount is known about her political views, her political participa-
tion, and her journalism, the same cannot be said of her personal affairs.
Biographical entries fill in only the broadest outlines. & She was born Sa-
rah Anne Vincent in Birmingham, England, in 1833, the daughter of
George Philips Vincent, a glass manufacturer of the provincial middle
class, who had an interest in chemistry and physics. During her youth,
she enjoyed an intellectual home life and a ladies school education,

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The fact that so little is known about Curzons domestic and per-
sonal life would perhaps be unremarkable were it not for the fact that
she was a historian and, as her writing plainly reveals, knew the value
of womens biographies to posterity. She recognized the quotidian acts
of caring for families and husbands as central to womens lives and, in
extreme contexts, the substance of bravery and heroism. She could
have constructed the same heroism out of her own circumstances: an
immigrant wife and mother caring for a substantial family of three sons
and a daughter who, despite many disadvantages of health and for-
tune accomplished much (Edgar 3). She did so in the absence of an
extended family there is no evidence that she ever saw her birth fam-
ily again or returned to England and, initially, without close friends.
If one takes domicile stability as an indication of economic stability, her
finances were always precarious. Between Robert Curzons first ap-
pearance in the City of Toronto Directory in 1864 and her death in
1898, the Curzons moved at least nine times, living in no one place for
more than seven years and often for much briefer periods. She never
owned her own home. She was also unwell. There is evidence that the
creeping symptoms of Brights Disease, from which she eventually died,
may have been evident as early as 1884, when she was forced to leave
the Canada Citizen more or less for good.! She was then fifty-one.
While she lived to be sixty-five, considerably old for the era, descrip-
tions of her as sick or sickly are no doubt related to the slow onset of
this chronic disease.
The details, the flavour, the effect of these contingencies, however,
are nowhere recorded. Curzon chose to leave the historical record of
her domestic life scant. Even the fact that her daughter went on to be-
come one of the first women to graduate with a bachelor degree from
the University of Toronto the direct beneficiary of her mothers polit-
ical activism is passed over almost unnoticed. " One may only conjec-
ture why.
What is certain is that Curzons public and professional life violated
the socially sanctioned roles and behaviour for women within the mid-
dle-class ideology of separate spheres. She was a type of Canadian
blue stocking in an age when educated, outspoken women were at-
tacked as unfeminine. The public, opinionated woman, like Curzon,
was defensively described as gentle [in] bearing because to be public
was inappropriate for her sex (Edgar 3). She may have also been inhib-
ited from discussing the details of her personal life because of the dis-
crepancy between her class affiliation and her economic status. As
Britons, Anglicans, and Tories, Robert and Sarah Curzon shared the
predominant racial, religious, and partisan demeanour of the citys
well-to-do, propertied, Protestant elite (Boutilier 54). While she

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The perception that closet drama is an artistic miscarriage has lin-

gered like a foul odour from the late eighteenth century into the twenti-
eth. One reason for this is the persistent view of the genre as failed stage
drama. According to Om Prakash Mathur, this view is premised on the
belief that the essence of the drama lies in its being acted: it is a litera-
ture that talks and walks, and only when in it does so is it fully effec-
tive (1). The judgment of Murray Edwards on some Canadian closet
dramas is typical of this critical posture, as a sampling of his pronounce-
ments reveal: Samuel James Watsons would not likely ... have
had much success in the theatre (96); John Hutchinson Garniers
is conceivably stageworthy (97), while C.F. Newcomb
and H.M. Hankss is worth noting for [it]
bears the marks of a stage play (99). Edwards claims that Curzons
was written with the stage in mind and that some of its

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In Canada, where stages, like politics, were dominated by English and

American business, the situation was similar. Thus, according to Rich-
ard Plant, closet drama was to be preferred, as it eliminated any need
for live performance with its perceived vulgarity and immorality
and drew on a respectable literary tradition (Benson and Connoly,
1501). Although there was
no formally designated Examiner of Plays in Canada, there were
clerical strictures against the theatre, and periodic efforts to suppress or
censor plays that continued well into the twentieth century (81). The-
atre conditions and architecture were also often shoddy and defective.
In the 1850s, the wife of a leading American comic singer, Sam Cowell,
wrote in her diary that their two nights in Ottawa were particularly
dismal, what with leaking gas, rats, and a swindling box-office keeper.
In Niagara, Cowell had to compete with a dog fight for the audiences
attention (9). Despite a spate of elaborate, purpose-built theatres in
Ontario and Quebec, fitted with the features that audiences found ap-
pealing comfortable seating segregated by class, attractive decoration,
and technical proficiency they were still dangerous places. Virtually
all were plagued by the threat of fire. By the turn of the century, the
Grand Opera houses in Hamilton, Kingston, London, and Toronto had
gone up in flames (2414). Others, like Torontos Royal Lyceum, had
cramped stage[s], clumsy pillars, poor sightlines, miserable dressing
rooms, and inadequate ventilation (478).
Feminist studies by Marta Straznicky, Catherine Burroughs, and Su-
san Brown provide evidence that womens reasons for turning to closet
drama differed from those of men, as did their relationship to the
genre. Although the work of these critics spans three centuries of play-
writing, there is general agreement on two broad issues. The first, not
surprisingly, is that the theatre as a place and drama as an art form
were male dominated and only with difficulty accessed by women. The
second issue addresses the apparent contradiction between a genre evi-
dently detached from the public stage and one that directly entered into
public discourses.
Theatre was not a forum in which women were invited to take part.
The extent to which seventeenth-century gender ideology prevented
women from participating openly in commercial theater cannot be un-
derestimated, claims Straznicky (356). Burroughs speaks of the anx-
iety of Romantic women playwrights over participating in a medium

that they viewed as potentially detrimental to their social reputations

and emotional well-being (76). By the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, the material conditions of the theatre matched the immorality
associated with womens participation in it. According to Susan
Brown, women generally viewed the stage as a degraded place and
rarely intended their works to be presented (90).
While the construction of gender changes over the three hundred years
preceding the late nineteenth century, the broad outlines of the public/
private dichotomy endure. Theatre was in the world, and womens place
was in the home; theatre was public and opened one to scrutiny, when
women were counselled to be private; it was a site of business and action
when the feminine bound women to domesticity and passivity. Women
who dared to participate in the theatre transgressed into mens territory,
and when they did so, their femininity was threatened. Actresses were
condemned as whores, and women who attended theatrical perfor-
mances were little better. Such views are implied in the 1871 conduct
book Our Girls , in which Canadian author Dio Lewis advises girls not
to go to the theatre, but if they must, to attend the matinees where
they present the most decent representations and women and chil-
dren are likely to constitute a large part of the audience (147).
A no-less vociferous criticism was made of women who published
plays. As the prefaces to their dramas attest, publishing was an inter-
vention into the public and therefore potentially detrimental to their
social reputations and emotional well-being: most did so in trepida-
tion and fear of censure (Burroughs 76). Although not face to face with
their critics, as in the auditorium, they were subject to ridicule in the
press for working in a genre that was held to be the natural and proper
purview of men. Whether or not individual women dramatists shared in
this view, a good number expressed an authentic sense of trespass
about the act of playwriting and publishing (79).
However, Straznicky, Burroughs, and Brown also claim in one way
or another that while the stage is without question a public space to
which women had difficult access the closet may not be so easily
fixed on the other side of the dichotomy (Straznicky 356). Closet
plays unlike published stage plays, are uniquely capable of conflat-
ing public and private discourses (373). They express at once the ethic
of privacy and the pressures placed upon women to remain within that
sphere and, at the same time, are a tool of oblique political interven-
tion, a form of public action (370, 372). While plays were written
and, increasingly, read in private, their prefatory materials and subject
matter entered into a variety of public debates.
According to Susan Brown, by the end of the nineteenth century in
England, few Victorian poets actually wrote for the stage; they turned

to closet dramas, collected in volumes of verse, and many of their texts

became the indigenous precursors of fin-de-siècle and suffragist
drama in England (89, 90). Curzon belongs to this tradition. Like her
contemporaries, she published Laura Secord (1887) and The Sweet
Girl Graduate (1882) in a collection of poetry: Laura Secord, The Her-
oine of 1812: A Drama: And Other Poems. Both were poetic plays, so
the elision between drama and verse in the title is not without ground-
ing. But Curzon is not simply using the term poetry as a descriptive
signifier, as the quotation on the title page by Justin H. McCarthy testi-
fies. Curzon situates the plays (along with the other poems in the book)
in the tradition of the majestic, white-robed bards to elevate them
and endow them with sophistication, education, and cultural cachet.
To call her dramas poetry was to class them with the greatest literary
texts in history, because poetry belonged to the single most valued cate-
gory of literary endeavour.
# Curzon thus fortified her work against the
dubious reputation of theatre; she transported it from the raucous

playhouse, with its masculine associations, into the privacy of the femi-
nine drawing room.
$
Yet Curzons dramas also had a material effect in the world of poli-
tics. Laura Secord is said to have led to the formation of several his-
torical societies and organizations having for their object the
promotion of original research, most notably, the Womens Canadian
Historical Society (H. Morgan 2356; Wagner 810). Rota Herzberg
Lister claims that the impassioned plea for the cause of womens rights
which ends The Sweet Girl Graduate contributed to the passing of an
Order-in-Council on the 2nd of October 1884 [finally and officially]
admitting women to University College ( Oxford Companion 127).
Laura Secord entered into the public arena not by taking the stage but
by participating in the literary, historical, and political debates of the
age. Like virtually all of Curzons literary output, it is a nationalist
work that aims to contribute to the development of a nascent Canadian
literature. It is dedicated to all true Canadians, its declared purpose
to demonstrate that in the hardships endured and overcome by the
United Empire Loyalists, Canada has a wealth of rich and interesting
stories worthy of preserving (preface).
Its preface makes a point of stating that it was originally written in
1876, but, owing to the inertness of Canadian interest in Canadian
literature at that date, could not be published. Together with works of
poetry on similarly nationalistic subjects, it was eventually published
by Blackett Robinson in 1887 and, according to Boutilier, paid for by
Curzon herself (60). Although the expense nearly bankrupted the
Curzon family, several things had happened in the intervening decade

that emboldened her to think such a venture was financially tenable

(ibid.).
% There was a marked increase in literary works concerned with
Canadian identity and anti-American feeling at the time. Most of the

nationalist periodicals for which Curzon wrote were founded in the
1870s and 80s; these years, together with the 90s, constituted her
most productive period. Three years prior to the publication of Laura
Secord, Ontario was swept up in summer centennial festivities celebrat-
ing its settlement by United Empire Loyalists. This in turn inspired a
significant body of historical writing and the erection of monuments
commemorating Loyalist heroes and their battles (N. Knowles 3). Cur-
zons poetry, lectures, memoirs, stories, and play about Laura Secord
participated in this tradition, as did the action Curzon championed to
erect a monument to Secords memory at approximately the same time
(128).
History was among the most respectable of nineteenth-century
genres. According to Carole Gerson, in its association with concrete
events, history was akin to truth, and truth with morality ( Purer 22).
History was not yet the purview of the academy that would not hap-
pen until 1894 but it was aligned with research, study, and writing
(M. Taylor 3). It dealt not with imagination and fancy but facts, for
which nineteenth-century Canadian society demonstrated a clear pref-
erence. Laura Secord represents itself as a drama based on considerable
research into Secords Loyalist roots and the War of 1812. It is accom-
panied by a veritable compendium of scholarly apparatus that turn the
play into a text to be read.
As I discuss in the introduction, Curzons preface is a clear statement
of the feminist politics that lie at the root of her play. It makes histori-
cal recuperation and historical tragedy a tool of womens rights
(Boutilier 58) and Laura Secord evidence of a womans heroism equal
to that of a man. Its aim, to rescue from oblivion the name of a brave
woman, is one to which time proved it thoroughly equal. Between
1887 when it first appeared and the turn of the century, Secord and her
heroic journey evolved from a relatively obscure anecdote to an im-
portant subject in mainstream Canadian histories, histories for school-
children, and collections of verse.
&
The recovery of a womans heroic deed as a sign of womens equal-

ity with men is at the heart of the plays liberal feminist project. Who
can be a hero and what constitutes heroism are questions that form
the subtext of the play. The central way that Laura Secord addresses
these questions, as we shall see, is by challenging the binary opposi-
tion of masculine and feminine. It accomplishes this through its
rereading of the female hero in the figure of the non-gender neigh-

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Act 3 is set in the parlour of the Decau farmhouse, the British head-
quarters at Beaver Dam. As in act 2, a group of characters, this time
soldiers, is immersed in a discussion of bravery that sets the scene for
Lauras arrival. FitzGibbon is regaling his troops with news from the
London Times and lamenting both Russia and Frances losses in Napo-
leons latest campaign as a sad waste of precious lives for one mans
will (50). A brief allusion to the Loyalists, celebratory talk of Nelsons
1801 victory at Copenhagen, and FitzGibbons lionizing of Brock com-
plete the plays second elaborate meditation on what it means to be
great in times of war. In the midst of a round of patriotic and pioneer-
ing songs Laura enters to relay her story of imminent American assault.
FitzGibbon extends heartfelt thanks on behalf of king and country, and
Laura, overcome with exhaustion, faints. She is placed in a ham-
mock and exits the scene with military salutes, FitzGibbon eulogizing
her act and admonishing his men to never forget this womans deed
and ever treat women well(62). Two brief scenes, representing real
historical incidents, close the play with FitzGibbons victory. The first
takes place in a way-side tavern at daybreak where he skirmishes
with two American soldiers and is rescued by a woman tavern-keeper.
In the second, at Beech Ridge, the wild sound of guns, the Indian war-
whoop, and advancing bugles represent the fictive reinforcements
with which FitzGibbon tricks the Americans and forces their surrender.
Laura Secord functions in some ways like a poetic epic with the fla-
vour of the romantic lyric wrapped around it. ' It recounts the history
of a hero and raises her to the level of a national legend that places
women at the centre of nation-building. Its ideology is seductive at the
end of a century of American aggression, contention over boundary
disputes, Manifest Destiny, Fenian raids, and internal rebellion. It prof-
fers the beliefs of the ruling class and serves as a guide for the social,
political, and religious ideals that Curzon sees Canadians inheriting
from Britain. The plays class relations are expressed in the rhythm and
metre of the poetry itself. As is conventional in post-Shakespearian
drama, its good or normative characters speak in iambic pentameter,
with the periodic use of tetrameter and diameter for variation and
punctuation at moments of heightened emotion. Its lower orders, in-
cluding some of the Americans, the natives, and the slaves, speak in a
special dialect, their lack of linguistic eloquence mirroring their inferior
social, intellectual, and cultural position within the play.
Laura Secord glorifies fidelity to the British crown and the War of
1812, its great battles and even greater military leaders. It exalts Canada
and provides her with a folklore and heroes to entice a nation. Each se-
quential episode of the journey not only tests Lauras courage but reveals

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As Frye says, one may print a lyric or read a novel aloud, but such
incidental changes are not enough in themselves to alter genre (247).
Laura Secord is a closet drama. It may have some theatrical stage direc-
tions and characters that emerge of out of theatre, but it is not, as Mur-
ray Edwards suggests, written with the stage in mind (123). From a
purely practical point of view, its cast is ungainly, with forty speaking
parts, not to mention walk-ons involving twenty youths, a number of
native warriors, various crowds of soldiers, and at least thirteen scene
changes. Such grand, not to say cumbersome, requirements of cast and
mise en scène stand in direct opposition to its substance, which involves
a great deal of conversation or internal reverie rather than action, and
its largely single focus on Laura herself. Moreover, stories like the
Quakers of Stoney Creek and FitzGibbons of Queenston Heights, as
well as Lauras soliloquies, halt the action almost entirely. Two instances
include the farewell my home speech at the foot of Queenston
Heights in act 1, scene 5, and Lauras long lament of war in act 2, scene
3, at the Beech Ridge. The plays extended stage directions ostensibly
convey information relating to performance, but the overall effect is to
turn dramatic action into poetic narrative. Knowledge of Lauras inner
thoughts, such as when she remember[s] the cowardly nature of the
snake, provides readers with privileged information about her character
in the same way an omniscient narrator might (41). Evocations of the
forest are phrased like descriptive narrative passages: Bats are on the
wing, the night-hawk careers above the trees, fire-flies flit about, and the
death-bird calls. Even the songs are more like poetic interludes than
moments of music in theatre.
Laura Secord is invested with fiction and fancy bolted down at the
corners with real historical fact. It imagines a voice, motivations, and
actions for Laura but represents itself as an accurate historical tale of
national identity. Its particular construction of history is conventional in
that it takes politics as its subject and chronicles the lives of miliary and
civil heroes (Boutilier 58). Its rendition of Canadian history, as Boutilier
says, involves the culmination of three centuries of British beneficence
in North America, the unquestioning acceptance of British rule as di-
vinely inspired, and the Loyalist exodus from America into Canada as
the defining moment in Canadas formation as a nation (59).
The drama relies heavily on W.F. Coffins 1812: The War and Its
Moral, published in 1864, a history that shared with Laura Secord the
intention of instilling pride and loyalty, producing a glorious past, and
portending a promising future, as well as providing an antidote to the
American literature of the day (19). Much of the mythology that
came to surround Laura Secord, in particular the events that became
the standard version of Lauras exploits, says Norman Knowles, orig-

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as Boutilier says, the notion that war and politics were the preserve of
men by writing women into history (58). Its publication was also said
to have aroused interest in all the events of the campaign of 1812
14 (Secord, preface). At least two contemporary reviewers indicate
that it also provoked a genuine sympathy for womens part in nation-
building: For great deeds have been done, and are being done every
day by women, deeds of devoted disinterestedness and self-sacrifice
(Mrs. Curzons Laura Secord 1112). !
The play had an additional practical purpose, which entered it into
the general controversy over pensions for veterans of the War of 1812.
It would aid, Curzon hoped, in bringing about an act from the Gov-
ernment of the Dominion recogniz[ing] the contribution of Laura
Secord to her nations sovereignty (Prentice et al., 1 IJ ed. 142). Cur-
zons immediate end was to right military sexism: she wanted a war
pension posthumously awarded to Secord and bestowed upon her only
surviving daughter, Mrs Smith. "
The recuperation of womens role in a Canadian Loyalist history is
at the heart of Laura Secords larger liberal feminist project: to repre-
sent women as the equals of men in history, in war, and in nation-build-
ing. As with contemporary liberal feminist strategies, the play positions
women as equals within existing structures. It does not attempt to
change those structures. Consequently, its construction of history re-
mains more or less top-down, replacing men with women in a narra-
tive of great events. It attempts to elevate the status of Laura Secord to
the position of a great woman and accord her the recognition that Loy-
alist men of similar heroic stature received to write her name on the
roll of Canadian heroes (preface).
The ethic of equality between male and female characters in the play
does not extend to the blacks or natives, whose behaviour never corre-
sponds in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability to those who are white.
As much is implied by the sentry when he muses that America would be
better served by fighting the Indians than the British: if honours
what we want, theres room enough / For that, and wild adventure, too,
in the West, / At half the cost of war, in opening up / a road shall reach
the great Pacific (25). Here and in footnote 9 the text implies that fight-
ing Indians is free of the moral turbidity involved in fighting the Brit-
ish. As Boutilier points out, Curzon refers to the Mohawk men allied
with the British crown as good allies but nevertheless represents them
as noble savages bought with a few plugs of tobacco (Boutilier 64).
The natives are friendly and offer more assistance than their British
counterparts. Yet their initial encounter with Laura imitates a surprise at-
tack that contrasts white womans imperilled femininity with the ste-

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Here, taking up arms for ones country is the epitome of heroism, and
the precondition for such heroism is ones status as a man. But this is
also a supposition the play will call into question. In epic verse and
tragedy, the hero is always a variation on the public warrior, often with
superhuman power and a direct line to God (Frye 334). In his The-
ory of Modes Frye leaves little doubt that the typology of the hero in
European fiction entails masculine constructs superior in to
other men and superior in to other men (33). Furthermore,
in speaking of heroic and domestic melodrama, genres to which
Heather Jones argues belongs, the feminine also conven-
tionally resides outside of the sphere of heroic action: the female cen-
tral character is almost always seen as victim precisely because of the
idea that Christian moral values and the domestic sphere preclude the
possibility of woman articulating her own discourse (H. Jones, Fem-
inism 10). Nevertheless, Laura is clearly a hero and as such critiques
heroism as predominantly masculine. She achieves this status through
the liberal feminist construction of the neighbour.
The figure of the neighbour in posits what Marjorie
Garber calls a third term, a mode of articulation, a way of describ-
ing a space of possibility that presents a challenge to the binary oppo-
sition of masculine and feminine (11). This is because the neighbour is
based on a feminist and Christian notion of equality that collapses the
dichotomy between masculine and feminine into a non-gendered, uni-
versalized human identity of being. When Laura proposes to her hus-
band that she go to Beaver Dam to warn FitzGibbon, he objects on the
grounds that her mission violates his masculine responsibility as a hus-
band to guard thee as myself ( 21). James Secords misinter-
pretation of this biblical imperative as an affirmation of current social
laws that subordinate women to men allows him to justify his patriar-
chal self-interests. Laura corrects his allusion, however, indicating, as
Boutilier puts it, that any reading of the Christian marriage contract
that consigned women solely to the protection of husbands, or reserved
to men exclusively the duties and privileges of citizenship was spiritu-
ally/legally invalid (62). She explains to James that the law says as
thyself Thou shalt regard thy neighbour ( 21). Her invocation
of Mark 12.30, which Jesus claimed to be the first of all command-

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The terrain of rough battle portended by the sentry is replaced with a

beautiful, peaceful, and fertile mother, one that, if it reiterates stereo-
types of Canadian nature, also reinterprets them for feminist ends:
The lovely Summer, in her robes of blue,/ Bedecked with every flower
that Flora gave / Her wreath, a coronet / Of opening rose-buds
twined with lady-fern;/ And over all, her bridal-veil of white, / Some
soft diaphnous cloudlet, that mistook / Her robes of blue for heaven
(40). Country is thus a feminine construct, and the familial metaphor
that structures relations between Canada and Britain is the same as
that which operates in Curzons Wentworth address. Country, at least
in part, is here synonymous with home, and home is identified with
woman. Therefore, the invasion of Lauras home is synonymous with
the invasion of womans domain. As a result, the moral imperative that
demands that she act in defence of her country is the same as the mater-
nal imperative that demands she protect her home and children.
There is also a liberatory aspect to Lauras heroism, which, as Wilson
contends, involves selfless risk (4) and replicates the role of mother
the protector and nurturer of life (4). Although these qualities do not
redefine womens relation to the feminine, they do redefine the heroic
and invest it with valued maternal attributes. Canada is Eden and Laura,
as Celeste Derksen so aptly puts it, is a vindication of women(14); she
is a redeemed and redemptive Eve who harkens back to the
and to devotional literature of the seventeenth century like the
(1611) and Ester Sowernams
(1617). As an Eve figure, Laura reclaims the Christian
creation myth and transforms woman as seductress and provocateur into
woman as defender of the Christian faith. She reinterprets original sin
the product of a womans folly as the work of the devil:

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This passage clearly calls for a redefinition of womens role in war; it

calls attention to the masculine romanticization of women as sensitive
beings in need of mens protection when, as the interpolated tales
evidence, women are required to be as bold and brave as men in war.
Like men, they risk losing home and family for the greater good of the
country.
Laura Secord does not dispense with essential notions of the feminine
and the masculine. Instead, it reifies the feminine by constructing a hero-
ism that transfers female virtues to the public/male sphere. Male hero-
ism in Laura Secord is reconceived in a way that recalls Wollstonecrafts
articulation of liberal feminism for men. Her notion that men should
develop sexual restraint domestic affections delicacy, chastity, and
modesty (Wollstonecraft 1223) is expressed in significant feats under-
taken by the plays major male characters. For instance, the Quakers he-
roic act of supplying the soldiers with a knowledge of the Yankee camp,
detailed in his opening narrative, anticipates Lauras form of indirect,
non-violent heroism. It is through such means that he helps to save the
Loyalists and win the battle at Stoney Creek. When James Secord re-
marks, Ah! ha! Friend John, thine is a soldiers brain / Beneath that
Quaker hat, the Quaker rejects the designation soldier: No, no, I
am a man of peace, and hate / The very name of war (14). This scenario
represents heroism as primarily passive and thus helps to displace the
conventional relation between the masculine and heroism from the out-
set, in order to help make room for the possibility of women as heroes.
The Quakers heroism, like Lauras, concerns the dissemination of infor-
mation, not active military intervention.
FitzGibbon can also be understood to embody the maternity of Brit-
ish imperial authority, as Curzon imagined it, within Imperial Federa-
tionist politics a maternity expressed in his protectiveness of Laura
and Canadian territory. While armed and ready to do battle for Cana-
dian sovereignty, he proffers the feminine qualities of graciousness and
refuge in the face of the American invasion. The heroic fight for blood,
revenge, and victory, which properly should end a battle such as Beaver
Dam, does not. It is superseded by guile, intelligence, and compassion
for the lives of the soldiers on both sides of the war. In the plays con-
cluding scenes, when FitzGibbon confronts the American army, his first
course of action is to outwit them, and his second is to call for a truce
in order to save a useless loss / Of brave mens lives (64). In FitzGib-
bon, therefore, the nationalist ideals of duty and loyalty to ones coun-
try, traditionally associated with the public and masculine, are
reconceived as the feminine values of family, domesticity, maternity,
and Christian morality.

A similar reconfiguration of heroism operates in Lauras interpreta-

tion of her husbands role at home. When she equates her public mission
to his sad anxiety and dreadful pangs of helplessness and dread,
she suggests that to remain at home, usually a womans common lot,
requires a heroism equal to the mans role / Of fierce activity(23).
The politics of liberal feminism upon which Curzon has premised the
construction of Laura as neighbour gestures towards a universalized
human identity in which gender differences are collapsed. It does so to
represent an ontological place, both feminist and Christian in spirit, in
which men and women are equal and in which womens public and
civic actions are justified and esteemed. Gender difference is reinscribed
in the idealization of the feminine. Laura Secord reconfigures national-
ism and heroism as feminine constructs that represent the moral and
rational influence of maternity on the culture and the country. On this
basis, the play reclaims womens contribution to Canadian history and,
by extension, womens duty and right to take an enlarged role as citi-
zens in Canadian society.
The Sweet Girl Graduate, the second of Curzons two closet dramas, is a
delightful short comedy in defence of womens equal right to post-
secondary education. Although a much less ambitious piece, in many
ways it is a companion to Laura Secord. Written in verse and never in-
tended for theatrical performance, it found its stage in the late nine-
teenth-century political campaign for womens access to post-secondary
institutions. $ In the play the biologically determined discourses of sex/
gender that govern the conservative side of the debate on womens access
to higher education are replaced with a liberal feminist subject position,
this time embodied in the figure of the student. By situating Kates cross-
dressing within a mythological tradition in which women dress as men
for political power, it recasts a male-centred theatrical/literary trope and,
like Laura Secord, reclaims a history for women. In the final analysis, de-
spite its strong liberal intent, it reinscribes an upper-middle-class female
gender and constructs a heroism that transfers the virtues of a reform-
minded femininity onto the public/male sphere.
The Sweet Girl Graduate is what Richard Plant has called parathe-
atrical dramaturgy, a dramatic form that throughout the nineteenth
century appeared in publications like Grip, Grinchuckle, and the Ca-
nadian Illustrated News and dominated political satire (Benson and
Conolly, Oxford 151). It was written at the instigation of John Wilson
Bengough (18511923), the editor of the satirical reformist weekly
Grip (141), and appeared in volume 1 of what was intended as a sum-
mer annual, The Grip-Sack, in 1882 (Grip-Sack 5; Regenerators 137).

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of The Sweet Girl Graduate enacts two sides of this late nineteenth-
century debate. The Bloggs are upper-middle-class, urban parents who
believe that women are essentially different from men, a difference
based on their sexuality, and that their education should reflect this dif-
ference. Kate represents the liberal feminist position. She believes in
womens equality with men, particularly in their intellectual equality,
and feels they should have access to institutions of higher learning.
At least some critics of higher education in Canada argued that
women were synonymous with a deviant, seductive sexuality, like that
traditionally associated with Eve. ' They feared grave evils would re-
sult from allowing young men and young women to attend the same
college (Ford 34; Prentice et al., 1 IJ ed. 159). In The Sweet Girl
Graduate, we are told that the university has refused the admission of
women because they threaten the rules of discipline and order (43).
Mrs Bloggs sympathizes with the position, claiming,

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Women in the public world of the academy, according to Mrs Bloggs,

who go sittin down on the same benches studyin off the same
desk as men threaten to degrade the moral atmosphere of the univer-
sity (44).! Their sheer physical proximity to men makes them impu-
dent minxes and an affront to feminine modesty (44). !
The view of women as synonymous with sexuality, expressed by the
Bloggses, was prevalent among nineteenth-century critics of womens edu-
cation and allowed them to argue in completely contradictory ways. On
the one hand, women were too delicate for a university education, not
physically constituted to handle the rigours of the academic life (Pren-
tice et al., 1st ed. 159). It was even charged that their education might
cause the birth rate to decline (159). On the other hand, some feared that
academic life would unsex women and make them more masculine (158
9). In 1872 the Christian Guardian wrote that very intellectual women
are seldom beautiful; their features, and particularly their foreheads, are
more or less masculine (quoted in Prentice et al., 1IJ ed. 158159).
The hegemonic ideology for the new middle-class, Anglo-Canadian
women in Ontario was based on the concept of separate spheres. The fa-
ther was viewed as the sole wage earner and undisputed head of the fam-
ily and the mother was the household manager (many employed servants)
with leisure time to focus upon the needs of children. Opponents of

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Mrs Bloggss primary considerations have to do with social conven-

tions relating to her gender, class, and race. She asserts that women like
Kate do not need so much education as men because they should
get married and be done with it (45). She wants Kate to marry Harry
Gilmour, a risin young lawyer from a good old family who has
prospects of becoming a senator (45). She wants her to respect the nice-
ties of her class, keeping regular hours and speaking politely and de-
murely to her parents. Thus she interprets Kates passionate defence of
womens right to study simply as bad manners, and storms out of the
room in a rage crying, How rude you are, Kate! I am ashamed of
you (46). She also wants to ensure that Kates housewifely skills are
above those of the greenhorns from the emigrant sheds ignora-
muses [who go] spoilin the knives, and burnin the bread (45).
In advancing her arguments against education, Mrs Bloggs botches
the subject names mathyphysics and metamatics, humorously ex-
posing her lack of knowledge and calling into question her ability to
stand in judgment on her daughter (44). Yet Mrs Bloggs is not an en-
tirely uninformed character. Her views, in fact, invoke the position of
president of the University of Toronto, Daniel Wilson (18801892),
who repeatedly stalled womens admission because he wanted the
Province of Ontario to pay for the establishment of a separate but af-
filiated womens institution. She concedes, if theyd build another
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put it under charge of a lady who would look after the girls, I wouldnt
object so much (45). Mrs Bloggs believes that women should be ed-
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ucated in separate facilities from men and that they should be educated
in separate disciplines.
At the vanguard of the education debate in Ontario was Principal
George Monro Grant (18351902) of Queens University, whose poli-
tics of liberal equality and womens education accorded with Curzons
own. In his 1879 inaugural lecture before the ninth session of the
Montreal Ladies Educational Association, Grant, echoing Woll-
stonecraft, professed that the equality of the sexes was based on the
understanding of woman as a primary existence, [who] owes re-
sponsibility directly to God, [and] is bound to cultivate her faculties
for her own sake (quoted in Cook and Mitchinson 132). Positioning
himself against the biological determinists, Grant contended that any
insipidity of a womans mind must be attributed to the inadequacies
of a fashionable education in ladies accomplishments: French,

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In the face of her mothers emotional remonstrations, Kate is level-

headed and logical. Her superior facility for reason and argumentation
exposes the contradiction in her mothers contention that attendance at
university amounts to a sexual indiscretion, especially when, as she
points out, she is allowed to go almost anywhere else with men un-
chaperoned. Kates demonstrative proof of womens intellectual abili-
ties and their equal capacity for study in the same subjects as men,
occurs when she dons masculine attire and enrols in Toronto Univer-
sity as Mr Christopher and then graduates at the top of her class (52).
Female-to-male cross-dressing is at the centre of the plays theatrical
effect and feminist message, making it not only politically bold but dra-
matically bold as well. Historically, cross-dressing has been a male-cen-
tred theatrical tradition. As long as women were banned from European
stages, as in the time of Shakespeare, men dressed as women to play
their parts. Female to male cross-dressing became a relatively common
occurrence when the prohibition against women on stage was rescinded
in England in the mid-seventeenth century; but, in the view of many crit-
ics, it predominantly appealed to the sexuality of men.
!' The seven-
teenth-century female actor donned breeches for the delectation of a

predominantly male audience, asserts Marion Jones (148): Prologues
and epilogues were sometimes given by favourite actresses in mens
clothes with no other apparent reason than to provide the same arbi-
trary thrill [for men] (148).
" Eighteenth-century theatre operated in a
similar fashion: the novelty of women on the stage was a mild form of
the delectation stage audiences take in lesbian pornography and reached
a sort of climax in George Farquhars The Recruiting Officer
(Senelick 32). Female to male cross-dressing re-emerged in nineteenth-
century breeches roles, productions of Shakespearean drama and En-
glish pantomime in which the principal boy was often played by a mid-
dle-aged woman. The male impersonator appeared as a novelty in music
halls and variety shows, and the butchy personae of Annie Hindle and
Ella Wesnera are proof of a brief period of lesbian eroticism involved in
adopting a male role that was transgressive for the performers them-
selves, according to Laurence Senelick. Generally, male impersonation
was perceived as a dangerous infringement of patriarchal right and,
thus, unpopular with theatre-going audiences of the time (Senelick 40).
The Sweet Girl Graduate, although not intended for performance,
nevertheless reclaims this male-centred theatrical tradition as female
and feminist. In it, Kate cross-dresses not for the fancy and inclination
of men, but for the social power of women. She associates her act with
famous historical and literary figures who donned mens garb to em-
bark on heroic adventures and defy the expectations of the weaker sex:
Yet might I plead that men and women oft / Have done the same

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By cutting her hair, Kate, like Joan of Arc, symbolizes both feminine
self-sacrifice and feminist defiance. Kate spurns male dominance by
offering up, with some remorse, this image of femininity and patri-
archal praise, on the altar of a greater social good. Short hair, on the
other hand, is a renunciation of the feminine and has been associated
historically with whores and harlots women who are outside the male
sphere of influence (Wheelwright 69). As though to guard against the
image of a depraved woman, in the next scene Kate, as Mr Christopher,
is under the domestic supervision of a nurse and represented as some-
what regretful of the bold step that circumstances force her to take.
Kate, as student, is positioned outside of gender. She is free of the
social restrictions identified with the feminine or the debauchery of the
masculine. She has access to the world of knowledge but is unfettered
by the masculine vices of drinking, smoking, and cavorting. She says,
I must be brave and show myself a man, / Nay, more, a student, rol-
licking and gay (49). In her new position as student, she is literally
a freshman a new, universalized image of an ungendered person, in
the same way that Laura achieves the status of human being as neigh-
bour. However in her final speech as Mr Christopher, Kate reveals
that she has entered the university a third year man, having studied
two years outside the academy for the matriculation exams and made
her mark upon / The honour list (43). We are thus to understand
that the student has always already been implicit in her character
just as women, within a feminist politics of liberal humanism, are al-
ways already the equals of men.
The Sweet Girl Graduate, like Laura Secord , nevertheless reinscribes
maternity in the very term it uses to supplant it. The figure of the stu-
dent is at once a state outside of gender and one invested with
womens role as a personal and a social mother. Although Kate resists
the prescription of marriage and family as a womans only lot and re-
fuses to be coerced into a love match with Gilmour [he] has no
chance / And that Ill let him know (43) motherhood is an impor-
tant premise upon which she lays her claim to education. Like Woll-
stonecraft, but also like many environmentalists or eugenicists of the
last decade of the century, Kate argues that the more educated a
woman is, the better she can fulfil her home duties, especially in the
care and management of the health of her family, and the proper train-
ing of her sons and daughters as good citizens (45). Education, in
Kates view, will make her a more responsible mother as well as more
effective in her role as instructor of future members of the state.
Kates coming out as a woman, despite its hyperbole, can also be
read as a return to a feminine identity that pre-exists the performance
of Mr Christopher. Every detail of the scene, as she sets it out in her let-

ter to Orphea, from the flowers and water to her dress and hair, is de-
signed to reaffirm her class and femininity:
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lady, one that at the party is augmented by Orpheas melodramatics
when she falls into hysterics on Miss Bloggss neck (53). In defence
of her actions, Kate relies on the stereotypical feminine image of na-
ked truth and piteous beauty, a delicate if narcissistic aesthetic that
situates her as object for the sexual titillation of her male peers (Shep-
herd 91).
Mr Christopher, the student, is not a simple reappropriation of
masculinity but rather, like the male heroes of Laura Secord , he trans-
fers the virtues of the feminine into the public/male sphere. He rede-
fines stereotypical masculinity associated with unbridled sexual
appetite and vice, and reinvests it with the feminine virtues of sexual
chastity and modesty:
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masculine in terms of a feminine morality of restraint and temperance,
a mode of behaviour more winning with the women than that associ-
ated with real men and clearly held up to men as exemplary.
Read in relation to the historical/political discourses of the age in
which they were written, Laura Secord and The Sweet Girl Graduate re-
place rigid gender codes based on hierarchical binaries with a liberal
feminist ideal that imagines a place of ontological equality between men
and women. This equality does not dispense with the idea or category of

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2 Performing Politics:
Propaganda, Parody,
and the Mock Parliament

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that home and keeps it in neat array, so she would clean the cobwebs
out of our common political home and eradicate its corruption. There-
fore, the resounding voice booms, let us be on the side of these an-
gels of mercy, let us bring our women into the public fold and bestow
upon them the same rights of citizenship we accord ourselves.
The march that ushers the men out of the hall creates an atmosphere
of solemnity and patriotism, but it cannot suppress a whisper that
courses through the audience. Surely these well-spoken men were not
radicals; surely they were God-fearing citizens with a loyalty to British
ideals and a stake in the necessity for order and good government?
Now comes the moment everyone has been waiting for: the evening
sitting of the mock parliament. The curtain rises on a replica of the leg-
islative assembly: fifty-two seats divided between two political parties,
leather chairs, and small desks littered with important-looking docu-
ments. In this performance it is assumed that women have ruled in the
legislative halls from time immemorial while men have from the early
days been hewers of wood and drawers of water. But, at last, men see
plainly that in order to rise from their inferior position in society, they
must be enfranchised.
To accomplish this much-desired purpose, a deputation of men has
summoned the courage to approach the Attorney-General, humbly
praying that their downtrodden sex be granted this first right of a citi-
zen the vote. The Attorney-General, sorry though she will admit she
is, must refuse. After much preamble, she assures the men that she
heartily endorses their bid but she does not wish to buoy them up with
false hopes of its success. Even the members of her cabinet, advanced as
they are on most questions, do not see eye to eye with her on this mat-
ter. The most she can promise is that their plea will receive suitable
!
consideration. The men dejectedly quit the hall.
Fifty-two of the strongest-minded women in Toronto file into the
House. The Sergeant-at-Arms, with due ceremony, lays the royal mace
upon the table. The Speaker is seated, and the business of the day com-
mences.
I beg to present a petition from a quarter of a million electors of
Ontario asking that members of the legislature be prohibited from us-
ing a railway pass and consequently weakening their independence
when dealing with railway corporations who ask for favours at the
hands of the legislature. [The petitioners feel it] unjust that this mile-
age, which they are asked to pay, should be greater than is necessary in
consequence of the large number of dead-head politicians travelling on
the railways.
The Select Committee appointed to consider the proper costume to
be worn by Lady Public School Teachers reports that it had before it

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That is how it might have been and, indeed, some of how it was on
that Tuesday evening in 1896 when members of the Womens Christian
Temperance Union and the Dominion Womens Enfranchisement Asso-
ciation put on their version of the mock parliament.
The mock parliaments, also called Womens Parliaments, embody the
dual ideology of liberal and domestic feminism that informs the Cana-
dian suffrage movement out of which they originate. They were devel-
oped as propaganda and proved to be a valuable and effective tactic in
placing the issue of womens equality before the public and, ultimately,
helping women win the vote. The conditions of their production critique
the division of gender roles that relegated women to the domestic sphere.
On the one hand, these performances were successful, large-scale events,
deftly incorporated into well-organized campaign strategies. They were a
testimony not only to the political acumen and strength of women but to
a movement that demonstrated women knew how to organize and repre-
sent themselves as the equals of men within a public forum. At the same
time, the mock parliaments were hardly acts of militant political protest.
They were an expression of the safe, moderate tactics of an upper- and
middle-class white womanhood who wanted representation within the
existing system of parliamentary democracy. In the plays a similar

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6

erate in its tactics, and often it was associated with middle-class reform or-
ganizations like the Womens Christian Temperance Union, which was
directly or indirectly involved in all productions of the mock parliaments.
Broadly speaking, the suffrage movement in Canada began in On-
tario in the 1880s and was completed in the 1920s with the achieve-
ment of provincial suffrage in Prince Edward Island. These dates, of
course, do not encompass the anomalous situation of Quebec, where
women were not enfranchised on the provincial level until 1940. By
and large, suffrage was in the hands of locally based womens organiza-
tions. This was virtually ensured by the Franchise Act of 1898 in which
control of the Dominion franchise was turned over to the provinces
(Cleverdon 111)."
The movement was longer and stronger and gained earlier successes
in provinces that mounted mock parliaments: Ontario, Manitoba, and
British Columbia. In Eastern Canada, prohibition was accepted early,
as in Prince Edward Island, and the church garnered energy that might
otherwise have gone into suffrage agitation, as well as actively generat-
ing anti-suffrage propaganda (the Catholic Church in Nova Scotia);
suffrage movements were weak and there is no evidence of mock par-
liaments having been performed (Prentice et al., 1 IJ ed. 1857). Of all
the provinces, Ontario had the most extended suffrage history and the
largest number of suffrage organizations, and did the greatest amount
of work to connect disparate groups of women across the country
fighting the same battles. It also put on the greatest number of plays.
The province to mount the first mock parliament, Manitoba, boasted
the first and most dynamic suffrage campaign, one that set the progres-
sive tone later adopted by powerful farmers organizations like the
Grain Growers Associations of Saskatchewan and the United Farmers
of Alberta, and helped these provinces to win victories in little more
than six years. # British Columbias early suffrage activity was a direct
response to the external forces of Britain and America, but also of
Manitoba, its suffrage initiative helping substantially to spur on a West
Coast victory (Cleverdon 8990).
Scholars of Canadian history, almost without exception, recognize
the two dominant political positions within the suffrage movement as
liberal feminism and domestic or reform-minded feminism. Although
these were not mutually exclusive (most feminists were also dedicated
social reformers), liberal feminism generally addressed womens politi-
cal and social equality: its proponents fought for womens increased
participation in the public sphere and their access to post-secondary
education. Domestic feminism was a politics that developed out of the
cult of domesticity, an ideology that dominated the image of women
in the social reform movements between the 1880s and the 1920s in

Canada (Mitchinson 153). The domestic ideal represented women as

morally superior to men, based on their innate maternal and nurturing
qualities. Supporters of this position, like Nellie McClung (1873
1951), argued that womens right to vote was central to their mater-
nal responsibility to reform society (In Times xiii).
The Toronto Womens Literary Club advanced liberal feminist poli-
tics, as did its successors, the Dominion Womens Enfranchisement
Association and the Canadian Suffrage Association. Among the mem-
bership of the latter was one of the most radical women the movement
produced, Flora MacDonald Denison (18671921). Denison, a writer
for Saturday Night , expounded a widely democratic, egalitarian femi-
nism, adopting a position that was intensely critical of capitalist society
and orthodox Christianity (Prentice et al., 1 ed. 1912). Along with
IJ
younger members of the organization, she advocated the adoption of

militant tactics like those of the British suffragettes. The Icelandic
Womens Suffrage Association of Manitoba was also liberal in its poli-
tics. These largely immigrant women had long enjoyed a tradition of
equal rights in their country of origin, and it was this tradition that
they hoped to establish in Canada (184). The Womens Enfranchise-
ment Association of New Brunswick, the only organization of its kind
in the last decade of the nineteenth century, also articulated equal
rights arguments to advance its cause (186).
Most womens organizations, including suffrage organizations, sub-
scribed to a politics of domestic feminism. In terms of suffrage, domestic
or reform-minded feminists argued that womens right to vote was
based not on equality but maternity. As mothers of the nation, women
understood enfranchisement as an extension of their desire to protect
their homes through the protection of society (Mitchinson 158). The
National Council of Women, Womens Institutes, Homemakers Clubs,
and many local womens organizations subscribed to domestic femi-
nism. The most influential and widespread of such organizations within
the suffrage cause was undoubtedly the Womens Christian Temperance
Union. Closely tied to Protestant evangelicalism, the M?JK was active
in several areas of social reform. Its main platform, however, was prohi-
bition. Its failure to solicit a serious response in favour of prohibition
from either the federal or provincial governments in its nascent stages,
despite various campaigns across the land, focused attention on
womens lack of a political voice. This in turn instigated their struggle
for womens enfranchisement. Over time the M?JK provided the single
most popular route to suffrage activity for men and women in Canada
(Bacchi, Liberation 69). It was also directly or indirectly involved in
most productions of the mock parliament.

Of all the organizations dedicated to suffrage, the M?JK has the

longest history. In the 1890s it became the first national organization to
support suffrage. Across Canada, almost without exception, it initiated
suffrage activity when there was none, continued to struggle when
other organizations failed, and lent its support to the strong and active.
Even prior to adopting suffrage as a national platform, it participated
in the first suffrage delegation to the Ontario provincial legislature in
1889. Between 1896 and 1905, the M?JK was the only functioning
suffrage organization in the province (Cleverdon 27).
The M?JK was also responsible for initiating suffrage activity in all
three prairie provinces (Bacchi, Liberation 74). From its inception in
Manitoba in 1877, it was at the centre of the suffrage cause (ibid.). Its
members were instrumental in establishing the provinces premier suf-
frage association, the first of its kind in western Canada. At the begin-
ning of the century, when the Icelandic women alone were active, it
continued to send petitions to the legislature (Cleverdon 4952). It also
lent its support to the formation of the Winnipeg Political Equality
League. When the struggle for womens suffrage began in the newly
formed province of Alberta, the M?JK launched the crusade (Clever-
don 68). In Saskatchewan its members worked in conjunction with the
Women Grain Growers Association and local political equality leagues
to achieve victory (80). Prior to 1908 the M?JK was the only organi-
zation upon whose consistent support ardent suffrage workers could
rely (89).
In Nova Scotia, early suffrage activity was also instigated by the
M?JK : of the thirty-four petitions to the legislature in the 1890s, many
were presented under M?JK auspices (160). A simultaneous flurry of
petitions in New Brunswick was in large part the result of M?JK energy
(181). Two of the three bills that were presented during the lean years
had their backing (187). According to Cleverdon, the province-wide
scope of the M?JK as compared with the purely local character of the
Enfranchisement Association often carried greater weight with the law-
makers at Fredericton (188). In Prince Edward Island, where prohibi-
tion was achieved in 1900, the M?JK presented only two suffrage
petitions, but they were the only ones received by the legislature (200
1). Even in the unprogressive political climate of Quebec, the M?JK was
the first organization to come out in favour of woman suffrage (217).
The national influence of the M?JK , an organization with a much
larger membership than any individual suffrage society, contributed
significantly to the moderate character of Canadian suffrage, according
to Carol Bacchi. Its conservatism tamed the movement and, in so do-
ing, made it more appealing to a broad base of women who did not

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and wife were their highest calling. They stood in direct opposition to
those who used the Bible to argue that a womans place was to be in
submission to man (Cleverdon 6), that she had no ability or aptitude
for political life, or that she was physiologically ill-equipped for intel-
lectual pursuits, unable to bear competition or the strain of public life,
and incapable of practical and political judgment (5). Not only were
women represented as holding office and being skilled in parliamentary
debate, but the larger political campaigns of which the plays formed a
part proved them as savvy on the hustings as their enfranchised broth-
ers. Obviously, their brains were as capacious, their desire as great,
their stamina as enduring.
Mock parliaments proved womens acuity in campaign strategy.
They were organized to raise the profile of suffrage, supply its coffers,
and develop greater public support. They provided forums for discus-
sion and lobbying, pamphlet distribution, and signature collection. Ad-
vertised in local papers and covered by reviews, they were attended by
illustrious audiences. Sometimes they were also staged in grand houses.
At the time that it hosted the mock parliament in 1893, the Bijou in
Winnipeg was most famous for its major American touring attractions
(Skene, Manitoba 323). Later taken over, renovated, and renamed
the Winnipeg Theatre by American theatre magnate C.P. Walker, it be-
came a major theatrical house on his Red River Valley Circuit (Skene,
Manitoba 323; Walker 588). The Edwardian-designed Walker
Theatre, which replaced the Winnipeg Theatre on the circuit, was cho-
sen as the venue for the 1914 mock parliament. From its opening in
1907 until the collapse of the Canadian theatrical touring system in the
early 1930s, the Walker Theatre was Winnipegs largest touring house
(Skene, Walker588). In an otherwise rare reference among theatrical
studies, Reg Skene suggests that the 1914 mock parliament was one of
the most noteworthy events ever to fill the 1,800-seat house. % The two
Winnipeg productions were timed to coincide with the presentation of
suffrage petitions. The Bijou performance in 1893 took place on the
evening of 9 February and was succeeded shortly thereafter by the pre-
sentation of two suffrage petitions. On 14 and 16 February, A.M.
Blakeley and others pray[ed] that the rights of citizenship be not
abridged, or denied on account of sex and that the Franchise be ex-
tended to women.& In 1914 the Political Equality League used the
M?JK suffrage petition to the Manitoba legislature on 27 January as
pre-performance publicity for the Walker Theatre parliament of the fol-
lowing evening. As McClung relates the tale, the women were counting
on Premier Roblin (18531937) to refuse their supplications: What
would be the fate of our play if Sir Roblin were wise enough to give us
a favourable reply? (Stream 115). She was not disappointed, however,

when the premier, an orator of the old school was at his foamy
best He was making the speech that I would make in the play in less
than thirty-six hours O, the delight of that moment! He wasnt
spoiling our play. He was making it! (115). McClung proved herself a
master of mimicry and improvised speech-making when she took up
the role of mock premier and delivered what has now become an al-
most mythic parody of Roblins pompous rhetoric and paternal ser-
monizing (11122).'
The Toronto mock parliaments of February and April were staged in
the Pavilion at Allen Gardens to raise money for the M?JK building
fund (see play program, fig. 8). According to Cleverdon, they were an
endeavour on the part of the @MA= and the M?JK to kick-start the
flagging Ontario suffrage movement and gain it publicity (27). Unfor-
tunately they failed to prevent the almost ten-year period of inactivity
that followed. But they did inspire similar efforts on the part of local
M?JK franchise departments, which continued to stage mock parlia-
ments as a way of keeping the issue alive.
Many performances were significant enough events to command the
attendance of society audiences and the attention of parliamentarians. In
Winnipeg in 1893 this was in large part attributable to the preparatory
work of Dr Amelia Yeomans (18421913), campaign leader and first
woman physician of Manitoba. Through one Mr Burrows on 7 Febru-
ary and again, in person, on 9 February, Yeomans presented a petition to
the Manitoba legislature for an adjournment on Thursday Evening,
to attend the Womens mock parliament. Although the petition failed,
the reported that no fewer than twenty mem-
bers of the legislative assembly were in the audience at the Bijou for the
mock parliament of 9 February. At the British Columbia mock parlia-
ment in 1910, both the lieutenant-governor and the premier were among
the crowd to witness the revolution that might be expected were
women to take the place of men in the lawmaking chamber (Cleverdon
89). Two members of the Manitoba Opposition deserted the civic
dinner on the evening of the 1914 Walker Theatre production in Win-
nipeg and secreted themselves among the audience, according to the
(McClung, 122).
This 1914 parliament was particularly successful, drawing a capacity
crowd and netting enough money to finance the remainder of the pro-
vincial suffrage campaign. ! High-profile activists in the suffrage com-
munity were featured in the play, and the venue, according to the
, was used to actively campaign for new support:
During the evening an opportunity was presented [to] the audience to
sign a petition calling upon the government to extend the franchise to

M?JK ! "

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Many of the women who took part in the mock parliaments were the
most distinguished activists the suffrage movement produced. As social
reformers, lecturers, politicians, and campaign organizers, they had
experience of both politics and the stage. Mrs A.J. McClung, mother-
in-law of Nellie McClung, helped produce the first mock parliament in
1893. She was assisted by Dr Amelia Yeomans and Miss E. Cora Hind
(18611942), the latter well known nationally and internationally as
an agricultural expert and longtime journalist for the
. In 1896 Annie O. Rutherford, once editor of the M?JK
&
, was president of M?JK when she took up the role of
Speaker in the Toronto presentation. Beside her played Dr Emily
'
Howard Stowe (18311903), the first woman physician in Canada as

well as the first female principal and elected school board trustee. !
This parliament also included Stowes daughter, Dr August Stowe-

Gullen (18571943), Mary McDonnell, and Mrs A. Vance, all of
whom contested seats on the Toronto School Board in 1892. Lillian
Beynon Thomas (18741961) was responsible for the idea of the
Walker Theatre play in 1914, after hearing of its success in British Co-
lumbia while on a visit there (McClung, 113). Its star, Nellie
!
McClung, was the most famous proponent of the first-wave reform

movement and a veteran of the lecture circuit. Playing alongside Mc-
Clung was Mrs C.P. Walker, wife of the theatre magnate. Their daugh-
ters Florence and Ruth respectively, took the roles of pages.!
Announcements of the mock parliaments, published in local papers,

contributed to their moderate character. They were billed not as politi-
cal theatre but as entertainment, and advertisements were to be found
in the entertainment section of the newspaper. The and
of 18 February 1896 spotlight the musical portion of the
evening and the local musicians who would perform, a not entirely in-
appropriate strategy given that the program was largely musical. The
deputation of men speaking on suffrage and the mock parliament come
second and fourth in a program of fourteen musical pieces; the final
nine pieces constitute a promenade, which seems to have been
placed to allow the audience to work off some of the energy and emo-
tion occasioned by the performance. Although advertisements for the
Walker Theatre mock parliament appear with those for other theatri-
cals in the Amusements section of the paper, the politics of the per-
formance are more obviously foregrounded. Prior billing is given to
!!
the patently suffrage play ; a byline announces

the mock parliament as a production of the Winnipeg Political Equality
League in Which Over fifty Women, Prominent in Winnipeg Public,
Literary and Social Circles will take part ( , 29
January 1914).

Just as the play advertisements understate the political import of the

performances, newspaper reviews celebrate their success as entertain-
ments while cautiously supporting their plea for womens suffrage.
Most reviews open by heralding the box-office success of the plays: a
standing room only audience assembled at the Bijou (
, 10 February 1893), A sold-out house at the Walker The-
atre ( , 29 January 1914) and the favourable re-
sponses they elicited from their audiences. A column by Portia, an
early womens-page feature, is peppered with the howls
of delight that were generated among the audience ( , 20
February 1896). From the standpoint of an entertainment, lauds the
, the 1893 mock parliament was excellent
and few burlesques have ever met with a heartier response (10 Feb-
ruary 1893). This exuberant praise for the quality of the entertainment
is, nevertheless, reinforced by genuine support for the politics of the
plays. One reviewer comments: There is but little doubt that wiser
and better men left the house than entered it (10 February 1893). The
reviewer for the reveals an unquestionable sympa-
thy for suffrage, remarking, If last nights production is any indication
and the campaign in future meets with as much success, the cause may
not be so hopeless after all and the vote may not be so far away as one
might be inclined to fear (McClung, 118). The repeated use of
the word may, however, discloses a polite hesitancy, no doubt de-
signed to make the political message of the play more tolerable to a
conservative readership for whom the idea of women in the public
sphere was, if not entirely novel, still radical. The similarly lighthearted
tone of the , in which it is claimed that ev-
eryone knows no harm could possibly ensue if the mock parliament
declared war or framed a new school bill (10 February 1893), also
seems to recognize the risk of condemnation that suffragists faced from
those who associated the stage with immoral proclivities and women
with hearth and home (Careless 48).
The liberal and conservative forces at work within and around the
mock parliaments are paralleled by the liberal and domestic feminist ar-
guments employed by reviewers in their defence. Portia gleans a lib-
eral response from the Toronto performance: Every woman present
seemed to feel that here was her opportunity to express herself, to im-
press her individuality upon the world. Although the
maintains that the Bijou theatre production made the citi-
zens feel that if necessary something could be done in the way of legisla-
tion (10 February 1893), the reviewer commends the parliamentarians

for their maternity their kind, motherly look while the
praises their composure and elegance (McClung,

121). As Portia indicates, such praise is, at least in part, a strategy to un-
dermine derogatory stereotypes that characterized suffragists as man-
nish he-women: We freely confess that we looked in vain among the
members of the Womens Parliament for the grotesquely gowned, loud-
voiced, domineering, aggressive, disagreeable (and chimerical) individu-
als we hear described so often and specimens of whom, we were in-
formed, would surely be plentiful among these women desiring to vote
( , 20 February 1896). It is, nevertheless, also the case that
the vast majority of women, both feminists and social reformers, who
attempted to eliminate sex-prejudice within parliamentary democracy
did not want to violate the feminine or rewrite womens place in the so-
cial order as first and foremost wives and mothers.
The conditions that governed the production of the mock parlia-
ments express a tension between the liberal and conservative politics
that operated within the woman movement in general and suffrage in
particular. The organizers and actors of these plays flouted the rigid
definition of gender roles maintained by the status quo. Not only, as we
shall see, did women act as politicians in the plays but, by making them
successful and effective elements in the campaign, they became the pol-
iticians that they represented on stage. In doing so, they confuted the
opinion that women and men were by nature essentially different, and
that this difference presupposed that womens proper sphere of influ-
ence was home and family. At the same time, the parliaments were not
a militant strategy. The press treated them primarily as entertainment,
and from all accounts their audiences responded politely and enthusias-
tically. They were a cultured, contained demonstration of the political
will of influential middle- and upper-class women, many of whom saw
enfranchisement as a means by which to impose maternity and a supe-
rior feminine morality on the society.
In her study of English Canadian fiction, ,

Linda Hutcheon claims that parody and irony [are] major forms of
both formal and ideological critique in feminist and Canadian fiction
alike (7). Both challenge dominant traditions and a cultural subject
position that is characterized by white, male, British and American val-
ues (5). These literary forms allow writers to speak to their culture,
from within, but without being totally coopted by that culture. The
irony and distance implied by parody allow for at the same
time that the doubled structure of both demands recognition of
(7). Parody in the mock parliaments expresses both a reverence
for and a rejection of the parliamentary system, a system women wanted
to be a part of. Their imitation of parliamentary procedure, in the name
of equal suffrage, affirms an implicit faith in democracy and its principle

of one person, one vote. The parodic critique of this system comes in the
form of a feminist challenge to its gender-biased constitution. The rever-
sal of roles between men and women exposes the naturalized relation
between men and power as an ideological one. It gives both liberal and
domestic feminists a way of expressing their social and political disad-
vantage within the present parliamentary system and subjects the preju-
dice of that system to ridicule.
The mock parliament faithfully represents a legislative assembly in ses-
sion. All of its theatrical trappings stage, props, actors, scripts, plot,
and action have direct referents in this political arena. The forms
strongly mimetic character confirms the authority of the original, and
this in turn confers credibility on the critique. Its mimesis of an actual
parliament is a reverent emulation, which helps to ensure that the cri-
tique will be read as a reconstruction rather than a demolition of the in-
stitution. The mock parliament positions its women actors in largely self-
reflexive roles, as fictional versions of the politicians they hope to be-
come. Such roles align women activists with images of social respectabil-
ity, mitigating, if not exonerating, their appearance on a public stage. !"
In the February 1896 mock parliament in Toronto, the stage set is a
version of the floor of the provincial legislature. !# It is divided verti-
cally into two sections, each represented by twenty-six desks and
twenty-six parliamentarians. Between them is the Clerks table, occu-
pied by the Clerk and her assistant. The Speaker sits on a throne be-
yond the head of the table facing the audience, the Sergeant-at-Arms is
down-stage across from the Speaker, guarding the door, and little
girls in handsome dresses flitted about as pages (Mock Parliament:
Universal Suffrage). !$ The modifications to the real historical parlia-
ment, while minor, indicate that the play reproduces the spirit of the di-
vision of power rather than the real one: eighty-two electoral seats
have been collapsed into fifty-two and represent only the two larger
parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. !% It is impossible to deter-
mine which of the large parties is in power because on the issue of suf-
frage and social discrimination based on gender, there is no substantive
difference between their positions.
The central parodic feature of the mock parliament is the reversal of
roles between men and women. On the most fundamental level, this
reversal separates political power from men FAH IA and alienates the
audience from its usual homocentric perspective: it lays bare the natu-
ralized relation between men and political power and calls attention to
this relation as a socially constructed one. By implication, the reversal
of roles challenges the exclusive authority of men to rule the state. In
representing women as politicians, it questions the ideology of natural
spheres.

M?JK ! "
The scope of the reversal extends beyond the present into the past
and reconstructs a history in which women have ruled in the legisla-
tive halls from time immemorial.!& This reconstruction involves the
recuperation of a mythic past for women, one that positions them as
strong and their roles as politically important. The possibility that a
historical matriarchy did exist was first posited by German philosopher
J.J. Bachofen (18151887), whose influential text Das Mutterrecht in-
spired spin-off theories by such well-known nineteenth-century Ameri-
can feminists as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman.!' In the mock parliament, the construction of a matriarchal
herstory for women is a symbolic gesture. It implicitly questions ho-
mocentric renditions of history, but it does not idealize a matriarchal
utopia such as those imagined by Stanton or Gilman.
The reversal of roles in the parliament involves a faithful mirror im-
age. This means that matriarchal rule contains and reproduces all of
the flaws inherent in the original, inherent in patriarchy. According to
Mary Daly, reversal itself is one of the male methods of mystification
by which patriarchy oppresses women ( Gyn/ecology 8): it masks
womens religious subjection to men, it devalues their history and their

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which children shall not be in the streets after nightfall without proper
guardianship. Such municipal Council shall in such cases cause a
bell to be rung at or near the time appointed [usually nine
oclock] (162).#
The question in the mock parliament that addresses itself to smoking
a farcical plea for an apparatus [with spittoon attached] which each
and every smoker shall be compelled to use (under a penalty therein pro-
vided) is directly related to the M?JK crusade against tobacco con-
sumption, and their more general prohibitionist platform.# Like the
issue of curfew, underlying this question is the reform-minded belief in
social control as a means to eradicate social and individual evils (Bacchi,
82).
The remainder of this mock parliament deals with issues that more
properly belong to a liberal feminist agenda. These include the condi-
tions under which women worked in the public sphere, their access to
employment generally, and their ability to earn a living wage. The
bill restricting men from wearing long stockings, knickerbockers, and
round-a-bout coats when bicycling, and the report of the Select Com-
mittee on the proper costume to be worn by Lady Public School
teachers, are satiric treatments of the social restrictions placed on
womens dress.# The bill restricting mens clothing reverses the contro-
versial issue of womens dress reform and especially the fashions asso-
ciated with bicycle-riding. This new exercise fad required short,
tight-fitting clothing that became, like bicycle-riding itself, a challenge
to the physical and social restrictions placed on women (Light and Parr
2278). The Select Committees report can be read as a general attack
on Toronto School Board trustees who tried to impose a traditional
Christian concept of womanhood on their lady teachers. However, it is
undoubtedly a specific attack on the locally infamous Trustee Bell who
instigated a meeting to exchange impressions on the provocative fash-
ions of the women teachers by claiming that he did not know
whether to call [a woman in bloomers] a lady or a prostitute (W. Rob-
erts, 32). The mock parliament report singles out
the school-board trustee for particular criticism when it is revealed that
of the twenty-one witnesses called upon to examine the contentious
garments knickerbockers, bloomers, divided skirts, short skirts all
gave their evidence in a most careful, thoughtful, calm, and satisfactory
manner, save the school board Trustee. #! Surely, the point of these
bills was to suggest to men the personal invasion that women felt when
their clothing, and particularly their undergarments, became a public
and professional issue (32).
Bills and questions on a wage reform and mens access to employ-
ment in the mock parliament parodically treat the sex-stereotyping

that enabled the exploitation of women workers. The bill debarring a

husband from receiving a salary when his wife is in receipt of one
and the act to dismiss all married men engaged in the profession of
teaching once again attack the Toronto Public School Board, which
openly policed the morality and private lives of its female members,
paid them humiliating wages, and refused to hire any woman over
thirty (31). The mock legislation was outrageous only to the extent
that its target was men. The latter bill parodies a contemporary To-
ronto School Board ruling, implemented in 1895, that prohibit[ed
the] employment of married women who had husbands to support
them (W. Roberts, Rocking 312). By attempting to deny a mans
right to an income, the mock legislation emphasizes the degradation of
womens occupational vulnerability in the face of conservative forces
that institutionalized sex discrimination and expelled them from the
workforce upon marriage. It critiques the lack of a married womans
right to work as well as the commonly held belief that married women
chose not to work (Kealey, Canadian Socialism and the Woman
Question 97).
There is an implicit reproof in these bills directed at the family
wage and its material relation to a womans proper sphere. Both is-
sues, however, are more directly addressed by legislation which, in the
one case, attempts to implement pay equity and, in the other, mocks the
gender-determined eligibility for work. The former is a bill to remedy
the injustice from which the weaker half of humanity suffer men per-
forming the same work as women, and in an equally efficient manner,
receive only one-half or one-third the wage paid to women. This bill is
a simple reversal of the feminist demand for womens wage reform and
of the unhappy fact that women were indeed paid from one-third to
one-half less wages than men (W. Roberts, 8).
#"
Its critique is of a two-tiered pay scale that was based on the assump-
tion that men should be paid more because they had to support a wife
and children.
## The latter bill prohibits men from invasion of the
lighter employments such as medicine, law, dressmaking, millinery,

which by their very nature belong to women. It satirizes the widely
held belief that men and women had a natural predisposition to particu-
lar kinds of employment. Its specific attack is directed against the no-
tion of lighter employments, which masked the extremely labourious
nature of much work done by women, justified their lesser pay, and ex-
cluded them from a variety of jobs (8). In an age when domestic chores,
the quintessential womens work, were physically strenuous and enor-
mously time-consuming, the irony implicit in the notion of lighter
employments that would not jeopardize the delicacy of woman-
hood must have been glaringly obvious, especially to women.
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The only complete extant script comes from the 1893 Manitoba par-
liament, reprinted in the .57 Its major differ-
ence from the 1896 production is that it does not sustain the parodic
reversal of roles between men and women. In it, women argue for their
own suffrage. One can only surmise why the writer/actors decided to
play it in this way. The reviewer suggests that it was in keep-
ing with the object of the meeting: to have the all-important ques-
tion the ballot for women discussed before the public and also to
raise funds for carrying on the work of the union. Given the high-
profile nature of the event and its audience members, participants were
obviously willing to abandon their fictional frame for the opportunity
of a full hearing on the issue of womens suffrage.
Yet in spite of the straight treatment it receives, the suffrage debate
also involves an irony that remains consistent with the tone of both the
1893 and 1896 productions. Mrs Dolsen is at her drollest when she
quips that while it is said that men have from four to six ounces more
brain than woman on the average, it is also true that the elephant
would outdo man greatly in this respect. Anti-suffrage claims that
womens brains were smaller than mens were not uncommon. But the
debate depended for its humour on deadpan underplaying and the con-
text of a womens parliament to make comments like women are not
trained in politics or the cradle lies across the door of the polling
booth ring with an irony worthy of the first half of the play.
The debate is also prefaced by the introduction of nine bills requiring
a second reading and the proposal of two new bills. This wish-list of
womens demands seems to play on the fears of anti-suffrage critics like
McGill professor Warwick Chipman, who criticized womens ten-
dency to propose laws on every subject and to constantly exhort state
interference (Bacchi, 49). Some of the bills simply reverse
the double standard; others are genuine goals that women activists de-
sired to see realized in law. Many evince the prairie roots of the play-
text. Bill No. 3, to provide for the disfranchisement of certain
classes of men in certain cases, is probably the best example of the
nativism of some prairie women reformers. After the great wave of
immigration that began in 1985, such attitudes grew into a strong
sense of resentment against foreign men [who] could vote, while rela-
tively well-educated Anglo-Saxon women could not (Prentice et al.,
2nd ed. 223). Bill No. 4 proposes the amendment of the Devolution
of Estates Act, to declare the interest of the husband in his deceased
wifes estate. This satiric reversal of inheritance law imagines men in
womens place, pleading for their due. In the West, widows had no
legal rights to inheritance and were frequently abandoned to the

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tain amount of seclusion? Mrs Jamieson wonders. She takes this fear-
mongering to its hyperbolic extreme when she surmises that the pub-
lic polling booth will become a favourite revenue of the drunken
woman and the prostitute.
The suffrage bid loses, the performance, as it must, having aban-
doned the fictional reversal of roles. But the last word, nevertheless, is
given to the pro-suffrage side, and in hindsight it portends the first suc-
cess of the movement: And shall not Manitoba, brave little Manitoba,
who has declared her ability to manage her own affairs in the face of so
much opposition, shall not Manitoba have the honour of being the first
of the provinces to grant equal rights to all her citizens? Manitoba
was indeed the first province to accord women the vote, twenty-three
years later, in 1916.
Although all three of these mock parliaments resolved in the failure
of the suffrage bid, the action of the performances is infused with an
irony and an optimism necessary to political struggle. In the end, they
communicate a sense of the headiness of power and the continuing in-
justice of womens disenfranchisement. Their faithful imitation of par-
liamentary procedure discloses a reverence for the democratic process,
but they challenge the validity of this process by critiquing its gender
bias. The substance of this critique represents the two political tradi-
tions that inform the suffrage movement. Just as the conditions under
which the plays were produced express a liberal and domestic feminist
position, the plays argue that womens claim to suffrage is based at
once on a belief in the equality between men and women and, at the
same time, on their maternal difference from them a difference that
promises to make womens rights, social reform, and Christian moral-
ity its priorities.
3 Mothers of a New and Virile

Race!: Liberalism and Social
Purity in the Life and Works of
Kate Simpson Hayes
The biography of Kate Simpson Hayes, perhaps more than anything

she wrote, testifies to her liberal feminist conviction that women were
the social equals of men. She lived independently, forged a high-profile
career, achieved substantial literary and dramatic recognition, and par-
ticipated in the professionalization of women journalists and womens
suffrage. But Hayess work was also informed by the more conservative
politics of Social Purity. Like Social Gospel, Social Purity was a funda-
mentally religious and nationalist movement that aimed to Christianize
the social order. This remoralization, as Valverde calls it, focused
particularly on the control of sexuality (Valverde 17). The ideology of
Social Purity underpins much of Hayess journalism, teaching, and im-
migration work, in which she repeatedly asserted the domestic feminist
view that women were innately maternal, the cultural arbiters of a su-
perior morality, and that non-Anglo-Canadians were a godless impure
breed that required assimilation and civilization into middle-class An-
glo-Canadian values.
Hayess plays express the same political tension. Her early Regina
plays reflect her liberal feminist attitudes, later ones, those of Social Pu-
rity. A Domestic Disturbance (1892), The Duplicate Man (1897), Di-
vorce for $50 (1893?), and A Bargain Husband (1897) belong to the
former category. Although no longer extant, these light comedies sati-
rize Hayess affair with Nicholas Flood Davin. Their treatment of ille-
gitimacy, divorce, and adultery, favourite targets of sexual regulation
by social reformers, seems to suggest a liberal feminist critique of patri-
archal politics.

My analysis of Hayess playwriting focuses, necessarily, on

and , which, other than the playlet
, are her only surviving dramatic works. These plays deal with

the regulation of race and gender within the ideology of Social Purity.
, a childrens fairy-tale play, inculcates hege-
monic values through the control of instinct and desire. The alternative
fairy world created in this play can be read as an expression of chil-
drens libidinal impulses, as well as those of the fairy population, both
of which must be repressed in order for the children to adopt middle-
class, Anglo-Canadian, Christian values. The resolution to the dra-
matic conflict between the fairies and the prairie children provides an
idealized solution to deep cultural conflicts between Anglo-Canadians
and natives in the form of a peaceful segregation.
What remain tendencies and implicit tensions in the fairy play the
dangerous sexuality beneath the hedonism of the fairies as native and
other become explicit in , as they are embodied in the crim-
inal libidos of the Galician immigrants. Written thirty years after
, nevertheless returns, generically and
ideologically, to an earlier period. It is a problem play that focused
upon immigration and is informed by Hayess experiences as immigra-
tion officer and teacher. It asserts that Anglo-Canadians are the arbiters
of nation building and of truth and good; it is their responsibility to as-
similate the Galcians, who are foreign, immoral, and godless, and to in-
stil in them a fidelity to Christianity, king, and country. This task can
only be achieved by middle-class women reformers whose active mater-
nity converts not just the heathens but the animal passion of men
generally.
Catherine Ethel Hayes was born the third daughter of Irish Catholic
immigrant Patrick Hayes at Dalhousie, New Brunswick, in 1856. Her
family, at least initially, was middle class. According to Constance
Maguire, whose study of Hayes has uncovered much new material, her
father was a lumber merchant and later owner of a general store in that
town. After financial difficulties forced foreclosure on his property, and
after losing what must have been an expensive nonpayment suit at the
Supreme Court of New Brunswick, he left his family to work in a Wis-
consin lumber camp. Six months later, in 1869, when Kate was thirteen
years old, he died a slow and painful death five days after being
crushed by a falling tree (Maguire 267). Kates mother, Anna Hayes,
was widowed at forty-two and left to care for three young daughters.
A highly cultivated woman, according to nineteenth-century biogra-
pher Henry James Morgan, to Kate she bequeathed her taste for litera-
ture (516). Thus, while still in high-school, Kate enjoyed her first

St Croix Courier

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city of Regina almost from the moment of her arrival. According to

ONeill, in November of her first year, Hayes was offering her ser-
vices as a Teacher of Elocution, French and Music (Nineteenth
Century 4). On top of opening her own millinery shop, she was or-
ganist of St Marys Roman Catholic Church. She also participated in
the development of Reginas first Literary and Musical Association and
staged plays at Reginas earliest venues, the Town Hall Theatre and the
North West Mounted Police Barracks Theatre.
It was while participating in the Literary and Musical Association,
no doubt, that she made the acquaintance of the eloquent, erudite,
and charming Nicholas Flood Davin (18431901), founder and edi-
tor of the (Koester, m.p.
60). Davin was to
have a profound effect on all aspects of Hayess professional and per-
sonal life. He fostered her literary career by publishing her poetry in
the and by drawing the attention of Canadian literati like Will-
iam Douw Lighthall and Sara Jeannette Duncan (18611922) to her
work (Maguire 367). He employed her as a journalist, the
first woman reporter (1920; 357). In 1890 it was his influence that
secured her the government post of legislative librarian, making her the
first female in the Northwest to hold such a position (35).
But Hayes also had an influence on Davin. Maguire concludes, It is
no coincidence that at the time Kate Simpson was planning to dispose of
her shop, the Bazaar, Nicholas Davin was expressing concern regard-
ing married womens property rights in the federal parliament (35).
Hayes was the woman behind the man who prompted Sir John Thomp-
son, then minister of justice, to abolish the law making women liable for
their husbands debts. Maguire does not agree with Mary Kinnear and
John Herd Thompson, however, who concur that it was under her influ-
ence that Davin carried his other intercession into the House of Com-
mons on behalf of womens rights. In May 1895 his womans suffrage
bill was the first full-dress debate on the question in ten years and
also the last until the period of the Great War (Cleverdon 110). "
Hayess professional ambitions and liberal feminist politics were con-
solidated in her work for the Canadian Womens Press Club, in which
she played an inaugural role. Her involvement in the club brought her
into contact with an elite group of educated, progressive, professional
women. Among its members were Nellie McClung, Cora Hind, Frances
Marion Beynon, Lillian Beynon Thomas, and Emily Murphy (1868
1933), the most influential women in the Canadian woman movement
at the turn of the century (Jackel, First 54). Hayes and journalist
Miggsy Graham of the
pressured the ?FH s publicity di-
rector, George Ham (for whom Hayes was working in Montreal at the
time), to extend the privilege of free railway passes to women journalists

in order that they, like their male counterparts, might travel to the St
Louis Worlds Fair in 1904 (Maguire 68; Jackel, First 567; Hayes
Papers 4, scrapbook, Ladies St. Louis Party). The sixteen women who
made that journey, including Hayes, founded the club. Hayes was the
first secretary, but its initial two years under the presidency of the pio-
neer journalist Kathleen (Kit) Coleman (18641915) were largely in-
active. According to Cora Hind, Hayes was the prime mover behind
a second important meeting in June 1906 which rekindled the fledgling
club and averted its early demise (Jackel, First 57). She was elected
to succeed Coleman as its second president. Maguire cites newspaper ar-
ticles in which Hayes condemns womens clubs, and details how she re-
signed her post as president of the ?MF? early in frustration at womens
lack of organizational abilities. But her disenchantment did not prevent
her from helping found a new local branch of the ?MF? in 1908 while
living in Victoria (57).
For almost ten years between 1904 and the outbreak of the First
World War, Hayes worked as an immigration agent for the Canadian
Pacific Railway. It was a position that accorded her the privileged sta-
tus of a representative of the Canadian government on foreign duty;
thus, she lived the life of an emancipated woman writing for foreign
newspapers, holding public lectures, and participating in an elaborate
social life. She hobnobbed with the English upper classes, attending
over the years a variety of high-profile events including the kings coro-
nation, which she viewed from the ?FH offices in Trafalgar Square, and
Dominion Day festivities, celebrated in the company of Lady Strath-
cona and the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, the High Commis-
sioner for Canada. She visited the Dominion Club and the Crystal
Palace, where she was introduced to Lord and Lady Northcliffe. She
was received by Countess Aberdeen in Dublin and attended the open-
ing of parliament there. She met Lady Gregory (18521932), undoubt-
edly the most famous Irish woman playwright of her day, and Robert
Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. She banqueted with the
Council of the Society of Women Journalists, heard lectures by Emme-
line Pankhurst, and joined both the suffrage demonstration at Royal
Albert Hall and the Womens Social and Political Union suffrage pag-
eant, billed as the greatest gathering of women the world has ever
seen (Hayes Papers 3, programs, invitations, etc.).

In a commemorative article collected in her scrapbook, one journal-

ist writes that Hayess work on the Womans Page of the
made her name a household word in thousands of Western
homes: Mrs. Hayes has done much in the literary area and she ranks
in a foremost place among women of letters, fully justifying her elec-
tion to the honoured position of President of the Canadian Womens


!" #!$ %
Press Club (Hayes Papers 4, scrapbook). In 1900 she edited

Womens World, the first sustained womens page in western Can-
ada. # Her voice was a feature of the paper for almost a decade. In
Hayess view, the intention of the page was to interest, to entertain
and, when possible, instruct (Maguire 64). She often used it to ex-
press liberal feminist sentiments. Her column addressed a whole range
of issues having to do with womens sphere of personal and social ac-
tivity, including their right to participate in the public world. She de-
fended their independence from men and marriage and raised her voice
in support of their decisions to remain single, to work, to vote, and to
organize. She encouraged women to take the initiative in courtship
(109), but she also believed that not all women were suited to marriage
and that not all marriages lasted. Not surprisingly, given her own his-
tory, she placed the blame for most broken homes upon abusive and
inebriated husbands and felt it entirely appropriate an imperative act
of self-reliance, in fact that women who renounced such abuse and
separated from their husbands, as well as single women and widows,
enter into the public world of wage labour. On occasion, paid labour
included the position of wife, which Hayes felt had such high social
value that it deserved formal financial remuneration (107, 112, 114).

In 1901, she took the part of Toronto garment workers in a dispute

with their employers and the following year did the same for Winnipeg
nurses (173). She lent her support to women doctors and those moving
into the new field of clerical work. She wrote of womens participation
in journalism, in libraries, in business, and in farming (1689, 182,
135, 184). She reported on the work of the Canadian Womens Press
Club and the National Council of Women. She also championed
womens right to vote: for beyond moral suasion their strong loving
hearts cannot go for their hands are practically tied by the refusal of
the greatest power that of casting the ballot (139).
Hayes supported herself, and for a good many years her children,

through journalism and freelance writing. Although she left her edito-
rial post on the in 1906, she continued to submit

articles on a freelance basis. In 1910 she briefly edited a similar page

for the (75). In the 1920s, while in her seventies and

living in Victoria, she wrote a daily advice column for the

called Problems of the Heart, as well as articles for

, the , , and the
(77; 91). By the time she died in 1945, at the venerable age of
almost eighty-nine, she had spent almost half her life earning her living
as what she called a penny-a-liner (97).
Hayes also had more strictly literary aspirations and enjoyed consid-
erable success in having her work published. She was a writer in the
!

largest sense, penning story and sentiment in every major genre. In the
" # $

1890s she contributed poetry and fiction to , ,

, , , and

(60). Her first book, , a collection of
% !

poetry and short stories that also included her childrens play

, received very warm reviews in , The ,
and the Winnipeg when it was published in 1895 (Hayes pa-
%
pers 4, scrapbook; Maguire 44). It was followed by an edition of sto-
ries and poetry for children called
$
(1900). Later
& ' & ( )

in the decade Hayes published two works commemorating Indian
*
culture: a 1906 novella,
% )
, and in 1908, an addition of native folk-tales,
+!
West, which she intended to mark the passing of the
,
Red man (Maguire 74; 8). (1910) is a col-
lection of comic verse, Robert Service, to whom it is dedicated, and
was inspired by her early twentieth-century trip there. Other tales of
the West include The Trail Breakers, a novel of western settlement

that was never published, and The Taras Pioneer the West, a story
serialized by the (97). Hayes even tried her hand
at a song entitled Two Irish Eyes.
%
99 The Life and Plays of Kate Simpson Hayes
By the time Hayes had published , her flam-

boyant theatrical days were behind her, as it was in Regina that she en-
joyed most of her dramatic successes. There she produced, directed,
acted in, and, of course, wrote theatre. Patrick ONeill claims, that to-
gether with Davin, Hayes was in the vanguard of theatre leader-
ship(Ninetheenth Century 4). She made her Regina debut as an
actor in the fall of 1886 when the Musical and Literary Association,
spearheaded by Davin, held its premier performance. She made her sec-
ond appearance in the mirthful and laughable farce ,
where she played the soubrette part to perfection (quoted in ONeill
4). Her production of scenes from , in which she
took the role of Lady Teazle, kept the nascent town theatre in Regina
alive while under threat from the newly built theatre at the Northwest
Mounted Police Barracks. In the words of one contemporary reviewer,
as an actor she was most finished [in] manner, with great histrionic
power, which displayed not only natural gift but careful training
(quoted in ONeill 4).&
Her own plays were performed in Regina, Moose Jaw, Portage la
Prairie, and Winnipeg before enthusiastic audiences. One even had
the honour of being performed under the sponsorship of the Lieuten-
ant Governor (Maguire 7). In the 1920s, after many years hiatus,
Hayes returned to theatre as a creative form; but instead of the light-
hearted comedies of her early years, virtually all of which made their
way to the stage, she wrote serious dramas that never had productions.
Her longest and most ambitious play, , showed some brief
promise of being turned into a film; The Writ won tenth place in a
Montreal playwriting competition; Midnight Express is a very short
one-act play, more a play fragment than a completed piece (Hayes Pa-
pers 6, books).
Hayes negotiated her sexual relations with the same sense of self-de-
termination that she did the professional and literary aspects of her
life. In a climate where the new phenomenon of the single, self-sup-
porting working woman was perceived as a threat to the moral tenor
of Canadian society, Hayes flouted feminine propriety and began a
high-profile affair with the forty-three-year-old Nicolas Davin. Their
romance produced two illegitimate children and was said to have
rocked the little community of Regina to its foundations (McCubbin
12; MacEwan 36).
Davin obviously answered Hayess expectations on all kinds of lev-
els: sexual, social, cultural, and professional. According to John Herd
Thompson, he cut a distinct figure in the muddy streets of the capi-
tal (250). With ramrod posture, almost six foot tall, Davin was a
handsome bachelor, a dandy who affected a top hat and a flowing

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But when Hayes passionately laments, the might have beens are
what break ones heart, she bemoans more than her marital status.
Although Maguire does not mention the American divorce, it is unclear
whether the social barrier to which Hayes refers is purely a religious
one, as she contends. Had she been governed by ecclesiastical doctrine,
by religious morality, or even by a strong sense of social respectability,
surely she would neither have conducted such a public affair accord-
ing to Maguire the entire community clearly knew of the relation-
ship (41) nor would have made it the subject of town theatre, which
she did. If she wholly subscribed to the domestic ideal of her journalis-
tic persona, Mary Markwell, seeing marriage and motherhood as
womens highest calling, then legitimating her relationship, especially

for the sake of her children, would have been her priority. A Canadian
divorce may have been onerous and unseemly, requiring as it did a Pri-
vate Bill in the House of Commons, but it was still possible especially
for one so politically well connected as Hayes.
In the end Hayes chose not to marry Davin, I believe, because by the
time Agnes was born, he had become a hopeless alcoholic. Despite the
depth of feeling they had for one another neither was ever to love in
the same way again despite their history and their children, Hayes felt
justified in leaving him because he no longer lived up to her expecta-
tions as a friend or as a man (Koester Papers, Letter to Koester, 9
March 1979). In a letter to Morgan after Davins death she wrote:

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She was strong, vibrant, and aspiring, the very qualities which she had
admired in him but which he had discarded. He became for her a fallen
hero, self-absorbed, over-proud, and cowardly. Reflecting on the finan-
cial and professional defeat that characterized Darvins final years,
Hayes confides to Morgan that he drifted away on a sort of sea of
tempest and storm: He was like a chieftain swaying a sort of outlaw
clan, and had he held his sword aloft they would have followed him
with unswerving devotion and loyalty. He had such strange fits of ac-
tive cowardice (Morgan Papers, 10 April 1901; 12 April 1901).

Davin had surrendered to weakness. In Hayess view, he chose drink

over her, and when he did so, she too made a decision. Despite the ob-
vious pain it caused her, she left him, as she had done her first husband.
While her letters offer clear evidence of the deep loss she felt, she was
not willing to be harnessed to a relationship, even one that had been so
gratifying, if it no longer fulfilled her. She was not prepared to relin-
quish satisfying work for marriage which, as Maguire demonstrates,
were exclusive choices for her to marry a man who debased and dis-
graced her affection (1634). She chose independence from Davin at
the expense of the children she had with him. Rather than the illegiti-
macy surrounding their births, I believe, it was the guilt associated with
this decision no doubt exacerbated by her propagation of Social Pu-
rity politics to the contrary that caused her in later life to so vehe-
mently deny them.

In 1979 Ken Mitchell published a historical drama entitled

in which Hayes figures as a central character. While
Mitchell admits in his introduction to the play to altering facts to con-
vey his story, his representation of Hayes is a version of the woman I
have described above: feisty, self-confident, politicized, refusing to be
satisfied by an inadequate and tempestuous lover. She was a career
woman entrepreneurial and professional whose actions helped se-
cure womens social and professional equality.
Yet Hayess behaviour, implicitly and explicitly scorning and con-
temptuous of traditional womanhood, belied her more conservative
maternal feminist views that reinscribed women in patriarchal relation-
ships by placing wives, mothers, and morality at the centre of Cana-
dian society. Perhaps less a function of character than the social and
political climate in which she lived, many of these attitudes, and her
work associated with them, belonged to the ideology of Social Purity,
which had a substantial influence on women who, like Hayes, were ac-
tive in the woman movement.
Social Purity, according to Mariana Valverde, was a philanthropic

project developed by a newly forming urban bourgeoisie to reform or
regenerate Canadian society in the name of nation building
(1516). It was at root both religious and nationalistic. Its predomi-
nantly middle-class, English-Canadian proponents like the wctu ,
ymca , Salvation Army, and the Canadian Purity Education Associa-
tion believed that God intended people to act in a chaste Christian
manner: to work, to live in patriarchal families, to attend church, and
to refrain from, for example, unconjugal sexual relations, tobacco, and
alcohol. Social conditions arising from the transformation of Canadian
society, including immigration, poverty, crime, and prostitution, were
not understood as fundamentally economic or political issues but as so-
cial problems. More particularly, they were moral and sexual prob-
lems. The regulation and control of sexuality, according to Valverde,
was thought to be the foundation of character and civilization. This
view, and the attitudes that developed out of it, were determining fac-
tors in gender formation, class order, and racial organization, three cat-
egories that structured the work of the Social Purity movement (18).
Social Purity espoused domestic feminist values of womens essential,
innate maternity and moral superiority. According to Carol Bacchi,
women were considered to be above sex, and their asexuality was
made a patriotic virtue (Race Regeneration 308). Paradoxically, great
numbers of middle-class women who participated in the movement
made their careers out of studying the problem of the immigrant

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flag that pioneer Canadians are forced to leave the country to earn a
living while millions of dollars are spent to help bring foreigners in
(Hayes Papers 4, scrapbook, Speaks on Foreigner in Canada). By
suggesting that foreigners were taking all of the jobs, Hayes made a
clear distinction between two kinds of Canadian newcomers. There
were the pioneers of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent (and Celtic con-
verts like the Confederation father DArcy McGee, in whom was en-
trusted, as Hayes said, the future of this Canada of ours) who had
grown up during the heyday of the British Empire and pledged their fe-
alty to God, king, and country (Hayes papers 4, scrapbook, DArcy
McGee As I Saw Him). In contrast, the minorities arriving from the
central southeastern Powder Magazine of Europe she depicted as
having crude traditions, deplorable living conditions, impoverished
minds, and seditious politics:

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Like other proponents of Social Purity, Hayes represented the economi-

cally deprived conditions of immigrants as presenting problems that
were at root moral and sexual. Material poverty, in her view, was the
result of a degenerate morality and a lack of Christian governance in
their lives. These in turn led to communist politics and uncontrolled ag-
gressive instincts men smoke, beat their wives; crude women beat
their children (Speaks). Hayes feared for the future of the nation
and called for social regulation. Left unconstrained, she warned, this
depravity would breed into offspring whom she described as mostly
crippled or mentally deficient. She ended her article on a note of
chauvinism that urged the country to take responsibility for its immi-
grants and assimilate them: money should be spent on making them
decent Canadians, teaching them patriotism, good citizenship, and
the standards and customs of the land.
In the absence of any personal account, it is impossible to know the
details of Hayess teaching experience. But the following sketch, writ-
ten many years after the fact, suggests that she saw her pedagogical role
as one of surrogate mother and her classroom as a domestic refuge,
supplying food, warmth, civilizing manners, and nationalism:

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by elevating domestic work to a masterful and fulfilling activity, an ac-

complished occupation requiring specialized skills and a high level of
competence:
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Even while she attempts to glorify domestic work here, Hayes was
aware of the abominable conditions in which domestics frequently
worked. She was on more than one occasion critical of employers:
There is much inhumanity in allowing a woman who is working
for her daily bread to wait for her wage, to overwork, to be denied
common kindness or to be made a serf (Maguire 178). Such positions,
according to Marilyn Barber, confined women within individual house-
holds in master-servant relationships, often in isolated farming commu-
nities, and involved dull, repetitious, and strenuous household chores
(158). Abandoned to the mercy of individual and sometimes unethical
and unprincipled employers, most domestics were little more than
working-class servants.
When More Women Wanted for Canada announced every possi-
ble safeguard for those placed, it was not simply referring to womens
physical safety. To be fair, this assurance was partly a strategy for allay-
ing legitimate concerns in an age when the system was unorganized,
chaotic, and open to abuse by both immigrants and the agencies (Bar-
ber 158). But given the ?FHs firm policies on sexual proclivities, the
signifier safeguard must also be read as having moral connotations
that implied that womens sexual purity, as much as their personal
safety, was the business of the Canadian government. There is much
evidence, that the Department routinely deported women for offences
that were little more than sexual transgressions [like] pregnancy or ve-
nereal disease (B. Roberts 207).
While Hayes attempted to impose middle-class, Christian, and do-
mestic values on women through her journalism, teaching, and immi-
gration work, she also wanted to be seen to be governed by such
values. The difficulty was, of course, that she had committed the very
sexual improprieties against which she warned other women, and

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111 The Life and Plays of Kate Simpson Hayes
with him as his six-year-old nephew (Koester, Mr. Davin M.P.

129).% Daughter Agnes did not have the same good fortune. Her mem-
oirs describe a tragic early life. She was bounced from pillar to post,
suffered repeated sexual abuse by the guardian priest with whom she
lived, and was tormented by schoolmates; in the absence of any real in-
formation to the contrary, she had little defence against accusations
that she was his bastard child (Robinson Papers, 27 October 1980).
Maguire claims Hayes sincerely believ[ed] that Agnes would be safe
with the nuns and Father Sinnett (94). It is likely she did not know of
the abuse. Yet she did know that her infant daughters health was frag-
ile. The nuns told her the child might die. While she paid Agness bills,
she did not visit and she prevented Davin from adopting Agnes by
burying her identity and baptizing her under an assumed name. &
She did this and made it impossible for Davin to include their daugh-
ter in his will because, according to Koester, she feared the intimate
details of her private life becoming public knowledge ( Mr. Davin M.P.
207).' Yet, even if she knew nothing of the early abuse, she most cer-
tainly knew that the adult Agnes was psychologically fragile and
wanted desperately to know her mother. But so concerned was Hayes
to maintain the facade of respectability, the fiction of Social Purity, that
her primary concern was not at all with her child but the fate of their
correspondence the possibility of their letters falling into the wrong
hands and the information somehow leaking out.
Hayess life and work were informed by two apparently conflicting
political ideologies. Her belief in liberal equality allowed her to ad-
vance in several careers, including journalism, diplomacy, and literary
and theatrical production, reaching the level of her male counterparts
and often surpassing them in ability and ambition. She had the courage
to leave her marriage and strike out on her own: to launch herself in
business, act in theatre, and dare to make her living from her pen. She
also advocated womens social and professional rights. Not only did
she support suffrage in her journalism, she was president of some of
Canadas earliest womens organizations, like the ?MF? and the Regina
Council of Women. She had moxie enough for an exciting, illicit, ex-
plicitly sexual relationship with a man whom she loved, despite the
towns disapprobation, and the resolve to leave him when it no longer
worked. At the same time, her personal and professional life was influ-
enced by the politics of the Social Purity movement and its more con-
servative views of gender, racial organization, and class formation. Her
own liberation and independence as a journalist were predicated upon
circumscribing housewives in traditional roles. She held the view that
non-Anglo-Canadian foreigners lacked moral and sexual control
and understood it as the job of middle-class, Anglo-women teachers,

! "

like herself, to remoralize them in the name of a staunch British nation-
alism. As immigration agent for the ?FH , she propagated Christian and
domestic feminist values in potential émigrés, while in her private life
concealing secrets that, if known, would have seriously undermined her
credibility as the representative of those values.


The conflict in Hayess personal and professional life, between her lib-
eral convictions and her Social Purity politics, is also at work in her
play-writing. The former were expressed in her flamboyant Regina
plays, all of which, very unfortunately, have yet to be recovered. These
comedies were unquestionably Hayess greatest theatrical successes and
from existing accounts her most politically daring. They take as their
subjects illegitimacy, divorce, and perhaps even adultery, cornerstones
of the regulation of sexuality within Social Purity politics. But they
treat these issues with a comic irreverence that moves in the direction
of a liberal feminist critique.
A Domestic Disturbance (1892), Divorce for $50 (1893?), and The
Duplicate Man (1897) were parlour farces that seem to ridicule the cir-
cumstances of her affair with Davin. A Domestic Disturbance, accord-
ing to Maguire, was greatly anticipated by the press for the month
leading up to its presentation. Billed as Reginas first local comedy,
the play, set in Regina, involved the story of a love child (with the
unlikely parodic appellation Nodgett-Blodgett-Nodgett-Mite) who
suddenly appeared at the reading of the will of a prominent man
(ONeill, Nineteenth Century 9; Drake 60; Hayes Papers 4, scrap-
book). In this comic revenge scenario, a man is forced to face the con-
sequences of his extramarital relations, and it is he, rather than the
woman, who is left holding the bag. Despite the critical ire it raised for
taking aim at local personalities and events, with Hayes in the lead as
Sophronia Bangs, the play was a genuine success. Initially mounted as a
hospital benefit, Domestic Disturbance played on 21 and 29 December
in the Town Hall Theatre, on 30 December in the Barracks Theatre,
and in Moose Jaw on 2 January 1893 (ONeill 9). After augmentation
with songs and dances, it was again put on by the Winnipeg Operatic
Society, making it the first of Hayess theatrical pieces to enjoy such
widespread success (Maguire 43). Divorce for $50, performed in
Winnipeg, was a comedy that apparently imagined a practical solu-
tion to [Hayess] own marriage situation (ONeill 15). It questioned
the sanctity of marriage that underpinned the religious condemnation
of divorce and legitimated marital dissolution, suggesting it should be a
financial rather than a legal or moral affair. Another of Hayess plays,
TOther from Which, performed in both the Town Hall and Barracks
theatres in May of 1894, was the highlight of the amateur theatrical
season of 18934 (9).
The Duplicate Man; or, Too Much a Godfather may have addressed
the issue of adultery; it may have treated second marriage; it most cer-
tainly dealt with children born out of wedlock. Staged after Hayes and
Davin had separated, this comedy, it was announced, satirized certain

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the hypocrisy of birth, death, romance, respectability, and Victorian

marriage.
Even Hayess plays for children had political purpose and satirical
edge. Her adaptation of Cinderella called
, enjoyed several performances beginning in 1891, when
she mounted it with a cast of fifty youngsters from St Marys Catholic
Church. A revised version entitled
starring her daughter Bonnie in the lead as Prince Lupin of the court,
was the first major fund-raising activity of the Regina Council of
Women, of which Hayes was president (ONeill 9; Maguire 467;
Hayes papers 4, scrapbook). But a repeat performance for Lady Aber-
deen (18571939) was cancelled when several of the members took of-
fence. The play contained offending bits, including a police-mans
song, and even when it was decided to expunge the problematic ele-
ments, the performance never took place (Maguire 47).
"
Of all Hayess plays, only two full-length texts survive. Both express
her Social Purity politics. It is therefore to these plays that the attention
of this chapter now turns.
, A Christmas Drama for Wee Ones, appeared

in Hayess collection which she sold at the great
territorial fair in the summer of 1895. It was first play written and
published in the Northwest and among the earliest contributions to the
genre of childrens drama that was favoured by several women play-
wrights of the early twentieth-century (Hayes Papers 4, scrapbook;
ONeill 9).
# Its first production was at Christmas in 1894 in the North
West Mounted Police barracks, under the sponsorship of St Marys

Catholic Church (ONeill 9); it also saw additional performances in
the Town Hall in the fall of 1895.
Like the genre of the European fairytale which it most closely resem-
bles, inculcates mores, values, and manners in
order to children according to the social code of [its] time
(emphasis added, Zipes 3). As a fairy-tale play, it posits a real and an
alternative world, the basic precept often cited for reading a text as fan-
tasy (Rabkin 419). The critique implicit in fantasy, of the context in
which the text is produced, operates within the ideology of Social Pu-
rity: it is concerned with the repression and control of sexual and ag-
gressive impulses that construct class, gender, and race in terms of
middle-class Anglo-Canadian values. The peaceful resolution between
the natives and Anglo-Canadians that underlies the tensions in the play
is in many ways analogous to Jamesons central idea in
! : that narrative structures are to be grasped as the imagi-
nary resolution of a real contradiction in culture and history (77).
A playbill for Hayess A Domestic Disturbance. Courtesy

of the Saskatchewan Archives Board
A playbill for Hayess

. Courtesy of the Saskatchewan
Archives Board

is a short verse play in two scenes. Its cast of
real-world characters includes four young, innocent siblings: Dollie-
Dimple and Bessie-Bee, best friends and virtually inseparable, and their
sister and brother, Belle and Teddy, who only appear in the second
scene of the play. Among the alternative-world characters are the
Queen of the Fairies and her courtiers. The most distinguished of the
court nobles are Sandman, whose task is the bringing of dreams and
sleep, and the mischievous trickster, Puck, his nemesis. A chorus of
fairy flowers, Daisy, Rosebud, Buttercup, and Bay-leaf, fill out their
number. The setting and location of the entire play is the edge of a for-
est on the prairie.
As the play opens, Dollie-Dimple and Bessie-Bee have left school and
escaped into the forest, where they accidentally come upon a fairy
haunt, recognizable to the audience by the sound of disembodied
voices. Sandman enters and realizes that the children have wandered
into the fairy world. Afraid for the fairies if their world mixes with the
childrens, he sprinkles his dust to make the children sleep. While Sand-
man is assessing the situation, mischief-maker Puck switches Sand-
mans sandbags (it is not clear what is in his other bag) so that the
children awaken into the land of the fairies. The children can now see
the fairies and are at first charmed by them. They want to join the fairy
fun and games, and even become fairies themselves. This, the fairies
say, can only happen if they give up all earthly things.
The enchanted children are more than willing to comply, until they
realize that all earthly things include home and mother. No, they
protest, but it is too late. Dollie-Dimple and Bessie-Bee are whisked
away to fairyland. At this point of crisis, Sandman, realizing Pucks
trick, switches the sandbags back to their original positions on either
side of the stage. But Puck, in an uncharacteristic moment of remorse,
decides to right his wrong by restoring the bags to their rightful posi-
tion. Because he does not know that the bags have already been
switched by Sandman, his action causes them and the worlds to remain
mixed up.
In scene 2, Teddy and Belle are looking for their sisters and, mean-
while, gathering flowers in the wood. Like their sisters, they hear the
laughter and song of the fairies. But at the very same instant, the fair-
ies, adversely affected by the mixed-up sandbags, fall suddenly asleep.
Dollie-Dimple and Bessie-Bee reappear and are reunited with their
brother and sister just as Sandman arrives with the dust which awakens
the fairies. The spell cast upon the children by the fairy dust is broken,
and they all run home.
On one level, of course, this play is a simple and straightforward
childrens tale an imaginary experience of being lost and found in the


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Two important levels of analysis inform this interpretation: first, the

historical context in which the play was written and produced; and sec-
ond, the social context represented in it, the dramatic real in its juxtapo-
sition to the alternative world. In terms of historical context, the West
experienced its first great immigration boom only months after the publi-
cation of (1895) in which the text of the play first ap-
peared. During this period, responsibility for immigration was part of
the portfolio of Clifford Sifton (18611929), minister of the interior in
Sir Wilfrid Lauriers Liberal cabinet. Siftons vision of filling up the Last
Best West with agricultural labourers and farmers was something of a
messianic quest. In 1896 about 17,000 immigrants arrived in Canada,
largely from Europe. By 1899 the figure had almost tripled to 45,000
and, by 1905, it was approaching 150,000 (Francis 111, 128). A major-
ity of these immigrants went directly to the prairies where the population
grew from 400,000 in 1901 to two million by 1921 (Berton 1819).
Opposition to the great wave of non-Anglo-Saxon immigration of
the 1890s, claims Angus McLaren, manifested itself in a virulent
mix of nativism, racism, anti-radicalism, and anti-Semitism (48).
Many people spoke of immigrants at the time in the context of racial
degeneration and the need to protect the race. These attitudes, in
turn, engendered an ideology of Canadianization by which some
meant biological integrity and others meant the defence of cultural tra-
ditions and customs (48).
Because the idea of the foreigner existed in relation to the politically
dominant Anglo-Canadians (including Celts), indigenous people in
Canada were also treated as foreign. They were considered one of
the lesser breeds by the nationalist/imperialist Protestant churches,
which, from their earliest beginnings, included natives within their for-
eign missions:

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any specific or documented societies, yet it has been an influential

and powerful concept capable of referring both to societies out there
and to subordinate groups within the West (20). Most frequently, as-
serts Torgovnick, it is defined as different from (usually opposite to)
the present. After that, reactions to the present take over (9). The
primitive, therefore, functions as an empty signifier, its value and na-
ture filled up or determined by western ethnographers and writers (9).
Sooner or later, claims Torgovnick, tropes for primitives become
the tropes conventionally used for women, as they are identified, like
the primitive savages, with childhood, nature, unbridled passions, and
the irrational (17). In , the indigenous inhabit-
ants of the alternative, natural world are the feminized flower fairies
who limp onto the stage in scene 2, having been picked, bruised, bro-
ken, and, as it were, deflowered by the thoughtless male Teddy (181).
Claiming that only kindness lies in their hearts, the forgiving fairies
represent a feminine space, their role one of nurture, solace, love, and
service. The fairy order is governed by a benevolent queen. Her min-
ions are delicate, rare and sweetly mild flowers and spice, who
throw perfume over the prairie (181) and weave its sunbeams. The fair-
ies, for the most part, are submissive, emotional vessels like the chal-
ice of the lily [that] oft holds a tear (180). When gathered and
touched by kind hands, they say, each tiny bud will soft open (181).
Like the heart of the rose that is all gladness, they are handmaids
to love: Were used just as Cupid Weve been vowed over, cried
over, kissed over (1801). Their primary function, according to Sand-
man, is to allure, and it is this ability that is threatened when the
fairies get sand in their eyes (177).
The alternative world of is also constructed in
terms of a repressed and violent sexuality, especially as these are em-
bodied in Puck. Although the play bears only the most superficial rela-
tion to Shakespeares , the mischievous
Puck does resemble his more famous predecessor. As Jan Kott reminds
us, Puck is one [of] the names for the devil, invoked to frighten
women and children (172). Prankish Puck is the locus of dramatic
tension in Lolypop Land; it is he who causes the abduction of Dollie-
Dimple and Bessie-Bee and their transformation into fairies (176).
While the fairy queen tells us that the childrens dislocation occurs by
their having strayed here by mistake, it is Puck who exchanges the
sandbags. Simply put, it is his fault the worlds have collapsed and that
the children are trapped.
Abduction, according to Torgovnick, always carries with it the
double meanings of kidnapping and rape; indeed, the etymological
root for rape is the Latin , which means to abduct, to seize, to

carry off as plunder or booty. Abduction encodes not just the natu-
ral in male-female relations but also the unnatural, the threat of mis-
cegenation, disguised as a species of difference (Torgovnick 51). In a
predominantly feminized world, Puck is male and associated with the
dark side of pleasure. Within the action of the play his conduct
breaches fairylands primary interdiction not to switch the sand, or
the fairies will lose their power to allure. His threat to fairy power is a
threat to the social constitution of their world and the health and well-
being of the inhabitants. (As the play ends, the Sandman is catching a
cold brought in by the earth children.) This fairy interdiction mirrors a
similar Anglo-Canadian taboo against the danger of interracial mixing.
It is this taboo that is the subject of a repentant Pucks final moral mes-
sage: And the very best plan, as you all may see, / Is for you to be you,
and me to be me (184). Clearly, a strict separation of alternative and
real worlds, native and Anglo-Canadian, primitive and the civilized is
maintained.
Alternative worlds, according to W.R. Irwin, are often a transgres-
sion or violation of what is generally accepted as possible (5). Thus,
in a violent landscape where men and women had to curb their pas-
sions and contain them within a tight neo-Calvinist framework in or-
der to master the land (Kreisel 263), the alternative world has two
important and opposing roles. On the one hand, it functions as the
wish-fulfilment of a dream, a wished-for instinctual satisfaction and re-
gression into the primitive world of appetite and desire. On the other
hand, it idealizes through its absence the domestic and maternal values
of Social Purity politics: the childrens encounter with the fairies
teaches them moral lessons having to do with respect for nature and for
the environment. At the same time, the play reaffirms existing racial hi-
erarchies in which Anglo-Canadians are clearly a higher order of being
and maintains their paternal relation to indigenous peoples, identified
throughout with nature. Consequently, at the end of the play Dollie-
Dimple concludes: I believe there sermons in stones; And lessons
in little brooks (182). Thus she enables her sojourn in the fairy forest
to be identified with the idyllic world of the Forest of Arden in
, while she leaves it behind to return to the middle-class conven-
tions of home and motherhood in which the play locates moral virtue.
To use Jamesons language, posits an imagi-
nary resolution to actual, unresolvable contradictions. It critiques con-
quest and violence by finding a peaceful settlement to the conflict
between cultures. It is simultaneously a plea for a system of apartheid,
an effective separation of founding peoples from their European con-
querors. It teaches that if the land and its inhabitants are unpredictable
and dangerous, they are also enchanting and moral. It implies that for

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which the play is premised asserts that Anglo-Canadians, the best of

whom are (as Hayes says in another context) the teachers of truth, the
arbiters of right and the proclaimers of peace, have a paternal respon-
sibility to assimilate the heathen foreigners who land upon their shores
(Maguire 107). This task can only be achieved by women, who are the
cultural preservers of moral purity.
The historical context of The Anvil probably precedes by a few years
the period in which Hayes worked for the ?FH . The sea voyage from
Europe to Canada, which immediately anticipates the action of the
opening scene, recalls the many treacherous passages of the early and
mid-nineteenth century: the ship caught fire at sea, we are told, and
three hundred souls have been lost (25). Soulsbys corrupt immigra-
tion practices function as a critique of the North Atlantic Trading Com-
pany, which, between 1899 and 1905, under the administration of
Clifford Sifton, allowed the establishment of clandestine organizations
of European shipping agents. These were paid per head for immigrants
from western European countries like Germany which had emigration
quotas: Agents received five-dollar bonuses for any man, woman and
child over twelve who were bona fide farmers This illegal scheme
ended in 1905 after public allegations that unknown European agents
profited from the scheme at the Canadian governments expense.
During its operation, however, the company brought in thousands of
emigrants from Western Europe (Francis 122). Such a practice is repre-
sented in the unscrupulous business deal that Soulsby makes with
Storke. We are told that each immigrant pays a dividend: Storke gets
ten plunks per head but the shipping companies get a rake-hoff (30).
Soulsby is angry because the calamitous journey has yielded a boatload
of damaged cargo: A damn poor bunch they are! Id say some of them
ready fr the ceme-tary! (3). He tells his partner to pick out the
best, leaving the others to fend for themselves (4). Soulsby takes only
those, like Dora, fit to work a farm: she looks as if she could haul a
threshin outfit from Moose Jaw t Medicine Hat! (4).
The vociferous racism of Anglo-Canadian Westerners towards the
Galicians was common at the turn of the century. The largest group of
eastern Europeans to settle on the prairies 170 000 between 1896
and 1914 and largely peasants, they became the group most often
singled out for hostility (Bennett et al., 444). The general contempt in
which they were held by Anglo-Canadians can be gleaned from the
Calgary Herald , which feared that Sifton was handing the Canadian
West over to dirty hordes of half-civilized Galicians who were lacking
everything but dirt (Francis 127). Such attitudes are illustrated in the
plays opening scene where the immigrants are figured as impoverished
and uncivilized spitting, blowing their noses, smoking and cuffing

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the men mounts. Drunk and driven by passion, Torr grabs for a log and
brings the full force of its weight down upon Soulsbys sons head,
knocking him dead.
In the early scenes of the play, a chorus of Galician characters are fig-
ured as uncouth, immoral, and intemperate. Their dirt and poverty are
the external signs of a savage libido that violates the most fundamental
Christian laws and presents a serious threat to the nation. Among them,
Foona is particularly suggestive, as she represents the focus within So-
cial Purity on prostitution. Social vice, as it was called, threatened the
moral and physical degeneration of society. It not only flew in the face
of chastity, it was the antithesis of the idealized, domestic women which
Social Purity espoused. As a prostitute, Foona represents the worst that
can happen to a woman: she is morally bankrupt, seduced by tawdry
trinkets bought with the ill-gotten gains of lurid sexual acts. In the scene
above, and again with Vanya in the brothel, she is constructed as a fig-
ure as much to be feared as condemned. Yet in each instance the focus is
not on her seduction of men, as one might expect, but on the danger she
presents to other women in the play, especially our heroine, the good
but temporarily misguided Vanya.
Storke, the translator and go-between for Soulsby, is the apotheosis
of the bad Galician man and a veritable compendium of the racist ste-
reotypes that Hayes propound in her article Speaks on Foreigner in
Canada. Uneducated and criminal, he has repeatedly over the years
hoodwinked his own community for personal gain. Like Torrs and
Foonas, his immorality has a sexual component: he is Foonas pimp,
and he fervently solicits Vanya. He also incites seditious political vio-
lence and threatens to attack religious and state institutions. In an an-
gry rage to Haf blenty mooniess, he goads the crowd to Bur-r-u-n
down cghurcghes! Bu-r-r-un down sgchoolss! Preak down chailss und
take monies on Bankss (41a). The serious challenge that he presents
to the moral and social fabric of the country is underscored when, after
he has thrashed his daughter and dragged her from school, she is tragi-
cally killed beneath the falling flagpole. In the symbolism of her death
beneath Canadian flag, the audience is encouraged to interpret the inci-
dent both as a sacrifice Storke makes for his corruption and criminality
and a victory for Canadian law and order.
Social Purity held a liberal belief in environment as determinative of
class, race, and gender. According to Valverde, Evangelical reformers
tended to put more emphasis on the role of centuries of parliamentary
rule, civilized sexual habits, and Protestantism in producing what they
thought was the highest race, rather than subscribing to the dominant
ideologies of social Darwinism and eugenics (Valverde 107). The contra-
diction between the assumption that non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners were

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the opening of the play cannot take place because each is guided by an-
imal nature, he by aggression and she by her libido. In the end their
marriage is possible because both have become morally worthy of the
institution; both have been domesticated and are willingly governed by
Anglo-Canadian values and laws. As a dramatic resolution, their mar-
riage suggests social success, cultural assimilation, and Christian re-
demption. Within the context of this transformation, Armitts liberal
vision of equality becomes tenable: I saw ( oracularly ) the men and
women of the future! I saw the mothers of a new and virile race! I saw
the Doctors, the Lawyers, the Merchants, the Ministers and the parlia-
mentarians of a Day-to-be! (75). Future economic prosperity and so-
cial equality among people in the nation are of course highly qualified.
Men and women, Anglos and Galicians can achieve equality, but the
precondition for this is an Anglo framework. Equality is conceivable
when the immigrant aggregation of tangled child-minds is accultur-
ated into the religious and rational views of the politically dominant
Anglo-Canadians (75).
If assimilation is the goal and ideal of Social Purity politics, the
promise that this goal can become a living reality resides primarily with
women, the mothers of a new and virile race. Female gender, as it
functions within Social Purity politics, is represented in the active do-
mesticity of middle-class women reformers. The Anglo-Canadian
women characters, Mrs Work and the teacher, represent ideal femin-
inity and become the yardsticks against which other characters are
judged and, like Dora, approved or, like Foona, found wanting. They
apply their traditionally domestic, maternal skills to the public world
of educational and social philanthropy with a view to transforming so-
ciety and creating Canadians out of Galicians.
Mrs Work reflects the evangelical disposition of Protestant reform to
win men from their intemperate habits by bringing them the word of
God (Mitchinson 165). Her efforts in the prison represent womens
expansion into this area of social service and the importance many
placed on prison reform in the period. In the jailhouse scene, where she
counsels the inmates, we are told by the Turnkey that Mrs Work is
one o them improvin wimmen. Re-formers y might call em she
talks to the wust o em like she was ther own nussin mother! Say, we
ad fellers ere come hin rip-rearin blood-tasters, but a-hunder er,
why, Blacksmith, they goes hout singin canaries! (31).
Mrs Work is the mother as spiritual redeemer: the honly nime hi
ears er called by them prisners is Mother (32). Notably, she is the
councillor of a newly formed prison night-school class. She subdues
Torrs rebellion at the injustices done to his people by educating him in

the teachings of Christ: Take that feller, Torr, now; Lord Lumme;
weve ad m hin the strite jacket; e wanted t kill heverybody!
sees im once, an as im cryin like a bloddy biby! You should ear er
talk to em (32). Mrs Work schools Torr in the Christian convictions
of Bunyans . By comparing the appalling conditions
in which he and his people live to the allegorical gullies of Hope and
ditches of Despair, she brings him through crisis and desolation to
contrition and salvation: even though they have
blood upon them in a crimson stain, oh believe, believe , my boy,
that Jesus will wash away the stain if you ask Him in prayer
(29). Mrs Work holds out the promise of forgiveness and Gods grace.
For her, Torr is a sinner, lost in the depraved quagmire of lifes trials
and tribulations but, like all sinners, worthy of redemption.
The teacher in idealizes Hayess own experiences teaching
immigrant children in Manitoba. She is the agent of nationalism among
the Galicians and fulfils the promise that its youth will be patriotic,
Christian, and acculturated. Her job is an answer to Soulsbys cynical
query: Wonder what the next generationll be like? (13). In the cli-
mactic flag-raising ceremony that closes act 2, the teacher represents
the interests of the state under attack by the social evil of prostitu-
tion and the dangerous ignorance of the foreigner, epitomized by
Storke. The childrens ceremony is first interrupted by Foona, who at-
tempts to spirit Vanya away to a brothel in the city, and then continu-
ally by Storke, objecting to his daughters participation, removing her
from the festivities, and clobbering her before the spectators. An attack
upon the teacher, such as Storke typifies, represents an attack upon
Christianity and the Canadian state. His daughters death is a lesson
for those who will not be governed by her. As the voice of morality and
reason, the teacher is accorded the privilege of interpreting the event,
and her homily warns that wickedness always brings distress in its
wake (53).
If morally depraved femininity in Galician women is represented by
Foona, their potential for an ethic of active domesticity is expressed in
Dora, who takes on the role of community matriarch. Dora shares
manners, customs, and history with the Galicians. She is also the
mother of a violent murderer, which initially calls into question both
her morality and maternity. Nevertheless, even before this incident, in
the second scene, in fact, the whole bulk of her large body stands firmly
against Soulsbys sons lascivious intentions to seduce Vanya. When he
and his pal, Murray appear like intruders, demanding food and making
aggressive sexual advances, she grudgingly sells them a meal but not
her soul or that of her soon-to-be daughter-in-law. We become aware
that part of what defines Doras character is a sense of chastity and ma-

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son of English squire Dalton Armytage. By identifying himself with

concrete acts of Christian and patriotic reform and repenting his
former class position as decadent aristocrat, Armitt has committed
himself to conquering the base impulses that caused him to murder,
recreating himself as a bourgeois man.
We are meant to understand his transformation not as complete but
as an ongoing struggle. Thus, we see him slip into periodic moments of
cynicism and a loss of faith, as in his fatalistic view of Torrs emerging
Christian contrition: Boy! once the blood of your fellowman reddens
the hands nothing can take away the stain! (33). Although he
quickly retracts his words and counsels Torr that without an educa-
tion man is but an animal, he is also astonished at his own idealism:
My God! What am I saying? What has education done for me? (33).
Armitts virtue is ultimately rewarded with financial success (he discov-
ers oil) and a familial reunion (Mrs Work is discovered to be his long-
lost wife.)!" But his untimely death at the end of the play is the sacrifice
he makes for coming into consciousness. It is the ultimate Christian
penance for murder and the most definitive proof of his conversion.
The Anvil was copyrighted under the pseudonym Marka Wöhl, a
German adaptation of Hayess frequently used pen-name Mary Mark-
well. She sought relative anonymity, according to Maguire, because
of the plays critical treatment of government policy (95). Yet in the fi-
nal analysis the play is less concerned with policy than with gender, in
which moral character is complicit. It unquestionably targets unscrupu-
lous immigration practices that had real, historical antecedents. But it
lays the blame for such practices squarely upon masculinity, Anglo and
Galician alike, and its character of unchecked carnality. Man, Hayes
once said, is but a tented animal where no appreciable feminine in-
fluence exists (Maguire 111). The regulation and control of desire lays
the foundation of a Christian character and civilized culture. Its re-
tainers are women or men who, like Armitt, adopt the feminine val-
ues of Social Purity.
Both Slumberland Shadows and The Anvil, written in and about the
immigration boom in Canadas Last Best West, are strongly influ-
enced by the construction of race, gender, and class as they operate
within the Christian and nationalist vision of Social Purity politics. The
fact that the former ends with separation between Anglos and the in-
digenous population and the latter is resolved in assimilation could be
interpreted to mean that the native people of the prairie, like other non-
white groups such as Chinese, Japanese, and East Indian, were re-
garded as impossible and undesirable to Canadianize (Bennett et al.
445). One cannot help wondering if Hayess collection of Indian tales,

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4 Instructive and Wholesome:

Domestic Feminism, Social
Gospel, and the Protestant Plays
of Clara Rothwell Anderson
In one sense the life of Clara Rothwell Anderson can be read as the
fulfilment of her fathers hope that she would grow up a good, obedi-
ent girl (Rothwell Diary). Born middle-class, cultivated in the arts,
she became a ministers wife, who considered her primary responsibili-
ties to be her family, her husband, and the church. But did good
girls write plays? Not usually. Clara, however, did. Moreover, she
managed to gain support from the church, historically the theatres
most vehement detractor.
Clara Anderson secured the churchs endorsement because her ama-
teur theatre shared in the evangelical spirit of the Social Gospel move-
ment that galvanized many Protestant womens reform organizations.
Her play-writing was a service to the church, a way of making money
for its projects and a way of disseminating Christian values. At the same
time, Andersons Christian labour provided her with a measure of inde-
pendence, for it allowed her professional autonomy, a public persona,
and a platform for her domestic feminist and Christian views. Indeed,
her theatrical practice and the thematic focus of her work subverted the
male-dominated professional theatre by furnishing not only her but
other women as well with a mode for expressing their ideas and issues.
What we might now call her feminist theatrical process was obviously
popular with Christian womens societies for whom her playwriting
provided unparalleled opportunities to produce, direct, and perform in
amateur theatre for and about themselves. Between about 1912 and
1920, Anderson wrote eleven plays for adult audiences, placing her
among the most prolific woman writers of her generation.

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our attention and please us most. The resolution of the plays by an indi-
vidual female hero who is middle or upper class, Protestant, and conser-
vative in marriage is both conventional and ideological; patriarchal
marriage rather than the struggle of a strong woman (not to say women)
is reinscribed as the rightful and idealized role for women. Andersons
New Greek comedies, like domestic feminism, both serve and challenge
patriarchy. They allow women a certain liberal latitude, a measure of in-
dependent thought and action, a social role outside of their relations
with men. Their dramatic structure, however, forecloses on womens in-
dependence and reinscribes marriage, family, and feminity.
and
are feminist parodies that betray a similar
tension, refusing yet revering feminist politics. Like the mock parlia-
ments, they use parody as a form of both formal and ideological cri-
tique (Hutcheon, 7). They use feminist
theatrical techniques to critique a resolutely womens world of organi-
zations and politics from the point of view of domestic feminism. In
breaking with generic conventions, the plays are free to comment upon
the patriarchal structures that govern womens lives, without fully ac-
cepting these structures. By juxtaposing a fictive representation of
womens meetings on the stage with those familiar to audiences, the
plays employ a pejorative irony that is critical of womens issues, orga-
nizational ability, and business sense from a feminist position. But the
committee clowns and there are many of them perform a buffoon-
ery that also acknowledges the early-twentieth-century horizon of
womens concerns and actions. The plays establish a dichotomy be-
tween an extremist feminism, associated with suffrage and the domes-
tic science movement, and a battery of dependent, naive Victorian
characters whose gender and social roles are completely defined by
men. Both groups are critiqued by the figure of the Protestant reformer
whose moderate Christian views establish a middle ground between
womens rights and womens familial and domestic responsibilities.
Like the vast majority of turn-of-the-century social reformers, Ander-

son grew up in the midst of substantial social and material privilege.
She came from an educated family, benefited from the erudition of her
father, attended school, and eventually fulfilled her hearts desire by
marrying a professional man who consolidated her class position and
provided her with children.
She was born Clara Rothwell in the small town of Listowel, Ontario,
on 3 June 1871, the third child of Benjamin Rothwell and Sarah Cozens.
Her mother gave birth to six children in all. Although the first, Samuel
Herbert, died at the age of two, the next two sons attended university

and went on to become respected professionals. William Alfred was a

doctor in Kendrick, Idaho, and Ben, a graduate of Wesley College, Win-
nipeg (1899) practised law in Swan River, Manitoba. Claras younger
sister Nelly married Dr M.H. Langs, a cousin of Robertson Davies; the
baby of the family, Ruby, learned telegraphy, remained single, and
worked in the Toronto Stock Exchange. Claras mother, however, had
died suddenly in January of 1881, leaving bereft her large family of very
young children. It was Claras father, therefore, who was to have the
most determining influence on the children and on Clara in particular.
Benjamin Rothwell was one of Listowels original city founders; at
his passing, he was commemorated as the towns foremost citizen.
He hailed from the township of Gloucester in Ireland, the first of nine
children, born on 4 July 1835 to Thomas Rothwell and Catherine
Tompkins. Emigrating to Canada, the family settled just outside Ot-
tawa on Sugarloaf Farm in Elma, now eponymously named Rothwell
Heights.! Like the children who would succeed him, Benjamin came
from an aspiring family: two of his brothers went to the United States
to practise medicine and one worked the family homestead, while he,
at the age of twenty-one, with only a smattering of formal education,
took the county teachers examination and founded Listowels first
public school. Except for an eight-year period, he remained principal of
this school until 1899.
Rothwell also participated in civic affairs, becoming both clerk and
treasurer of the municipality. On many occasions, he was urged to take
a position in the municipal council; it was said that the Mayoralty of
the town and the Conservative candidature of the riding were at his
command [but] he could be prevailed upon to accept neither (
, 27 March 1913). Nevertheless, according to his young-
est daughter, Claras half-sister Mary Quinn, he was a fine orator and
invited to speak on many public occasions. He quoted the best au-
thors by the page and graced his conversations to the young with
Shakespeare and Tennyson (Quinn). "
It is, then, perhaps not too remarkable that a thumbnail sketch of
Clara at the age of eight by so intimate and astute observer as her father
captures her character with such precision as to seem an auspicious
forecast: Clara wishes me to make a note about her. Well, [she] is now
in her ninth year a strong, robust, jolly elf, big of her age and fat, fond
of dolls but much fonder of butter of which she eats no small share. She
learns very well, stood first in her class at the midsummer promotion,
entitling her to the first prize. I hope she may grow up a good, obedient
girl.# Anderson was never small, neither in stature nor in disposition.
As an adult, she stood five feet eight inches tall and was stout of build
with a commanding, self-confident demeanour. Certainly everyone

made way for her, recollects Margaret Dejourdan, a young girl in the
MacKay Church congregation during the Anderson tenure. She had
an imposing presence.$
Even as a child, as her fathers brief commentary suggests, Anderson
evidenced the precociousness of one who had been endowed with sig-
nificant social advantages. Like many of her class and generation, her
intelligence was channelled into the feminine accomplishments of liter-
ature and music. Her love of the arts, including theatre, recalls Mary
Quinn, was fostered by her father, who exposed her not to the standard
fare of the touring circuits but to highbrow productions, chosen for
their association with a respected literary tradition, like performances
of Shakespeare, or for their potential for spiritual edification, like the
ones put on by the travelling Chautauqua Institute:

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Yet it was not theatre that Clara initially cultivated but music. At first
she was sent to the local organist, but as she grew older, her step-
mother, with whom she had particularly affable relations, encouraged
her to go to Toronto to train professionally.% Eventually graduating
from the Toronto Conservatory of Music, she was offered a position
shortly thereafter as soprano soloist at Trinity Methodist Church. It
was at this long-established Toronto church on Bloor Street that she
had her first experience on stage in front of an audience. But establish-
ing herself as an accomplished singer and musician was not Claras pri-
mary ambition. Just as her hard-won education was beginning to bear
fruit, she overthrew all for what to most was the apotheosis of woman-
hood: marriage and children.
While she was living in Toronto, Clara met Peter William Anderson, a
tall, slender, handsome young man who was taking a degree in theology
at Knox College.& Not long after, Clara accepted a position as precentor
in a church in Chatham, but this was an interim appointment; by this
time the couple were engaged and waiting for Peters ordination and call
to clerical service. While there is no question that Clara wanted to marry
very much, her decision to do so was at least as practical as it was emo-
tional: if she loved Peter Anderson, her actions suggest that his future

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In the late nineteenth century, society and religion were under siege,
and Protestant and Evangelical church leaders sought to defend both
by means of the Social Gospel. Their success is evidenced in the consid-
erable sway Social Gospel had over the social, political, and religious
life of Canada until its demise in 1930 (Allen, ).
The countrys transition from a rural, agrarian-based economy to an
urban, industrial state with a growing middle class brought with it
enormous social discord that went right to the heart of traditional fa-
milial and social structures, and it was feared would destroy them. A
developing secularism also challenged the ethical and intellectual
foundations of Christian beliefs (Hall 121). Social Gospel sought to
forge connections between these secular trends in late nineteenth-
century thought liberal progressivism, reform Darwinism, biblical
criticism and philosophical idealism and the principle that the divine
could be realized in the social world (Allen, ). It
reworked such traditional Christian doctrines as sin, atonement, sal-
vation, and the Kingdom of God to emphasize a social content relevant
to an increasingly collective society (ibid.).
Although control of the Social Gospel movement lay in the hands of
men, it nevertheless encouraged great numbers of women to participate
in social reform causes. Church womens organizations and female mis-
sionary societies, according to Prentice et al., were the first large-
scale organizations in which women were able to act independently
IJ
and to develop confidence in their own abilities (1 ed. 172). The
transition from Protestant womens mission bands to autonomous
home and foreign mission societies meant that organizations once seen
as an aid to Social Gospel work done by men now developed into par-
allel societies with women-driven agendas and financial resources.
Prayer meetings, committee work, and fund-raising activities were
training grounds for womens social and political action. Under the
cloak of respectability provided by church organizations, women de-
manded a more prominent role in establishing the well-being of society
and thus expanded the sphere of feminine influence.
The women who participated in Christian reform organizations were
predominantly middle-class, the beneficiaries of an affluent milieu in
which workplace and home were increasingly separate arenas of activ-
ity and domestic help and technological advances commonly available.
It was these women, therefore, who had the leisure time necessary to in-
volve themselves in social causes. Their opinions, ideas, and perspec-
tives gave social reform its domestic feminist character, and greater
numbers than ever before took up positions of prominence in reform
organizations and set its agendas (Hall 120; Strong-Boag, Crusader
181). Their idealization of home, family, and maternity, from which

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they were in many ways liberated, became the platform for womens
emancipation, and they made gains in many important areas. Post-
secondary education, the professions, property rights, and suffrage
domains where traditionally smen and male authority had been undis-
puted began to yield to women. At the same time, however, the class
position of these women also made them intolerant of ethnic differences
and blind to the deep inequalities produced by capitalist society.
The politics of domestic feminism underlying womens reform devel-
oped out of the cult of domesticity that dominated the image of
women between the 1880s and the 1920s (Mitchinson 153). It fully ac-
cepted the ideology of separate spheres between men and women and
the natural differences upon which these spheres were based. Within
this arrangement, women were primarily and fundamentally maternal,
the guardians of home and family (161). This politic rested upon the

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made that time in his life: She was attentive and kind and always there.
She made the manse a very homey place, especially on receiving days
when the maid would wheel in a tea-wagon in front of a big, roaring fire
with the cat and dog sitting in front of it. As the ministers wife, her
function as hostess was one of her most central and time-consuming oc-
cupations and she was generally considered to be very gracious in this
role (Dejourdan). It was something in which [my mother] took great
pride, Murray Anderson says.
The idealization of the domestic which Barbara Hall sees as the
ground upon which women justified their move into the public sphere
was precisely what allowed Anderson to venture into the arena of the-
atrical performance and professional authorship. Home for her was a
hybrid space somewhere between the intimate domain of husband and
children and the public world of the church ministry.# Andersons en-
tertaining was a form of social mothering that also called upon many
of the same skills she used in creating theatre. As Sue-Ellen Case eluci-
dates, acting the role of hostess was itself a form of personal theatre
with an illustrious tradition in the European salons of the late eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries. At such events, women played the
playwright (in conversation), the director (in casting the production by
creating the guest list, helping to create the scenes by making the intro-
ductions, and setting the pace by actively keeping the conversation go-
ing), the actor, the set-designer and the costume-designer (in setting
the fashion and formality of the dress code) (Case 47).
As the ministers wife, Anderson organized a range of amateur entertain-
ments to raise money for the church coffers. One of the most celebrated of
these was the MacKay Church Lilac Tea. This event was entirely Ander-
sons production, a tradition initiated and directed by her and in which she
was the star performer. She held it in the gardens of the manse, when the
flowers were in bloom, taking full advantage of its long veranda and broad
green lawns to provide the perfect pastoral setting for an afternoon lun-
cheon reminiscent of the Victorian gentry. Margaret Dejourdan recalls, I
have a memory of Clara. It must have been at one of these Lilac Teas,
walking across the lawn in a wide, sweeping hat looking very elegant. Ev-
erybody clustered around her was saying Mrs Anderson, oh Mrs. Ander-
son. The people of the congregation really looked up to her. She was a
beautiful hostess (interview). Her guest list, of course, included the people
of the congregation, while her own well-known preference for elegant
dress dictated formal afternoon attire. The maid served food and filled
glasses while Anderson applied herself primarily to the business of engag-
ing her guests in conversation (Quinn). She was a lovely conversational-
ist according to her son, and usually spoke on cultural subjects such as
music and books, which were her first love (Murray Anderson).

But Andersons plays were her most serious contribution to church

life and, in the view of Dejourdan, constituted her real work among
its women. They were both an act of Christian charity on the part of
the ministers wife and way of establishing herself in an independent
career with an individual identity. They allowed her to remain within
the private sphere while permitting her to do business in the public
world and thereby earn her own income. While they challenged the
dour conservatism of many traditional Protestants who held theatre of
all types to be immoral, their evangelical spirit protected them. Their
focus on women provided an alternative to male-dominated main-
stream theatre, as did their Christian theatrical practice, which implic-
itly critiqued the profit-driven motives of the mainstream and
anticipated the precepts of a contemporary feminist theatre practice.
Like the Lilac Teas, Andersons plays were an activity appropriate to
her gender and her class: writing, if not play-writing or production,
was an acceptable form of employment for a woman of her social posi-
tion. The New Edinburgh congregation, as Dejourdan says, respected
and looked forward to her performances. Of the twelve plays Ander-
son wrote, all but one were penned in a small upstairs room in the
manse, overlooking the palatial grounds of the governor-generals resi-
dence across the street. Most of those in which Anderson was involved
were got up in the church facilities next door and usually staged in
the Sunday School Hall behind the nave of the church, which sat five
hundred people.$ Virtually everything related to Andersons plays
advertising, typing and editing manuscripts, writing letters to publish-
ers and to womens groups who wanted to produce them could be ex-
ecuted within the compass of her own home.
The plays made a significant contribution to womens organizations.
According to the Reverend Andersons successor, John MacKay, Mrs.
Anderson wrote plays for Churches of all denominations across Can-
ada, and delighted the [New Edinburgh/sMacKay] congregation every
year by directing talented young people in producing her dramatic
works (43). Under the auspices of the Ladies Aid (and in one case,
the Young Womens Club), Anderson allowed her church to present her
plays royalty free: Her generosity enabled church groups to raise much
needed funds through entertaining the congregation (Edwards 41).
Women at church needed money. Clara wrote plays to make money
for [them and] that they did so was of considerable satisfaction to her
(Quinn). Admission was generally twenty-five cents per ticket, and a
conservative estimate taken from the [New Edinburgh] records shows
that over $1,200 was realized from presenting the plays (Bird 46).
The major portion of all proceeds made by the Ladies Aid Society,
which sponsored the plays, went to supporting large church projects

like the building fund and repairs to the manse, as well as the Minis-
ters Mutual Aid Fund and the Womens Missionary Society (Minutes
Book of the Board).
If Andersons plays were a form of Christian charity, an offering
from the ministers wife to her sisters in the congregation, they were
also acts of personal emancipation. While she was the Mrs Rev. P.W.
Anderson to parishioners and on committees, her plays were published
under her combined birth and married names, Clara Rothwell Ander-
son, suggesting that in playwriting she established a separate, semi-
autonomous, professional persona. It was through this persona that
she became known locally, as well as within the larger church commu-
nity in which her plays circulated. According to her son, she thought of
herself as a writer and took substantial pleasure in her popularity. The
one trip he recalls his mother making during his childhood was to Van-
couver to attend an Authors Association Meeting.
Anderson fostered her professional authorship through her local lit-
erary circle with whom she shared interests and frequently exchanged
ideas. Included within this circle was popular fiction writer Mary Es-
ther MacGregor (18761961), like Anderson, the wife of a Presbyte-
rian minister. Many of MacGregors fourteen novels, written under the
pseudonym Marion Keith, are Christian tales that deal with the church
and manse (Klinck 330). Another literary colleague in Ottawa was
Madge Hamilton Lyons MacBeth (18781965). Known to her readers
as Gilbert Knox, she won substantial acclaim for her fiction, even stir-
ring up political controversy with her 1924 novel Land of Afternoon,

which took as its subject ministers of the crown. MacBeth wrote at
least one play and was the first president and architect of the Canadian
National Theatre.
%
Anderson employed neither a manager nor a publisher, but from her
room in the manse directed all the business relating to her literary af-
fairs and maintained tight control over every aspect. She prepared all of
her plays for printing, edited them herself, and after they returned from
the typesetter, read the proofs. Much of the printing was done by J.J.
Hope and Sons of Ottawa, who were close family friends, and thus she
was able to keep even this public facet of her work on a private and
somewhat intimate level. She wrote and corresponded a great deal with
women from other churches who solicited her plays, a task she particu-
larly enjoyed (interview, Quinn and Murray Anderson). She advertised
them independently, not in newspapers or magazines but on self-styled
flyers that included her trademark, the old woman in the rocking chair,
and a list of all of her plays to date: She would have hundreds printed
up at once and sent them out to churches all over Canada and the
States (interview, Quinn and Murray Anderson). She held her own

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Speer concedes that if the drama were to give itself to the matter of
pure art and entertainment, and blacklist everything that fell below the
line morally, then the world would be the better of what the playhouse
has to give (29).
The church was often aided by the theatre. One early example can be
found in the career of Captain Burton Dean who, in the 1880s, do-
nated the proceeds of several performances to the Anglican and Presby-
terian churches in Regina, Lethbridge, and Fort Macleod (Baker, 436).
Ethel Bird also locates several instances of Protestant womens associa-
tions using theatre to raise money for the church during the first two
decades of the twentieth century. In parishes belonging to Confer-
ences in the Maritimes, Ottawa, Toronto, and Alberta, the putting on
of plays was a legitimate form of entertainment and service. Andersons
dramas were an example of the kind of playwriting such organizations
found acceptable, and she may even have provided the template, and
perhaps also the texts, for two of the performances.
Although Anderson never refers to the morality of the theatre in her
plays, there is evidence in her loosely biographical novel John Mathe-
son (1923) to suggest that she was concerned about potential censure
of her dramas by the parishioners. In it, the young Reverend Angus
proposes that theatre be used to expand the spiritual reach of the
church. The response from the community to that idea is not alto-
gether positive, Angus acknowledges: When I introduced the idea of

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For my purposes the most important difference between Andersons

comedies and Fryes mode of comedy, modelled on New Greek Com-
edy, resides in the way Anderson shifts the focus of this otherwise male-
defined genre onto women. Aunt Susans Visit (1917), Martha Made
Over (19?), The Young Country Schoolmam (1920), and Marrying
Anne? (192?) feminize both the mythos of comedy and the Christian
myth, replacing the hero/son with a redemptive mother who realizes
the aims of the Social Gospel by applying Christianity to the ills of an

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(1920?), surely one of Andersons most successful

comedies, vindicates the popular, turn-of-the-century New Woman.
It does so by associating her with a progressive politics of gender in-
spired by domestic feminism and Christianity. The plot adheres closely
to the formula of feminized New Comedy. Mr Oldays is charged with
the guardianship of his affluent step-granddaughter Anne until she
makes a suitable marriage. Anne has no intention of being governed by
her irascible relative and turns the tables on his authority by exposing
his sexism as part of a moral ignorance. Although Anne is not a
mother, the position she takes up the other characters is a ma-
ternal, redemptive one that reconstitutes a fragmented family through
the Christian-informed values of truth and honesty. The fourfold be-
trothal that ends the play consolidates this reunion and holds the
promise of a future in which women and men share greater equality
under Christianity.
The play takes place over three short acts, the first and last set in the
living-room of the Oldayss home. It is over-furnished. Large pictures
cover walls, piano covered with big drape and bric-a-brac, stuffed birds
on table. This realist set represents the stodgy Victorian world in which
Mr Oldays, his daughter Rosie, and the maid, Mrs Chubbs, are firmly
ensconced. Its draped piano and dead birds humorously reflect the
characters ossified views and presage their strong resistance to the un-
bidden change about to be thrust upon them.
Into this environment, like an apparition from another planet, de-
scends the plays hero, the young, wealthy, emancipated Anne Elizabeth
Burns, accompanied by her girlfriend, June. Both are typical of the
New Woman. They eschew the dictates of feminine fashion
for more comfortable, masculine attire and long tresses for a short bob.
Both are educated in domestic science, speak their opinions plainly and
boldly, accompany men on unescorted dates, and play sports like skiing
and tennis. They seek freedom from male domination and the liberty to
act as they see fit. In the process they are prepared to overturn a good
many of the conventions and accepted notions of Victorian femininity.
Act 1 turns on a clash of wills that polarizes the values of the societ-
ies represented by these two groups of characters around issues of fem-
inine gender. Mr Oldays is the and chief blocking figure of
the reigning secular order. He assumes that because he has been ap-
pointed the guardian of Anne and her money, it is his right to decide
when she will marry and whom: If she is to be my ward shell be di-
rected by me and when she reaches the marriageable age, whenever
that is, Ill choose some decent chap for her and hand her over money
bags and all (7). Aligned with Mr Oldays and his patriarchal views is

his dependent daughter, Rosie. Her clinging and helpless character is

the product of womens traditional accomplishments, and, ironically, it
is these that she supposes are lacking in Anne: Well, I have decided we
will do our duty by her and train her up in the quiet, modest ways of
gentlefolk, Rosie says. Being delicate, I fear her education may have
suffered but I will teach her the rudiments of music and fine needle
work myself (8). She reasons that being orphaned and neglected has
caused Annes unfeminine behaviour. Mrs Chubb, the longtime maid,
underscores her employers prejudices. As a kind of comic simpleton,
she does not look for justifications beyond Anns bold, brazen dress
to disdainfully announce that she is most disgraceful and outlandish
(10).
Considerable humour is generated in this first act out of the Oldays
histrionic reaction to their new ward and her candid dismissal of their
attitudes to proper feminine behaviour. When Anne appears in slacks,
Mr Oldays acerbically comments, We wear skirts in this civilized
country, Miss (11). Unabashed by his remark, Anne retorts, Do you,
grandfather? How interesting. I hadnt noticed (11). Rosie is over-
come with a case of nerves when Anne dares to make her toilet in
public in front of men. Simply unable to bear up under such a bra-
zen act of immodesty, she screams and resorts to smelling salts.
In a congenial but forthright retort, Anne rationalizes her actions in
scientific rather than gendered terms: Not men dear only grandfa-
ther hes seen hair combed before and as to powdering my nose that
is just merely applying a soft white chemical substance to the epidermis
of my proboscis Have I made that clear grandfather? (13). In the
face of the exaggerated conservatism of her adopted grandfather and
his thistle-down daughter, Anne is never without a witty, rebellious
response to deflate their fabricated fears for her morality and endear
her to the audience.
Although her guardians outmoded edict forms the first obstacle to
Annes will, the important opposition in act 1 is between Anne and
Rosie and their dichotomous conceptions of feminine gender. Rosie
represents precisely that condition of leisure-class, Victorian woman-
hood that Anne as a New Woman positions herself against. Like Anne,
Rosie is a child to Mr Oldays, but because she is a spinster, grown-
up and unmarried, she also functions in the dual role of wife-substitute.
She is less the angel of the house, however, than its prisoner, with no
meaningful occupation, no strength, and little energy. In truth, Rosie is
neither wife nor mother but perennially a daughter, completely subser-
vient to the misguided tutelage of her father. Her education has suited
her for nothing useful and has left her without the tools to make herself
or anyone around her happy. She is driven primarily by her emotions,

and her romantic conceptions have only contributed to her misery: Of
course it is not considered maidenly to allow a suitor to see that you fa-
vor him I thought he would love me better if I was was cold and
held off (28). Because she does not feel it a womans place to be seen
encouraging the overtures of a lover, she has forfeited the only man she
ever seriously cared for, and who cared for her, to a wasted life of isola-
tion and loneliness.
Anne also moves largely within the domestic sphere, but it is a world
to which she is committed rather than enslaved. Her place is not de-
fined by men as much as it is by Christianity, class, and domestic femi-
nism. Like the Presbyterian tradition that she represents, she places
great stock in the principles of individual industry, economy, and intel-
lect. Although indisputably upper-class, her education in domestic sci-
ence has given her practical training; it has taught her the middle-class
value of self-reliance in the sphere of home and family. Thus, when the
maid threatens to resign her position over Annes unconventional at-
tire, Anne tells her: I wont promise to dress to suit your taste but if
you want to go why pass right out we wont lay a straw in your
way Ive had a course in domestic science can cook and carry on
until Aunt Rosalind gets a capable woman (14). Annes education and
initiative express the wish of domestic science advocates that such
courses improve the quality and condition of family life (Mitchinson
156).
Despite her insistence to the contrary in act 2, ultimately Anne too
wants to marry. The difference is that she is willing and able to say so.
Thus, when Mrs Chubb insists that modern girls are no good for any-
thing but gadding round, dressed like men not willing to work or fit
to be an honest hard working helpmeet for a decent young fellow as is
looking for a wife, Anne responds: Show him to me, Mrs. Chubb.
Im hard working, and yes I think I can say honest, and I am looking
for just the young man you have painted in such glowing colors (16).
Anne is pragmatic about finding a suitable mate and will not allow the
bigotry of her cantankerous grandfather to prevent her from making
her own decision: I can crank my own car. I can look after my own
matrimonial affairs (25). When Rosie tells her that she has renounced
her lover over a property quarrel her father had with the neighbour,
Anne exclaims: Id like to see any backline fence I couldnt get over if
I cared enough for anyone (30).
The opposition between Anne and Rosie provides a critique of
womens blind submission to men, as well as of their relegation to the
role of useless, ornamental object, while at the same time affirming
womens domestic role and the middle-class values of education and
industry. It mocks womens romanticization of chivalry, which Nelly

In Times

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to see an Olday[s] in Church? (38). Anne exposes Oldayss sexism as

symptomatic of his greater Christian ignorance. For him, manhood con-
sists of the power to command submission and silence from the women
under his control. In contrast, manhood, for Anne, like womanhood, is
bound up with a fidelity to God: for her, real power and authority can
only be gained by living within His purview. Annes truth, we are told, is
a tonic all round: it heals old wounds, unites the family, and creates a
community of lovers, friends, and neighbours (30).
Although Anne speaks of women now-a-days (13), she has no af-
filiations outside of the home. Christianity binds her to the larger body
of the church, but as a hero, she acts alone. At least part of this confi-
dence is related to her class position. The class prejudice implicit within
the domestic feminism of the play is thrown into relief by the treatment
of the maid-servant, Mrs Chubb. It is she who has taken the money
that estranged Mr Oldays from his son. While she maintains that she
wanted to put the money back, Mrs Chubbs poverty is aligned with a
form of bad judgment that borders on moral depravity. Unlike Rosie or
Mr Oldays, who share the same class as Anne and are therefore the
beneficiaries of the family she reconstructs, Mrs Chubbs is the object of
Christian charity and forgiveness (Anne offers to pay her debt) but not
a subject. For this reason, she is simply dismissed from the plays come-
dic ending a pharmacon of sorts paid off and banished to an uncer-
tain future.
The point of tension, if not contradiction, within the play, between a
resistance to dominant, patriarchal values and a capitulation to them,
arises in the promise of the fourfold weddings with which it ends.
Rosie is united with her neighbour-lover, June with Dr McCallum,
Lizzy with the son of Mrs Chubb, and Anne with Bob, the prodigal son
of Mr Oldays, who literally falls from the sky to provide her with a
man worthy of her strength and appreciative of her emancipated views.
These, like all comedic marriages, are the site where the conventions of
comedy and the ideological pressures requiring the circumscription of
womens power within a patriarchal relation militate against the inde-
pendence of female characters. Annes engagement to Bob promises to
extinguish her rebellious character, especially as she tells Mr Oldays,
Dont worry any more, Grandfather Im tamed (32).
But marriage does not by any means cancel the feminist values
around which the new society is formed. While the details of the
emerging society, as in most comedies, are left vague, its ethical base
will involve morally strong women in relationships of greater equality
with men. Annes politics, like that of domestic feminists, does not es-
chew marriage: in retrospect many of her actions can be taken as pre-
paring the ground for her future role as wife and mother within the

The Young Country Schoolmam

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is a strong, rural, Protestant farmers wife, not well educated, as her
language betrays, but gainfully employed and zealously dedicated to
the care of her home and family. By her own admission, she hasnt a
lazy bone in her body (7). Continually racing in and out, she cooks,
cleans, bakes, toils, and moils till shes wore to a shadow (5). For the
audience, Ma is a bustling force of comic activity. Her heavy-handed,
not to say insulting, nurture is most humorously expressed in her
barbed assaults upon her husband: Pa never uses the bit of brain he
has Mr. Hardy, unless I am on hand to tell him every step to take, his is
for puttin his foot in it every time, he is (14). Mas nurture is mired in
the superfluous material adornments of secular life, particularly man-
ners and social appearances: Id wear my fingers to skin and bone,
cleanin afore Id have dust. Her preoccupation with dust is a sym-
bolic reflection of the inordinate importance she places on appearances
and surface detail:
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Mas genteel pretensions are a second-hand affectation. She repeatedly
commits versions of the very social offences she attempts to correct in
her husband, slurping her spilt tea from the saucer, wiping her mouth
on her apron, and inviting her guest to clean up with the basin and
towel and comb as pa has just finished usin (9). Of course, this lack of
self-knowledge is the same trait that makes her both a funny and culpa-
ble character.
Mas overbearing nurture approaches moral blunder in the ill-con-
ceived guidance of her children, particularly the preferential treatment
she lavishes upon her son. Because she is preoccupied with upward mo-
bility, all of her money and aspirations are focused on Ikey who, at all
cost, she is determined will not be a farmer jist like his Pa, but some-
thing requiring education and more social status (22). Ma has been
scrimpin and savin every cent to give Ikey his book-learnin (5)
and is boastful of the material advantages she lavishes upon him:
Now I wonder Mam if you know our Ikey? Like as not you do. He
lives in Toronto where you do and is often down to the stores (11).
Maria Jane, on the other hand, is confined to a life of domestic drudg-
ery: Clean pots is more important than fine clothes, mind that child

(7). When she pleads for something pretty, and becoming to wear, like
the other girls have, Ma accuses her of takin on airs You should
be satisfied with sech things as you can git, bein as you cant git any-
thing else (8). Mas double standard not only flies in the face of her
sons interests and abilities As Ikey tells us, he was a failure at the
University and would never have filled a mans shoes (22) it causes
her to neglect the needs of her daughter who refuses the boy she loves
because she is ashamed to be seen (5). Ma is also unable to recognize
that Maria Janes desire for the finer things in life is little different from
her own.
The Schoolmam is associated with a more rarified form of mother-
ing. Although she remains a vaguely defined character she does and
says little she is a clear ideological device in which Christian morality
and education produce intelligent nurture. During her stay in the
Sneckleby home, she liberates Maria Jane from household chores and
supports Ikey in his decision to return to the farm. In her role as
teacher, the idea of mothering is extended beyond the home to include
the spiritual and moral nurture of the community, which she directs to-
wards Christian virtue. The Schoolmam embodies the Social Gospel
belief that Christ is present in those who undertake his work. At the
end of the play, therefore, Ma describes her as a shepherd who, like
Jesus, gathers a community around her that willingly follows her spiri-
tual path. Her benevolent influence, we are told, inculcates in them
Christian servanthood and submission to a greater religious good of
which she is the symbol.
Like Anne, the Schoolmam expresses the industry and economy of
philosophical idealism. She acts alone, her work is geographically and
practically isolated, her progressive views appear to be hers alone, and
the fight she wages and wins with the school trustees is a form of sin-
gle-handed combat. Because there are no allusions to a school system
or professional hierarchy in which Miss Wise functions, or to reform-
minded organizations that inform her views, she is positioned as a
Christian maverick of sorts, forging her credibility as a female teacher
along with that of her new pedagogical practice.
Nevertheless, both the Schoolmam and Maria Jane are characters
who owe their existence to presumptions fostered and defended by
feminism. The Schoolmam is a vindication of women teachers. Her
work, although well within a traditional concept of womens nature
and roles, is salaried employment in the public sphere. Maria Jane
wants the kind of fair deal that womens-rights advocates were
championing: something approaching social equality with her brother
and recompense for her contribution to the family economy (Strong-
Boag, New Day 147).

The engagements that close the play reinforce the notion that the
ideal for all women, regardless of their abilities, is to live within a patri-
archal marriage in the private sphere. This point is reinforced in the last
scene when the minister declares that he will use his influence to see
that Miss Wise leaves this school at the close of the term (25). It is
Miss Wises independence, however, and her status as an intelligent and
victorious hero, that make her attractive to the minister, who, within
the terms of the play, is a reward for her exemplary conduct. But by
marrying the minister, as she plans to do, she also symbolically marries
the church, thus forging a strong bond between evangelical Christianity
and feminist motherhood.
Aunt Susans Visit (1917) is similar in subject to The Young Country
Schoolmam: against a backdrop of social upheaval from country to
city, the play critiques mothering from the point of view of domestic
feminism and the Social Gospel. Where this play differs is in its comic
treatment of the material. Structurally, it follows what Frye calls the
ternary form of the larger mythos of comedy (171). In it there are
three societies: a prelapsarian one, presumed to have existed before the
main action of the play begins; the present society of the blocking char-
acters, who are obsessed with middle-class luxury and social prestige;
and the heros society, a place of knowledge and moral good that re-
calls a golden age in the past to which her triumph will deliver the
fallen society in the end (ibid.).
The ternary form of the play is feminized by incorporating into it a
latent Cinderella plot. Mrs Tibbs figures as the wicked stepmother,
Rebecca as the mean sister, and Mary Alice as the good but neglected
Cinderella who, under the influence of her fairy-godmother, meets her
senator prince. The play politicizes this plot for feminist ends, however,
by shifting its dramatic focus away from romantic love and the gen-
dered tale of a woman rescued from penury and mistreatment by a
worthy and wealthy man, onto the fairy-godmother. The dramatic ten-
sion in the play again resides in the interaction between a selfish, so-
cial-climbing mother and the mother-saviour who serve[s] and
save[s] the community (McClung, In Times 66).
Aunt Susans Visit opens in the breakfast room of the Tibbs home
with the news that Mr Tibbss childhood guardian is about to pay an
unexpected visit. Although his good daughter Mary Alice is delighted
by the news, daughter Rebecca and Mrs Tibbs protest. Aunt Susans ec-
centric ways will cause them to be a laughing stock before the neigh-
bours and thwart Rebeccas chances of collaring an upper-class man.
Learning that their visitor is rich, however, Mrs Tibbs ceases her pro-
testations. Act 2 moves to the living room. When Aunt Susan descends
on the house with pies, mouse traps, and her own feather bed, Mrs

Tibbs and Rebecca are alarmed and employ every means to spirit her
away to the bedroom. But Aunt Susans comic sincerity confounds
their social pretense. She inadvertently frustrates all efforts to keep her
from the monied acquaintances who come to visit. Much to the chagrin
of mother and daughter, she is a hit with everyone, especially Mary Al-
ice and Mr Tibbs, whom she cajoles into joining her at church after
many years absence. Act 3 introduces a stream of callers to the Tibbs
home, including Rebeccas two potential suitors, the favoured Senator
Smith and Guy De Marchmont Coggs. As the romantic stakes increase,
Mother and Rebeccas coy and relatively subtle jibes at Aunt Susan
reach the point of open insult. But other than the imposter Guy De
Marchmont Coggs, all are won over by her natural demeanour and ir-
repressible penchant for bald-faced honesty.
Act 4 stages the farewell party. In the period of time that elapses be-
tween acts, Aunt Susans Christian nurture has restored the Tibbses to
a happy family and renewed the health of the community. Neighbours
make offerings of thanks to her for having nursed them through their
various crises, Mr and Mrs Tibbs are reunited as husband and wife,
Senator Smith announces his engagement to Mary Alice, and Guy
looks forward to the prospect of marrying Rebecca.
The extra-diegetic history that precedes act 1 is revealed through the
recollections of Aunt Susan and Mr Tibbs. The roots of this history lie
in Peppers Corners, a small, rural farming community that represents
a simpler bygone age and time of Christianity and community. For Mr
Tibbs, it represents the old times when I used to go barefoot for the
cows and get a handout of half pie from Aunt Susan by way of re-
ward (6). It is a Christian place where he walked five miles to
church, summer and winter, rain or shine (16). In Peppers Corners,
domestic commodities like pants and pillows were handmade and
moral infractions were nothing more than the shenanagins of a mis-
chievous schoolboy like little Sammy Smith, now Senator, who let
[Aunt Susans] chickens out of the hen coop and ate all my raised jelly
cake as I was savin for company (27). For Aunt Susan, Peppers Cor-
ners is still such a closely knit community that leaving the neighbours
and the hens and cows [to come away] was hard (12).
After their marriage, the Tibbses transferred to the ironically named
Golden City and their upper-class aspirations are causing their fi-
nancial and moral ruin. As the opening of the play makes clear, here
they have no genuine social circle, no emotional connection to their
neighbours, and, except for Mary Alice, do not attend church. The
Tibbses new city lifestyle has also involved the repudiation of their
small-town past, which, in their rarified social circle of acquaintances,
is a social embarrassment. Thus, when Aunt Susan suggests that even

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When it comes to domestic chores, Mrs Tibbs has what, within the
ethics of the play, might fairly be termed a bad attitude. While the
truth is that she delegates most of her responsibility to the hired help,
the house and meals are something she maintains she drag[s
herself] around over sick or well (7). Her main preoccupation
is building a network of well-positioned social acquaintances with
people like the wealthy and aristocratic Mrs. Highborn quite the
most prominent [woman] in the town (20). Her other important con-
cern is acquiring a husband for her beautiful daughter. Like Ma in
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Tibbs plays favourites among her children, sacrificing what she consid-
ers to be her homely daughter for the interests of her beautiful one:
Where is Reba? I am so anxious to have her meet [Senator Smith]
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lay and rest, Eliza Ann, Ill make you some camomile tea, you do look
washed out and bleachy, to be sure (13). In contrast to Mrs Tibbss
favouritism of one daughter over the other, Aunt Susans motherhood
is fair and just. She recognizes the virtue of the forgotten Mary Alice
and even sees in the self-deceptive egoism of Rebecca the need for edu-
cation, kindness, and nurture.
Aunt Susans mothering, like the work of real Social Gospellers, ap-
plies Christianity to the collective ills of an industrializing society
(Allen, ). She has what McClung calls the best
instincts of maternity; her idealized nurture is bound up with her spir-
itual regeneration of the lost, world-weary community which she re-
turns to sound religious principles ( 66). Thus a parade of
guests attends her farewell party to bear witness to her miraculous
manner that has affected the whole town (34). Mrs Weakly thanks
her for nursing her son through convulsions and Mrs Sadden for halt-
ing her son on his way to destruction when the whole town turned
him down (38). Like the Schoolmam, Aunt Susan makes motherhood
into an indispensable social service, inextricably linked to a redemptive
Christian mission: she nurtures the physically ill and socially depraved
but also feeds their starving souls. Mrs Jenkins observes that under
Aunt Susans influence for good ever so many more are attending
church (36). Aunt Susans Christian maternity endorses a greater
measure of social involvement for women and legitimates their philan-
thropic interventions into the public world. But, like all of Andersons
heroes, her nurture is an individual practice, and so, therefore, is her
emancipation.
The movement of the comedy backwards to an apparently better time
when domesticity and maternity made women guardians of a deeply
Christian culture is historically problematic. It was well known even in
Andersons day that the nineteenth century accorded women very little
power. It was, in fact, an era when women lost rights, most significantly
the right to vote, which in the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brun-
swick, and Quebec they had, even if they rarely used it.
" Their ideolog-
ical identification with the domestic and maternal realm was itself part
and parcel of this loss of social power and a way of excluding middle-
class women from public arenas of influence and decision-making. For
these reasons, the plays romanticization of the past contradicts the
emancipation Aunt Susans character is supposed to represent. Indeed,
it invokes the politics and conditions of womens oppression rather than
portending any real change that would see them gain greater social
power. The idea that maternity has a public function, that it is a social
strength that should be harnessed, belongs not to the past but to a con-
temporary politic, to the period in which Anderson is writing.


The tension between a private and a public maternity implicit in a re-

turn to the past is further compounded by the resolution of the comedy
in bethrothal. The heros society, as Frye says of the Cinderella arche-
type, is ushered in with a happy rustle of bridal gowns and bank-
notes (44). The plays marriages, including the reunion of Mrs and
Mr Tibbs, are made possible by the benevolent influence of Aunt Su-
san. There is nothing, however, within the relationships themselves that
promises an expanded social role for women. Aunt Susans emancipa-
tion is strengthened in part by her status as a single woman, not con-
fined to marriage or the private sphere. But the end of the play does not
extend this same liberation to either Rebecca or Mary Alice. Although
the girls unquestionably benefit from their aunts maternal Christian
ethics, there is no indication, as in other of Andersons plays, that ei-
ther will live as she does or assume the mantle of public motherhood.
The play leaves us with the impression that the heros society will be in-
formed by Christian values, yet the domestic feminist values of the
mother-hero are left in abeyance; we do not know if her strength and
independent character will be inherited by those women characters
who have been improved by her moral guidance.
is the only one of Andersons comedies that en-
ters directly into the contemporary debate on biblical criticism. It uses
the New Testament story of Martha and Mary to represent the disposi-
tion of the Social Gospel towards elevating social involvement to the
level of religious significance. The trajectory of the play moves from
Marthas secular self-sacrifice to spiritual community involvement, from
blindness to self-awareness, from sin to social salvation. The opposition
between the individual and the community around which several issues
in the play are structured is embodied in Martha herself, who is both
blocking character and hero of the play. Her liberation, while facilitated
by a network of family, and acquaintances, ultimately comes from
within. In Christian and feminist terms, Martha is made to recognize
her maternal duty to God, church, and community. In class terms, she
learns to accept the social responsibility born of economic privilege and
to leave the menial household labour to the hired help. Although the
play does not end in marriage, the terms of reunion between Martha
and her husband involve a return to stereotypical feminine accomplish-
ments; they also absolve her husband and, by implication, men gener-
ally, of their responsibility in womens domestic oppression.
The first three acts take place in the sitting room/kitchen of the
Hayes home. # Martha, tired and overworked, runs in and out,
waiting hand and foot on the family, when she receives word that her
old school-friend Ruth Dawn is about to pay a visit. Her husband,
daughters Anne and Blanche, and son Davie all depart to attend vari-

ous engagements. Marthas childhood nanny, Samantha, arrives to help

with the chores and upbraid her mistress for her obsession with domes-
tic details and willingness to be used as a doormat by her children. Act
2 introduces four more characters, Ruth Dawn, Uncle Joe, Mrs West,
and Mrs Fare, all of whom encourage Martha in one way or another to
redirect her energy towards more enlightened and socially useful activi-
ties. The time that elapses between acts 2 and 3 allows Ruth Dawns in-
fluence to change both the atmosphere and appearance of the house as
well as that of Martha herself. With Ruth Dawn, Martha makes her
first excursion out of the house to attend a church reception in which,
we are told, she is called upon to accompany her daughter on the piano
when the regular accompanist fails to appear.
Act 4 is broken into two parts. The first takes place in the living
room, where daughter Blanche is being wooed by Dr Molar when Mar-
tha returns home ill after visiting the poor in Palace Street. In part two
the stage is set for Marthas homecoming after six months convales-
cence. Dad, Anne, Blanche, Davie, Samantha, and Uncle Joe are gath-
ered in the parlour when she appears, entirely recreated and
rejuvenated. In a scene of ritual celebration, Martha is reunited with her
husband and children, while Ruth Dawn is matched with Uncle Joe
(who had gently attempted to win her affection before her departure).
Blanche and Dr Molar announce their engagement. The church choir,
led by the minister, also arrive to welcome the women home and to re-
hearse their upcoming concert.
dramatizes Luke 11: 3842, in which Jesus is re-
ceived into the home of sisters Martha and Mary. Mary sits at the
Lords feet and listens to his wise words, while Martha is cumbered
about much serving. When Martha urges him to bid her sister to help
her with the work, Jesus reproves her, saying it is not she but Mary
who hath chosen that good part.
In Nelly McClungs anti-war tract,
(1917), an
elaboration of the Martha and Mary story opens chapter 4, Should
Women Think?, and it is this version that Andersons comedy in-
vokes. McClungs Martha is a domestic martyr who cannot see beyond
the drudgery of daily life; her Mary is a thinker (30) who recognizes
that one must also appoint a house-cleaning day for the soul (31).
McClung sees in Martha a general propensity in women to sacrifice the
spiritual and intellectual health of families to domestic duties: There
is a strain of Martha in all of us, she maintains; we worry more over
a stain in the carpet than a stain on the soul (301). If women are to
make a meaningful commitment to themselves, their families, and the
world in which they live, says McClung, they must abandon their
narrow vision of housework for a broader domesticity that would have

them tidying up the inner recesses of [their] mind and soul (31).
Women must re-evaluate their priorities and recognize the responsibil-
ity they have to think in order to make good and not just be good
(33). To atrophy our soul in domestic details is a sin, McClung
declares, which destroys us (345).
Andersons Martha is both blocking character and hero. As the play
opens, the material needs of her family are her only care. We are told
that she used to be active along church and social lines, but now her
priorities are to keep my house spotless and to wait on my children
(8). The cluttered supper table, which takes up a position of impor-
tance in this opening stage set, symbolizes both Marthas principal pre-
occupation with domesticity and her confused state of mind. She is
simply overwhelmed by the growing demands of home and children.
The housekeeper, Samantha, explains, Well, I do declare! Whats
wrong? I never before seed so much as a pin out of place in this house
and here its goin on to nine oclock and the room all in a clutter
are you ailin, Martha, tell your old nurse dearie (11).
Marthas children are fond of their mother but take her for granted
and have come to depend on her for their every need. The girls order
her to fasten their dresses, loop up their skirts, and bring shoes, slip-
pers, and wraps. Son Davie, wanting his share of attention, has her
search for his hockey equipment, while complaining that the girls
party dresses have so dominated their mothers time that he has had
to suffer with only two pies this week (5).
Sacrificing herself completely to the details of domesticity, Martha
neglects her role as companion to her husband, who, in this same
scene, is irritated because his wearied wife can find no time to accom-
pany him to an office reception: I would pay anything to see my wife
dressed up like the other mens wives and to have her go out with me.
Im not so strong on = 1 housekeeping. You can get too much of a
good thing (7). The arrival of Ruth Dawn throws Martha into such a
flurry of cleaning in act 2 that her forgotten husband is once again
swept out the door: I work from morning until night and I cant keep
this house in order. See ( ) you have pulled the table cloth
all crooked with your books; why cant you do your writing at the desk
in your office? ( ) (14).
Martha has become so dedicated to the picayune details of an or-
derly house that, despite strain and fatigue, she refuses hired help: they
might smash my dishes and hang the tea-towel on the wrong nail and
the dishpan upside down (10). Faced with Samanthas unbidden assis-
tance, she agonizes, I hope you have been careful to hang the broom
on the fourth nail from the end and place the knives straight in the
kitchen drawer (12).

The series of characters introduced in act 2 serve as foils to Marthas

wayward womanhood. Of these, Mrs West and Mrs Fare are minor in
terms of the plays plot but major with respect to its Christian feminist
message. When Mrs West, one of those tiresome church women, as
Martha calls her, arrives to invite her to the church sociable, Martha
flatly refuses: I never go out. I seldom go to church even. You see I
cant get the work done in time to go (21). Mrs West demurs, first
things come first, you know (21). What! Martha protests. Leave
my work undone! And go to church that would be shirking my duty
(21). Martha is an example of what McClung calls a selfish middle-
class urban housewife whose comfortable social status allows her no
more thought for the underprivileged, overworked woman than a pussy
cat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street ( 109).
This attitude is first suggested in act 1 when Marthas husband, perusing
the evening paper, tells her that he thinks the country may be heading
for war again. Martha responds with patent indifference: Well, Ive
enough to worry over at home without bothering over foreign affairs. I
have no time to keep informed now; I dont know and I dont care what
is going on in the outside world (6). The self-centred nature of Mar-
thas motherhood is again thrown into relief when Mrs Fare calls to so-
licit her participation in the work of the Womens Institute and the
M?JK . Martha understands the work of these organizations completely
in terms of her own personal circumstances. When Mrs Fare asks if she
is a member of either, Martha responds, No I never joined I had no
occasion to none of my relatives ever drank and I am not afraid of my
husband or son there was no reason for me to join (22). Even after
the broader nature of the organization is explained to her, particularly its
work in the towns poorer neighbourhood where it hopes to do some-
thing about the frightfully unsanitary housing conditions (22), Mar-
tha assumes that the fault in such a circumstance lies with the women
themselves: Very likely, the poorly kept homes are due to the fact that
the women are running about instead of cleaning their homes (22).
When McClung says that women make life hard for other women
because they do not think, she is referring precisely to Marthas form
of social irresponsibility ( 34). Martha leads an insular life, her
commitment to her family both her and her fortress
against the world. Her sin, ironically, is of indifference and intellectual
and moral laziness, something McClung calls the worlds sin (
10). She wears herself out cleaning and has no time or energy for
important familial and social duties. She fails entirely to see the rela-
tionship between her domestic/maternal role and her responsibility to
the society into which she brings her children, the very charge that
McClung levels against women in general ( 24).

The catalyst for Marthas transformation in act 3 is Ruth Dawn,

whose name, like Mrs Fare or Miss Wise, is another of Ander-
sons telling character appellations. Unlike Martha, who by her own
admission is old and weather beaten (24), Ruth Dawn is youthful in
appearance and attractively dressed. Like the Schoolmam, she also is a
dramatically vague character. Nevertheless, between acts 2 and 3, we
are told that her culture and refinement bring a more pleasing and
comfortable atmosphere to the house. Unmarried, she is unencumbered
by domestic work. She takes an interest in the community and inspires
in Martha the desire to expand her focus beyond domestic drudgery
and her own personal sphere. Ruth Dawn functions as a type of Mary
figure in the Bible parable. In McClungs retelling of the story, Mary
was a thinker. She looked beyond the work, and saw something better
and more important, something more abiding and satisfying (
30). She laid hold on the things which are spiritual (31). In
Andersons treatment, the interest that Ruth Dawn shows in Marthas
plight is an extension of her larger concern for the welfare of society,
especially evident in her excursions with Martha and Uncle Joe to the
urban poor in Palace Street.
Marthas transformation at the end of the play involves a personal
awakening into spiritual and social consciousness. While this first oc-
curs at church in act 3, it is upon her return from a six-month rest, in
the second part of act 4, that she declares: Now listen, children, and
everybody I want you all to know that I am changed changed in ev-
ery way. I realize now that I have been careful and busy over things that
didnt really count. I I have neglected the . From now
I shall take a lively interest in the church and community and as far as
my health and means permit I shall help every good cause (46). Mar-
tha has become a feminist of McClungs variety, ready to employ her
domestic and maternal skills to make the world a better place for those
less fortunate than herself. She has reassessed her values and realizes
that what really counts is the health of the Christian community.
Yet Marthas emancipation from household chores, her freedom to
attend the church concert, to assist the poor, to take six months to re-
flect, are all directly contingent upon the housekeeper Samanthas dedi-
cated labour as a servant. Id work for [Martha] as long as I had a
foot under me, so I would, she declares (26). Samantha throws into
relief the middle-class status of those worthy of liberation within a do-
mestic feminist politic. Her working-class status obviously constructs
her womanhood along different lines and excludes her from the ethic
of womens liberation that the play espouses. Since her husband is
dead, the greatest good she can do is to serve her employer. There is
certainly no consideration of her participating in reform activities, like
going to Palace Street or taking a holiday.

There are important tensions in between a wom-

anhood liberated from the oppression of self-sacrifice and one that, at
the end of the play, remains primarily inscribed within a patriarchal
construct. Perhaps Marthas physical beauty and the rejuvenation of
her talents at singing and piano playing, if they reaffirm typical femi-
ninity and feminine accomplishments, are properly conceived as a mea-
sure of her newly discovered self-worth. Nevertheless, these qualities
have less association with strength and independence of the kind
Anderson invests in Anne, the Schoolmam, or even Ma than with a
woman as passive sexual object whose attributes and abilities are de-
veloped for the pleasure of her husband or lover. The sheer number of
individual comments on Marthas appearance at least ten during the
reunion scene re-emphasizes what has always been true of women:
that their appearance, perhaps more than any other single factor, is the
primary measure of their social worth.
Another thorny issue upon which the play forecloses is the question
of who is responsible for womens acceptance of the attitude of self-
sacrifice. The answer within the context of the play is women them-
selves. Marthas husband, after all, will gladly buy her domestic sup-
port: he pleads with her on three separate occasions to renounce her
slavish devotion to house and children and encourages her to take an
interest in public affairs. He even tells her, Id go to church twice a
day if my wifed go with me (32). Uncle Joe is of a similar mind. He
too insists that Martha abandon her domestic servitude and goes to
Palace Street to help the poor when she is too busy to do so. Given that
she is surrounded by such reasonable, progressive men, where did she
learn her love of martyrdom ( 61)? McClung claims that
womens slavish mentality comes from long bitter years of repression
and tyranny (61) centuries, in fact, in which women have been un-
der the absolute authority of male masters. Thus the plays allowing
Mr Hayes and Uncle Joe off scot-free, depicting them as progressive
advocates of womens liberation, relieves men generally of their role in
and responsibility for womens oppression. It is a safe tactic, especially
if one is concerned not to alienate the male and male-identified mem-
bers of the audience. Unfortunately it also participates in the very ethic
of self-effacement the play argues against. To say that women are the
authors of their own oppression is once again to clean up after men, to
take complete responsibility for their domestic mess.
The contradictory impulse within the ideology of domestic feminism
reinforces traditional notions of gender and at the same time expands
womens role in society by identifying them with a superior morality.
Andersons comedies negotiate a similar tension. By representing middle-
class female heroes as domestic saviours who uplift the community and
direct them towards virtue, her plays represent a form of emancipation

and an enlarged social role for women. Nevertheless, while their focus is
on challenging patriarchal dominance, they still serve the status quo by
characterizing womens liberation as individual and by retaining the
conventions of marriage within a love plot.
Anderson termed (19?) and

(1912) Character

Sketch Entertainments. According to Margaret Edwards, they were
two of her most popular plays (130). Like much feminist theatre of the
past and present, their formal features depart from traditional theatri-
cal conventions: they break with conventional comedic structure, story,
and causal plot. In doing so, they reject the patriarchal teleology of
comedy and provide a political and organizational context for the do-
mestic feminism that inspires their comedic heroes. As parody they ne-
gotiate a rejection of and a respect for feminist politics. The
juxtaposition of the womens meetings on the stage with those familiar
to audiences is intended to mock womens organizational abilities and
business sense. Yet amidst all of the clowning and buffoonery, these
dramatizations also span a broad range of womens issues and would
have been a valuable tool in placing them before a conservative audi-
ence. As satirical parodies, the plays re-deploy a host of popular stock
characters that represent on the one hand an extremist view of
womens professionalization, and on the other a patriarchally defined
Victorian femininity. Both are moderated by the familiar figure of the
domestic feminist for whom womens proper sphere involves a mater-
nity infused with an evangelical sense of Christian duty.
Joggsville is set in a public hall and in an old-fashioned
parlor. Both stage formal meetings simply furnished with chairs, a ta-
ble for the president, speakers, flags, and posters. As in the mock par-
liaments, the action generally follows an agenda and formal meeting
protocol. The issues that arise are pertinent to womens politics during
the early part of the twentieth century. These are ensemble plays with
no central character or hero, and only women appear on stage. Because
their movement is sequential rather than causal, there is no necessary
relation between one incident and the next. Along with linear plot, they
also dispense with any semblance of story: nothing traditionally dra-
matic happens and there is little sense of beginning, middle, or end.
Thus, the action wanders and returns on itself it begins, begins again,
lunges forward, and circles back.
As Sue-Ellen Case has remarked of present-day feminist theatre, such
plays abandon the hierarchical organising-principles of traditional
form that served to elide women from discourse (129). The absence of
a female hero, the object of male desire, both inside and outside of the

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and parody the efficacy and efficiency of this

type of association by irreverently imitating their executive roles and
formal structures. In both plays the presidents are seen to hold up the
show rather than facilitate its progress. They arrive late, are unable to
focus the discussion, and allow the meetings to devolve into frivolous
jabber (1112). In Mrs Weakly comes tripping onto the
stage harried by sick children and laden with bundles. She forgets her
glasses, drops her umbrella, and, when she finally settles into the job at
hand, is easily distracted. She has trouble proposing a motion and can
get no one to vote. In , Mrs Smith is so poor at guiding the
discussion that she finds herself opening the meeting twice. She has no
agenda, considers all votes unanimous, no matter what the count, and
on what apparently is central business for the evening, the date for the
upcoming sale, she blithely accepts the motion to hold [it in] the latter
part of June, the beginning of October, or any other intervening date
(14). The secretaries of the meetings are equally inept and in
become the brunt of substantial ribbing. Mrs Bilker claims to be very
particular I want all the details correct and for this reason re-
quires her chair to be positioned 2 feet 11 89 inches from the Presi-
dent and 1/2 yard from the table (9). She has, however, no idea of
how, when, or about what to take minutes. Not wanting to be up-
staged by the treasurer, she decides in the second half of the meeting to
give an impromptu progress report charged with her own opinions. $
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knowledge of the subject the more remarkable since she lacks the per-
sonal touch (25). In the secretary never does arrive and
the woman cajoled into assuming the post feels unappreciated and
threatens to leave halfway through the proceedings.
In both plays, the women are sick and tired, and no one will volun-
teer for work. Their discussions continually wander off-track, and all
have trouble making decisions, being much more interested in the re-
freshments to be served than the business of the agenda. The atmo-
sphere of unorganized confusion on the stage is a visual representation
of a confused politics. In characters are in a constant bustle,
entering and exiting the playing space: they change chairs, talk, laugh,
let books fall, run out for wraps (11). The crowning of this mood
comes at the end of act 1 when the secretary stands to read the follow-
ing resolution:


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who threaten to emasculate men. This strategy operates with a common

anti-feminist typology that caricatures womens-rights activists as angry,
fanatical, and imitative of masculinity and male power. Miss Harpe and
Mrs Dale in and Mrs Granite and Miss Buskin in
conform in appearance to man-hating suffragists. Their dress, we are
told, should be variously plain, prim, severe, dark, thin,
stiff-collared ( 5; 4). Mrs Granite, as her name
suggests, is tough and bossy: Conventions, she tells Mrs Gush, are no
place for feelings tell [people] to sit down in their seats and stay there
(10). Mrs Dales strong-minded feminism threatens an armed uprising:
women of strong principles and strong arms will lay hold of the reins
of government! (23, 25). Men, she asserts, should stay at home and
turn the washing machine while women go together to the polls (16).
Miss Harpe concurs: When women get the vote, men will do the clean-
ing (18). At Mrs Dales upcoming meeting, speakers will discuss the sub-
ject How shall I best teach my husband to stay at home and get the
meals, while I vote and look after the interest of the town? (23).
Men are feminized to the point of emasculation. In a parodic inver-
sion of the National Councilbacked reform of mothers allowance,
the women in discuss the efficacy of legislating an amount of
money to be paid to men, the spending of which is subject to the su-
pervision of wives (Mrs Boker adds the rider that he must also spend
it on his wife), and not in any case to exceed the sum of 25 cents
(28). & Feminism, as it is represented here, is a politics of castrating
crones; it directly attacks masculinity and threatens to topple the exist-
ing social hierarchy.
In her discussion of anti-suffrage caricature in the British context,
Lisa Tickner contends that nothing was more absurd for some audi-
ences than the spectacle of a woman trying to become like a man
nothing was more fundamentally unnerving, and therefore more pro-
ductive of the laughter by which tension is released and anxiety trans-
formed momentarily into pleasure (163). The promise of pleasure,
according to Tickner, bribes the audience into taking sides with pa-
triarchal prejudice (163). But Andersons militants are clowns. Like
Mrs De Floyd Fitz, who contends that home is not a womans
place (25) and that minding babies and preparing meals is not to be
compared with the ability to write a paper, and treat a subject in an in-
telligent manner, these clowns not only reverse mens and womens
roles but invert the belief shared by most reformers that women were
essentially maternal. They are over-the-top exaggerations, so opposi-
tional as to appear ridiculous, and would have been read as such, espe-
cially as they played off their comic counterparts at the other end of the
gender spectrum.

These extremist feminist politics are is set in opposition to those in

which womens gender is entirely circumscribed by Victorian con-
structions of patriarchal femininity. Women characters who represent
this side of the dialectic, like Mrs Weakly and Mrs Gush in
and Mrs Bruce, Mrs Kane, Mrs Black, Mrs Kindly, and Mrs Crowler
in , dress in wide, frilly, Victorian skirts and petticoats and
are naive, emotionally overwrought, and simple-minded. The appro-
priately named Mrs Gush cant see why women are so cross at
men. A world without them would mean no one to take you out, or
get you pretty clothes or anything (8). To invert McClungs maxim,
Mrs Gush will take chivalry over plain justice any day! For Mrs
Bruce, womanhood is manifest as the familiar Victorian diseases of
weakness and frailty. Her nerves are so bad that any discussion of mil-
itant force sends her into fits of flutters and fanning. Mrs Kanes con-
dition is similarly delicate and only slightly more foolish as she
misinterprets Mrs Dales call for insurrection as requiring equestrian
skill: Oh, how you do frighten me. I could never lay hold of the reins
[of government] I am so afraid of a horse (25). Mrs Black is sceptical
of suffrage because it might conflict with doing the laundry: Sup-
posin voting day came on a Monday and I was busy at the washing,
how could I leave it, and the clothes ready to boil over any minute?
(16). Perhaps the most humorous of the male-defined characters, Mrs
Crowler, might well have sent her husband to the meeting rather than
attending herself. She interrupts the proceedings no less than fourteen
times with my husband says offering a range of patriarchal plat-
itudes including Womans proper place is in her own kitchen, and
she will find business enough there cooking her husbands victuals
(11).
In a structure that can be read in terms of dialectic and opposition,
the moment of synthesis in these entertainments is located in those
characters who speak from a position of domestic feminism. Although
the least dramatically interesting, they are, like the heroes of Ander-
sons comedies, invested with the voice of moral authority. Their mod-
erate politics negotiate a space between womens rights and womens
familial and domestic responsibilities. Thus, in Mrs Brown
says, I cook three good meals for my man every day, and still have
time left to read, and I really think I could find time to vote for some
reforms that would benefit my children without seriously interfering
with the meals (11). Suffrage, for Mrs Brown, does not preclude her
traditional domestic role. Moreover, it is justified by her motherhood.
The vote means having a say in laws that will govern her childrens
lives, thereby making her a more effective mother.

In Joggsville this moderate position is echoed by the character of Mrs

Rose. An ameliorative presence at the meeting, she has a kind, polite
demeanour with which she repeatedly defuses potential arguments be-
tween radical and conservative factions. She shares with domestic sci-
entists a belief in intelligent maternity but has more confidence in
common sense and home remedies than new-fangled theories: Dont
be hard on the children Jane, she advises. They are little growing
things and not made to be still (16). In the face of extremes, she sup-
ports the domestic feminist belief that women are the spiritual and
moral guardians of childrens lives: Oh, well, ladies we all know that
children are a little work to raise but on the whole I think the world
is the better for them. Just dont fuss over them. Keep them clean and
wholesome and a bite in their mouth. Educate them up for this world
and the next, then just set back and enjoy them (19). While she argues
against a professional maternity that places child-rearing in the hands
of public educators, she is reluctant, unlike Mrs Crowler or Mrs Gush,
to surrender her social and familial responsibility to men. For her,
womens proper sphere involves a maternity that is infused with evan-
gelical Christian duty.
Although the primary issue in Joggsville is child-rearing, the plays
closing discussion addresses issues dealing with male/female relations
in which the domestic feminism of Mrs Rose is aligned with womens
social emancipation. Act 2 ends with the question drawer as the
women respond to a variety of queries having to do with the appropri-
ate age for marriage, courting rituals, dress, and hair length. Once
again they fall into radical and regressive camps, with Mrs Rose occu-
pying the middle ground. The hard-nosed, dogmatic Miss Jode thinks
that young women should not be handicapped by matrimony (31),
that clothing is unimportant it is what is inside [a womans] head
that counts (31) and that, regardless of who proposes marriage, a
woman should be apprised of the financial status of her husband (31
2). Emotive Mrs Gush feels that women should marry early, that
their hair should be pleasing to their husbands, and finds the idea of
their making proposals of marriage confusing (ibid.). Between the
opinions of the man-hating and male-identified women lie those of Mrs
Rose. Although her beliefs do not challenge fundamental patriarchal
structures, they do represent an autonomy for women within those
which exist. Mrs Rose is not particular about when a woman should
marry anytime will do (31); long or short hair is less important
than a style that becomes the woman; on the issue of proposing matri-
mony, she thinks that men can always be given a helping hand (32).
Through the character of Mrs Rose, the play equates domestic feminism

with an ideal of motherhood that involves social responsibility; but it is

also associated with a moderate form of emancipation in other areas of
womens lives maintaining, for example, that women who aspire to
be mothers should have some say in decisions about whom and when
to marry.
and are not the only plays to take
as their subject early womens organizations in Canada. ' But their do-
mestic feminism represents the less tangible, more ephemeral mood
the internal criticisms and ideological conflicts of the organizations in
which it was propagated. The plays parody rejects both the blind ide-
alism of contemporary defenders of womens organizations and the
abandoned denunciation of critics. They express instead an ambiva-
lence, which Anderson herself shared, between an esteem for these or-
ganizations as the loci of activities, actions, and political discussions
and a critique of their efficacy, efficiency, and methodologies.
Unlike Nellie McClung or even Sarah Anne Curzon, who declared their
feminist politics openly on public platforms, there is no evidence that
Anderson ever called herself a feminist or thought of herself in those
terms. Like the cautious Mrs Brown in she supported an
expanded social role for women and their right to vote but believed
their first duty was to family, home, and church. Her life is evidence of
this. She had confidence in the evangelical spirit of her plays, forged for
herself a dramatic niche, and enjoyed her public identity as both artist
and executive member of Christian womens organizations. The con-
text of her professional career, however, was her husbands ministry,
and its importance cannot be underestimated. After the Reverend
Anderson died in 1936, she settled in a small retirement home on Lau-
rier Avenue in Ottawa. Although her sister, Mary Quinn, claims she
continued to do the things she loved best, like writing, her only sur-
viving work between the 1920s and her death in 1958 is
(1940?). The remarkable similarity of this play to earlier come-
dies suggests that Andersons writing developed little, if at all, when she
was on her own. She was at her creative peak during middle age,
within the purview of New Edinburgh Church and its manse. The
money, status, time, and emotional support these institutions provided
fostered her writing and also gave her inspiration, an audience, and a
theatrical venue.
The feminism of Andersons plays negotiates a similar political ten-
sion to that which informed her life. The language of her comedies is
not of womens rights but of Christian responsibility. Womens social
emancipation is circumscribed by class affinities within a politics of

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conclu.fm Page 194 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:39 PM
Conclusion
I began this book by situating my recuperation of plays by women in

the larger context of the Anglo-American project of archival recovery
begun in the 1970s. It is the fruit of this labour the anthologies, the
theories, the histories that made possible the opening of a new field of
study in York Universitys Graduate English Department in the late
1980s. I was only the second person to sit the Womens Literature
field exam, and I remember, in those heady days as I embarked on my
study, feeling like something of a pioneer entering a new region, mak-
ing a provisional road, digging entrenchments. This experience left an
indelible impression upon me, as the present work testifies.
At the same time, as my reading of European and North American
women writers progressed, I was also left with the sobering recognition
that being a pioneer was not all romance. Indeed, each generation of
women writers had considered itself as pioneering, and, for most of them,
this meant not just hard work but secrecy, illegitimacy, risk, and isolation.
It meant that none had benefited from or built upon the work of the
other: Mary Wollstonecraft did not look to Mary Astell (16661731),
nor did Mary Astell know of the work of Christine de Pizan (c1364
1429). By and large, women had no sense of working in a tradition or of
there being writing by women that preceded their own. As a group they
never enjoyed the strength of consciousness that men had drawn from
knowing their precursors. On the contrary, most would not even have
conferred upon themselves the name of author, more often than not con-
sidering their writing a hobby, an amusement, a personal pastime to be
shared among intimates and family but certainly not with the world.
195 Conclusion
My commitment to the recovery of womens drama is rooted in the

knowledge that history is fundamentally empowering, a fact that is es-
pecially poignant in this age of first histories, such as the first history of
Canadian women, the first history of Social Purity, the first history of
women teachers and journalists, and of women in the law all works
upon which I have drawn. David Perkins, in his discussion of literary
history in America, says that movements for the liberation of women,
blacks, and gays produce such histories in order to claim identity,
tradition, and self-understanding. History empowers because it ex-
plains oppression and marginalization in the present (10). But it also
holds the promise of future liberation: of a time when culture and the
institutional bastions that preserve it are genuinely democratic. Above
all, it is the only safeguard against having to begin over. Never again
should women have to look, as Virginia Woolf did in 1929, into the
great historical abyss and wonder what occupied their mothers or if,
in fact, they had any at all. Never again should they have to accept the
empty cant of academics who insist that women simply did not con-
tribute to art, to literature, to drama, or that the range of their contri-
bution is not worthy of serious study.
The work of recovery I have undertaken here has been a long time in
the making. When I initiated it, virtually nothing had been written on
early Canadian womens drama. Even today, with a few exceptions
most notably the theoretical work being done by Heather Jones this
is still the case. Sarah Anne Curzon has sparked the imagination of
scholars like Ann Wilson, Christine Boyko-Head, and Celeste Derksen,
but early Canadian womens drama has been generally disregarded.
There are diverse reasons for this lack of critical attention. In the case
of the mock parliaments, their neglect may result from the plays being
deeply embedded in the history of suffrage. Their status as propaganda
has also likely discouraged scholars from recognizing them as legiti-
mate acts of performance. The same, no doubt, can be said of Ander-
sons plays: didactic, Christian theatre has not been among the great
works of the dramatic arts since the medieval miracle plays. Childrens
theatre is only now receiving the attention it deserves and the focus, not
surprisingly, is on contemporary work.
One of the most significant deterrents to scholarly inquiry into nine-
teenth-century drama is the lack of readily available playtexts. For many
plays, including the mock parliaments and most of those written by Kate
Simpson Hayes, scripts have been lost and textual records of performances
are fragmentary. In this respect Canadian theatre historians owe a special
debt of gratitude to Ann Saddlemyer, Richard Plant, Patrick ONeill, An-
ton Wagner, and John Ball, whose bibliographic and recuperative work
has made so many texts available over the past twenty-five years.

In a short, pithy article written in 1985 entitled Why We Dont

Write, Margaret Hollingsworth articulates what she calls a womans
aesthetic (25). Among its recurring features she enumerates the lack
of leading or star characters, a focus on ordinary women rather than
those who are great or unusual, the propensity to treat large and small
events with the same emphasis and importance, a form that breaks
with canonical theatrical conventions or what she terms an accepted
dramatic form (25), and for reasons of mutual support and growth,
collective creation (26). In answer to the question, What would a
woman left to her own devices bring to a play that a man would not?
Hollingsworth explains, for a start she would bring more womens
roles (26).
While not all conform to this morphology of womens drama, the
tendencies Hollingsworth maps out are strong among the plays of this
period. Each foregrounds women, and many are written for an almost
exclusively female cast. While some have leading characters, many are
ensemble pieces. The mock parliaments were collective creations;
Andersons plays were collectively produced and modified by the indi-
vidual groups that mounted them. Most of these plays reject epic, over-
arching, universalist themes in favour of the domestic, the local, and the
personal. Their structure is sometimes circular, sometime sequential;
the character-sketch entertainments dispense with story altogether
nothing traditionally dramatic happens, and there is little sense of be-
ginning, middle, or end.
In important ways these plays prefigure characteristics we have come
to associate with feminist theatre of the 1970s and 80s. They are col-
lectively created, politically motivated, women-centred, gender-based,
critical of womens place under patriarchy, and elliptical and fragmen-
tary in their form (Case 129). Closer scrutiny promises to provide
scholars of Canadian feminist theatre with some sense of their having a
history and context. My purpose, however, is not to make these plays
written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century conform to a
feminist aesthetic of drama devised one hundred years later. It is simply
to trace some structural and thematic tendencies that, historically, have
caused womens dramas to fall outside of conventional aesthetic cate-
gories, canonical genres, and critical lenses.
In 1916 a little-known author named Lucile Vessot Galley wrote a
now almost entirely forgotten play entitled . Described
by Galley as a character representation, it conforms to the basic ge-
neric features articulated by Hollingsworth. It boasts a cornucopia of
strong women from across the globe and throughout history, thirty-
seven in all. Queens and peasants, ladies and maids, military and civil
heroes, reformers and radicals present themselves before a female judge
197 Conclusion
to argue why their particular contribution to culture deems them wor-

thy of being crowned the true ideal of womanhood.
Its purpose was
educational, according to Galley, and it was published for the use of

womens societies. Groups were encouraged to adapt the play by select-
ing monologues and supplying their own songs. Some of its characters
are well known today, like Mary Queen of Scots, Joan of Arc, and Flo-
rence Nightingale; others, like the maid, the wife, and the mother, are
ubiquitous types. Miss Ophelia, Topsy, and Eva are literary figures;
Canada and Britannia are allegorical. There are old women and young,
contemporary and historical, secular and sacred, gentile and Jew, royal
and working class.
My interest in however, like other plays included in
this book, has as much to do with its political and historical implica-
tions for the woman movement as its generic principles.
was written in 1916, the year that womens suffrage in Canada
gained its first real victory, when women were employed in non-tradi-
tional professions in unprecedented numbers and fervently organizing
around a whole host of social, political, cultural, and economic issues.
This obscure little play is imbued with the feminist buoyance of the
age, and it represents some of its most famous political figures, like
Frances Willard and Mrs Pankhurst. Its mood is egalitarian. The
women come from all classes, many different races, and across four
continents including North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. There is
a native Canadian woman, a Japanese woman, an Arab, an Italian, and
an Ethiopian. There are women from England, the United States,
Spain, France, Austria, Sweden, and Scotland. Regardless of their place
in history, their nationality, social role, political stand, or heroic feat,
the play treats most as equal in importance and gives all, more or less,
the same amount of time in the limelight.
Yet is not free of the nativism of the age (the In-
dian and Italian characters have no dialogue), and the two thousand
years of history which it spans is dominated overweeningly by Euro-
pean and North America women. There must also be a winner of this
contest that raises one woman above all others. It will come as no sur-
prise that the apotheosis of womanhood, the bravest and the truest of
them all, is the faithful Mother. In her speech she gestures towards a
populist position, saying that she represent[s] a great many women
unknown to fame. But she is clothed in western dress, and, with her
sewing kit and the child she leads by the hand, is clearly an image of
white, western middle-class womanhood. She also refuses enfranchise-
ment, claiming that it is not my duty to rule the state, but to shape
character and to train boys and girls to become worthy members of
society. Quoting the Bible, she appears to defer to the argument of

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Append.fm Page 199 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:40 PM
appendix
This list marks the first time that early dramatic works written by women in
Canada have been collected together in a single bibliography. Like any such
list, it is provisional, and I hope it will spark further research to uncover more
works of its kind. Its provisional nature has partly to do with the difficulty of
knowing with certainty the sex of an author when men and women share so
many names. Plays were often written anonymously or pseudonymously under
male names; others may have been written by women but were attributed to
organizations. Still others have no date to firmly locate them in the period.
This bibliography covers the period from 1880 to 1920. Consequently, the
oeuvre of several authors is not covered in its entirety. There are a few excep-
tions, the most obvious of which are two plays by Kate Simpson Hayes and one
by Clara Rothwell Anderson, as these figure in the text of this book. I have also
included two undated plays by Sister Mary Agnes. A great deal of her enor-
mous corpus falls within the 18801920 time frame, and while I know that
both The Eve of St Patricks and The Paschal Fire at Tara were written later,
they are listed in no other existing bibliography.
This bibliography has been complied largely from the sources cited below.
Thus, the real digging through early bibliographies, libraries, collections, ar-
chives, periodicals, newspapers, and obscure publications has been done by
others, most notably Patrick B. ONeill. Their bibliographies often give more
detailed information than is recorded here. The Brock Bibliography, for exam-
ple, is annotated; the Catalogue of the Canadian Drama Collection in the Li-
brary of Mount Saint Vincent University provides the length, type of
manuscript, subject of the play, and first production where applicable.

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notes.fm Page 215 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:40 PM
Notes
introduction
1 See select references in Henry James Morgan, ;

Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, 142;
Moira Day, The Womanly Art of Theatre, 4352; Richard Plant,
Drama in English 1, 14853. For articles on women actresses, see
Vanderheyden Fyles, Canadas Share in the Modern Drama, 40310;
Denis Salter, At Home and Abroad: The Acting Career of Julia Arthur
(18691950), 135; Paula Sperdakos, Canadas Daughters, Americas
Sweethearts, 13158.
2 Domestic and liberal feminism are unquestionably the dominant feminist
discourses of the period; but they are not the only forms of feminism dur-
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Janice Newton
has demonstrated in
.
3 See Richard Plant, Drama in English 1, 14850. Robert Rodgers wrote
his five-act drama ! " # (1766) about the
abuses of the natives by both the French and the English. George Cockingss
patriotic tragedy $% ! &%'
(1766) was brought to the boards in Philadelphia by the most famous pro-
fessional troupe in the eighteenth-century United States. Edward Win-
slows dramatic pamphlet entitled !%' (' )%
*' + ! (1795) critiqued a government plan to develop vari-
ous inland areas of New Brunswick.
1 *A %

!
"#$%&' ( )
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217 Notes to pages 2634
, 1958 ed.; , 1966 ed.;

vol. 2, 1935 ed.,
, 1899 ed., cihm 07356. Three biographies in particular, how-
ever, provide more detail. See Henry James Morgan,
1898; Lorraine McMullen,
vol. 13, 1990; and Boutilier, 5355.
9 Most biographies place Curzons emigration in 1862. The first entry for
Robert Curzon in the is 1864. See Lady Edgars
Sketch of Mrs. Curzons Life and Work (1899) 34; Morgan,
1898 ed.; Sarah Anne Curzon, (November
1891): 155.
10 Peter Brenchley Curzon, personal interview, Toronto, 11 March 2002.
11 See J.L. Granatstein et al., 3rd ed.
(Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990), 34. Poor harvests and the collapse
of international markets caused a severe economic downturn that per-
sisted from 1874 to 1878: Invariably every part of the Canadian economy
felt the impact, and every commercial operation suffered.
12 The following chronology of Curzons domiciles has been taken from the
, 185898: 1866 1872/3 Palace St.; 1873 12
Ontario St.; 1874 274 Carlton St.; 1877 20 Oxford St.; 1879 282
Bathurst St.; 1882 41 Bellevue Ave.; 1890 5 Washington Ave.; 1893
270 Wellesley Ave.; 18978 15 Grenville St.
13 Curzon refers to a long period of sickness [that] has prevented my saying
many things with regard to the cause of woman suffrage that have been
in my heart. Although she claims to be a little better just now, she never
resumes her position as editor of the paper. See letter,
(9 January 1885): 327.
14 See Boutilier, note 15. According to the , at the
time of her death Curzons first-born son, Robert, was a manager at Conger
Coal Company and Arthur was working for Cockburn and Drake Travel.
Frederick was an artist at Toronto Lithography Company in 1890, his last
appearance in the ; according to his grandson Peter he became
special artist for the ! "# , for which he drew at least one fa-
mous picture of the Battle of Batosch. Edith had just graduated and taken a
job as teacher at the Toronto Technical School.
15 So much was implied by Charles Mair when he opened a discussion of Ca-
nadian literature with the stipulation By the term Literature you mean, of
course, poetry. Quoted in Carol Gerson, $ # , 19.
16 This is not to say that poetry generally, or Curzons poetry in particular, is a
feminine genre, but that historically it accommodated the feminine and was
an acceptable nineteenth-century middle-class female accomplishment.
17 Curzons financial loss was public knowledge, if not before, then certainly
after Louisa Murrays 1889 review of the drama: I have just heard with
A '89

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tlemen in afternoon attire. The gallery filled with students, the seniors in their torn,
ragged gowns strolling to front seats, the sophomores vigilantly rounding up the
freshmen for the latters spiritual elevation and to fill up the back. The college song
Met Agona rang out. The great central doors opened and the academic proces-
sion filed in led by Chancellor Allan in his gorgeous gold-trimmed robes, and closely
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ages. The assembly rose, awed and respectful in the presence of such dignity and
scholarship, but solemnity vanished as the gallery carolled freely The Animals
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in Latin which were fervently Amen-ed upstairs. Public Orator Boys drawled in his
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224 Notes to pages 704
10 February 1893: 5; ]Mock Parliament: Universal Suffrage ... Stowe-

Gullen Papers. Victoria University Library, University on Toronto. ]Portias
Column: Women as Legislators in Their Mock Parliament,
, 20 February 1896: 5; Women Score in Drama and Debate,
, 29 January 1914, and Women Suffragists Gambol at
Walker Theatre, , 29 January 1914, reprinted in Mc-
Clung, 11822. For McClungs fictive version, see
27389. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent references to newspaper
reviews of the mock parliaments refer only to the articles cited here.
16 Mock Parliament, wctu Archives, mu 8288, mu 8289.
17 Also see Reg Skene, Theatre and Community: The Development toward a
Professional Theatre in Winnipeg, 18971957.
18 , February 1893: 20, 23.
19 For Roblins speech, see Womans Sphere Is in the Home Says Premier to
Women, , 28 January 1914, morning edition: 62. Mc-
Clungs parody of this speech is partially preserved in and
, but no complete copy of the text is extant. Randi Warne (Department
of Religious Studies, Mount St Vincent University) who has worked substan-
tially on McClung, surmised in an interview that it is unlikely, given Mc-
Clungs training in an oral tradition, that the speech was ever written down.
20 See New Pavilion for Toronto, , February
1905: 31. Rebuilt in 1878, the new Allen Gardens Pavilion had an ex-
panded capacity for seating 1,800 people when the mock parliaments
played in 1896.
21 See Prentice et al., ! " , 2nd ed., 205. Yeomans
was appointed provincial president of the dwea in 1894.
22 See the , February 1893: 20, 23.
23 See McClung, 117. According to McClung, the Manitoba Political
Equality League gave the play twice in Winnipeg and once in Brandon,
and had crowded houses on all occasions. We made enough out of the play
to finance our campaign in the province, and there is no doubt that it was a
great factor in turning public sentiment in favour of the enfranchisement of
women.
24 Reverend Robert Sedgewick, The Proper Sphere and Influence of Woman
in Christian Society, Young Mens Christian Association, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, November 1856, reprinted in Cook and Mitchinson, eds.,
, 834.
25 For a critique of Bacchis text, see Ernest Forbes, review of #$
%&: 11924.
26 Tickets for the 1896 Toronto play were advertised at twenty-five and fifty
cents. See 18 February 1896: 3.
27 See Cook, introduction, in Cleverdon, %%
, xi. It was naturally the educated, reasonably well-paid, profes-
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In (1915), Charlotte Perkins Gilman created a utopian society

made up entirely of women, under the rule of the New Motherhood. She
formed around this monosocial (or one-sex) society a culture, political sys-
tem, and familial arrangement that grew out of a society of women, rather
than simply the absence of men.
40 Nellie McClung: The Stream Runs Fast, ?>? , writ. Randi Warne,
?>? Edmonton, 1 and 8 May 1991.

41 See Cleverdon, 237. By the time of the Febrary 1896 mock parliament, the
@MA= had approached Sir Oliver Mowats provincial legislature on the is-
sue of suffrage three times, no fewer than a dozen bills had been introduced
(most of them by Liberal member John Waters), and scores of petitions had
been written. Also see Mock Parliament: Universal Suffrage ...
42 See

(Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1896), 14. It is im-
portant to note that provincial parliamentary procedure at this time is regu-
lated by federal government guidelines and is the same for the federal and
provincial houses alike. The succession of events in the 1893 play, as de-
scribed in the , follows the procedure outlined
here. The Walker Theatre parliament of 1914 was apparently similar: As
nearly as possible the rules of the House were followed and the routine
proceedings adhered to as much as could be expected under the circum-
stances. Petitions were presented; motions were offered; questions were
asked and bills were read. See McClung, , 119.

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Kate to Davin:
When you died, I thought I too must die;

How could I live without your word and smile?
How meet the morrow and alone? When thou and I
Together long had planned and dreamed; the while
You held my hand the hill of life,
Care-strewn, was sweet,
And thorns to roses turned beneath my tired feet.
When you died, I said, I too must die.

But spite of grief and spite of woe and tears,
I could not blind the sunshine of the sky;
And some sweet tinge of hope upheld my fears.
And looking back upon the path we walked, I see
Where your feet failed the day you died for me.
The sun still circles and the clouds drift;

The prairies blossoms bud and bloom and die;
Sunshine and rain alternate through clouds rift,
And tears and gladness come as I pass by,
The same old pathway where sad memories bide,
And linger in my heart, because you died.
! " # $ % & ', $ ()
Here is an example never told before. When the Abbott ministry took the reins of
power Davin was enraged to be left out. He wrote a most vicious attack upon the
government? the leader? the party? Nay, but upon Lady McDonald taking the in-
cident of the famous diamond necklace for his topic. Need I tell you the article was
a ? It was to appear on a certain Thursday in . On Wednesday he
telephoned me, at the government library to come down at 4 oclock to give him
an opinion. I went. The form was set up, the galley had been proofd and the copy
was handed me for an opinion? I read it he was slightly intoxicated and when
I got through he said in that feverish way you must know belonged to his mood.
Well, what will they say to that? That you are a coward I said Attack a de-
fenceless woman and from a cupboard-of-men I said.
? He tore the copy in bits called up Pearl and had the whole article
withdrawn!
D '9?

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5 6
biblio.fm Page 239 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:41 PM
Bibliography

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Post Confederation

! "#$%
& ' Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nine-
teenth-Century Canada !( ) "##"
* English Canadian Theatre, 17651826 +, * & ) -
"##$
. / 0 + ' 1 Nineteenth
Century Theatre Research 2 3"#456 $2.#5
& ! 7 /' )
"$$2."#"1 Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada
" " 3"##26 2".5#
8 - ) A Bibliography of Canadian theatre His-
tory, 15831975 ) , ' "#4%
. Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada: The Beginnings to 1984 / Bibli-
ographie dhistoire du théâtre au Canada: Des débuts fin 1984
A?M ) "##2
. Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History: Supplement, 19751976
) , ' "#4#
7 / ! 9 ! : ;
9 "$4."#21 Ontario History 4 2 3"#$6 "$.4
, 8 0 : Plays by American Women: The Early Years
8 0 +, * & <= "#$"
8 Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier.
>= ; )
? < = / ; + 1 : Canadian The-
atre History: Selected Readings 2$.4
' ' & "##%
/@ ,1 Perth County Herald 4 7 "#"2 5
) ! ' 8 8 +& Canada: A North
American Nation 7A , "#$#
0 -! ' English-Canadian Theatre 9?
; >= ) "#$4
0 -! ' Oxford Companion to Canadian The-
atre 9?; >= ) "#$#
8 Encyclopedia of Philosophy. B " 0 )
0, - ' 7 "#4
' The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism,
18971914 >= ; ) "#4
8= /7 1 : The Oxford Companion to Cana-
dian Theatre 0 -! ' 9?; >
= ) "#$#
) / ) ; , 1 : Political Corruption in Can-
ada C 7 A ' , "5."$
7' "#4%

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales.
! " High Buttoned Shoes and Tabi # $ %&
# '(
) % * #
+ , - And Their Work Continueth : The History of the Womans Asso-
ciation of the United Church of Canada .+ / ! / + 0
* - 1$ ! + $ / - &
#2 Theatre History in Canada 3'4 5)5
# 6 % ! Myth, Religion, and Mother Right 77 !
% ! .* # % ##
# Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Poli-
tics in Britain, 17801800. / + / + .* # % ## ((
-! " + Hiss the Villain: Six English and American Melodramas
8+ , 9 : #+
* 1;<# " # + =# : > / ? +
%!# / + @# 2 A Creating Historical Memory: English-Ca-
nadian Women and the Work of History ++ * + >&
# % ! B) C !* K>? % ##
&@ + / # 1> ! A # &/
/ + = : / ?<# Laura Secord: The Heroine of 18122
Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada 3 ((4
5)
# An Encyclopaedia of Fairies %
+ : " Holidaying in Canada on the Ottawa River. D&
8&-
- E% <# 6 # A# $ A# @ < D $
'(#2 Theatre History in Canada 3'54 )55
:# 1= + @ # 6 , ># ;# +
/# = C! ;2 Victorian Poetry 55 3B4 ')
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! 7 The Last Best West $ ?
! > High School History of England $ / /
'
+! / 1$ ; ''(#2 Theatre
History in Canada 3'54 B)(
"* + 7# % # * D D - ! 5
/ # Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform in Late-
Nineteenth-Century Toronto $ .* # $ % ##
# / Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory
of British Romantic Women Writers % + .* # % +&
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/ : + + 8 -!- +# New Women: Short Stories by
Canadian Women, 19001920. D .* # D % ##

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The Story of Laura Secord: And Canadian Reminiscences

! " ! #$ % "
& ' Canada Citizen ( ))* +
& ,' - . Dominion Illustrated /0" )1 *2
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tion of the Province of Ontario, Canada /)*421 &
& ,5 6 3 %-" . Canada Citizen 2 5"7
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& ,! : - 6 $ ; " <" 8# ) ).
Journal and Transactions /) 1 2&
& , 3 0 . Dominion Illustrated / ( )1 )
0 % Beyond God the Father " +
& Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism " +)
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atre Research in Canada/ Recherches théâtrales au Canada * /<
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Canada/ Recherches théâtrales au Canada * /9 1 &*
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Feminism 8$ B A 9 - "A > )*
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Canada / Histoire du théâtre au Canada * /)1 &

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On to Victory: Propaganda Plays of the Woman Suffrage

Movement
The Anatomy of Criticism ! "

# $% & ' ( ) * + Canada
Monthly , - . /01/
2 3 4 $ * The Week 3 * 0 ,+
Journal of Canadian Poetry -. 1
2 ( 5 Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
6 7 89
2 # '9 89 3 The New Woman and Her Sisters:
Feminism and Theatre, 18501914. 4 4 3 ("

2 4 The Better Half : ) 0
2 9 ( English Romanticism: The Human Context. 6 7 ;;

2 % Canadas Early Women Writers: Texts in English to 1859. <=
% 8 " >9 3 4 "* 3 ;*
1 A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-
Century Canada. ? 3 ?
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Canada ? A?M
2* % 7 Herland BC 6 7
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. : '$ A Chapter of the History of the War of 1812 in the Northwest
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glish-Canadian Fiction # '3 >C& ,'4$ % $ 5
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History $$ + 0''$ !" $' 3 ,'4$ & $' 5"
! $ 0 $ :) ' The Canadian Encyclopedia nd $ 5
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Act / . 3 - '$ ,'4$ % $ 5
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Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of
Shakespeare ! " #$%$
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, ! -.!/ ) The Native in Literature: Canadian and Comparative Per-
spectives ! 0 1 23455 0 ! A?M " #$%
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! 8 & ! 22459 : #$$$
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1 ! 0 The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Su-
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18701970 +! +.&7A= ! " #$$%
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gration Policy, 15401990 0 ! : " #$$

Mr. Davin m.p.: A Biography of Nicholas Flood Davin.

!"
# $ % & r '
( Shakespeare Our Contemporary ) * !+,
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cism 3 * ,#++ / 4& 0 / !'
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) % $ The Blue Fairy Book. ! 7 8$ 9 :&
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18801945 * *<=> 4& !!!
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18001914 % @ ++# 6 / 4& 0 /
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8$ -$ oise !6
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* ( @ .5 1 Victorian Painters ) !+!
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* 3$ < And Mighty Women Too
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* % * Down the River to the Sea 8$ 9 -@
!

Lays of the True North and other Canadian Poems

Roland Graeme, Knight: A Novel of Our Time. ! " # $
%&' ( '' )
*++$ " , - Canada % . '
* / " , * / 0 ' 122 + Highlights from MacKays
History" * $ '" 12 # $ * 32
* / 4 -$ ( ' 5 '6 7
* 8 " 9 9 * / 5 7 :'" # $
* " 7' Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 18851945
% *5 ; $ 9
* * " 5 " **" < . ' Silenced
Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists *
*=>6' 4: ' ( '' 1
Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 18801900.
**" Dictionary of Canadian Biography ?
Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian
Women Writers. # $ 4: ' 8 # $ ( ''
Pioneering Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, Beginnings to 1880
# $ 4: ' 8 # $ ( '' 1
**" " 5 & " ' Pioneering Women: Short
Stories by Canadian Women: Beginning to 1880. # $ 4: ' 8 #
$ ( '' 1
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and Girls * !8
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ing, 19001990. % #@8 4: ' ( '' )
* " 5' 7 5: 5 8
+ ' 8 / & ' A '" 2)2 * ' 6' ''" 4: ' 8
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* " 5 ' 8 : .& + Songs of the Great Dominion "
.B
Manitoba Legislative Assembly Journals. C 1 9" 1
* " = Theatre Lethbridge: A History of Theatrical Production in
Lethbridge, Alberta (18851988). 5 B' 1
* :'D 8 -$ ( The Globe" 9 C )
* " #& ( ' The Closet Drama of the Romantic Revival (
B & ( % , &' A < +' 8E
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* " / B : % ( + Rebels in Time. & -.'

* '" . % M?JK GC =" A& - : 6 7
- 5 C&'& + A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women

and Reform in Canada 1880s-1920s

! " !! ##
$%&' " ( Montreal Gazette ) *+ ,, -
$%&' " ( Montreal Gazette *+ ,, -
$%&' " ( Montreal Gazette *+ ,, ,
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! Honest Womanhood: Feminism, Femininity and Class Con-
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index.fm Page 257 Monday, January 12, 2004 1:41 PM
Index
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"" # - / ) John Mathe-
", , - son /) Ladies Aid -
& . - # / ) - /
* * ( * /- ) # - ) 7 8
& ( , ) Let Mary Lou Do It )
) 0 1*, 2 Marrying Anne?,
* % ) ' *' /) Martha Made Over,
* ) * /-) #/ ) Ministers
##) * 3 " ) Bride ) * 3
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) $ 3 3 * ) ' , (" -/ ) , , '
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33 " 5 ) 33 " Country Schoolmam, /
, ) " #-. See also ! 6 ,
American Reformer * ( * # /
Anatomy of Criticism. See ! 6 , '3** /-
& (% Aunt '* +"% 0 1*, 2 4
Marys Family Album ) 5 * -#) * + , '
Aunt Sophia Speaks, ; Aunt Su- * #/ ) The
sans Visit #-/) " , -/ Sweet Girl Graduate #
258 Index
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259 Index
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260 Index
Anne?, ") ") Martha Made

Over ") "% " ! 5 ,
! "# "$ %$# ! ) $ ) %# %"
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;
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"" ! $ The Joggs- tion," " Ladies Aid "
ville, Convention Ladies Aid
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"%#" Laura Secord $ $) rying Anne ")" 0 * ,
!! "% Marrying "% ! 5
261 Index
! " "#

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262 Index
career woman, 92, 956, 989; and son Hayes, 14, 96, 1034, 10810, 112,
childrens drama, 4, 14, 93, 98, 11820, 121; and mock parliaments, 87; and Sif-
1226; and ton, Clifford, 121, 129; and Social Pu-
, 115; and comedies, Re- rity, 1034, 131
gina, 113; and Nicholas Flood Davin, Imperial Federation, 224
92, 95, 99102, 105, 11011; 11314; ! $% &
114
and Divorce for $50, 92, 113; and ! ' . Nellie McClung
A Domestic Disturbance, 92, 113, Indian: and Aweena, 98; as foreign-
116; and domestic feminism, 92, 101, ers, 106, 136; and Hayess fiction, 98;
1034, 1079, 112, 120, 126, 133; and and Indian Act, 121; and
The Duplicate Man, 92, 113; as en- 36, 37; and nativism, 121, 136; and
trepreneur, 95, 111; and journalism, noble savage, 124; as Other, 121, 124,
958; and immigration, 14, 96, 1034, 1367
10810, 112; lost plays, 92, 113, 195; irony, and Andersons comedies, 8, 10;
and liberal feminism, 14, 92, 95, 97, and mock parliaments, 77, 87, 91; and
111, 137; and Literary and Musical As- " and ( %%# #
sociation, Regina, 10, 95; literary , 140, 183, 186, 188
works, 98; and Midnight Express, Irwin, W.R., 126
93, 99, 100; as Mary Markwell, 97,
101, 105, 106, 110; performances of Jackel, Susan, 956
plays, 99, 11315; and Jameson, Frederic, 10, 115, 11920, 1267
, 98, 115, 121; and problem ( %%# # 4, 15, 140,
plays, 93, 1278; and race politics, 106 18292
8, and , 10, 15, Johnson, Gordon, 122
93, 99, 115, 11827; and suffrage, 92, Johnson, Stephen, 41, 122
957, 105, 111; as teacher, 1068, 112, Jones, Heather, 42, 43, 53, 195
134; and , 113, Jones, Marion, 53
117 journalism: Kate Simpson Hayes, 92, 98,
Haymarket Theatre, 30 1045, 109, 111; and Sarah Anne Cur-
health and hygiene, 12, 146 )
zon, 212, 27 and women, 11, 14, 23,
Hind, E. Cora, 75 25
Hindle, Annie, 53
Hincks, the Reverend W.H., 152 Kahn, Coppelia, 6
Hirshfield, Claire, 8, 68, 198 Kealey, Linda, 7, 11, 13, 17, 20, 85
historical drama, 4, 9 Keats, John, 30
Hobbes, Thomas, 19 Keith, Marion, 151
Hollingsworth, Margaret, 196 Kinnear, Mary, 95
Homemakers Clubs, 66 Kirby, William, 28
, 68 Knowles, Norman, 34, 38
Howe, Julia Ward, 64 Knox, Gilbert, 151
Hutcheon, Linda, 10, 77, 140, 183. Knox College, 142
parody Koester, C.B., 945, 100
Kott, Jan, 125
Icelandic Womens Suffrage Association of Kreisel, Henry, 126
Manitoba, 667
Ibsen, Henrik, 9, 127, 128 "* "
! " 114 $ +% + '
illegitimacy: Hayess children, 92, 1002,
11011 Ladies Aid societies. Anderson, Clara
immigration, 11, and "#, 93, 127, Rothwell
1312; British domestics, 1089, 112, , - 114
121; Galician, 93, 127; and Kate Simp- Lamb, Charles, 31
263 Index
Land of Afternoon, 151 biography, 934, 1012, 106, 1089,
Lang, Andrew, 119 111, 113, 115, 129, 136, 137; and
Laura Secord. See Curzon, Sarah Anne Hayess influence on Davin, 95; and
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 121 Hayess plays, 98, 99; and Winnipeg
Legend of the West, The, 98 Free Press, 105
lesbian eroticism, 53 Mair, Charles, 9, 23,
Let Mary Lou Do It, 158 Manifest Destiny, 36
Le Théâtre de Neptune, 9 Manitoba Political Equality League, 12
Lewis, Dio, 32 Markwell, Mary, 101, 105, 106, 110
liberal feminism: and archival recovery, 6; marriage: in The Anvil, 1323; in Aunt Su-
critique of, 7; and Famous Women, sans Visit, 171, 176; and the Bible, 42
1978; and Kate Simpson Hayes, 925, 3; and Clara Rothwell Anderson, 142,
97, 111, 137; and Hayess Regina come- 148, 160; and Clara Rothwell Ander-
dies, 14; and the ideology of the sons comedy, 15, 140, 158; and Nicho-
womens movement, 5, 1113, 16; and las Flood Davin, 11011; and Kate
Laura Secord, 3440, 404; and Mary Simpson Hayes, 94, 97, 1012, 105,
Wollstonecraft, 19, 11, 51; and mock 106; and Hayess Regina comedies, 113
parliaments, 14, 636, 76, 77, 846, 15, 137; andThe Joggsville Convention,
889, 91; and Sarah Anne Curzon, 17 Marrying Anne?, 1645; and
191; and
22, 25; and The Sweet Girl Graduate, Mary Markwell, 978; and Martha
49, 523, 56, 578 Made Over, 18, 2; and mock parlia-
liberal progressivism, 144, 160 ments, 85; and Sarah Anne Curzon, 26;
Light, Beth, 7, 84 inThe Sweet Girl Graduate, 56; in The

Lighthall, William Douw, 95 Young Country Schoolmam, 170
Lindley, Harry, 114 Marrying Anne?, 4, 15, 139, 155, 159,
Literary and Musical Association, Regina, 1616
10, 95 Martha Made Over, 4, 15, 139, 159, 176

Little Manitoban, The, 98 82
Locke, John, 19 Mary Agnes, Sister, 7, 199
Loyalism: in Laura Secord, 9, 23, 335, materialist feminism, 6, 7
36, 38, 40, 45, 46 Matheson, John, 154
Lundys Lane, Battle of, 23 Mathur, Om Prakash, 29
Lundys Lane Historical society, 23 maternal feminism. See domestic feminism

Mellish, Emma Stanton, 48
MacBeth, Madge Hamilton Lyons, 151 melodrama, 30, 42, 128
McClung, Nellie: and Canadian Womens Mens Enfranchisement Association, 59,
Press Club, 95; and chivalry, 164; and 63, 66, 69
domestic feminism, 66, 146, 170, 175, Merritt, Catherine Nina, 9, 16
192; and In Times Like These, 66, 146, mimesis, 78, 1845, 191
164, 179, 181, 17780; and 1914 mock Midnight Express, 93, 99, 100
parliament, 14, 6972, 745, 77, 80, militancy, and the woman movement, 68;
83; andMartha Made Over, 17781, and The Joggsville Convention and La-
192; and Purple Springs, 70, 83 dies Aid, 183, 18891
MacDonnel, Ann Botham, 7 Mill, John Stuart, 11, 21, 35, 39
McGee, DArcy, 94, 107 Ministers Bride, The. See Anderson, Clara
MacGregor, Mary Esther, 151 Rothwell
Machar, Agnes Maule, 16 minstrel shows, 30, 41
McLaren, Angus, 121 miracle plays, 195
MacMillan, Carrie, 7 Miss Appleyards Awakening, 68, 198

McMullen, Lorraine, 7, 23, 28 Mitchell, Ken, 103
Maguire, Constance Anne: and Canadian Mitchinson, Wendy: and domestic femi-
Womens Press Club, 96; and Hayess nism, 66, 1456; and domestic science,
264 Index
163; and the persons case, 12; and 186, 188, 192; and ,
propaganda, 10, 63; and Protestant re- 190; and & , 1789;
form, 133, 1456; and recovery of and Mary Markwell, 101, 105; and
womens history, 7; and separate mock parliaments, 89; and Sarah Anne
spheres, 13, 50, 74; and Womens Chris- Curzon, 27; and !$' !",
tian Temperance Union, 68, 83; and 120, 126; and !" # # $ ,
womens education, 51 56; and womens education, 56; and
mock parliaments, 61, 63, 65, 78, 79, 183, womens identity, 22; and ($
195, 196; and advertisements, 75; agit- $ ) ! 16670
prop, 4; at Allen Gardens 63, 72; Can- mothers allowance, 189
adas role in, 69; as ; * , 21
Mowat, Sir Oliver, 81
, 69; and fund-raising, 10, 71; + , 114
and Garland, Alison, , Murphy, Emily, 95
69; and genre, 14, 69, 1956; and music halls, 30, 53
and ,
140, 182; and liberal feminism, 14, 63 National Girls Work Board, 198
6, 76, 846, 889, 91; and mimesis, 78, nation-building, 23, 25, 36, 40, 105, 108
81; and the mock debate, 8691; and National Council of Women, 12, 50, 66,
National History Society, 69; and Nellie 98, 183
McClung, 14, 6972, 745, 77, 80, 83; National Equal Franchise Union, 12
and parody, 14, 64, 702, 778, 81, nativism, 87, 106, 121, 137, 197
189; and participants, 745; and perfor- Newcomb, C.F., 29
mances, 69; and performance venues, New Greek Comedy. ! comedy
70, 75; and political satire, 10; political New Woman, 161, 163
strategy, 712; and reversal, 78, 80, 86 Niagara Historical Society, 23
7, 186; reviews, 767; and social re- noble savage, 40, 124
formers, 75; and Sophie Louise Wepf North Atlantic Trading Company, 129
Clark, 69; and suffrage, 635, 75, 80, Northwest Mounted Police Barracks, 99
86, 91; and !" # # $ ,
48; and 1893 Winnipeg mock parlia- & $
ment, 6876; and 1896 Toronto mock " 4, 15, 140, 18292
parliament, 60, 63, 73, 7587, 121, ONeill, Patrick, 7, 95, 99100, 11315,
129; and 1914 Winnipeg mock parlia- 195
ment, 689, 702, 756; and the M?JK , Ontario Temperance Federation, 147
656, 69, 72; and the M?JK s view on ORagan, Thomas, 26
tobacco, 84; and woman movement, 77. &$ # , 32
! Bacchi, Carole; parody Owen, Martha, 16
Moi, Toril, 6
Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 146 Paine, Thomas, 11
Montreal Ladies Educational Association, Pankhurst, Christabel, 64
51 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 64, 96, 197
moral reform, 74, 81, 132, 164 pantomime, 53
morality and drama, 150, 1525 parody, 14, 64, 702, 778, 81, 189; and
Morgan, Henry James, 23, 33, 93, 94, 102 A Domestic Disturbance, 113; and
motherhood: and $ !$ , 170, Andersons plays 13940, 160, 18292;
172, 1756; and changing expectation, and Linda Hutcheon, 10, 77, 183; and
167; and Clara Rothwell Anderson, mock parliament, 14, 64, 702, 778,
143, 1489; and Imperial Federation, 81, 189
25; influence of science and education Patmore, Coventry, 50
on, 188; and Kate Simpson Hayes, 106 performance: and Clara Rothwell Ander-
8; 11011; and % son, 14950, 1545; and closet drama,
265 Index
28, 31, 38, 478, 53; and Kate Simpson Protestant reform, 12, 15, 66, 133; and
Hayes, 94, 99, 115; and gender, 54, 56; plays of Clara Rothwell Anderson, 140,
and mock parliament, 6, 63, 6872, 75 168; and Social Gospel, 1389; 144
6, 86, 89, 91, 195; and morality, 152; Provincial Association, or Taxing Each
and politics 9, 115; transgressive, 53; Other, 9
and women, 74, 138 pseudonym, 94, 110, 198
Perkins, David, 195 Purple Springs. See McClung, Nellie
pernicious literature, 12 Pygmalion, 128
philosophical idealism, 144, 160,
164, 169 querelle des femmes, 44
Pioneer Historical Association, 24
Plant, Richard, 9, 10, 31, 47, 195 Rabkin, Eric, 115, 120, 123
Plato, 88 race: in The Anvil, 131, 133, 136; and
playbills: and A Domestic Disturbance, Kate Simpson Hayes, 1068; and native
116; and Ladies Aid, 184; and Canadians, 10, 15, 37, 3940, 1212,
TOther from Which, 117 137; and nativism, 87, 106, 121, 137,
plays: absence of those by women, 4; and 197; and primitivist discourse; 1246;
advertisements, 756; as political ac- and privilege, 13; and qualifying the cat-
tion, 71, 72, 74. See also drama; theatre egory of women, 6; and racism, 121;
political satire, 910, 47 and Sarah Anne Curzon, 18; in Slum-
political theatre, 4, 5, 9, 75 berland Shadows, 93, 115, 119, 1212,
Political Unconscious, 119 124, 126, 136; and Social Purity, 93,
poverty, 103, 107, 131, 165, 181 108; in The Sweet Girl Graduate, 51
Prairie Pot-Pourri, 98, 115, 121 racism, 106, 108, 121, 131
prejudice, 77, 152, 165, 189 radical feminism, 6, 7
Prentice, Alison, et al.: and Christian re- railway scandals, 82
form, 12; and Denison, Flora Mac- Recruiting Officer, The, 53
Donald, 66; and Dominion Womens Red Cross, 1989
Enfranchisement Association, 20; and Red River Valley Circuit, 71
domestic feminism, 13, 146; and femi- Reform Darwinism, 144, 160
nist, 11; and Laura Secord, 40; and re- reformers, 15, 132, 140
cuperation of history, 7; and suffrage, regenerators, 47
645, 68, 87; and Womens Christian Regina Council of Women, 111, 115
Temperance Union, 81; and womens Renaissance, 7, 30
organizations, 144, 183, 188; and Restoration, 30
womens post-secondary education, 49, reversal: and Andersons comedy, 160,
87, 144, 146, 183, 188 174; and fantasy, 123; and literary con-
prison reform, 133, 146 vention, 160, 164; and mock parlia-
problem plays, 15, 93, 1278 ments, 70, 7881, 858, 91; and
productions of plays: and Clara Rothwell parody, 78, 81, 87; and Slumberland
Anderson, 149, 1546; and Kate Simp- Shadows, 120, 123
son Hayes, 99, 111, 11415; and mock reviews: of Hayess acting, 99; of 1893
parliaments, 63, 6971, 767, 87 mock parliament, 70, 76, 87; of 1896
professional theatre. See theatre, profes- mock parliament, 76, 867; of 1914
sional mock parliament, 70, 72; and Sarah
prohibition, 5, 22, 53, 656, 88, 90 Anne Curzon, 26; of Slumberland Shad-
property rights. See women ows, 98, 119
prostitution, 12, 84, 91, 103, 128, 1301, Riel rebellion, 123
134, 146, 152 Roberts, Wayne, 84, 85
Protestant: attitudes toward dramatic per- Roblin, Sir Rodmond Palen, 702, 74
formances, 1534, 183; as cultural elite, Roddick, Amy Redpath, 16
18, 27, 104, 107, 121 Rodgers, Robert, 9
266 Index
$ As You Like It

&$ < 3 $
Midsummer Nights Dream $
%$ Tam-
ing of the Shrew $
! Aunt Susans Visit " # * ; &
"# $ %$ Young * = 3 > & "
Country Schoolmam && &'# '
() ' " % * * "
* ' * ) See also <
3
* ++ + , '' " 3 "$ Canada Citizen, )
* " See also ; : *
* &' *4 3 "
* - . / & , '$ Laura Secord &
* 0 & '& Slumberland Shadows %
* 1 '#"
&' * 2 "
* 2 . 3 ) See * = %
, 4 3 , $ <
* , % 4 3 + ' $ The Sweet Girl
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Graduate & "$ 4
% " % ' ' '$ The Anvil
& * ? '
School for Scandal, %% ,
* * - % * = & $
* Aunt Susans Visit " " $ ++<
* 4 &% "&$
! ++ 5 ' &
'$ 6 7 $ &%$ %$
8 . " %$ + 3 , &%$ Marry-
3 # '$ ing Anne?, &# $ Martha Made
4 "'$ 3 '' Over "& '%$ <
% &% & &$
* , + ' &%$ ? &%$
9! The Anvil "#$ , Young Country Schoolmam &
+ & ' ' $ + %# &%$ <
$ 3 # " &#"
%$ ' % "$ * 0 % %# $
: * ; $ The Anvil " %# #"$
+ $ 5 ""$ : * ; #
9 $ 9 %# %&#' $ Slumber-
'&$ 3 " "" ' land Shadows % #
'$ 9 ' "$ &
$ * $ . <
* 0 %# %" $ The Anvil $ <
"$ &$ The &&$ & '$
Sweet Girl Graduate '# %$ , 4 "# ' '
& $ 9 +5 ' $ , '"$ Slumber-
'# ' land Shadows $ 3 ""$
9 3 ) See * 0 - . @
* 4 - ! &
267 Index
6 !2 <'

$ <, 2 ,
! *, 2 M?JK %
" # $ % 2 The Sweet Girl Graduate
& ! !2 ,
'() *)+) ! // See also ' -+
,- . % / @ ) /2 *, )$'
+'0+ 1, ! ! $+ /2 ), %92 0,-
)$$+ Canada Citizen, 2 /2 0 )$$+ /2
34 )$$+ * ,' 4 "+ +# 2
2 5, 6 7 2 , 2 , ' + 2
8 % /92 $ / 2 $)' '
Famous Women !2 $ 2 + 2 $ 2 '
+ $ 9 2 $), $ 0 9 %2 ,
*, 2 The Joggsville 2 % 92 '
Convention, % / /! /9% 2 , 2 $ '
2 : & %9/ 9
% 2 Ladies Aid % / C ,), % 9
/! /9% 2 ; $ 2 ', ) $
/2 ' + !! /2 %
,- % 9 , , , / % 2
2 , + 2 ' , , , , %
, ! !2 , ' , , !% / %
$ 2 The Sweet Girl , ) See ) ,
Graduate /2 92 < < & %%
34 = ) %2 <,- = /
34 <, > <- %
!2 4 $ !2 4 Tom Browns Schooldays,
+ 2 <+,- .
/ < 34 = ) %9
)$$+ 9
)$$+ < 34 ., ,
)$$+ / ! ! /2 . TOther from Which !
.- ' )$$+ %2 )+ ,,)
Joggsville Ladies Aid / < & < C, * )4 ='
Sweet Girl Graduate, The / + B
% !9/ < & < 3+
"< 0- <# /
< ),
? / "<) & B) #
< 0 "< D # /
< . 0-
, / 2 The Anvil 2 > =
: & % 9/ > $ < ! /
)
Tecumseh, ) /
,@ ) %2
The Anvil % 2 Canada Citi- 1 . %9 %9
zen, 92 $ 2 %/
,)$ / / / 2 A)
2 ,- / ) ,@ 0;) < 3'
/ // %2 B <, + 2 6 ( C- 3+
268 Index
114; New Edinburgh/MacKay Sunday women and school board trustees, 75, 84
School Hall, 150; Northwest Mounted Women Grain Growers Association, 67
Police Barracks, Regina, 99; Pavilion at womens access to professions, 8, 1113,
Allen Gardens, 63, 64, 71; Saint Marys 201, 111, 145, 197
Catholic Church, Regina, 115; Town womens aesthetic, 5, 196
Hall Theatre, Prince Arthurs Landing, womens brains, 87
Ontario, 94; Town Hall Theatre, Re- Womens Canadian Historical Society, 4,
gina, 95, 99, 113; touring circuits, 9; 24, 33
Walker Theatre, 6976 Womens Christian Temperance Move-
, 19 ment (M?JK ) 12, 60, 63, 65, 66, 67, 70;
and Christian morality, 88; and
Walker, C.P., 71, 75 179; and Mitchinson,
Walker Theatre, 6976 Wendy, 68; and mock parliament, 69,
Wage Reform, 845 75, 80, 84; and political reform, 81; and
Wagner, Anton, 33, 48, 195 provincial entrance into, 67; and Social
Wandor, Michelene, 8 Purity, 103; and suffrage, 66, 72, 74;
Wang, Shou-ren, 30 and variety theatre, 152
, 158 Womens Enfranchisement Association of
War of 1812, 3, 23, 33, 36, 38, 40 New Brunswick, 66
Waterston, Elizabeth, 7 Womens Foreign Mission Society, 147
Watson, Pearlie, 83 ! "#, 21
Watson, Samuel James, 29 womens history, recuperation of, 5, 7, 18,
Wentworth Historical Society, 23 24, 195
Wentworth Historical Society Address. Womens Institutes, 12, 66, 183, 188
Curzon, Sarah Anne Womens Journal, 21
Wesnera, Ella, 53 womens legal identity, 88
Wheelwright, Julie, 56 womens mission bands, 144
9 Womens Missionary Society, 146, 151
white slave trade, 146 womens organizations: and $
Willard, Frances E., 21, 80. Womens % 150, 18393; and Kate
Christian Temperance Movement Simpson Hayes, 106, 111; and mock
Wilson, Ann, 195 parliament, 88; and public speaking, 68;
Wilson, Daniel, 44, 47, 51 and Social Gospel, 144; and suffrage,
Winnipeg Operatic Society, 113 646; and the woman movement, 11;
Winnipeg Political Equality League, 67 and womens emergence into the public
Winslow, Edward, 9 sphere, 146
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 11, 19, 202, 25, womens pages (in newspapers), 212; 96
46, 194 8, 1056
woman movement, 1012; and domestic womens rights, 1113, 42, 198; and ac-
feminism, 12, 16, 77; and tresses, 9; and Clara Rothwell Ander-
, 196; and influential women, son, 15, 192, 193; and drama, 58;
95; and Kate Simpson Hayes, 103; and , 198; and $ &
liberal feminism, 11, 16, 17, 20, 77; and % and ' , 140,
mock parliaments, 77, 90; and politics, 183, 190, 193; and Kate Simpson
5, 6; post-1960, 7; and Sarah Anne Cur- Hayes, 14, 978, 106, 111; ' &
zon, 20; and womens drama, 4, 6, 13, , 34; and mock parliament, 61, 70
1516 1, 8491; and Nicholas Flood Davin,
women and domestic assault, 97 95; and property rights, 5, 95, 145; and
women and higher education: and drama, Protestant reform, 15, 140; and reli-
5, 8, 145; Sarah Anne Curzon, 20, 27. gion, 86; and Sarah Anne Curzon, 13,
1718, 202; and Social Gospel, 145;
women and public speaking, 27, 68, 106 and the stage, 9, 91, 183, 190; and
269 Index
Sweet Girl Graduate, 18, 201, 334, Yeats, William B., 30
48, 58. See also domestic feminism; lib- Yeomans, Amelia, 71, 72, 75, 88, 198
eral feminism; suffrage; woman move- ymca , 103, 183
ment; women in higher education; York Pioneers, 23
womens access to the professions; Young Country Schoolmam, The, 4, 15,

wctu ; womens organizations 159, 16670
Womens Social and Political Union, 68, 96
Womens Suffrage Journal, 21 Zipes, Jake, 10, 115, 119
womens work, 856
Woolf, Virginia, 195
Wordsworth, William, 30
Writ, The, 87, 100


Kym Bird - Redressing The Past - The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920-McGill-Queen's University Press (2004)

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Redressing the Past

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For the committee of women in my life: Thelma Florence

Sarah Anne Curzon, within a few years of her death in

Clara Rothwells extended family during the 1880s / 143

I owe so much to so many who assisted and encouraged this project in

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Some of these plays were a form of political agitation  like petitions,

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ties within liberal and radical feminism by problematizing woman as

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had been politicized by modern playwrights such as Shaw and Ibsen,

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ment Association, the Canadian Suffrage Association, the National

included more conservative organizations like the National Council of

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1 Leaping into the Breeches:

The clearest admission of Sarah Anne Curzons commitment to liberal

at the heart of the imperial federationist recovery of a Canadian

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For the committee of women in my life: Thelma Florence

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