Edited by Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford, University of Manitoba Press, 2020/$31.95/344 PP.
Politics and activism are central themes in the history of women in western Canada, and Compelled to Act contributes to this literature in significant new ways. Edited and with an introduction by accomplished historians Sarah Carter and Nanci Langford, this highly readable volume offers 10 original essays that explore diverse kinds of political engagements across the 20th century.
The volume begins with Joan Sangster’s sophisticated analysis of the international networks that influenced early Canadian suffrage movements. The theme of feminist activism is also taken up in essays on late-20th-century reproductive rights and on peace activists who opposed Canadian involvement in testing nuclear and chemical weapons. Other articles explore women inspired by commitments to labour struggles, those addressing the needs of agricultural communities and those grappling with the difficult experiences of Japanese-Canadian and American women in internment camps during the Second World War. In their nuanced narrative of the evolutions of Indigenous women’s organizations in Saskatchewan, Allyson Stevenson and Cheryl Troupe tease out how Indigenous women’s activism differed from male-dominated organizations but also diverged from the priorities of mainstream non-Indigenous feminist organizations. Two biographical studies are particularly interesting for their observations on how women fared within formal political parties. Esyllt Jones introduces readers to Mindel Cherniack Sheps, who was brought to Saskatchewan to help Tommy Douglas’s CCF government design a state-funded healthcare system, while Cynthia Loch-Drake tells the story of Ethel Wilson, labour-organizer turned Social Credit member of Alberta’s legislature. Both articles explore how religion—Judaism in the case of Sheps, and evangelical Christianity in the case of Wilson—intersected with their gender to complicate their careers and their legacies.
Compelled to Act introduces readers to a wide range of activists: female journalists, nurses, community organizers, elected politicians, women on picket lines, peace activists, feminists and anti-feminists. Of course, as the editors acknowledge in their introduction, the volume also has gaps. The collection reveals the need for new studies on Indigenous women’s organizing and activism, on those advocating for diverse sexual and gender identities, on women labour leaders, on religious women and even on women historians!
But the structure of the volume also demands we ask about “western Canada” as an analytic category. Almost all the essays here focus on events in Alberta and Saskatchewan, with British Columbian Nisei journalists the focus of one article and Manitoban women the focus of none. Thus, while some articles consider “subregions” such as southern Alberta’s “Bible Belt” and others foreground national and international influences and connections, only Sangster’s piece considers western Canada as a unit of analysis. How useful, then, is Canada’s “west” as a way to organize our knowledge of women’s activism? Perhaps provincial boundaries are now more meaningful, especially as provincial governments consolidated their political authority over the course of the 20th century. Is “western Canada” less a way of understanding how female activists organized their political work and rather an artifact of Canadian colonialism—both in the term’s current usage vis-à-vis Indigenous people and in its earlier iteration articulated by Donald Swainson in his 1992 “Canada Annexes the West”? Is western Canada, to riff off Benedict Anderson, an “imagined community”? And, if so, what role did feminist activists play in that imagining?
Compelled to Act is an engaging read that inspires new questions. It is a wonderful addition to an important field
—Kathryn M. McPherson is a professor in the department of history at York University.
