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Veronica (Nikki) Strong-Boag, a UBC professor in the Departments of Education and Women's Studies, is a former Director of the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations and a former coordinator of women's studies programming at SFU. She has co-edited a B.C. coursebook on women, B.C. Reconsidered: Essays On Women, with UBC's Gillian Creese, and studied adoptions in English Canada.
With her doctorate in history from University of Toronto, Strong-Boag arrived at SFU in 1980. Her other books include New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939, which received the Canadian History Association's John A. Macdonald Prize for best history book of 1988. With Carole Gerson, she co-wrote two E. Pauline Johnson studies, Paddling Her Own Canoe in 2000 and E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose in 2002.
John Campbell Gordon was Canada's seventh Governor-General, from 1893 to 1898. Originally from Scotland, he and his wife Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon, collectively known as 'the Aberdeens,' were known for their passion for social reform. Strong-Boag's Liberal Hearts and Coronets (University of Toronto Press, 2015) explores the compelling story of the progressive Aberdeens and their contributions to Canada. It is also "the first biography to treat John Campbell Gordon as seriously as his better-known wife."
The couple's first visit to the country was part of a world tour undertaken in 1890. They immediately felt an affinity with Canada and in 1891 bought Coldstream Ranch in BC's Okanagan valley. (The purchase was reportedly touted in local newspapers as "the best advertisement the Okanagan country has ever had.") In 1893 John was appointed Canada's Governor-General and the Aberdeens settled in at Ottawa's Rideau Hall. The couple was dedicated to worker's rights, women's rights and home health care. Ishbel helped found and was elected president of Canada's first National Council of Woman and the Victorian Order of Nurses. John travelled extensively through Canada, driven to meet and speak with the everyday Canadian. Through their beliefs and actions, the Aberdeens transformed the perception of Canada's Governor General. Previously viewed as an upper-crust representative of the monarchy, the position was now seen as one that listened to and spoke of Canadian citizens' concerns.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)
Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada
Working Lives: Vancouver, 1886-1986
Liberal Hearts and Coronets: The Lives and Times of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens
BOOKS:
In Times Like These (Social History of Canada Series) by Veronica Strong-Boag, Nellie L. McClung (1972)
Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita C. Fellman (Copp-Clark Pitman, 1986)
The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939, by Veronica Jane Strong-Boag (Penguin, 1988)
"Janey Canuck": Women in Canada, 1919-1939, by Veronica Jane Strong-Boag (Canadian Historical Association, 1994)
Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag et al (1998)
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), by Veronica Strong-Boag, Carole Gerson (UTP, 2000)
E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose,
by Carole Gerson (Introduction), et al (2002)
Nellie McClung, The Complete Autobiography: Clearing in the West and The Stream Runs Fast (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003) (Editor)
Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective (Wilfred Laurier University, 2005) (Editor with Cheryl Krasnick Warsh).
Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the 19th Century to the 1990s (Oxford, 2006).
Liberal Hearts And Coronets: The Lives And Times Of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens (University of Toronto Press, 2015) $32.95 9781442626027
The Last Suffragist Standing: the Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson (UBC Press 2018) $89.95 978-0-7748-3868-9
A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press, 2022) $32.95 9780774867252
[BCBW 2023] "Anthropology" "Women" "Pauline Johnson"
***
The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press $89.95)
Review by Patricia E. Roy
From a variety of sources —including interviews with descendants and records left by contemporaries—Veronica Strong-Boag has uncovered many details, and has set them firmly in the context of the times, for The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson.
After growing up on a poor Ontario farm, Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882-1964) briefly taught in the Crow’s Nest Pass, graduated at the University of Toronto, worked for the YWCA in Stratford, Ontario, married lawyer John Stewart Jamieson, a member of the Liberal Party, and moved to Burnaby.
The focus of this book is on Jamieson’s work for reforms, especially those affecting women, and her election to the provincial legislature to become, according to her biographer, the last Canadian suffragist to serve in a legislature.
Her education, her active role in Vancouver’s University Women’s Club, and her husband’s position put Jamieson into the middle class, but she was uneasy with that status. She criticized the “patronizing” attitude of some middle class women to the impoverished, their non-recognition of the rights of domestic servants, and the failure of suffragists such as Nellie McClung to seek other reforms, such as minimum wage laws, to improve women’s lives.
Similarly, in the mid-1940s when women were still cautious about participating in public life, Jamieson complained of their “strong inferiority complex” and hesitation about taking on tasks of citizenship that would have the public see them “as ordinary people first and as citizens, before it thinks of them specifically as women.”
Jamieson practised what she preached. She saw education and internationalism as the keys to solving “global problems” and achieving “a fair deal for women.” As the mother of young children, her involvement in the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) seems natural, but Strong-Boag suggests that Jamieson wanted to use the PTA to “promote internationalism.” Active in the feminist and pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), she sought to ally the League with other progressive bodies. Yet, she was realistic.
When the international situation deteriorated in the late 1930s, Hitler changed Jamieson’s belief in pacifism. She called for trade embargos on belligerents.
Given her husband’s part-time position as a juvenile court judge in Burnaby, a position to which she succeeded after his death, Jamieson became known as an expert on child welfare. She called for sex education, even for young children, and for the establishment of nursery schools and of community centres where older children could enjoy recreational and cultural activities.
In 1938, she resigned her judgeship to resolve, through politics, what she considered the root cause of juvenile delinquency, the lack of “food and clothing,” an argument she was still making in 1953.
***
Although she could not vote for them in 1916, Jamieson favoured the provincial Liberals because they supported women’s suffrage. Despite their introduction of such reforms as Mothers’ Pensions, Jamieson thought the Liberals abandoned their progressive sympathies after granting the franchise, so she looked elsewhere. Attracted by the ideas of socialists about public ownership of utilities and equal pay for equal work, in 1920 she announced that she had joined the Federated Labour Party.
By supporting socialism and internationalism in the 1920s, Jamieson put herself “on the periphery of women’s political activity.” Yet, when she ran as a CCF candidate for a provincial seat in a 1939 Vancouver by-election, some Liberal and Conservative women helped her successful campaign.
Strong-Boag suggests that moving away from “mainstream clubwomen” may have contributed to Jamieson’s defeat in the 1945 provincial election. That may be so, but in 1941 the Liberals and the Conservatives split the non-left vote; in 1945, Coalition candidates secured both Liberal and Conservative votes.
Jamieson was not long out of electoral politics. Elected as a Vancouver alderman, she argued for progressive reforms, particularly low-rent housing, but could not persuade city council to adopt this idea. In 1952, she re-entered provincial politics after the Coalition disintegrated, but lost in 1953 by a narrow margin to a candidate of the new Social Credit government.
A feminist champion of social democracy, Jamieson had been deeply involved with the CCF from its beginnings even though, as Strong-Boag notes, many party members assumed that men had the right to lead the party with women serving only in an auxiliary role. It is telling that one of Jamieson’s last public appearances was at the founding convention of the New Democratic Party in 1961 where she presided over a meeting of 300 women.
In relating Jamieson’s story, Strong-Boag presents fresh material on the well-known divisions within the CCF, especially between democratic socialists or social democrats like Jamieson and doctrinaire Marxists, notably Dorothy Steeves, at times, the only other female member of the CCF caucus.
***
Outside the legislature, Jamieson combined her belief in the importance of educating people, especially women, about current events, and the need to supplement her income. When her husband died of blood poisoning, he left only a modest estate and two school-aged children. Jamieson created study groups from whose members she collected a fee.
She also applied her belief in the value of co-operative housing by taking in boarders, a precedent for the communal residences for employed women she set up in Vancouver. Her favouring of co-operatives was sincere; she urged CCF members to patronize co-operative ventures such as grocery stores.
***
Strong-Boag rightly concludes that Jamieson was more concerned about injustice based on class and gender than on race. Jamieson did favour an easing of restrictions on immigration from China and India to permit family reunification but was cautious in speaking about the Japanese. Yet, during the war she endorsed the Vancouver Consultative Council’s demand for justice for Japanese Canadians while favouring their dispersal across Canada.
Strong-Boag recognizes Jamieson’s imperfections especially in respect to Indigenous peoples. In British Columbia, Jamieson appears to have had little interest in its Indigenous residents, but in what was likely a draft for a speech relatively late in her career, Jamieson wrote approvingly of efforts to integrate Indigenous children into the public schools of Oliver.
The Last Suffragist Standing is lively and informative; the descriptions and analyses of the times make a valuable contribution to the wider historiography of women’s political activities in Canada and to British Columbia politics in general.
Laura Marshall Jamieson would undoubtedly be pleased with this study of her life and times. 9780774838689
Patricia E. Roy is professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria. She is best known for her trilogy of books, A White Man’s Province (1989); The Oriental Question (2003), and The Triumph of Citizenship (2007).
***
A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press $32.95)
Review by Tom Sandborn (2023 BW)
“I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” —Eugene V. Debs, US labour leader and socialist agitator
While Mary Ellen Spear Smith was a rough contemporary of Eugene Debs, an American firebrand whose life engaged many of the issues that defined Smith’s life and career, she would not, we can assume, have unequivocally endorsed the sentiment of the quote above. Much of Smith’s life was spent on a concerted effort to rise from the working class to middle-class gentility. And yet this complicated and imperfect woman also emerges in Veronica Strong-Boag’s biography A Liberal-Labour Lady as an important pioneering advocate for women and workers, so long as they were “white.”
Like most of us, Smith “contained multitudes,” and she was perfectly capable all her life of holding positions that to 21st century readers will seem wildly inconsistent, some even repulsively racist. Together with too much of the province’s labour movement in her era, Smith supported Asian exclusion and ignored the oppressed and colonized situation of the province’s Indigenous people.
However, Smith was a significant figure in Canadian history, campaigning for women’s suffrage, mothers’ pensions and other pro-women reforms while becoming BC’s first female MLA, and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister (albeit without portfolio, staff or stipend).
One of this remarkable biography’s chief virtues is that it resists the temptation to flatten the contradictions in Smith’s life or to explain them away. What emerges is a magisterial study of an important and too-long ignored figure in BC history, a masterclass in how to account for our bewildering past and present.
As a child of a miner and then a miner’s wife, Smith saw first-hand the destructive impact of 19th-century capitalism on the workers who were her neighbours and family members in the hard-scrabble coal towns of northern England and then in the lethal BC coalfields around Nanaimo after she and her husband, Ralph Smith, moved to Canada in 1892. In the north of England, the young couple had already become involved in Methodist church life and the populist, co-operative projects and politics often associated with dissenting churches in 19th-century Britain. Never advocates for armed rebellion, or of militant class-conscious struggle, the Smiths saw the cross-class cooperation promoted by the Liberal-Labour tradition as the way forward for workers, and they both brought their enthusiasm for that tradition with them to Canada. Unsurprisingly, their lack of militance cost the Smiths some of the support they might have hoped for from unionized workers, but it won them support in their respective political careers from middle-class reformers.
In Canada, Ralph became involved in his union and in electoral politics, while Mary Ellen, busy raising five children, continued her lifelong pattern of hard work as a volunteer, serving in her church, the YWCA and many other women’s reform–oriented groups. She accompanied Ralph to Ottawa when he was elected to Parliament and glittered in the capital’s social scene during the first decade of the 20th century, becoming close to the Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his wife Zoe. While moving toward the political centre along with Ralph, Mary Ellen still advocated for women’s suffrage and higher wages for women workers, as well as for backward and destructive policies like Asian exclusion and eugenics. After Ralph’s death in 1917, she ran in the byelection to replace him in BC’s Legislative Assembly, where he had renewed his political life after a few years of post-Ottawa business ventures. Her victory, as previously noted, made history, as did her brief stint as a provincial cabinet member.
As Strong-Boag observes, “In both rejecting and reinforcing injustices, this flawed but extraordinary woman deserves far more than canonization or condemnation.” Strong-Boag, an award-winning historian associated with the Social Justice Institute and the Department of Educational Studies at UBC, and the departments of History and Gender Studies at UVic, sets out in this book to provide her readers with enough context and detail to make our own assessments of Smith’s mixed legacy. She brings to this task impressive strengths, both as a researcher and as a literary portrait painter. Her account of Mary Ellen’s and Ralph Smith’s personalities, and the political milieus in which they lived, reveals a sense of nuance and character worthy of a novelist.
We read history to see where we’ve been and to plot our course into the future. This thoughtful and informative study offers substantial help on both counts. It will be of interest to contemporary feminists and union organizers, to general readers and to fans of BC history. Highly recommended. 9780774867252
Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
With her doctorate in history from University of Toronto, Strong-Boag arrived at SFU in 1980. Her other books include New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939, which received the Canadian History Association's John A. Macdonald Prize for best history book of 1988. With Carole Gerson, she co-wrote two E. Pauline Johnson studies, Paddling Her Own Canoe in 2000 and E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose in 2002.
John Campbell Gordon was Canada's seventh Governor-General, from 1893 to 1898. Originally from Scotland, he and his wife Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon, collectively known as 'the Aberdeens,' were known for their passion for social reform. Strong-Boag's Liberal Hearts and Coronets (University of Toronto Press, 2015) explores the compelling story of the progressive Aberdeens and their contributions to Canada. It is also "the first biography to treat John Campbell Gordon as seriously as his better-known wife."
The couple's first visit to the country was part of a world tour undertaken in 1890. They immediately felt an affinity with Canada and in 1891 bought Coldstream Ranch in BC's Okanagan valley. (The purchase was reportedly touted in local newspapers as "the best advertisement the Okanagan country has ever had.") In 1893 John was appointed Canada's Governor-General and the Aberdeens settled in at Ottawa's Rideau Hall. The couple was dedicated to worker's rights, women's rights and home health care. Ishbel helped found and was elected president of Canada's first National Council of Woman and the Victorian Order of Nurses. John travelled extensively through Canada, driven to meet and speak with the everyday Canadian. Through their beliefs and actions, the Aberdeens transformed the perception of Canada's Governor General. Previously viewed as an upper-crust representative of the monarchy, the position was now seen as one that listened to and spoke of Canadian citizens' concerns.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)
Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada
Working Lives: Vancouver, 1886-1986
Liberal Hearts and Coronets: The Lives and Times of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens
BOOKS:
In Times Like These (Social History of Canada Series) by Veronica Strong-Boag, Nellie L. McClung (1972)
Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita C. Fellman (Copp-Clark Pitman, 1986)
The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939, by Veronica Jane Strong-Boag (Penguin, 1988)
"Janey Canuck": Women in Canada, 1919-1939, by Veronica Jane Strong-Boag (Canadian Historical Association, 1994)
Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada, edited by Veronica Strong-Boag et al (1998)
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), by Veronica Strong-Boag, Carole Gerson (UTP, 2000)
E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose,
by Carole Gerson (Introduction), et al (2002)
Nellie McClung, The Complete Autobiography: Clearing in the West and The Stream Runs Fast (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003) (Editor)
Children's Health Issues in Historical Perspective (Wilfred Laurier University, 2005) (Editor with Cheryl Krasnick Warsh).
Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the 19th Century to the 1990s (Oxford, 2006).
Liberal Hearts And Coronets: The Lives And Times Of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens (University of Toronto Press, 2015) $32.95 9781442626027
The Last Suffragist Standing: the Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson (UBC Press 2018) $89.95 978-0-7748-3868-9
A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press, 2022) $32.95 9780774867252
[BCBW 2023] "Anthropology" "Women" "Pauline Johnson"
***
The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press $89.95)
Review by Patricia E. Roy
From a variety of sources —including interviews with descendants and records left by contemporaries—Veronica Strong-Boag has uncovered many details, and has set them firmly in the context of the times, for The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson.
After growing up on a poor Ontario farm, Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882-1964) briefly taught in the Crow’s Nest Pass, graduated at the University of Toronto, worked for the YWCA in Stratford, Ontario, married lawyer John Stewart Jamieson, a member of the Liberal Party, and moved to Burnaby.
The focus of this book is on Jamieson’s work for reforms, especially those affecting women, and her election to the provincial legislature to become, according to her biographer, the last Canadian suffragist to serve in a legislature.
Her education, her active role in Vancouver’s University Women’s Club, and her husband’s position put Jamieson into the middle class, but she was uneasy with that status. She criticized the “patronizing” attitude of some middle class women to the impoverished, their non-recognition of the rights of domestic servants, and the failure of suffragists such as Nellie McClung to seek other reforms, such as minimum wage laws, to improve women’s lives.
Similarly, in the mid-1940s when women were still cautious about participating in public life, Jamieson complained of their “strong inferiority complex” and hesitation about taking on tasks of citizenship that would have the public see them “as ordinary people first and as citizens, before it thinks of them specifically as women.”
Jamieson practised what she preached. She saw education and internationalism as the keys to solving “global problems” and achieving “a fair deal for women.” As the mother of young children, her involvement in the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) seems natural, but Strong-Boag suggests that Jamieson wanted to use the PTA to “promote internationalism.” Active in the feminist and pacifist Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), she sought to ally the League with other progressive bodies. Yet, she was realistic.
When the international situation deteriorated in the late 1930s, Hitler changed Jamieson’s belief in pacifism. She called for trade embargos on belligerents.
Given her husband’s part-time position as a juvenile court judge in Burnaby, a position to which she succeeded after his death, Jamieson became known as an expert on child welfare. She called for sex education, even for young children, and for the establishment of nursery schools and of community centres where older children could enjoy recreational and cultural activities.
In 1938, she resigned her judgeship to resolve, through politics, what she considered the root cause of juvenile delinquency, the lack of “food and clothing,” an argument she was still making in 1953.
***
Although she could not vote for them in 1916, Jamieson favoured the provincial Liberals because they supported women’s suffrage. Despite their introduction of such reforms as Mothers’ Pensions, Jamieson thought the Liberals abandoned their progressive sympathies after granting the franchise, so she looked elsewhere. Attracted by the ideas of socialists about public ownership of utilities and equal pay for equal work, in 1920 she announced that she had joined the Federated Labour Party.
By supporting socialism and internationalism in the 1920s, Jamieson put herself “on the periphery of women’s political activity.” Yet, when she ran as a CCF candidate for a provincial seat in a 1939 Vancouver by-election, some Liberal and Conservative women helped her successful campaign.
Strong-Boag suggests that moving away from “mainstream clubwomen” may have contributed to Jamieson’s defeat in the 1945 provincial election. That may be so, but in 1941 the Liberals and the Conservatives split the non-left vote; in 1945, Coalition candidates secured both Liberal and Conservative votes.
Jamieson was not long out of electoral politics. Elected as a Vancouver alderman, she argued for progressive reforms, particularly low-rent housing, but could not persuade city council to adopt this idea. In 1952, she re-entered provincial politics after the Coalition disintegrated, but lost in 1953 by a narrow margin to a candidate of the new Social Credit government.
A feminist champion of social democracy, Jamieson had been deeply involved with the CCF from its beginnings even though, as Strong-Boag notes, many party members assumed that men had the right to lead the party with women serving only in an auxiliary role. It is telling that one of Jamieson’s last public appearances was at the founding convention of the New Democratic Party in 1961 where she presided over a meeting of 300 women.
In relating Jamieson’s story, Strong-Boag presents fresh material on the well-known divisions within the CCF, especially between democratic socialists or social democrats like Jamieson and doctrinaire Marxists, notably Dorothy Steeves, at times, the only other female member of the CCF caucus.
***
Outside the legislature, Jamieson combined her belief in the importance of educating people, especially women, about current events, and the need to supplement her income. When her husband died of blood poisoning, he left only a modest estate and two school-aged children. Jamieson created study groups from whose members she collected a fee.
She also applied her belief in the value of co-operative housing by taking in boarders, a precedent for the communal residences for employed women she set up in Vancouver. Her favouring of co-operatives was sincere; she urged CCF members to patronize co-operative ventures such as grocery stores.
***
Strong-Boag rightly concludes that Jamieson was more concerned about injustice based on class and gender than on race. Jamieson did favour an easing of restrictions on immigration from China and India to permit family reunification but was cautious in speaking about the Japanese. Yet, during the war she endorsed the Vancouver Consultative Council’s demand for justice for Japanese Canadians while favouring their dispersal across Canada.
Strong-Boag recognizes Jamieson’s imperfections especially in respect to Indigenous peoples. In British Columbia, Jamieson appears to have had little interest in its Indigenous residents, but in what was likely a draft for a speech relatively late in her career, Jamieson wrote approvingly of efforts to integrate Indigenous children into the public schools of Oliver.
The Last Suffragist Standing is lively and informative; the descriptions and analyses of the times make a valuable contribution to the wider historiography of women’s political activities in Canada and to British Columbia politics in general.
Laura Marshall Jamieson would undoubtedly be pleased with this study of her life and times. 9780774838689
Patricia E. Roy is professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria. She is best known for her trilogy of books, A White Man’s Province (1989); The Oriental Question (2003), and The Triumph of Citizenship (2007).
***
A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith by Veronica Strong-Boag (UBC Press $32.95)
Review by Tom Sandborn (2023 BW)
“I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” —Eugene V. Debs, US labour leader and socialist agitator
While Mary Ellen Spear Smith was a rough contemporary of Eugene Debs, an American firebrand whose life engaged many of the issues that defined Smith’s life and career, she would not, we can assume, have unequivocally endorsed the sentiment of the quote above. Much of Smith’s life was spent on a concerted effort to rise from the working class to middle-class gentility. And yet this complicated and imperfect woman also emerges in Veronica Strong-Boag’s biography A Liberal-Labour Lady as an important pioneering advocate for women and workers, so long as they were “white.”
Like most of us, Smith “contained multitudes,” and she was perfectly capable all her life of holding positions that to 21st century readers will seem wildly inconsistent, some even repulsively racist. Together with too much of the province’s labour movement in her era, Smith supported Asian exclusion and ignored the oppressed and colonized situation of the province’s Indigenous people.
However, Smith was a significant figure in Canadian history, campaigning for women’s suffrage, mothers’ pensions and other pro-women reforms while becoming BC’s first female MLA, and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister (albeit without portfolio, staff or stipend).
One of this remarkable biography’s chief virtues is that it resists the temptation to flatten the contradictions in Smith’s life or to explain them away. What emerges is a magisterial study of an important and too-long ignored figure in BC history, a masterclass in how to account for our bewildering past and present.
As a child of a miner and then a miner’s wife, Smith saw first-hand the destructive impact of 19th-century capitalism on the workers who were her neighbours and family members in the hard-scrabble coal towns of northern England and then in the lethal BC coalfields around Nanaimo after she and her husband, Ralph Smith, moved to Canada in 1892. In the north of England, the young couple had already become involved in Methodist church life and the populist, co-operative projects and politics often associated with dissenting churches in 19th-century Britain. Never advocates for armed rebellion, or of militant class-conscious struggle, the Smiths saw the cross-class cooperation promoted by the Liberal-Labour tradition as the way forward for workers, and they both brought their enthusiasm for that tradition with them to Canada. Unsurprisingly, their lack of militance cost the Smiths some of the support they might have hoped for from unionized workers, but it won them support in their respective political careers from middle-class reformers.
In Canada, Ralph became involved in his union and in electoral politics, while Mary Ellen, busy raising five children, continued her lifelong pattern of hard work as a volunteer, serving in her church, the YWCA and many other women’s reform–oriented groups. She accompanied Ralph to Ottawa when he was elected to Parliament and glittered in the capital’s social scene during the first decade of the 20th century, becoming close to the Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his wife Zoe. While moving toward the political centre along with Ralph, Mary Ellen still advocated for women’s suffrage and higher wages for women workers, as well as for backward and destructive policies like Asian exclusion and eugenics. After Ralph’s death in 1917, she ran in the byelection to replace him in BC’s Legislative Assembly, where he had renewed his political life after a few years of post-Ottawa business ventures. Her victory, as previously noted, made history, as did her brief stint as a provincial cabinet member.
As Strong-Boag observes, “In both rejecting and reinforcing injustices, this flawed but extraordinary woman deserves far more than canonization or condemnation.” Strong-Boag, an award-winning historian associated with the Social Justice Institute and the Department of Educational Studies at UBC, and the departments of History and Gender Studies at UVic, sets out in this book to provide her readers with enough context and detail to make our own assessments of Smith’s mixed legacy. She brings to this task impressive strengths, both as a researcher and as a literary portrait painter. Her account of Mary Ellen’s and Ralph Smith’s personalities, and the political milieus in which they lived, reveals a sense of nuance and character worthy of a novelist.
We read history to see where we’ve been and to plot our course into the future. This thoughtful and informative study offers substantial help on both counts. It will be of interest to contemporary feminists and union organizers, to general readers and to fans of BC history. Highly recommended. 9780774867252
Tom Sandborn lives and writes on unceded Indigenous territory in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (UTP $24.95)
Info
Novelist Ethel Wilson never forgot her meeting with Pauline Johnson, acknowledging she "pursued a path of her own making, and did this with integrity until the last day of her life."; Johnson advocated outdoor exercise for women and stressed the legal importance of being born in Canada and forging a separate Canadian identity. She remained financially independent, unmarried and dedicated to her artistry on stage and in print.
Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (UTP $24.95) by Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson discusses the poet, feminist, nationalist and Indian advocate against the cultural backdrop of Canada at the turn of the 19th century. After Johnson moved to Vancouver in 1909, the Pacific Coast Women's Press Club welcomed her and proclaimed, "It is very true that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, but is it not also true that the hand which wields the pen directs the world.";
Before Johnson died of breast cancer at the age of 51, she specified she wanted only to be remembered in the hearts and minds of her readers. A monument was nonetheless erected in Stanley Park at Third Beach. 0-8020-8024-3
[BCBW SUMMER 2001]
British Columbia Reconsidered: Essays on Women
Review
Women's studies courses in B.C. commenced at SFU in the mid 197Os around when Press Gang formed its feminist printing and publishing collective. That period also gave rise to Kinesis magazine and Status of Women associations in Vancouver, Victoria and the West Kootenays. In the 1980s conferences at Camosun College sparked two collections of essays from the college, In Her Own Right (1980) and Not Just Pin Money (1984), edited by Barbara Latham in partnership with Cathy Kess and Roberta Pazdro respectively. The bilingual Women and Words conference occurred at UBC in 1983. UBC has subsequently established its Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations with former SFU teacher Veronica Strong-Boag as its director. "Academe remains a chilly place for women," says Strong-Boag. "Too often feminist scholarship continues to be accorded little value in comparison to traditional malestream research."
EDITORS GILLlAN CREESE AND VERONICA Strong-Boag were respectful of divergent styles and approaches germane to their field when they gathered 23 selections for British Columbia Reconsidered: Essays on Women (press Gang 21.95), a wide-ranging anthology of B.C. feminist scholarship. Consequently their volume includes essays on Carrier women and mothering, female immigrants, Chinese Canadians, Sechelt women participating in self-government, women in the labour movement prior to WW II and a brief memoir by Okanagan native Jeannette Armstrong. "The feminist movement, so long dominated by white middle-class women," they write, "is being challenged by working-class activists and women of colour."; "...Many women of colour, for example, have criticized the way the family has been seen as a central site of women's oppression' reminding us that for many women living in environments in which racism is pervasive, the family has been a source of support and sanctuary." Also stretching dry, academic boundaries is a frequently passionate critique of women and violence, 'Still Kissing the Rod', by Helga Jacobon and Naida Hyde. If violence against women is endemic in Canadian society, they ask, "why are all forms of violence against women by men generally referred to as 'women's issues' and not 'men's issues'?"
B.C. foremothers such as Dorothy Steeves, Grace MacInnis, Mary Moody and Lottie Bowron are recalled. Plus Daphne Marlatt examines recent feminist writing on the west coast in Subverting the Heroic'. Prior to discussing writing by Anne Cameron, Helen Potrebenko, Betsy Warland, Audrey Thomas, Paulette Jiles and Sky Lee, Marlatt notes that the stereotypical hero in much literature and, for that matter, all Nintendo games and most Hollywood movies is "bent on rescuing innocent women (damsels in distress) or defeating experienced women (witches, monsters, evil seductresses), all to achieve his destiny. "Her role is only secondary; she is either the reward for the successful completion of his quest or the threat he overcomes. Not much of a role in either case." Sylvia Van Kirk opens the volume with a rare view of women in the Cariboo Gold Rush. "In comparison with other gold rushes, the scarcity of references to white prostitution seems curious, but it is possible that the availability of Native and even Chinese prostitutes discouraged the organization of white prostitution on any appreciable scale."; Melody Hessing explores office conversations; Sheila Baxter studies women and poverty; and one of two male contributors, Michael Cramer, documents the women's suffrage campaign in Victoria from 1871 to 1917. Conventional essays include Lynda Erickson's 'Political Women in a Partisan World'; Strong-Boag and Kathryn McPherson's 'The Confinement of Women: Childbirth and Hospitalization in Vancouver, 1919-1939; Creese's 'The Politics of Dependence' and Barbara Riley's 'Six Saucepans to One: Domestic Science vs. the Home in British Columbia, l900-1930'. Three major streams of contemporary feminism are identified:
* Liberal feminism advocates women's fuller integration into the system of rewards without changing the structures of Canadian society.
* Radical feminism seeks fundamental changes in the nature of family forms and sexuality.
* Socialist feminism advocates fundamental transformations in economic and family structures."
British Columbia Reconsidered also includes Theresa Healy's extensive bibliography of books and articles pertaining to B.C. women, which increases the likelihood that this anthology will be adopted as a text for women's studies programs. Women in 1991 constituted approximately 18 percent of all tenured or tenure track faculty at the universities of Victoria, British Columbia and Simon Fraser. Veronica Strong-Boag's previous books include New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 19191939, which received the Canadian History Association's John A. Macdonald Prize for best history book of 1988. Creese, a UBC sociologist, has co-authored Ups and Downs on the Ladder of Success: Social Mobility in Canada.
0-88974-038-0
SIDEBAR:
#1. Adam bites an apple. Everybody blames Eve,
#2. A hurdy-gurdy girl in 1868 is ironing in the back of Barkerville's Fashion Saloon. A miner accosts her. She tries to escape. They knock over a stovepipe and the town of Barkerville is reduced to ashes in less than two hours, "The hurdies never quite regained their former popularity," observes Sylvia Van Kirk in British Columbia Reconsidered: Essays on Women.
#3. In the 1990s a three-year-old girl in B.C, is sexually interfered with by an adult male, The man is found guilty and sentenced to 18 months on probation. The male judge partially blames the three-year-old, saying the girl was considered to be sexually aggressive.
"What words does a child have to describe the unthinkable, the terror filled, horror-filled experience that (sic) her father whom she loves comes in the night and chokes off her breath with his huge weight and nearly drowns her in semen, and tears her vagina and anus with his penis, the instrument of her destruction?" observe Helga Jacobson and Naida Hyde in British Columbia Reconsidered.
[BCBW, Autumn, 1992] "Women"
