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PUBLICATIONS
MANITOBA
BORDERS:
WOMEN WRITING OVER THE LINE
A historical overview of ten Manitoba Women
Writers
By Shelley Sweeney, University
Archivist and
Jan Horner, Coordinator of Collections Management of the Archives & Special
Collections, University of Manitoba Libraries, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Produced by the Manitoba
Women’s Directorate in Recognition of Women’s History Month October 2000
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Pioneers: Francis Marion Beynon, E.
Cora Hind, Nellie McClung
The Literay
Founders: Dorothy
Livesay, Vera Lysenko, Martha Ostenso, Gabrielle Roy, Laura Goodman Salverson
The Third Wave: Margaret Laurence and
Adele Wiseman
Conclusion
Personal
Biographies of the Writers
Writers' Bibliographies
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Each year, Women’s History Month is celebrated
across Canada as a way of publicly recognizing the achievements of women as a vital part
of our Canadian heritage. It is also a means of encouraging greater awareness among
Canadians concerning the historical contributions of women to our society.
For 2000, the Manitoba Women’s Directorate
focused on the many talented Manitoba women who write. This initiative, IN THEIR OWN
WORDS: A CELEBRATION OF MANITOBA WRITERS recognized the achievements and contributions of
Manitoba women writers to our province from a historic, economic and cultural perspective.
It also encouraged people to appreciate their work for the combination of imagination,
knowledge and skillful use of words.
The Directorate worked with three partners
– Doreen Millin, of the Arts Branch, Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism; Shelley
Sweeney and Jan Horner of the University of Manitoba Libraries , Archives and Special
Collections; and Kathleen Darby and Robin Maharaj of the Winnipeg International Writers
Festival.
The initiative included the commissioning of an
essay, Manitoba Borders: Women Writing Over the Line, authored by Shelley Sweeney
and Jan Horner. The essay, a historical overview of ten Manitoba women writers, was
presented at an Opening Reception in October, 2000 at the Manitoba Legislative Building,
along with readings from four contemporary women authors, as part of the Opening Event of
the Writers Festival. Shelley and Jan also produced a historical display, featuring
personal artificacts of the ten women. The display was open for public viewing in the
Legislative Building, for the month of October, 2000.
Shelley Sweeney is the head of Archives and Special
Collections at the University of Manitoba. Her department’s collections include a
manuscript research collection emphasizing western Canadian prairie literature and
agriculture. She is currently near completion of a Doctorate in Archival Studies with the
university of Texas (Austin).
Jan Horner is the Coordinator of Collections
Management at the University of Manitoba Libraries. She has an M.A. in English Literature.
In addition, she has published three volumes of poetry and is a past winner of the McNally
- Robinson Book of the Year Award.
The Directorate acknowledges the valuable
contributions of these individuals and organizations who helped to make this initiative a
success. Thank you to everyone!
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Introduction
Manitoba has a long tradition of
women writing in Manitoba of which it can be justly proud. But these women have had to
struggle against social conventions in their careers, the themes of their writing, their
politics, and their sexuality. They crossed both geographic and symbolic borders to write
over the line. Ten authors have been selected from Manitoba’s history to represent
these women writers. The selection includes journalists, novelists, poets, editors, and
playwrights. They reflect in their origins many of the ethnic groups in Manitoba such as
the Franco-Manitoban, Scots-Irish, Jewish, Icelandic, and Ukrainian communities. We have
grouped them into three generations: the Pioneers, the Literary Founders, and the Third
Wave.
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The
Pioneers:
Francis Marion Beynon, E. Cora Hind, Nellie McClung
Born around the time of the
creation of the province of Manitoba, it is not surprising that these three women, Francis
Marion Beynon, E. Cora Hind, and Nellie McClung, were pioneers in every sense of the word.
All three, as well as Beynon’s sister Lillian Beynon Thomas, were deeply involved in
the suffragette movement, pursuing the right to vote for women. They wrote a satirical
play about the Conservative Roblin government entitled "Women’s
Parliament." The play, or burlesque, was first performed at the Walker Theatre in
Winnipeg, and featured McClung as the Premier. The play raised both money and awareness
for the suffragettes and enabled them to campaign against the government. Although not
successful in defeating the Conservatives in the 1914 election, the Conservative
government fell the following year due to the Legislative Building scandal, and in 1916
the newly elected Liberal government granted full suffrage to women in Manitoba, the first
province in Canada to do so.
These authors broke new ground in
the labour market as well. They were employed in areas traditionally reserved for men.
Hind ran her own typewriting bureau and became an agricultural reporter and crop
predictor. Beynon taught briefly but soon moved to Winnipeg where she worked at
Eaton’s in the advertising department, one of the first women to be employed in that
field in the province. McClung was one of the first women to sit in a provincial
legislature, being elected to the Alberta government in 1921. In addition, McClung was the
first woman to be appointed to the board of governors of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation and the only woman to represent Canada at the League of Nations in 1938.
All were involved in unpopular
causes, with Beynon advocating pacifism during the First World War, and Hind and McClung
supporting temperance or the total abstinence from alcohol. Beynon ended up losing her
position at the Grain Grower’s Guide, and afterwards moved to New York,
returning to Canada only once before her death. McClung, the mother of five children, was
attacked for her involvement in public life. Photographers would hang about her house
during the day in the attempt to catch a picture of her children appearing dirty or
neglected. She had the dubious distinction of being burnt in effigy for her political
ideas.
Both Beynon and Hind wrote for
journals and newspapers, although Beynon did produce the autobiographical Aleta Day in
addition to her journalistic writing. Because so many people read and followed Hind’s
crop reports, they were used to establish the world price for wheat. McClung wrote fiction
that was extremely popular during her lifetime. Her first novel Sowing Seeds in Danny was
a great commercial success, running to 17 editions and selling 100,000 copies, thereby
netting the author $25,000, a considerable sum at the time it was published in 1908. In
the end, however, McClung is less honoured for the literary merit of her writing than what
she achieved by it politically or socially. Likewise, Beynon is more remembered for her
political and moral rhetoric.
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The Literary Founders:
Dorothy Livesay, Vera Lysenko, Martha Ostenso, Gabrielle Roy, Laura Goodman Salverson
This second generation of writers
reaped the benefits of the work that Beynon, Hind, and McClung had done in achieving
recognition for the power and legitimacy of women’s writing. In contrast, Livesay,
Lysenko, Ostenso, Roy, and Salverson established literary reputations based on the quality
and strength of their fictional and poetic writing. Between Livesay, Roy, and Salverson
alone, the three women won seven Governor General’s Awards. The group as a whole
received numerous prizes and honours. Winner of many literary distinctions in Canada and
abroad, among them the Prix Femina in Paris and the Literary Guild of America Award in New
York, Roy is considered one of Canada’s pre-eminent writers in the French language.
Ostenso won a prestigious American prize for her first novel Wild Geese.
Interestingly, similar to the
previous group of women writers, all applied their talents to non-fiction and journalistic
writing in addition to their literary creations. Livesay wrote about post-war conditions
for the Toronto Daily Star, Lysenko worked for the Globe and Mail and the Windsor
Star, and Roy wrote articles for a number of magazines in both France and Canada.
Four out of the five authors
pursued higher education, a sign of both more liberated times as well as their ambition.
They used education to further their goal in becoming self-sufficient in society and to
enrich their writing. Livesay, for instance, received two degrees and two diplomas over
her lifetime, earning a Bachelor of Arts, a Diplôme d'I tudes Superieures, a Master of
Education, and a Secondary Teacher’s Diploma.
Although all, except for Ostenso,
were forced to rely on traditional occupations such as teaching and social work to support
their writing, they wanted to change the society in which they lived. Journalism, an
unconventional occupation for women, allowed Livesay, Lysenko, and Roy to promote their
views on politics and social justice, although Lysenko’s life was changed
dramatically by her inadvertent brush with communism. Manipulated by the people, who
funded her sociological study of Ukrainian immigrants, Lysenko allowed her manuscript to
be altered so that it seemed to promote communist ideals. The resulting publication caused
her to be vilified by a large segment of the Ukrainian community that abhorred these
socialist ideas, and brought her under attack from many academics.
Moving and travel were two
important themes in this group’s work and both were often necessary for their
writing. Ostenso chose to leave Canada altogether in order to make a living from her
writing, while Livesay went to British Columbia, Lysenko to Ontario, and Roy to Québec.
Salverson herself lived a nomadic existence, moving around the Prairies as a child and
later as a woman married to a railway dispatcher. Additionally, Livesay travelled to
France and Africa, and Roy lived in France. Yet, all were deeply influenced by their
Prairie childhoods. Their experiences provided motivation, material, and language for
their writing. Roy, for example, employed her experiences growing up in St-Boniface and
teaching in rural Manitoba, for many of her novels. These years she described as "les
plus belles années de ma vie" or "the most beautiful years of my life." In
addition, the sacrifices and hardships of others that came to Canada as immigrants became
a focus in many of the author’s works. Being children of immigrants themselves,
Lysenko, Ostenso, and Salverson were sensitized to challenges their parents had to
overcome as new Canadians.
These second-generation authors
favoured strong heroines even in their works of romantic popular fiction. Wild Geese by
Ostenso, for instance, was ahead of its time in portraying the heroine’s longing for
sexual fulfilment. Judith, the central character, is described as resembling "some
fabled animal — a centauress, perhaps." The authors’ own lives provided a
model for their literature. Livesay’s bisexuality and Ostenso’s adulterous
relationship with her literary collaborator, Douglas Durkin, broke social taboos. In his
reminiscences, Professor David Arnason has stated that "Dorothy lived an intense and
passionate life."
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The Third Wave:
Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman
The Third Wave, Margaret Laurence
and Adele Wiseman, both knew from an early age they wanted to be writers and both emerged
at a time of cultural nationalism and the great flowering of Canadian literature and
publishing. Although Wiseman did have other employment in the early stages of her career,
both women were more focused on their writing than previous generations.
Laurence and Wiseman shared an
extraordinary and long-lived friendship which is amply documented in their correspondence,
a selection of which was published in 1997 (Laurence and Wiseman, Selected Letters of
Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman). Both authors were born in Manitoba in the
Twenties and were educated through the University of Manitoba (Laurence through the
affiliated United College). Their coming of age was marked by the Great Depression and by
the Second World War. Laurence was profoundly affected by the death of boys from Neepawa
she had known and by the horror of the atomic bomb. Wiseman was especially affected by the
threat of the holocaust to her culture and her family. Both women had social democratic
sympathies. In fact they are said to have met at the Ukrainian Labour Temple in
Winnipeg’s North End where they were trying to get newspaper work (Laurence and
Wiseman, Selected Letters). Both authors won the Beta Sigma Phi Award for their
first novels. Eventually both received Governor General’s Awards among other honours.
Their early lives were strikingly
different. Laurence was scarred by the deaths of both of her parents before she was ten,
and by her forced move into the house of her dictatorial grandfather. Wiseman’s home
life was enriched and fed by biblical stories, folktales from the old country, her
mother’s doll making, and the accounts of Jewish persecution she heard from her
family. Margaret was immediately attracted to Adele’s large, argumentative, and warm
family so much so that the Wisemans became a second family to her and Adele a surrogate
sister.
Wiseman achieved early critical and
popular success in 1956 with her first novel The Sacrifice which also won the
Governor General’s award. It took Laurence a longer apprenticeship, marked by her
African books, before she achieved similar acclaim with The Stone Angel in 1964 and
then with the other novels in the Manawaka cycle. And Laurence indeed became the
best-known and most successful English-Canadian novelist of her generation.
Both women travelled far from
Manitoba, yet it can be argued that their most powerful writing lay in their Prairie story
telling. Both were proud to call themselves Prairie writers. Each was personally affected
by their childhood experiences, growing up in a small town for Laurence, growing up in the
Jewish community in Winnipeg for Wiseman. Their individual ethnic heritages had a profound
impact on their writing. Manawaka, the town featured in Laurence’s Prairie novels,
was "an amalgam of all prairie small towns infused with the spirit of their
Scots-Presbyterian founders." Wiseman’s Crackpot is recognisably set in
the North end of Winnipeg during the Depression, while The Sacrifice (1956) depicts
the hardships endured by Jewish immigrants such as Wiseman’s parents.
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Conclusion
Strength, conviction, passion,
independence — these words might be used to describe all of the Manitoba women
writers featured here. They were neither bound by geography nor ultimately restricted by
the circumstances of their lives. Their creativity has helped shape the ideas and myths
Manitobans have of themselves and of the place in which they live. They have helped change
our ideas of what women are and what they are capable of doing. Their writings tell us
today that Manitoba is big enough to encompass many stories, many differences, and many
cultures. They have passed on a rich legacy to contemporary writers; writers who have
testified to their admiration for these women and drawn inspiration from their example.
There is no question — these women wrote over lines of conformity, complacency, and
convention into our hearts, into our minds, and into our dreams.
- Jan Horner and Shelley Sweeney
Personal
Biographies of the Writers
Writers' Bibliographies
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RETURN TO
WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
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