Piecing the Quilt

by Barbara Pezalla Powell, Myrna Williams, University of Regina. Canadian Plains Research Center

1996 · University of Regina Press

This publication is a directory to sources of women's history in Saskatchewan which are available through the Saskatchewan Archives Board collections. Entries include collection name, collection location, finding aid number, list of files with dates and extents of women's material if available (or a description of relevant items), and an entry number to aid in cross-referencing. The sources include both written and oral history material (such as audio tapes). Includes personal name index.

Literature as Pulpit

by Randi R. Warne, Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion

1993 · Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Nellie L. McClung (1873-1951) was an internationally celebrated feminist and social activist whose success as a platform speaker was legendary. Her earliest notoriety was achieved as a writer, and during her lengthy career she authored four novels, two novellas, three collections of short stories, a two-volume autobiography and various collections of speeches, articles and wartime writing, to a total of sixteen volumes. All this served as a “pulpit” from which McClung could preach her gospel of feminist activism and social transformation. She was convinced that God’s intention for Creation was a “Fair Deal” for everyone; and that Canada, particularly the prairie West, was a perfect place to begin to bring that about. Woman suffrage, temperance and the ordination of women were keystones in the battle — engaged, in contrast to contemporary stereotypes, with a wit and compelling humour that won over enemies as it delighted her allies. Literature as Pulpit explores Nellie McClung’s vision of a “better world,” and the impediments to it, as expressed through her novels and her feminist “tract,” In Times Like These. It addresses the profoundly anti-feminist context within which McClung was forced to make her arguments, and notes her indebtedness to other feminist writers and thinkers of her day. Throughout, McClung’s religion of “active care” emerges as a consistent and harmonizing theme which integrates her feminism and social activism into a single empowering vision for social change.