Nellie McClung
Charlotte Gray
Language: English
Pages: 103
ISBN: 2:00212935
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Feminist, politician, and social activist, Nellie McClung altered Canada's political landscape, leaving a legacy that has long survived her. She had a wicked wit, and her convictions and campaigns helped shape the Canada we live in today. Acclaimed writer Charlotte Gray, who has forged a distinguished career exploring the lives of such notable women as Susanna Moodie and Pauline Johnson, is the perfect writer to reinterpret McClung.
hope of getting a fair share of her husband’s estate or reasonable child support. If her husband decided he wanted to keep the children with him, she had no legal right to contest him. Today, the reality of life for women with no legal protections is beyond our frame of reference—until, perhaps, we see contemporary pictures of heavily veiled women in the repressive regimes of Iran or Afghanistan. In Manitou, Nellie frequently saw the utter helplessness of women. Dejected wives and downtrodden
expanded this “maternal feminist” argument. In the essay “What Do Women Think of War? (Not that It Matters),” she stated baldly, “Women are naturally the guardians of the race.” Women wanted peace. However, women themselves must show some initiative, especially now that political influence was within their grasp. The author had no time for women who hid behind their husband’s name or conventional wisdom, wallowed in “cow-like contentment,” and didn’t think for themselves. In the astringent essay
Germany. There was nothing Nellie liked better than getting out of the city, visiting towns that reminded her of Manitou, and meeting hard-working people (many of Ukrainian, Russian, or Chinese origin) with the simple rural values she cherished. She appears to have treated everybody with the same unpretentious warmth, regardless of race, creed, or their state of dress. When a shabbily dressed, elderly Cree man told a carload of Red Cross volunteers that his son was fighting in France, they
west along a bone-bruising, rutted trail from Winnipeg. In September 1880 they arrived at the rough, unchinked log cabin, with one window and a thatched roof, that Will had built on the homestead he had staked out near the Souris River. Eight kilometres from the new town of Millford, Nellie’s new home was set on shimmering meadows flowing around clumps of poplars. As soon as the Mooneys had unpacked an iron stove from their wagon, Letitia rolled up her sleeves and started baking bread. During
remained unmarried, or supplement the family income if the man she married hit hard times. Sweet-natured Hannah had already chosen this career, and spent six months at the teachers’ college, then known as “normal school,” in Winnipeg. In July 1889, Nellie Mooney learned that she too had passed the normal school admission exams. The five months she spent at “the normal” were, she always said, “pure delight” as she plunged into subjects like psychology, the history of education, and school