Nellie McClung

When we look back, however, we find our worlds are different, if not in their structures then in the spirit of the age. The world into which Nellie McClung was born was fraught both with possibility and the confidence that human beings could grasp that possibility to build a new world. The Social Gospel of liberal Protestantism was infused with a passion for justice, the transformation of the social order through "building God's Kingdom on Earth". Like a whirlwind, Nellie McClung swept in and declared that the moral regeneration of social relations among men was insufficient; men's relations with women had to be set right. She spent her life working toward that end.

It is sometimes thought (for this is how mainstream history remembers her) that Nellie McClung did two things: fight for the vote, and participate in the Person's Case.

Seen in this light, we might rightly ask, so what? Participatory democracy, such as it is, has not proved an exceptionally effective tool in dismantling patriarchal structures. What is less well-known is the range of strategies McClung employed to undercut the patriarchal assumptions of her anti-feminist environment. McClung is sometimes criticized for being an "inconsistent theorist," as if, had she thought more systematically, our situation would be different today. McClung knew that rational argument is powerless against prejudice. She attacked her enemies with humour and her epigrams set the country roaring with laughter. We need to recall both the restorative and political power of a good joke.

McClung challenged assumptions indirectly as well as directly. Her novels and stories provided a context for her feminist imagination, and her anecdotal skill and knowledge of the common person made her a writer of international renown long before she was a figure in the political arena. She had wanted to be "the Dickens of Southwest Manitoba" and, not unlike that mentor, she became a social critic who used literature as a pulpit from which to preach a text of spiritual renewal and social transformation. Throughout her work run the themes of "the Land of the New Deal" and "the Second Chance." In McClung's Canada the frontiers were open and new structures, new societies, built on just foundations, seemed possible. Women's work would finally be taken seriously and their labour valued; their relationship to men could be voluntary, unbound by economic necessity. The ideas of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner echo through her texts.

This transformation would take hard work and McClung saw herself as a kind of "alarm clock" who would wake people up to do it. If humanity had a real sin McClung believed it was "slothfulness," a failure to demand for ourselves our rightful share and a reluctance to challenge the "hoggishness" of others. Although she read the theorists, she believed in people's good hearts. Trusting in human capacity to change, she thought that hard work and education would set the world aright.