Canadian Women in History: A Chronology

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This eight-by-eleven, spiral-bound softcover resembles a student’s
notebook. It proceeds chronologically from 1007, when a female Viking
was the first European woman to inhabit and colonize the New World.
(Native women are largely excluded from this chronology.) It ends in
2020, when Canadians 65 and over will constitute one-fifth of the
nation’s population. This fact’s relevance to women is not given.

The second organizing principle is topic. Examples include abortion,
author, constitution, day care, divorce, founding women, and Women’s
Studies. Code letters identify the topic of each chronologically
positioned note. The volume includes a list of sources, also codified.

Canadian Women in History is a reasonably well-organized compilation of
useful data that should serve statisticians, journalists, politicians,
and the general reader.