Margaret McWilliams: An Interwar Feminist

Patricia Roome is Co-ordinator of History at Mount Royal College in
Calgary.

Kinnear’s biography of Margaret McWilliams examines her career and
shows that “hers was one of the faces of feminism during the interwar
years.” When McWilliams moved to Winnipeg in 1910, she was an
experienced journalist with a University of Toronto degree in political
economy. Although the University Women’s Club became her first home,
before her death in 1952 McWilliams had devoted her administrative
talents to many women’s organizations that in turn nurtured her
feminism. During the 1920s, while attending the International Federation
of University Women conferences as the Canadian Federation’s
President, she discovered an international community of women committed
to equality and feminist solidarity. Later, in the 1930s, McWilliams
served as a Winnipeg alderman until her husband became Manitoba’s
Lieutenant-Governor.

By 1945, when she chaired the Federal Subcommittee on Postwar Problems
of Women, her feminism was strong enough to permeate every aspect of
their published report. In contrast to her contemporary, Charlotte
Whitton, McWilliams believed that women had a right to work regardless
of their marital status. In rejecting the male model as her ideal, she
struggled to develop a concept of personhood that incorporated both
equality and difference. Kinnear concludes that McWilliams’s
“acknowledgement of the dual nature of women’s service was a
reconciliation of the major hallmarks of interwar feminism: concern for
women as wives and mothers and simultaneously, concern for them as
mothers and citizens.” But in common with other Canadian interwar
feminists, McWilliams failed to “fully integrate demands of
reproduction into her views of society.”

This excellent study belongs to a recent wave of Canadian biographies
that see women as historical subjects who created their own lives and
made history. The historian’s task, for Kinnear, is to “throw a
lifeline to women who could not write of their own lives.” In rescuing
McWilliams from obscurity, Kinnear advances our understanding of
interwar feminism, women’s activism, Margaret McWilliams, and the
genre of women’s biography. Further, Kinnear presents a welcome
historiographic challenge to the traditional wisdom, which sees feminism
as dead after 1920 and bourgeois women inevitably pursuing their class
interest over their feminist goals. McWilliams’s life reveals the
contradictions of a woman who grew more radical with age, encouraged a
feminist revolution by her activism, and yet received recognition from a
society that ignored women’s voices.