Rural Women's Leadership in Atlantic Canada: First-Hand Perspectives on Local Public Life and Participation in Electoral Politics.

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Canadian women’s participation in formal political life. Beginning with insight that fewer women find their way into electoral office in rural than in urban constituencies, political scientist Louise Carbert focuses her attention on Atlantic Canada, the nation’s least urbanized region and the one currently least likely to elect women to office. Her arguments are impressively grounded in the larger political science literature relating to electoral politics and draw on 14 focus group discussions conducted in 2000 with 126 women who were the mainstays of their rural communities.

In convincing and accessible prose, Carbert quashes many widely held assumptions about the political behaviour of both women and Atlantic Canadians. Women, she concludes, were diverted from the political arena not by domestic obligations, lack of funding, an alleged deeply rooted Atlantic Canadian conservatism, or even by gender bias, but by the structural contours of political life in their hard-pressed rural communities.

In seeking subjects for her focus groups, Carbert stumbled across an interconnected group of women, most of them well educated, employed outside the home, and active in voluntary associations. While they would make perfect candidates for political office, they were reluctant to enter the electoral arena because they were involved in one of the government-sponsored rural development programs that have proliferated across Canada in recent years. Moreover, since politics really matters in communities dependent on government assistance, there is a tendency to support proven male-dominated political networks and to avoid competitive practices that might threaten community consensus.

Given these realities, it is not surprising that the strongest theme to emerge from Carbert’s research is women’s disapproval of political life at the community level, where every political decision is subject to close scrutiny for evidence of bias and patronage. Carbert concludes that a more tightly regulated system, one that puts a greater distance between the decision-making process and the affected constituents, would make a political career more attractive for women, but how this “feminization” of political life might be accomplished is beyond the scope of this ground-breaking study.