Telling Tales: Essays in Western Women's History

Patricia Whitney, former coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at
the University of Prince Edward Island, is the Bank of Montreal Visiting
Scholar in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Eleven learned essays, a thorough introduction, and erudite apparatus
make this book an outstanding contribution to feminist scholarship.
Cavanaugh and Warne summarize the main configurations of historians:
traditionalists, who present the history of the public sphere and who
have accepted male experience as normative; the particularity camp,
which holds that traditional history is “but one narrative among
many”; and postmodernists, who are “suspicious of the homogeneity
assumed in both the traditional ‘consensus’ model and the
‘particularity’ model.” The text includes both the particularity
camp, which addresses women’s history as a narrative subordinated by
the dominance of traditional history and the postmodernists, who write
gender history, which emphasizes multiple and shifting subject
positions. The editors acknowledge the range of the analytic category
“woman” in their selection, which embraces the diversity of
Mennonite domestic servants, black women on Vancouver Island, and
aboriginal women across the West.

Ann Leger-Anderson’s essay, “Marriage, Family, and the Cooperative
Ideal in Saskatchewan: The Telfords,” to chose one of many fine
articles in this volume, is a study of one couple, Gertrude and John
Telford, who marry in Ontario as intelligent and devote young Baptists
before setting out for the prairies and John’s first ministerial
charge. Their life together, as they attempt to integrate the principles
of Social Gospel ideology into their marriage, becomes as exemplum of
white, liberal Protestantism and its impact on one “representative”
woman. Followers of the Social Gospel, the great Tommy Douglas being
one, believed that their Christianity affirmed a high position for
women. The Telfords sought to embody cooperation in every aspect of
their lives: within the intimacy of their marriage, in their gender
relations (although they would never have used that term), and in their
commitment to the church and the CCF. Gertrude Telford’s life (she
faced isolation, the loss of beloved children, and thwarted ambitions as
a woman striving to occupy political space in the public sphere) was
nonetheless a triumph of principle and attainment of the cooperative,
socialist family ideal.

Telling Tales is an essential addition to the history of Canadian
women.