No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton a Feminist on the Right

Julia Creet is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa
Cruz.

Biographies are the heart of much Canadian women’s history, the stories of pioneering personalities that gave us a place from which to look for more. Patricia T. Rooke and R.L. Schnell’s biography of Charlotte Whitton is an exhaustive exposé of one of these pioneering personalities. As Canada’s first female mayor, Whitton ran Ottawa for over a decade and the Canadian Welfare Council from its beginnings in the 1920s through the next 20 years.

Rooke and Schnell’s portrait of Whitton is not completely flattering, as the title suggests. Whitton was hard-nosed, ambitious, racist, and a feminist — contradictions which have roots in sexual and imperial colonization. The authors do an admirable job of setting the historical stage for Whitton’s performance, but it is sometimes cluttered and confusing. In some areas, the dearth of Canadian women’s history allows them to make questionable conclusions, specifically that Charlotte Whitton and Margaret Grier’s lifelong relationship was what they quaintly call an “Ottawa marriage.”

This book provides tremendous source material for anyone doing work in twentieth-century Canadian women’s history or the history of immigration, but the accumulation of facts sometimes makes for laboured reading.