Great Dames

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

In writing of Thérиse Renaud and other women who signed the 1948
manifesto of the Quebec artists’ movement Refus global, Patricia Smart
talks of “the major dilemma of those who seek to tell women’s
stories: the resistance of much of what makes up the texture of a
woman’s life to taking on the shape of narrative.” Herein lies the
main interest of this collection of essays by women scholars who were
invited by the editors to write about ordinary Canadian women. The
project grew into an exploration of ways of life writing that might
challenge the traditional biography, usually a narrative of the success
of famous people.

Some of the contributors found it impossible to extract the story of
one woman from the web of relationships that made up the life (as is the
case in Sally Cole’s investigation into anthropological student Ruth
Landes’s work with Maggie Wilson, a Scots–Cree woman who told
stories of Ojibwa lives). Others, faced with a deficit of information
about one woman, found the truth of the life in a composite essay on a
group of women (as Carolyn Strange did in studying official documents
relating to women in prison at the turn of the century).

The collection reflects a wide range of approaches to writing a life,
from Marlene Epp’s scholarly and dry account of five Mennonite refugee
women, to Afua Cooper’s uninterrupted interview with the founders of
Sister Vision Press, to Aritha Van Herk’s fictional intrusion into the
story of Florence Lassandro, hanged in Saskatchewan in 1923.

Ironically, the only names likely to be fami-liar to the reader are
those of the two doctors

who worked at Toronto’s renowned Women’s College Hospital, which is
currently facing

extinction: Dr. Marion Hilliard’s name is also remembered for her
columns in Chatelaine

and Dr. Henrietta Ball Banting’s because of her famous husband,
Frederick Banting. For the

rest, the book celebrates women who made a difference but who, without
their sisters bearing witness, might never have had their story told.