Framing Our Past: Canadian Women's History in the Twentieth Century

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This handsome volume on fine paper with many small black-and-white
photographs attests to the major part played by Canadian women over the
last century in areas ranging from education and health to politics and
economics.

Written for a broad audience, Framing Our Past portrays the daily
activities of women, drawing on social life, sports clubs, reading
groups, philanthropic and aesthetic activities, social work, consumer
activism, peace movements, royal commissions, broadcasting, and banking.
The collection of 85 essays by individual contributors covers an
enormous and impressive span.

The importance of an individual life is illustrated by Pepita
Ferrari’s essay on Montreal painter Prudence Heward. Ferrari was so
moved by Heward’s painting Au Théвtre that she was inspired to
research and direct a film, By a Woman’s Hands on the work (and lives)
of Heward and two fellow painters, Anne Savage and Sarah Robertson.

Editors Sharon Anne Cook and Lorna McLean are professors in the
University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. Kate O’Rourke is an
archivist with Special Collections, Archives of Ontario. Working from a
rich body of historical sources, the editors draw on diaries, oral
history, letters, paintings, quilts, milliners’ records, posters, and
other materials. Framing Our Past affords an important record of
women’s lives and achievements in a century that witnessed tremendous
changes in social structures and sexual roles.