Rebel Women
The women in these stories did the unthinkable for their time: they followed their own paths, flouting convention and daring to break from the traditions of family and marriage. They chose a life outside the norm, a decision for which most paid dearly. Nell Shipman was overlooked because she was not as acquiescent as required; she opened an indepen …
Letters from a Lady Rancher
A spirit of adventure, a great sense of fun, an observant eye, and enthusiasm for everything new--that's the kind of woman Monica Hopkins was, and that's what led her to leave the comforts of her English family home in 1909 to homestead on the prairies.
Hopkins was a young bride who had finally married her childhood sweetheart, an Irish lad who'd wa …
Roberta Bondar
"The feeling in space flight is like hanging by your heels...with all the blood rushing to your head. ...You feel as though you are at the top of a roller coaster when your stomach feels like it is going to lift off." - Dr. Roberta Bondar. This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: biography or space exploration. From t …
A War Bride's Story
Gwendoline Cramer was one of the 48,000 war brides transported to Canada by the Canadian government between 1942 and 1947. Many of them were escorted across the water and handed over to their husbands with nothing more than a handsake and a cookbook. Following her heart to rural Saskatchewan, Gwen felt like a fish out of water. She couldn't milk a …
Almost a Great Escape
Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Award, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, and the Alberta Readers' Choice Award
Following his mother's death in 2004, Tyler Trafford discovers an album of old letters and creased photographs that reveal a mother he never knew, a man he's never heard of, and a love affair doomed by class and circumstance. The let …
Imperial Plots
Sarah Carter’s "Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies" examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own.
Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the “spade-work” of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacin …
Found Treasures
The first of its kind, this anthology showcases women's writing previously available only in Yiddish. A book of voices from an almost forgotten female heritage, it features eighteen writers who speak powerfully of the events that shaped their lives; the d
When the Slave Esperança Garcia Wrote a Letter
In 1770, the slave Esperança Garcia bravely penned a letter to the governor of Piauí state, in Brazil, describing how she and her children were being mistreated and requesting permission to return to the farm where the rest of her family was living.
Before she wrote her letter, Esperança Garcia lived on a cotton farm run by Jesuit priests, where …
A Very Capable Life
Written in his mother’s unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman.Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression?even …
Give Your Other Vote to the Sister
"[Marshall's] work in responding to the challenge of exploring a little-known life should be an inspiration to other students of history … people across Canada will find it a pleasant way to become better acquainted with an attractive, interesting and unfamiliar contributor to our history." - Desmond Morton, McGill University
Give Your Other Vote …
My Name is Lola
This book contains the collected memories of Lola Rozsa - of her life and service to her family, her church, and her community as she and her husband, Ted, made their way from the tiny towns of the Depression-era, dust bowl southern plains to the burgeoning oil fields of Alberta in 1949. As Ted struggled to build his first seismic company, Lola rai …
An Unsettled Spirit
Under the name of G.B. Lancaster, Edith Lyttleton wrote over a dozen novels and some 250 short stories, mostly narratives of romance and adventure set in the remote back country of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. She was New Zealand’s most widely read author overseas in the first half of the twentieth century, reaching millions of readers. Wr …
The M Word
A CNQ Editors' Book of the Year
A Dropped Threads-style anthology, assembling original and inspiring works by some of Canada's best younger female writers — such as Heather Birrell, Saleema Nawaz, Susan Olding, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Carrie Snyder, and Alison Pick — The M Word asks everyday women and writers, some of whom are on the unconventi …
With All Her Might
Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in si …
Sanctuary
Winner, Design Edge Regional Design Award
Shortlisted, Atlantic Independent Booksellers' Choice Award
Authentic. Original. Inimitable. Mary Majka was one of Canada's great pioneering environmentalists. She was best known as a television host, a conservationist, and a driving force behind the internationally acclaimed Marys Point Western Hemispheric …
The Feminine Gaze
Many Canadian women fiction writers have become justifiably famous. But what about women who have written non-fiction?
When Anne Innis Dagg set out on a personal quest to make such non-fiction authors better known, she expected to find just a few dozen. To her delight, she unearthed 473 writers who have produced over 674 books.
These women describe …
Going by the Moon and the Stars
So, it was January the 18 and it was the middle of the night. And it was very, very cold. Snow was — we went just about knee deep in snow — And we went on the road going toward Posen, capital of Wartegau. And so we said, “Let’s take that direction.” Just going by the moon and the stars. (Katja Enns)
Going by the Moon and the Stars tells t …
Memoirs from Away
How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?
Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and …
Working in Women’s Archives
What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, straightforward accounts of the truth about someone or some event. But are they?
Working in Women’s Archives is a collection of essays that …
The Surprise of My Life
“It’s an autobiography! If I tell you what’s in it you won’t read the book.” — Claire Drainie Taylor
Or would you? Maybe you’d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little girl born to a middle-class Jewish Canadian couple in a small prairie town who, at age sixteen, married a refined Englishman, and surv …
Haven’t Any News
“Ruby wrote letters home almost every week....She wrote anything that came into her head: about her children and Fred, her housekeeping, food, clothes, her friends, activities, schemes for making money, her dreams for the future....Her letters, nave, intimate and lively, were always optimistic or poignant. We’d read them to each other on the ph …
Projection
2013 Governor General’s Literary Award — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction
2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust — Shortlisted, Non-Fiction
Projection is the story of this mother-daughter meeting in Brazil, of how two strangers, connected by little more than blood, spent ten days together trying to build a relationship.
In 1977, Priscila Uppal’s fathe …
A Canadian Girl in South Africa
As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Boer children living in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of fort …
The Queen of Peace Room
What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime?
Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the …
Pursuing Giraffe
In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study …
Weaving a Malawi Sunrise
“When you educate a girl, you educate a nation.” —Malawian saying
The women of Malawi, like many other women in developing countries, struggle to find their way out of poverty and build a better life for themselves and their families. Weaving a Malawi Sunrise tells the story of Memory Chazeza’s quest to get an education and to build a school …
The Grads Are Playing Tonight!
Between 1915 and 1940 the amazing Edmonton Grads dominated women's basketball in Canada. Coached by J. Percy Page, they played over 400 official games, losing only 20; they travelled more than 125,000 miles in Canada, the United States, and Europe; and they crossed the Atlantic three times to defend their world title at exhibition games held in con …
Motherlode
Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience is Carolyne Van Der Meer’s creative reinterpretation through short stories, poems, and essays of the experiences of her mother and other individuals who either spent their childhoods in Nazi-occupied Holland or were deeply affected by wartime in Holland. The book documents the author’s personal j …
No One To Tell
A stunning personal account of Janet Merlo's twenty years of service in the RCMP, with an introduction by Linden MacIntyre. In 2012, Janet Merlo was among the first female RCMP officers to publicly allege she had experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination while serving in Canada's national police force. The women kept silent for so lon …
Simone Weil
“The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced.” Simone Weil—the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer—was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of ess …
Not the Whole Story
Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and st …
Dead Woman Pickney
Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwe …
I Have My Mother's Eyes
This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother's Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother's dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her genteel upbringing in Warsaw through the shock of the b …
Pauline Boutal
In the first part of the twentieth century few women in western Canada had careers as artists—Pauline Boutal had three: 23 years as a fashion illustrator for the Eaton’s catalogue for the graphic design company, Brigden’s of Winnipeg, 27 years as the Artistic Director at the Cercle Molière Theatre and 70 years as a visual artist. Born in Bri …
Xwelíqwiya
Xwelíqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a Stó:lō matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. Proceeding by way of conversational vignettes, the beginning chapters recount Point Bolton's early years on the banks of the Fraser River during the Depression. While at the time the Stó:lō, or Xwélmexw, as they call themselves today, kept secret t …
A Woman of Valour
A Woman of Valour is the biography of Marie-Louise Bouchard Labelle, a French-Canadian woman who found love with a priest thirty-three years her senior. Against all social convention, they lived, produced three children, and built a life together after fleeing their village.However, after several years together, Bouchard’s husband ultimately chos …
A Great Restlessness
Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, the first Communist elected to Canadaís House of Commons, and the only woman elected in 1940. But despite her remarkable career, until now little has been known about her.From her youth in London during World War I to her burial in 1980 in a heroís cemetery in China, Nielsen lived th …
Gumboot Girls
Forty years ago, droves of young women migrated away from urban settings and settled in rural areas across North America. Many settled on the north coast of British Columbia, on Haida Gwaii or around Prince Rupert. Gumboot Girls tells the stories of thirty-four women, through their own eyes, as they moved from their comfortable city-dwelling surrou …
China Diary
Mary Austin was a mayor’s daughter who expected to live an uneventful life in Canada. But when she said “I do” to Jim Endicott she found that she had “married China.”
Thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but undeterred by the political turmoil around her in China, Mary Austin Endicott determined she would achieve the goals she set for …
Seven Eggs Today
Offers an intriguing glimpse into the daily life of an average Toronto woman in the mid-nineteenth century.
Mary Armstrong’s diaries are a window into the daily life of a middle-class woman in a new and changing land, and a revealing account of life in early Toronto just before and after confederation. Her journals are one of very few published b …
Working Memory
Working Memory: Women and Work in World War II speaks to the work women did during the war: the labour of survival, resistance, and collaboration, and the labour of recording, representing, and memorializing these wartime experiences. The contributors follow their subjects’ tracks and deepen our understanding of the experiences from the imprints …
The Gendered Screen
This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It al …
Recollections of Waterloo Lutheran University 1960-1973
To the very few women who were teaching in Ontario’s universities at the time of the great expansion in the 1960s, Flora Roy is a legendary figure. To many others, academic colleagues and former students, she has continued to be just that through all the years since....Flora Roy is unique among Canadian academics. She shepherded her department …
The Life Writings of Mary Baker McQuesten
How did a privileged Victorian matron, newly widowed and newly impoverished, manage to raise and educate her six young children and restore her family to social prominence?
Mary Baker McQuesten’s personal letters, 155 of which were carefully selected by Mary J. Anderson, tell the story. In her uninhibited style, in letters mostly to her children, …
Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought
Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought has intrigued readers from feminist-philosopher J.S. Mill (who used it in his The Subjection of Women) to the latest generation of women’s activists. Although selections from this long work have been published, Lynn McDonald is the first editor to work through the numerous surviving drafts of Night …
Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted
Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in post-war East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907–2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story.
Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and fa …
The Cougar Lady
Every town has its celebrities, but Sechelt’s own unique and larger-than-life personality is wholesome enough to satisfy all of North America’s appetite for eccentrics. Asta Bergliot Solberg, or “Bergie,” as her friends knew her, lived life on her own terms. She climbed wild mountain trails to hunt for goats, demanded car rides from unsuspe …
Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace
Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical de …
Be Good, Sweet Maid
January 21, 1995: Dorothy Joudrie is arrested for attempting to murder her estranged husband. Soon after, Audrey Andrews begins to write her book. Audrey and Dorothy had known each other as children, but the identification of Andrews with Joudrie goes beyond merely the accident of a childhood acquaintance. It has to do with being subjected to the s …
Love and War in London
Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.
Love and War in London: A Woman’s …