University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com LOOKING BACK: CANADIAN WOMEN S PRAIRIE MEMOIRS AND INTERSECTIONS OF CULTURE, HISTORY, AND IDENTITY by S. Leigh Matthews ISBN 978-1-55238-595-1 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at ucpress@ucalgary.ca Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: read and store this document free of charge; distribute it for personal use free of charge; print sections of the work for personal use; read or perform parts of the work in a context where no financial transactions take place. UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY NOT: gain financially from the work in any way; sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution of the work; use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception of academic usage within educational institutions such as schools and universities); reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its function as a cover of this work; alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/
S. Leigh Matthews Looking Back Canadian Women s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity
Looking Back
S. Leigh Matthews Looking Back Canadian Women s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity the West Series issn 1922-6519
2010 S. Leigh Matthews University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 www.uofcpress.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Matthews, S. Leigh (Sandra Leigh), 1967- Looking back : Canadian women s prairie memoirs and intersections of culture, history, and identity / S. Leigh Matthews. (The West series, ISSN 1922-6519 ; 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55238-096-3 Also issued in electronic format: ISBN 978-1-55238-595-1 ISBN 978-1-55238-509-8 ISBN 978-1-55238-597-5 1. Women pioneers Prairie Provinces Biography. 2. Women pioneers Prairie Provinces Social conditions. 3. Women pioneers in literature. I. Title. II. Series: West series (Calgary, Alta.) ; 1 FC3238.M38 2010 971.2 020922 C2010-904483-5 The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation. This book has been published with the aid of a grant from Thompson Rivers University. Cover image: Prairie Homsetead by Andrew Penner (www.istockphoto.com) Cover design by Melina Cusano Page design and typesetting by Melina Cusano
For Grandma Matthews and Nana West. [ [ [ Sadie Victoria Landry Matthews, Bankend, Saskatchewan, circa 1940. [
CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1: Introduction: Untilled Fields ix 1 2: Seemingly Trivial : Re-Visioning Historical Narratives of Western Settlement 33 3: Dauntless Optimism / Perverse Endurance : Re-Visioning Literary Narratives of Settler Women 121 4: The Precarious Perch of the Decent Woman : Re-Visioning the Space(s) of Western Settlement 207 5: The landscape behind it : Re-Visioning Some Other Subjects of Agriculture 6: Conclusions: The Ragged Garment of Memory Bibliography Index 297 383 391 411
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study has been a long journey, and could not have been completed without the aid and encouragement of many individuals and institutions over the last decade. I would like to thank the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Calgary Women s Writing Project for receipt of the Winnie Tomm Memorial Scholarship, as well as the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fund for Advanced Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose research fellowships originally enabled me, in the form of a doctoral dissertation, to explore the memoirs gathered here as a means to share the authors voices and experiences with a larger audience. The financial support noted above allowed me to work full-time on this project while living with my family in Kamloops, British Columbia, but the project itself would never have been conceived in the first place were it not for the supportive and inspirational atmosphere of the English Department at the University of Calgary. I would like to thank the Department for considerable financial contributions to my research and writing activities. Most especially, I am deeply indebted to Dr. Helen Buss, whose presence at the University of Calgary drew me to Alberta, and whose encouragement, advice, criticism, and patience illustrates her knowledge of the subject and her dedication to the project of advancing education. I would also like to acknowledge that I have previously published some of the materials that make up this study. Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Two have been published as (Nearly) Sacred Achievements: Culinary Place in Women s Prairie Memoirs, in a Special Issue of Essays on Canadian Writing titled Food, Cooking, and Eating in Canadian Literature, with Guest Editor Kathleen Batstone, 78 (2003): 16 41. Portions of Chapter One and Chapter Four have been published as The precarious perch of the decent woman : The Spatial (De)Construction of Gender in Canadian Women s
x Looking Back Prairie Memoirs, in History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies, edited by Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh (University of Manitoba Press, 2005), 141 74. I would like to thank everyone at University of Calgary Press for the attention to fine detail that occurs when assembling such a book, and especially to Donna Livingstone, whose persistence and vision has ultimately enabled these womens voices to be heard. Finally, to Dania Sheldon, whose careful and efficient gaze graced the manuscript in its final stages in order to create a comprehensive index.