Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2010 Looking back: Canadian women’s prairie memoirs and intersections of culture, history, and identity Matthews, S. Leigh University of Calgary Press Matthews, S. Leigh. "Looking back: Canadian women’s prairie memoirs and intersections of culture, history, and identity". Series: The West series; 1, University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/48921 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca 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. 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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 ix 1: Introduction: “Untilled Fields” 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 297 6: Conclusions: “The Ragged Garment of Memory” 383 Bibliography 391 Index 411 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study has been a long journey, and could not have been completed with- out 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 con- siderable 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, ad- vice, 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 ‘de- cent 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 atten- tion 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. [ 1 ] Introduction: “Untilled Fields” Funny, how the stories you read when you are young take such a hold on you. They are like friends that mold and often seem to be a part of your own life, as if you had helped live them. – Edna Jacques, Uphill All the Way (1977) For the woman artist is not privileged or mandated to find her self- in-world except by facing (affronting?) and mounting an enormous struggle with the cultural fictions – myths, narratives, iconograph- ies, languages – which heretofore have delimited the representation of women. And which are culturally and psychically saturating. – Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans” (1985) Their sharing is a gift of themselves, and a gift to themselves also; a restoration of themselves into our history. – Eliane Leslau Silverman, The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier, 1880–1930 (1984) 2 Looking Back Looking back now, I realize that the white, English-speaking image of the “Prairie Woman”1 existed as a fairly dominant force in my early life and im- agination. Indeed, I remember (still with a tremor of excitement) sitting down in front of the television in the fall of 1974 to watch the premiere of the series Little House on the Prairie, adapted from the autobiographical-inspired fiction by Laura Ingalls Wilder.