more persistent thumbsuckers than boys. fusing. Since her argumentation is based on a Perhaps mothers intuitively sense a girl's af• life-span anaysis, deletion of discussion of finity for oral comforting. This may provide a menopause and old age seem to be major gaps. partial explanation for the discomfort Caplan Yet female-female relationships are believed to states that mothers feel over feeding daughters. be critical for the aging population. Caplan's brief comments on aging are extremely super• It appears that the author is an exponent of ficial. Also, different styles of mother-daughter critical period theorization and the irreversi• interaction are only acknowledged in the sec• bility of effects of early behavior. Even though tion on adulthood. Caplan states in her preface this sounds very negative, the author does see that her observations do not apply to all light in the dungeon. However, we are more women. Nevertheless it is easy to lose sight of than damsels in distress and her suggestions for this comment in the body of the book where improvement are based on changing stereo• there is little discussion of individual dif• typic ways of reacting, primarily through in• ferences or multiplicity of patterns. creased communication amongst women. At an intuitive and clinical level Caplan's This conflict over nurturance continues propositions ring true. For instance, the throughout childhood, adolescence and adult• "Queen Bee" has suffered greatly in the hood. The subsequent diffculties between literature, but is treated rather sympathetically women wrought by the mother-daughter by Caplan who realizes that the "Queen Bee" relationship are fears of homosexuality, con• is also caught and dissatisfied. This volume is a cern of women about social disapproval by treasure-trove of untested hypotheses waiting other women who are the guardians for society for those engaged in research on women. I and general alienation of women from their have already encouraged many of my friends own needs. Caplan sees the adult woman (male and female) to read the book. moving into working relationships and friend• ships with other women, and as she goes on to M. Kaye Kerr have daughters of her own, she carries with her University of Winnipeg the often still unmet needs, fears and hopes REFERENCES that informed her developing relationship with her mother. Hittelman, J.H. & Dickes, R. Sex differences in neonatal eye contact time. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 1979, 25, 171-184. The third section of the book deals with Korner, A. The effect of the infant's sex on the caregiver. In H. women's personal relationships and women in Bee (Ed.), Social Issues in Developmental Psychology. Harper society. In this section Caplan discusses the and Row, 1978. bind women are in. Women find themselves divided against themselves in every kind of My Mother the Judge. Elsie Gregory Mac- work. Gill. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1981. Pp. 248. The book is delightful to read as the author mo/es from personal observations, to attribu• Originally published in 1955, My Mother the tion, Freudian and social-cognitive theories, Judge, a biography of Helen Gregory MacGill and clinical observations. Although her style is (1864-1947), has been reissued in paperback engaging and her ideas stimulating, the sup• with an introduction by Naomi Black. Al• port and argumentation for her position is of• though so closely related to her subject, Elsie ten not fully developed and sometimes con• Gregory MacGill has succeeded in balancing distance with intimacy, authority with monton and Calgary, where Emily Murphy warmth. She also demonstrates how seemingly and Alice Jamieson presided. minor customs affecting women distort our estimate of historical significance and our un• The Family Connection did more than open derstanding of social change. doors, however. As chronicler of her mother's career, Elsie MacGill posits a "golden thread" As her biographer makes clear, the Family in every life, a unifying principle that "reveals Connection loomed large in well-born Helen our moral purpose and dictates a recurring Gregory's growing-up years in late nineteenth- pattern of thought and action clearly discer• century Hamilton. Bored with balls, at homes nible in our work." (p. xxx). Psychologists and and conversazione, restless young Helen an• philosophers may raise questions about this nounced her ambition to be a concert pianist assumption, but its usefulness to the working and applied for studies in music at the Univer• biographer is beyond dispute. Furthermore, by sity of Toronto. When the governing body of looking beyond the individual into the past and Trinity College refused permission for her to (by implication) into the future, Elsie reduces attend lectures in 1885 (women could earn the mystical and deterministic elements in this degrees, as long as they did not clutter up the concept and transforms it into a process of con• classrooms), Helen's grandfather, a senior scious bequest and inheritance between judge, interceded "at the highest level" on her generations. behalf, and the doors were opened, (p. 46). Thus comfortably and quietly did nineteenth- century Ontario go about its social ad• For this reason the impatient reader should justments, without recourse to ill-bred popular not skip too quickly over the genealogical first agitations. (Compare the coincidence of the chapter of the book. True, male forebears are Smith family's fortunate acquaintance with catalogued in meticulous detail, but so are Principal Grant when Elizabeth Smith de• female ones. Here we meet Jane Racey, who at clared her wish to study medicine in Canada: eighteen was "competent to run a home of her Elizabeth and three other women were ad• own from the making of candles to the fining of mitted to Queen's in 1880, toppling another wine." (p. 7). Jane acquired her competence barrier to the economic and intellectual in• as well as her beauty from her mother Ann, dependence of Canadian women.) who raised eight children, ran the family farm while her husband engaged in Family Com• Elsie MacGill acknowledges a residue of pact politics, and carried on mission and snobbishness in Helen's middle-class outlook, social-service work among the Six Nation In• but argues convincingly for the altruism be• dians in her spare time. Jane was mother to hind her mother's long years of work in a vari• Emma, who was mother to Helen, who was ety of reform causes affecting women and chil• mother to Elsie, who wrote that "the 'golden dren, among them access for women to higher thread' . . . for Ann and Jane and Emma and education and the professions, female suffrage, Helen was a fierce sympathy for the weak and maternal guardianship rights, married the oppressed." (p. 93). These four women, women's property rights, and especially later and Elsie too, also shared a conviction, borne in life, prison and delinquency law reform. out by practice, that family responsibilities led Helen MacGill's self-administered legal inevitably to public ones. The golden thread, education earned her appointment in 1917 at in short, explains more than a single life; it also age 53 to the Vancouver Juvenile Court, hard provides the strand that connects sympathies, on the heels of similar appointments in Ed• actions and principles over a century and a half through transmission from mother to daugh• document, summing up the book's highlights ter. and commenting on their significance for current feminist analysis. Remarking on the David A. Gagan has taken much the same fact that Helen's most active years in public life kind of approach in his useful little book of followed her youngest children's entry into 1973 on the ultra-conservative Denison family adolescence, Black explains that "for Helen, as of Toronto. There are other Family Con• for most feminists of the day, public service nections in Canadian social and intellectual was an extension of family responsibilities and history—the Grants, Parkins, Masseys, Gor• would never have been allowed to take dons, Creightons, McNaughts, to name a precedence." (p. xvi). Black also answers those few—where patterns of continuity and change who criticize the stodgy conservatism of could similarly be drawn in. The difficulty, feminist thought in Canada. The vision of however, in tracing a historical profile of social reform espoused by the MacGill women Canada's female pattern-makers is implicit in is "not a conservative" one, she argues, de• Elsie's formulation just quoted—"Ann and spite its avowed gradualism, since the society Jane and Emma and Helen"—as well as in where women and men could work with equal Naomi Black's respectful reminder that "there authority and effectiveness for humane goals are still MacGill women," by which she means has never existed in history. Black goes on to the daughters of Helen Hughes, Elsie's elder say that "relatively cautious reform techniques sister. MacGill women, but without the continue to be appropriate in the Canadian MacGill name: each name-change at marriage context." Where realpolitik is the cultural obscures the family connection and leaves the norm, the appeal to abstract rights and the ex• achievements of these remarkable women pectation of radical change are equally out of vulnerable to involuntary dispersal among the place. In Black's view, "progress is made by a chronicles of male relatives. We are fortunate constant effort to exploit and expand existing that Elsie, the conscious legatee of four constraints." Thus the MacGill women generations of MacGill women, had the wit to "represent a small part of a continuing see that sharing a surname is less important to tradition of changing a society by how one lives a family connection than sharing an outlook or within it." (p. xxiii-xxiv). From this stand• belief. point, My Mother the Judge serves as both record and blueprint. Although unfailingly intelligent, informed and literate, My Mother the Judge was written without the documentation that a scholarly Susan Jackel biographer would now provide. Elsie Mac- University of Alberta Gill's sources are generally clear, however; newspaper and magazine articles, pamphlets, statutes and so on are often identified in the We Walked Very Warily: A History of text, while family papers, anecdotes and per• Women at McGill. Margaret Gillett. Montreal: sonal memories make up the rest. Purists may Eden Press Women's Publications, 1981. Pp. 476. on occasion question the attribution of feelings, motives, unspoken questionings to actors in the narrative, yet the net effect is one of judicious and reliable if affectionate portrayal. Some of the everyday experiences of the very first women who studied at McGill included Naomi Black provides a succinct, unclut• being chaperoned by a Lady Superintendent tered introduction well suited to the reprinted who "sat with her knitting in the tiny labora-