Breaking New Ground: The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920)

In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. Among them, both a cause and an effect of these sweeping social changes, was the first generation of Canadian women to work as professional authors. Although these women were not unified by ideology, genre, or date of birth, they are studied here as a generation defined by their time and place in history, by their material circumstances, and by their collective accomplishment. Chapters which focus on E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the Eaton sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), Joanna E. Wood, and Sara Jeannette Duncan explore some of the many commonalities and interrelationships among the members of this generation as a whole. This project combines archival research with analytical bibliography in order to clarify and extend our knowledge of Johnson’s and Duncan’s professional lives and publishing histories, and to recover some of Wood’s “lost” stories. This research offers a preliminary sketch of the long tradition of the platform performance (both Native and non-Native) with which Johnson and others engaged. It explores the uniquely innovative ethnographic writings of Johnson, Duncan, and the Eaton sisters, among others, and it explores thematic concerns which relate directly to the experiences of working women. Whether or not I convince other scholars to treat these authors as a generation, with more in common than has previously been supposed, the strong parallels revealed in these pages will help to clarify and contextualize some of their most interesting work.

A Recursive Income Model for Canadians : The Direct and Indirect Effects of Family Background (Working Paper 28)

This paper presents the results of a multi-equation income model which has been estimated for Canadian men and women which incorporates the effects of a number of important family background variables, including mother’s and father’s education, parents’ immigration status, their age at immigration, place of birth, language development, and learning background. Not only education, but also the individual’s tested literacy and numeracy levels are treated as intermediate outcomes which are affected by background and which, in turn, affect income. Many of the background variables are found to have important indirect effects on income which would be missed by more conventional approaches. We also find some interesting gender aspects with respect to the influences of parents’ educations on their children’s outcomes. Various policy implications of the findings are discussed.