Nellie Mcclung's Book in Times Like These Term Paper

Nellie McClung's book In Times Like These chronicles the struggles of common, Canadian women on the frontier in a series of speeches and essays by the author that were intended for the public at large or the audience of suffrage and temperance organizations. In Times Like These celebrates the rural and western ideal of life on the homestead for both women and men. It extols the moral superiority of Canadian country life over Canadian city life even while it strives to consciously uplift the Canadian urban locale through improved social policy. In her fiction, McClung once compared the country life to a nutritious and life-sustaining diet of "good brown bread" in contrast to the insubstantial "popcorn and chocolate" fare of the cities of the East.

This practical comparison of life through the 'staff' of life, of the goodness of home-cooked food often prepared by women vs. The mass produced capitalist comestibles of the city, is at the heart of McClung's maternal and idealist ideology. McClung was an advocate of women's equality, but an equality-based best realized on the home front, which offered women the ability to shine in the skills they excelled in, such as teaching, cooking, and the raising of the next generation.

This philosophy of the superiority of country life is reflected in the author's own biography. Helen McClung was born "Helen Mooney" in 1873 in Ontario. It was said, "it was a disappointment to her eldest brother Will. What a pity to have another girl!" he cried!

In 1880, Helen Mooney moved with her family to farm near Milford. At the age of sixteen, after only five scant years of formal education, Helen moved to Winnipeg where she attended Normal School and qualified as a teacher. In 1890, she went to teach at Manitou, where she boarded with the family of the Reverend James and Annie McClung and became profoundly influenced by the couple's faith. Helen was born to a Scottish Protestant Father and a Irish Catholic mother, but she was particular influenced by Annie McClung, an "ardent champion of women's rights," and the Canadian woman's struggle for 'the vote.' Annie McClung was president of the Manitou chapter of the Evangelical, Protestant organization known as the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Despite her success as a career educator, however, McClung's brand of feminism, so located in the bright and heroic local of the prairies, is often described as a kind of "maternal feminism."

In her book In Times Like These, McClung states that a woman's place is in the home and even when a woman leaves the home her primary purpose is to fiercely guard the people whom she loves and to improve conditions for her loved ones with cheer, optimism and the idealism of the Canadian Prairies.

Thus, although her book as well as the speeches that compose the majority of its text won McClung a large readership, might seem to confirm a contemporary acceptance for female authorship, ingenuity, and public spiritedness, it is important to remember that her texts were always infused with the language of domesticity and called upon women to define a public role for themselves mainly as women, sisters and mothers. Women should strive only to improve society as a whole, not for themselves as women alone, although the temperance cause was particularly devoted to alleviating the suffering of women and children from alcoholism -- but always in a maternal rather than a female-empowering ideological fashion.

Nellie McClung's In Times Like These is a testimony to the popularity of its author. It is a collection of long-standing, collected speeches and essays drawn from McClung's extensive career as a speaker for a Manitoba suffrage and temperance organization and shows that McClung was a popular enough speaker and public figure to have confidence that there was a demand to see her speeches in print that she had already…