Research Catalog

Title

Growing a race : Nellie L. McClung and the fiction of eugenic feminism / Cecily Devereux.

Author

Devereux, Cecily Margaret, 1963-

Publication

Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2005], ©2005.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

viii, 174 pages; 24 cm

Summary

"In recent scholarship, the extent to which Nellie McClung was implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada has created ambivalence around her legacy as one of the most popular figures in early twentieth-century women's rights activism. Cecily Devereux situates McClung's fiction within the context of her social reform work and the ways in which that work can be understood to be broadly eugenic or concerned with the preservation of race."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• McClung, Nellie L., 1873-1951
• Eugenics in literature
• Feminism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [159]-169) and index.

Contents

Introduction : McClung in the third wave : revisiting the "legacy" -- 1. Changing perspectives of maternal feminism : reconsidering the new woman and the mother of the race -- 2. "Motherhood on the eugenic basis" : how the anti-feminist principles of selective breeding became "one with the woman question" -- 3. Locating McClung's eugenic feminism : didactic fiction and racial education -- 4. "Finger-posts on the way to right living" : mothering the prairies -- 5. Pearlie Watson and eugenic instruction in the Watson trilogy : how to be a maternal messiah of the new world -- 6. "The great white plague" in "the last best West" : tuberculosis, temperance, and woman suffrage in Purple Springs -- 7. "In a Chinese restaurant, working at night" : Painted fires, white slavery, and the protection of the imperial mother -- 8. Re-forming "Indianness" : the eugenic politics of assimilation -- 9. "Called to [the] mission" : interpellating Metis mothers in "red and white" and "Babette"

ISBN

0773529373

LCCN

9780773529373

OCLC

• OCM61755513
• SCSB-5239173

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries