Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Heroines
women, they wage civil war among themselves, dissipating their energies
and diminishing the powers they can harness if they regard their sex
favourably. One of the reasons McClung's narrator travels to rural townships
giving speeches is to help break down women's isolation; when they
come together to hear what the speaker has to say, they recognize that they
share common concerns. Without opportunity to air their views collectively,
they acquiesce to submission. But working together, pooling their
energies and resources, they can make political change work to their advantage.
Optimistically, the narrator says, "Discussions are raging in women's
societies and wherever women meet together, and out of it something will
come. Men are always quite willing to be guided by women when their
schemes are sound and sane" (101). In The Next of Kin, McClung's narrator
asserts that female solidarity, which helps bring about women's emancipation,
will result in the creation of a better society for children and men, too.
(McClung writes women's recent victories into her text, thereby instilling
confidence in others that they can be winners at social change, but she also
recognizes the dangers of complacency. Writing in 1917, one year after
prairie women received the vote, McClung recognized that women's "worst
troubles" were not over, for a "second Hindenburg line" had been set up to
prevent them from entering the field of politics, and seemed harder to
"pierce" than the first [Next 232]. But the narrator seems undaunted, almost
eager to take up the challenge.)
Aside from urging their characters to document their feelings about war
and to voice their opinions publicly, Canadian women writers also utilize
militaristic language as a strategy for overcoming oppression. Their characters
use combat-ese with ease, one referring readily, for instance, to the "Big
Push" which will "soon see the finish of the Huns" (Rilla 141). There is, perhaps,
nothing unusual about women writers employing fighting words; as
part of the current vernacular during the First World War, they would be
part of every citizen's vocabulary on the homefront. But in these texts,
women illustrate they are well informed about the issues and events of war,
learning about combat primarily through their careful reading of daily
newspapers which "bristle with alien-sounding names like Mlawa, Bzura
and Przemysl" {Rilla 83), sites of battle like Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and
Festubert (TheMan Child200-01), place names foreign to both the tongue
and the ear. As their knowledge of geography extends, so does the range of
their conversation, for in spite of their remoteness from the roar of the can-
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