There are a handful of biographies about Nellie McClung, including her own two volume biography. McClung was born in 1873 and is considered a Manitoban hero for her involvement in the suffragist movement. In 1914, Winnipeg held a mock parliament as a fundraising event. This had been done in other cities, as early as in 1893, and it consisted of a role reversal in which Parliamentarians were women deciding the fate of men. It was a lot of fun. On this particular occasion, in Winnipeg, a delegation of women had been to the Parliament to demand the vote, and then staged their play the next day. McClung had been particularly attentive to the premier Roblin’s arguments and mannerisms, this not having been her first political encounter with the premier, and her impression of him made the play’s renown.
The fact that McClung was such a prolific writer overshadows her talents as a speaker, and it is a pity that only a measly recording of her voice is left, a few seconds of an acceptance speech many years after this period. Writing gave her the authority of being a published author, and therefore a ticket to being a public speaker, but it wasn’t her talent. The fact that she is so often singled out for credit in getting the women’s vote to pass in Manitoba is unfair to the other women who were also involved, but attests to the popularity of her speeches. She made people laugh, and she passed a message while doing so. This was instrumental to the women’s cause and it made her name recognizable. In turn, this helped the sale of her books, 16 all told.
She wasn’t a woman of great depth though and nothing illustrates this quite like the 1919 Winnipeg Strike. By that time, McClung was living in Alberta, but she continued to receive speaking engagements across Canada and the United States. The Strike which ran from May 15th to June 21st was peaceful when McClung decided to stop in Winnipeg on June 6th. McClung attempted to understand the issue at stake, interviewed a striker, took notes for a manuscript that was never published and left with an unfavourable view of the whole thing. In fact, she tended to agree with a conspiracy that posited the laborers were being directed by Russia.
James Shaver Woodsworth’s attitude and actions are an informative contrast. Woodsworth and McClung were both Methodists, were born within a year of each other, and had both been involved to greater and lesser degrees with their church’s social movement, most prominently embodied at the All People’s mission in Winnipeg’s North End. Woodsworth left Methodist ministry and subsequent a very public stand in favour of pacifism in 1916, he lost his job, moved to Vancouver, and could only find work as a longshoreman. Notwithstanding the humiliation, the wage of a laborer was, he discovered, insufficient to support a family. His own wife and children could barely afford necessities in food, clothing and school supplies. He eventually joined a union and began advocating changes to the economic system. His understanding of the problems at stake earned him an invitation to speak across Canada in favour of the labour movement. He was scheduled to speak in Winnipeg on June 9th. According to Woodsworth’s biographers, the Winnipeg Strike made an impact on his life. Not only did he become personally involved in its events (he was briefly jailed as a result), he worked for years to undo two legislative amendments (one allowing for the deportation of immigrants, and the other involving free speech) enacted at the time that were unfair, successfully repealing one in 1927 and the other in 1936. Woodsworth, having lived the experience of a labourer understood their situation in a way that McClung could not.
McClung was a mediocre writer. For a long time this bothered me. How do you explain this woman’s renown against her bland literary legacy? For this, Simone de Beauvoir provided an answer I can’t help but quote at length. These authors “very often remain divided between their narcissism and an inferiority complex. Not being able to forget oneself is a failure that will weigh on them more heavily than in any other career; if their essential goal is an abstract self-affirmation, the formal satisfaction of success, they will not abandon themselves to the contemplation of the world: they will be incapable of creating it anew.” And: “instead of enriching the woman, her narcissism impoverishes her; involved in nothing but self-contemplation, she eliminates herself; even the love she bestows on herself becomes stereotyped: she does not discover in her writings her authentic experience but an imaginary idol constructed from clichés.” In Nellie McClung’s case, her writing was a springboard into an essential role in the women’s movement.
She should be forgiven for her shortcomings, but we should not fall into the trap of singling her out based on a lazy familiarity with her name. This happened for example when in 2016 Premier Pallister argued against the Bank of Canada’s decision to cut her name from the women shortlisted for a banknote. What we need now are more historians who can take on the job of finding long-lost actors to diversify our pantheon.