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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Devereux, Cecily Margaret, 1963-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eugenics in literature.

Feminism in literature.

McClung, Nellie L., 1873-1951.

McClung, Nellie L.

Physical Description:

viii, 174 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen's University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Cecily Devereux reconsiders the extent to which McClung's enduring legacy of crusading for women's rights is founded on the ideas of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Caleb Saleeby and implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada. In a critical study of Painted Fires, the Pearlie Watson books, and several short stories, Devereux attempts to understand McClung's fiction in terms of its engagement with a politics of "race" and nation and constructions of specifically "racial" impurities that many women saw themselves as uniquely able to "cure."

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

McClung in the Third Wave Revisiting the "Legacy"

"To Serve and Save the Race" McClung, Maternal Feminism, and the Principles of Eugenics

Changing Perspectives of Maternal Feminism Reconsidering the "New Woman" and the "Mother of the Race"

"Motherhood on the Eugenic Basis" How the Anti-Feminist Principles of Selective Breeding Became "One with the Woman Question"

Locating McClung's Eugenic Feminism Didactic Fiction and Racial Education

Reading Maternalism in McClung's Fiction The Culture of Imperial Motherhood

"Finger-Posts on the Way to Right Living" Mothering the Prairies

Pearlie Watson and Eugenic Instruction in the Watson Trilogy How to Be a Maternal Messiah of the New World

Eugenic Plots Feminist Work and the "Racial Poisons"

"The Great White Plague" in the "Last Best West" Tuberculosis, Temperance, and Woman Suffrage in Purple Springs

"In a Chinese Restaurant, Working at Night"Painted Fires, White Slavery, and the Protection of the Imperial Mother

Eugenic Feminism and "Indian Work"

Re-Forming "Indianness" The Eugenic Politics of Assimilation

"Called to [the] Mission" Interpellating First Nations and Métis Mothers in "Red and White1 and "Babette"

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

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

ISBN:

1-283-52998-X

9786613842435

0-7735-7304-6

OCLC:

923231369