02 June 2018

Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers

Some 4,500 authors who published their first work, in English, in or before 1950 are included in the Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers.

As Carole Gerson writes in a short article on the database "Most Canadians know surprisingly little of their country’s literary past, even though many of their great-grandmothers or great-aunts were active participants in Canada’s print culture as poets, journalists, novelists, travel writers and biographers."

Searchable by title, name, place and publisher it's a rich and growing resource. A search for place Ottawa, ON found 18 writers born there, 42 who died, and 120 residents.

Perhaps the best known wrote:

The Immigration Problem for Canada, 1924
Social Work at the League of Nations, 1936
Social Work and the People's Health: An Expansion of an Address Given at the Annual Meeting of District 8, Registered Association of Ontario, 1936
God's Good Tide, 1941
Canadian Women in the War Effort, 1942
The Dawn of Ampler Life: Some Aids to Social Security, 1943
A Hundred Years a-Fellin': Some Passage from the Timber Saga of Ottawa in the Century in which the Gillies Have Been Cutting in the Valley, 1842-1942, 1943
Baby Bonuses: Dollars or Sense?, 1945
The Commons, 1950
By Command of the Queen, 1953

Who was she? Hint: It's not her photo above—that would make it too easy!

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