Explore the vast range of titles available.

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canadaengages in a discursive analysis of three 'texts' - the narratives of Anna Jameson (Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada), Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney (Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear), and the 'Janey Canuck' books of Emily Murphy - in order to examine how, in the context of a settler colony, white women have been part of the project of its governance, its racial constitution, and its role in British imperialism. Using Foucauldian theories of governmentality to connect these first-person narratives to wider strategies of race making, Jennifer Henderson develops a feminist critique of the ostensible freedom that Anglo-Protestant women found within nineteenth-century liberal projects of rule. Henderson's interdisciplinary approach - including critical studies in law, literature, and political history - offers a new perspective on these women that detaches them from the dominant colony-to-nation narrative and shows their importance in a tradition of moral regulation. This project not only redresses problems in Canadian literary history, it also responds to the limits of postcolonial, nationalist, and feminist projects that search for authentic voices and resistant agency without sufficient attention to the layers of historical sedimentation through which these voices speak.

Er ... small problem. When each prospective juror learned what the case was about and how much 'drug' was involved, they refused to serve. Juror after juror told the judge they would refuse to convict anyone over such a miniscule amount of pot. Twenty-seven prospective jurors were polled; twenty-two of them said that not only would they not convict, but the whole farce was a waste of taxpayer money. \"It's a mutiny,\" wailed the District Attorney. Most of the blame for Canadian hysteria over marijuana can be laid at the feet of a single Albertan, Ms. Emily F. Murphy of Edmonton. Ms. Murphy, a juvenile court judge back in the 1920s wrote under the pen name Janey Canuck for Maclean's Magazine. And she spewed some truly astounding crap. She wrote -- and Maclean's published -- that all marijuana users were \"non-white and non-Christian, wanting only to seduce white women.\" \"Behind these dregs of humanity,\" she wrote, \"is an international conspiracy of yellow and black drug pushers whose ultimate goal is the domination of the bright-browed races of the world.\"

Who were the five women-- the \"Famous Five\" -- who took the Persons case all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and how did they get there? The legal documents and briefs for the case are cast in technical legal language and say nothing about the women's lives, their beliefs, or their battles for women's issues and social justice. The formal legal citation for the case, Edwards v. Attorney General of Canada, ignores all but Henrietta Muir Edwards. The five names, listed in alphabetical order in the title of proceedings and Lord Sankey's judgment, revealed only their formal affiliations, though this was enough to make clear that these were five prominent and successful women from Alberta: \"Henrietta Muir Edwards is the Vice-President for the Province of Alberta of the National Council of Women for Canada; Nellie L. McClung and Louise Mc-Kinney were for several years members of the Legislative Assembly of the said Province; Emily F. Murphy is a police magistrate in and for the said Province; and Irene Parlby is a member of the Legislative Assembly of the said Province and a member of the Executive Council thereof.\" In 1915, when Nellie McClung wrote to advance the cause of suffrage, she did so from the perspective of a maternal feminist, explaining \"every normal woman desires children.\" Similarly, [Henrietta Edwards] described motherhood as \"God's greatest gift\" and saw a mother as \"a co-worker with God in a way that no man can ever be.\" Irene Parlby, too, believed that women had a political role to play in securing better conditions for children, better education, and better public health, but that when a woman was deciding whether to \"desert her home for politics ... one's children should always come first.\" Parlby also believed that \"only a limited number of women have qualities which will prove useful\" in politics. Most women, she declared, could and should limit themselves to their domestic duties. Maternal feminists came to realize, however, that predominance in the domestic sphere would only advance their goals so far. Laws and the legal status of women would have to change. In 1902, Henrietta Muir Edwards had described the dilemma facing the Canadian woman: Though she reigned as a \"queen in her home,\" \"unfortunately the laws she makes reach no further than her domain.\" Edwards urged women to enter the political world to make their \"written or unwritten\" laws capable of being enforced outside the home.

She found herself, as young reviewers often are, assigned a great many novels, few of them offering much scope for brilliant comment. When she did have something worth getting to grips with - Henry James's ''Golden Bowl,'' no less - her review was subjected to some cruel editorial cuts (Mr. [Andrew McNeillie] reprints the very full and conscientious notes she had made while working on it), though she still had enough space to complain, along with her words of praise, that ''Mr. James tortures himself and wearies his readers in his strenuous effort to get everything said that there is to say.'' The only other novels she reviewed that are still remembered today were ''The House of Mirth'' and ''A Room With a View.'' On the Edith Wharton she was no more than adequate, on the Forster rather cool. (By the end of the story, she reports, ''the view is smaller than we expected.'') But she is not really a writer you go to for brisk clear-cut verdicts. She is at her best when she can let her thoughts play around a subject or wind her way into it. If she had gone on to write more conventional novels, the clearest evidence would no doubt be her growing ability to evoke character in the robust traditional sense. Some of the essays are splendid portraits in miniature - the sketch of the indomitable 18th-century bluestocking Elizabeth Carter, for instance. But a few go further, exploring the mysteries and half-lights of the inner life in a way that foreshadows ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and ''To the Lighthouse.'' The most striking example is an extraordinary fiery essay on the memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt.

Although Mr. [Alan Schneider] displayed a catholicity of taste over the years -among his early efforts were stagings of such plays as Thornton Wilder's ''Skin of Our Teeth,'' Robert Anderson's ''All Summer Long'' and Clifford Odets's ''Country Girl'' - he would become best known for his more experimental work, and in one of the few passages of self-assessment in this volume he makes it clear where his affinities lay. ''I am the only American theater director who ever went from the avant-garde to the Old Guard without having passed through the Establishment,'' he writes. ''I have always favored the poetic over the prosaic, siding with instinct over reason, swayed by the power of symbols, images, metaphors, all of the substances lurking behind the closed eyelids of the mind. To me, these are more faithful signs of essential truths than all those glossy photographs that seek to mirror our external world. I've always preferred Chekhov to Ibsen, Tennessee Williams to Arthur Miller, and Dostoyevsky to Tolstoy; but [Samuel Beckett]'s metaphors reach deepest into my subconscious self.'' Having been signed up to direct the first American production of ''Waiting for Godot'' in 1955, Mr. Schneider spends a week looking for the elusive writer in Paris and finally succeeds in trying to get Mr. Beckett to answer his questions about the play. ''According to him,'' Mr. Schneider writes, ''Godot had 'no meaning' and 'no symbolism.' There was no 'general point of view involved,' but it was certainly 'not existentialist.' Nothing in it meant anything other than what it was on the surface. 'It's just about two people who are like that.' That was all he would say.''