"Passing years have only added new lustre to the figure of Agnes Macphail, Canada’s first woman MP. In this biography, Terry Crowley offers a heroine for our times with the depiction of Macphail the accomplished politician, the committed feminist and the complex, well-rounded witty human being. A democratic populist who emerged politically during the post-World War One farmers’ revolt, Macphail helped build the alliance that became the CCF party and ended the two major parties’ total domination of national political life. She later served the CCF as Ontario’s first woman MPP. In all her activities Macphail was an outspoken advocate of equality and human rights. She worked tirelessly to win recognition of women’s rights, to reform the nation’s penal system and to secure international peace. She pressed for controls on lobbying and for disclosure of business influences on the media. Strong convictions, openness to fresh ideas and devotion to democratic values were Macphail’s distinguishing characteristics."--Page 4 of cover.

Radical Housewives is a history of Canada’s Housewives Consumers Association. This association was a community-based women’s organization with ties to the communist and social democratic left that, from 1937 until the early 1950s, led a broadly based popular movement for state control of prices and made other far-reaching demands on the state. As radical consumer activists, the Housewives engaged in gender-transgressive political activism that challenged the government to protect consumers’ interests rather than just those of business while popularizing socialist solutions to the economic crises of the Great Depression and the immediate postwar years. Julie Guard's exhaustive research, including archival research and interviews with twelve former Housewives, recovers a history of women’s social justice activism in an era often considered dormant and adds a Canadian dimension to the history of politicized consumerism and of politicized materialism. Radical Housewives reinterprets the view of postwar Canada as economically prosperous and reveals the left’s role in the origins of the food security movement.

As this collection of scholarly case studies reveals, religion once played a major public role in all aspects of Canadian society, including politics, education, and culture.

For one hundred years women fashioned different dreams of equality, autonomy, and dignity; yet what is Canadian feminism? In Demanding Equality, Joan Sangster explores feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s.She broadens our definition of feminism, and – recognizing that its political, cultural, and social dimensions are entangled – builds a picture of a heterogeneous movement often characterized by fierce internal debates. This comprehensive rear-view look at feminism in all its political guises encourages a wider public conversation about what Canadian feminism has been, is, and should be.

Oscar Cole Arnal is Professor of Church History at the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary.

The first comprehensive guide to women activists from every part of the world, illuminating the broad range of women's struggles to reform society from the 18th century to the present. Despite being marginalized, disenfranchised, impoverished, and oppressed, women have always stepped forward in disproportionate numbers to lead movements for social change. This two-volume encyclopedia documents the visions, struggles, and lives of women who have changed the world. This encyclopedia celebrates the lives and achievements of nearly 300 women from around the globe—women who have bravely insisted that the way things are is not the way they have to be. Nadeshda Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin, spearheaded the drive against illiteracy in post-revolutionary Russia. American Dorothy Day founded the Catholic worker movement. Begum Rokeya Hossain organized a girls' school in Calcutta in 1911. Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. The stories of these women and the hundreds of others collected here will restore missing pages to our history and inspire a new generation of women to change the world.