Peter Campbell, Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People.

Smith, Julia

Peter Campbell, Rose Henderson: A Woman for the People (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2010)

IN ROSE HENDERSON: A Woman For the People, Peter Campbell examines the life, politics, and activism of Rose Henderson (1871-1937). Henderson was a prominent advocate for the rights of women, children, and workers, and a woman of whom Campbell himself admits, "the vast majority of Canadians have never heard." (3) Indeed, Campbell's desire to reclaim Henderson's life and legacy from the proverbial dustbin of history fundamentally shapes his study. As he states in the introduction, "The task at hand is to demonstrate that there was something compelling about Henderson, to convincingly argue that she is worth remembering after all this time." (3) To achieve his goal, Campbell sets out to recount Henderson's life in a way that allows her "to speak to us in our own day and age, to bring meaning to our lives across the intervening decades since her death." (3) In the process, Campbell not only details Henderson's life of public activism but also sheds light on many facets of Canadian history, including feminism, the left, labour and the working class, francophone and anglophone Montreal, and Depression-era Toronto. By examining the particulars of Henderson's life in relation to such broad historical moments and movements, Rose Henderson highlights the connections, tensions, and contradictions of everyday activist life, and thus makes an important contribution to the historiography on feminism, labour, and the left in Canada.

Campbell divides his study of Henderson into nine chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion. He begins by situating his work in relation to previous histories of feminism and socialism in Canada, arguing that Henderson's life does hot fit easily into the existing historiography, divided as the latter often is into movement-specific studies. In contrast, Campbell argues that Henderson can only be fully understood by linking what he considers to be the disconnected historiographies of Canadian feminism and labour and the left. Specifically, drawing on Barbara Taylor's argument that until 1845 utopian thinkers in England viewed feminism and socialism as fundamentally connected, Campbell's thesis is that Henderson's "life of social activism was a powerful evocation of the 'ideological tie' between the liberation of women and the liberation of the working class." (5)

The book examines this central theme in relation to Henderson's public activism in Quebec and Ontario. Chapters 1 through 4 discuss Henderson's early life and activities in Montreal in the first two decades of the 20th century. Campbell explains how Henderson quickly became known as a prominent activist for the rights of women, children, and workers, through her work as a volunteer with the Children's Aid Society and as a paid probation officer with the Juvenile Court. Campbell maintains that it is difficult to categorize Henderson's politics in this period as exclusively feminist or socialist, as she consistently linked women's and children's issues to a broader critique of capitalism. Chapters 5 and 6 examine Henderson's life in the interwar period, including her activities outside Canada and her participation in the peace movement. Campbell argues that during this period, Henderson's activism was shaped by the notion that "war was capitalism's evil offspring and the inevitable outcome of a male-dominated world. Peace would come when the immorality of militarism was replaced by the morality of international motherhood." (128) Chapters 7 through 9 look at Henderson's life in Depressionera Toronto and her involvement in leftist politics and the municipal school system. Henderson moved to Toronto in the late 1920s and soon became known as "a lecturer on women, children, drama, and the peace movement, and ... as a Quaker." (152) However, Campbell explains that by the mid-1930s, "Henderson's life of public activism increasingly centred on the Toronto public school system and the lives of disadvantaged children in it," work that put her into contact with a variety of prominent leftist organizations, most notably the Community Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. (187) Though her life as a middle-class educational reformer seems a far cry from her early days as a passionate lecturer on the evils of capitalism, Campbell contends that Henderson nevertheless "left an indelible mark on the political culture of her adopted city, as she continued to expose the hypocrisy of the better offs and shone as bright a light as she could on the dark corners of Toronto the Good." (188) Campbell concludes his study by highlighting the legacy of Henderson's life for the cities of Toronto and Montreal in particular and our understanding of the complexities and contradictions of a life of activism on the Canadian left in the early decades of the 20th century in general.

One of the strengths of Campbell's analysis is his careful reading of sources. In addition to incorporating an impressive amount of secondary source material on the many subjects with which Henderson's life intertwined, Campbell uses municipal, federal, and provincial archives, archival collections of various feminist and socialist groups, and numerous women's, labour, and leftist newspapers. Despite the numerous sources he analyzes, Campbell consistently emphasizes the many mysteries and gaps that still exist in our understanding of Henderson's life due to silences or inconsistencies in the historical records. Indeed, in several cases Campbell is careful to point out that without private papers or, in some cases, accurate historical records, "only speculation is possible." (11)

Campbell's work does have some shortcomings. At the book's conclusion, the reader is left with little sense of who Henderson was as a person beneath her public persona as an impassioned activist. As Campbell explains, this is largely due to a lack of personal papers; however, the limited discussion of Henderson on a more personal level detracts from the strength of the book as a biography. In addition, at times Campbell overstates the case for his study of Henderson, repeatedly stressing that, "few Canadians of her generation so insistently, so insightfully, and so intelligently laid bare the contradictions of patriarchy and the capitalist system." (127) Campbell's insistence that Henderson "had few, if any, equals" comes across as somewhat heavy-handed and, ultimately, unnecessary, as Henderson's life of activism makes for an interesting study in and of itself, regardless of whether it is unique. (5) Moreover, Campbell also argues that the historiographical divide between women's history and labour history "has made it difficult, if not impossible, to bring to light a life dedicated to the ideological ties between feminism and working-class protest." (5) Specifically, Campbell claims that "the scorn that many male Marxists had for 'bourgeois' women reformers in Henderson's own day has its echoes in the writing of Canadian labour history, and Canadian women's history is replete with condemnations of the sexism and misogyny of male-dominated socialist and labour movements that marginalized women and their concerns" (5); however, he does not provide any specific citations to support this assertion. Given that Campbell is attempting to fill what he argues is a gap in the literature, a more thorough historiographical discussion would strengthen his claim. Nevertheless, like its namesake, Rose Henderson highlights the connections and tensions between these movements and thus broadens our understanding of the history of activism, feminism, and labour and the left in Canada.

JULIA SMITH

Trent University