Great Dames is a great title, and a fitting one, for this collection of short biographies of 20th-century Canadian women. The editors and contributors are all feminist scholars, but you don’t have to be a feminist or academic to enjoy the book (although some readers may want to skip the introduction). Fully referenced and indexed, Great Dames is an invaluable resource for secondary and post-secondary students.

The original intent of the project was to record the experiences and contributions to Canada of ordinary women, neither fabulously wealthy nor famous enough to be considered suitable candidates for full-length biographies. After reading about some of these extraordinary “ordinary” women, however, it’s hard not to want to know more about them. Donna Smyth’s moving tribute to a grande dame of the Maritime theatre, Evelyn Garbary, “For Those of Us Whose Bones Are Stage Props,” could easily grow to fill a volume.

Co-editors Janice Dickin, from University of Calgary, and the prolific Elspeth Cameron, from University of Toronto, encouraged their contributors to explore non-traditional forms of biography. Citing Carol Gilligan’s 1982 work, In a Different Voice, they view conventional forms as best suited to conventional subjects, i.e. famous men climbing the ladder of success, whereas women tend to experience life as a web of connections (or a series of interruptions).

Free to take whatever approach they saw fit, the writers chose a wide variety of formats, but this only adds to the book’s appeal. At one end of the spectrum, in her portrait of a rumrunner, “Driving Towards Death,” Aritha Van Herk is unabashedly intrusive in her musings and speculations. At the other, Afua Cooper chose to
transcribe her interview with the founders of Sister Vision Press directly, without explicit commentary or interpretation. However, the most successful pieces tend to be those in which the writers are too absorbed by their subjects to be self-conscious.

And what subjects! After decades of research, through memoirs published and unpublished, the distaff side of our story is beginning to emerge. Whether native or immigrant, roughing it in the bush or keeping house in town, previous generations of women were human beings, not selfless saints who knew their place. Readers will be very grateful to writers such as Helen Buss, Sally Cole, Marlene Epp, Beverly Rasporich, and Patricia Smart for introducing such a great bunch of dames.