McClung name stripped from mag

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/12/2017 (2325 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The editorial team behind McClung’s, a feminist magazine based at Ryerson University in Toronto, has renamed the publication to remove its affiliation with the suffragette who made Manitoba the first Canadian province where women could cast ballots. 

As of Dec. 3, the twice-yearly magazine is called the Oakham House Feminist Publishing Society— the name of the magazine’s publishing society at Ryerson. 

Lisa Cumming, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said there was a desire to change the name because Nellie McClung was a supporter of eugenics — the theory that espoused the controlled breeding of humans to improve the population and enhance desirable genetic traits — and not someone the editorial team believes the intersectional feminist magazine should be named after. 

The volunteer-run magazine brought on an equity director this year to facilitate a name change.

“I am not sure why they would’ve decided that there was so much negative association with her and eugenics that it would cause them to make this change,” said Doris Mae Oulton, a board member on the Nellie McClung Foundation and Manitoba Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

“The one thing that the Nellie McClung name does immediately is situate yourself as a group or an entity that really is willing to recognize women’s rights and fight for them.” 

Oulton said the magazine’s decision is short-sighted. McClung was a passive supporter of eugenics who never wrote or campaigned for the practice, the former Canadian Federation of University Women president added.  

Al Thorleifson of the Bringing Nellie Home Committee has read McClung’s books and can think of only one incident where McClung addressed her support for sterilization — one of the facets of eugenics theory. 

McClung helped a disabled woman’s mother make the decision to get her daughter sterilized; her reasoning was the daughter wouldn’t be able to care for children. 

McClung was a product of her time, said Bette Mueller, an education board member at the Nellie McClung Foundation.

She says it’s important to place McClung’s beliefs in the context of the 1920s and ’30s. 

“By today’s standards, I think everyone disagrees with Nellie McClung’s position on eugenics, myself included,” Mueller said in a statement.  

Thorleifson, who curates the Pembina Manitou Archive in Manitou, the community McClung lived early in her career, said it’s unfair to use McClung’s involvement in eugenics as the excuse for the magazine’s name change.

“McClung believed society should take care of the vulnerable,” he said.

In 1916, thanks to McClung and fellow activists on the Political Equality League, women 21 and older got the right to vote and hold provincial office in Manitoba. Saskatchewan and Alberta followed, and by 1919, nearly all women in Canada could vote. 

“The fight for the right to vote didn’t give the right to all women. There were women who were left out of that as well, but it was a start, it was a statement and it’s worth celebrating,” Oulton said.

Asian, Inuit and First Nations women were disqualified from the polls. Indigenous women didn’t get to vote until 1960.

McClung was also part of the Famous Five, a group of feminists who took part in the 1929 “Persons Case.” The group successfully appealed a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that women were not “qualified persons.” Women were given full legal rights and could serve in the Senate.

Oulton said it’s sad the magazine has chosen to part ways with the McClung name because her work started the movement for getting more women into political roles.

“It’s very sad because that was an absolute tenet of everything she did: you work with a group of women, you work together and together you are more powerful,” she said.

McClung was a statement person, and using her name for a magazine title would be a great idea, Oulton added with a chuckle.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca