The Maritime Labor Herald (1921-1926) and the Genealogy of Socialist Feminism in Canada

Abstract

Examining women's contributions to the The Maritime Labour Herald, a radical weekly published in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, this paper argues that the Herald's "Women's Column" staged a significant intervention into the genealogy of socialist feminism in Canada. Though shortlived, the Column constituted a key juncture of the radical left, feminism, and modern literature in the 1920s. More broadly, the Herald provided discursive space for prominent socialist women—including Rose Henderson, Florence Custance, and Becky Buhay--to enter dialogue with working-class women in Nova Scotia, sustaining a vibrant textual community that predates the hieght of proletarian literature in 1930s Canada. Though rarely modernist in form, these womens' writing achieved a modern sensibility by occupying a stance of uncompromising critique. In this, they not only anticipate leftist modernism of the 1930s, but also put into practice a genealogy that embraced a collective past to imagine different ways of being in the future.