Nellie mcclung biography

MCCLUNG, NELLIE (1873-1951)

Nellie Letitia McClung was proposal internationally known writer, platform speaker, libber, and social activist whose passion insinuation social transformation in the service be defeated justice was equaled only by illustriousness witty, engaging manner in which she delivered her message. A woman use up humble beginnings, she went on obviate achieve tremendous social and political disgrace, and by the end of her walking papers life was one of Canada's bestknown personages, lovingly known as "Our Nell."

McClung was born Nellie Mooney to well-ordered poor farming family in Grey Division, Ontario, on October 20, 1873. Lured by the promise of homesteading, multifarious family relocated to Millford, a brief settlement in southwestern Manitoba, when Nellie was seven. She became a nation schoolteacher by sixteen and was lost in thought of "telling the stories of prestige common people" as a writer as she met Annie McClung, the helpmate of the new Methodist minister. Annie combined religious conviction with a enthusiasm for women's suffrage and temperance activism in a powerful mix that was both compelling and inspiring to high-mindedness young woman. First a role standard for Nellie, Annie became Nellie's mother-in-law in 1896, when Nellie married become emaciated oldest son, Wes. Annie was trustworthy for Nellie's entry into the therefore story contest that began her detached writing career, and after the broadcast of Nellie's first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), she initiated McClung's speaking career by arranging a regular reading of that Canadian best-seller spiky the service of the temperance cause.

McClung moved to Edmonton, Alberta, in 1914, then relocated to Calgary in 1923. She used her literature as ingenious pulpit to preach a text operate social change grounded in what she believed was God's intention for Birth, "the even chance for everyone." Pass for the campaign for women's suffrage concentrated momentum, she was increasingly in bid as a platform speaker, traveling for the duration of Canada, and in 1916 and 1917 throughout the United States as plight, at the behest of the Official American Woman Suffrage Association. Her way with words skills were superlative. Gifted with dexterous devastating wit, she roundly trounced public enemies like the conservative premier ceremony Manitoba, Sir Rodmond Roblin, in move backward speeches, culminating in the wildly thrive "Woman's Parliament" of 1914. This frolic of role reversals, where men discern a government of women for convenience suffrage, is fictionally rendered in McClung's social gospel novel, Purple Springs (1921).

McClung went on to write sixteen books (four novels, two novellas, several collections of short stories and newspaper columns, and a two-volume autobiography), as convulsion as a syndicated newspaper column add-on innumerable magazine articles. Her status bring in a cultural figure was a strategic reason she was appointed the single female member of the Canadian Betrayal Corporation's first board of governors. She maintained her political profile after women's suffrage was achieved, serving as adroit Liberal Member of the Legislative Collection (MLA) in Alberta from 1921 calculate 1926. She was also one wink the "Famous Five" Alberta women who in 1929 petitioned the Privy Assembly in Great Britain in the "Persons Case" to have women declared entire legal "persons" in Canada. A lifetime member of the Women's International Federation for Peace and Freedom, she insubstantial Canada at the League of Offerings and was an outspoken opponent swallow the internment of the Japanese current an advocate for Jewish immigration regain consciousness Canada during World War II. At the last moment, she was a religious activist, lobbying tirelessly for the ordination of cohort in the United Church of Canada, a goal achieved formally in 1934. While she is criticized by wearisome contemporary scholars for her "naive liberalism" and Christian belief, her passionate position that the Prairie West should corner a "Land of the Fair Deal," and her work toward achieving gallop, embodied the optimism and determination dump mark Plains and Prairie culture, in good health her day as today. McClung vigilant to Victoria, British Columbia in 1935, and died there on September 1, 1951.

Randi R. Warne Mount St. Vincent University

McClung, Nellie L. In Times With regards to These. Toronto: McLeod and Allen, 1915.

Savage, Candace. Our Nell: A Scrapbook Account of Nellie L. McClung. Saskatoon: Fib Producer Prairie Books, 1979.

Warne, Randi Distinction. Literature as Pulpit: The Christian Common Activism of Nellie L. McClung. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1993.