Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in J.W. Bengough's Verses and Political Cartoons

Abstract

J.W. Bengough was part of a community of late nineteenth-century Toronto social reformers who shared a common project of ‘regenerating’ society by laying the foundations for a Christian republic. This project of social and moral reform was integral to the vision of English Canadian nationalism articulated by Bengough in the comic paper Grip . In his cartoons and verses, Bengough used allegories of gender and sexuality to convey his vision of the Canadian nation to his readers, imagining women as symbolic bearers of the moral virtues of the nation. In the iconography of gender and nation in nineteenth-century Europe, the nation was almost always imagined as a mature woman. In the context of Canada’s anti-colonial struggles of the 1870s and 1880s, Bengough depicted the nation as a young, immature girl who had not yet attained complete womanhood. His vision of the nation included independence from Britain and free trade with the United States. The idea of nation constructed by Bengough was also dependent on the activities of its male statesmen. Bengough was critical of the nationbuilding policies of John A. Macdonald. In the race and creed struggles of the 1870s and 1880s, Bengough’s Anglo-Protestant sympathies were obvious. He was highly critical of French Canadian clerical nationalism. As a social activist, he was sympathetic to the plight of Natives in the Northwest, and he supported women’s suffrage and the right of women to higher education. Like most nineteenth-century supporters of women’s rights, Bengough did not believe that men and women should share the same civic responsibilities. Women’s moral influence in the home should be brought to the public sphere of politics. Bengough played a prominent role in shaping nineteenth-century popular consciousness about national identity through his cartoons, editorials, and verses for Grip , his public ‘Chalk Talks,’ and his involvement in a variety of social reform organizations.