Prairie Farm Women Organizing: A Faithful Commitment

Abstract

I own a video titled, Prairie Women, which portrays the organizing efforts of farm women on the prairies from 1913 through 1939. As a daughter and granddaughter of prairie women, I find these stories of struggle, courage and commitment deeply inspiring – part of the legacy of “critical memories,” which can nurture today’s work for justice and social transformation. In the images of women driving miles through mud and snow with petitions on suffrage or world peace, and in voices describing isolation, hardship and the strength found in community, I am reminded at what cost our now-threatened assurance of basic levels of social welfare and the right to participate in defining them, was achieved. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau have suggested that the shape of the Canadian welfare state is a result of an alliance of “Protestant churches, middle -class women and agrarian organizations,” and have discussed the intersection of these interests in the farm women’s movement. Yet neither Christie and Gauvreau, nor most histories of prairie women, provide much sense of how the women who participated in these movements related issues, actions and religious convictions. In what way were these prairie women informed by faith as they struggled to name their reality and transform their lives? I sought answers to this question in one of the sources in which prairie women were given a voice: the women’s pages of the prairie farm press. For various periods in the history of these journals, these pages came under the editorship of activist women who invited their readers to contribute to a