This talk is part of the ALLways Learning Series, which invites ALL members and members of our local community to join us for a free, casual lecture each Friday during the academic year (formerly Lunchtime Learning Series).

Abstract:  This talk examines how feminism became a source of inspiration for Canadian writers in the early and mid-twentieth century by focusing on two now-canonical texts. J.G. Sime’s short story collection Sister Woman (1919) and P.K. Page’s poem “The Stenographers” (1942) connect the labour of typists to the work of creative writing. In critiquing the gendered inequities of women’s paid labour, Sime and Page also comment on their own working conditions as writers and the patriarchal contexts in which their writing was received and valued.

Biography: Kait Pinder is an Associate Professor in Acadia’s Department of English and Theatre. Her research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary Canadian literature. She has published on Leonard Cohen and Friedrich Nietzsche, Sheila Watson and Simone Weil, Margaret Laurence and the Vietnam War, and Tracey Lindberg and the ethics of care, among other authors and topics. Her Introduction to Feminisms in Canadian Literature, co-authored with Andrea Beverley (Mount Allison), is forthcoming from Routledge.