Women and The Grain Growers’ Guide
The Grain Growers' Guide or GGG (1908-1928) was a weekly news record and is considered by The Enclyclopedia of Saskatchewan as "the most important publication of the early farm movement." GGG later became The Country Guide, which is still in print. The Guide was owned and managed by farmers and published by the Manitoba Grain Growers' Association, the Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association, and the United Farmers of Alberta. Its circulation promoted the perspectives and values of western rural communities by publishing widely about temperance and cooperative movements as well as educational reform.
The Guide was not simply a male-led and male-read publication. Barbara Kelcey and Angela Davis note that “while it was assumed that women might not be interested in animal husbandry, politics, and topical news, women’s concerns with domestics, families and decorating were set aside presumably because they would not be of interest to the men who actually ran the farm business” (xi). Fanny, evidently, among other homesteading women and writers, upended these expectations. Notable contributors included prominent leaders of Canada's women's movement: Nellie McClung (“Canada’s Eleanor Roosevelt”), Ella Cora Hind, Irene Parlby, and Violet McNaughton.
The Guide included a Women’s Section from its first year onwards that continued to expand as the years progressed. This section, which included “The Woman’s Sphere,” “Around the Fireside,” “The Country Woman,” and/or “The Country Homemaker," discussed both political issues such as women’s suffrage, equal rights for men and women, and homesteading as well as advice on household management, dress, marriage, motherhood, and finances. The female editors of the Women’s Section from 1908 to 1928 – Isobel Graham, Mary Ford, Francis Marion Beynon, Mary P. Callum, and Amy J. Roe – believed that women should have a say in political debates, a stake in property ownership, and a right to education.
Source: Barbara Kelcey and Angela Davis, A Great Movement Underway: Women and the Grain Growers’ Guide (Winnipeg: Manitoba Record Society, 1997).
N.B. Canada’s “famous five” suffragettes are Emily Murphy [Alberta], Nellie McClung [Ontario and British Columbia], Henrietta Muir Edwards [Montreal and Alberta], Louise McKinney [Ontario and Alberta], and Irene Parlby [London, England, and Alberta]
