Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism

Growing a Racechallenges the traditional reading of the fiction of Nellie McClung (1873-1951), revered author and pioneering feminist, situating it within a discourse of eugenical feminism that sought a racially homogenous "white Dominion." Cecily Devereux reconsiders the extent to which McClung's enduring legacy of crusading for women's rights is founded on the ideas of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Caleb Saleeby and implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada. In a critical study ofPainted Fires, the Pearlie Watson books, and several short stories, Devereux attempts to understand McClung's fiction in terms of its engagement with a politics of "race" and nation and constructions of specifically "racial" impurities that many women saw themselves as uniquely able to "cure.