Guest Blog: Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad by Cecilia Morgan

In Cecilia Morgan’s forthcoming book, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad, the little-known lives of late-nineteenth-century Canadian actresses take center stage. In this era, many Canadian women left their homes at young ages with hopes of becoming successful in the theatre circuits of the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. While only a handful of actresses achieved true celebrity status, many were able to maintain modest careers and live comfortably abroad. The book delves in to these actresses’ childhoods, their experiences of work, the fame they enjoyed, and their impact on transnational middle-class culture.

In her Guest Blog below, Morgan discusses the cultural, social, and political questions that arise when exploring the lives of these Canadian women. She concludes by acknowledging how socioeconomic class and white privilege positioned the actresses in a world where they could be so “sweet.”

Whenever a Canadian performer “makes it big” outside of Canada – usually in the United States – cultural commentators point to Canada’s history of importing talent across national borders, starting with Mary Pickford in the early twentieth century and then jumping forward in time to include musicians and actors such as Joni Mitchell, The Band, Neil Young, Jim Carrey, and, more recently, Drake and Justin Bieber.  Sometimes this history is accompanied by lamentation that such artists were “forced” to leave Canada because of lack of opportunities here.

My book, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad, joins this public conversation by acknowledging that from the mid-nineteenth century until the interwar decades, a number of women left Canada, either as children or as young adults, to pursue acting careers in the United States and Britain.  It also, though, seeks to expand this discussion in a number of ways.  I started by focusing on a few women who’d been studied by other historians and then, using both more traditional archival sources and the many new digital resources at hand, expanded my “cast” of characters.  My research shows that this was not a phenomenon limited to a few theatrical luminaries who wished to achieve fame and fortunes unavailable to them on Canadian theatrical circuits.  Both well-known and celebrated actresses – Margaret Anglin, Julia Arthur, Annie Russell, and Beatrice Lillie, for example – pursued careers outside of Canada, but so too did lesser-known performers, such as May Waldron Robson, Elizabeth Jane Phillips, and Frances Doble.  Becoming an actress was something aspired to by many English-Canadian girls and women, a desire they shared with their counterparts in the English-speaking world.

Poster for Julia Arthur, More Than Queen, 1899. Library of Congress, 2014637230.

Moreover, while like today, some cultural critics mourned these women’s departure, I was surprised to discover that others celebrated Canadians’ (and, for the most part, their definition of “Canadian” was often quite elastic) success on international stages.  The triumphs of women such as Anglin and Arthur were, such critics claimed, proof that the Dominion need not be ashamed of its “sweet Canadian girls,” since they were more than capable of holding their own alongside their American or British counterparts.  In these critics’ eyes, not to mention those of the women themselves, Canada was part of an international network of theatrical circuits: there was no shame or sense of loss that Canadian women wished to participate in them.  It probably helped that many of these actresses returned to Canada, performing in both large urban centres, such as Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, and in smaller towns across the country.  Thus, Canadian audiences and reviewers could claim these women as their own, while simultaneously having the pleasure of seeing them ply a craft honed by work on multiple stages.

May Waldron, The Henrietta program, 1887.  Author’s Personal Collection.

I also wanted to expand the discussion of these women’s lives by asking other questions, ones focused on the meaning of being an actress in these decades, and their experiences of working in theatre.  Why did women choose to become actresses or, if they had started their careers as children, what were the circumstances surrounding their early lives? What was it like to have to tour across North America at a time when constant travel became a necessary part of theatrical survival?  What types of roles did they play?

Too, I was interested in seeing them in their “offstage” roles, as part of wider cultural, social, and political currents.  The question of theatrical celebrity kept cropping up in my research, underscoring what cultural historians have been arguing for some time: celebrity is not a late twentieth- or early twenty-first century phenomenon.  Rather, it has a much longer history and was shaped by a host of historical developments, not least the spread of commercial entertainments and nineteenth-century forms of technology.  However, somewhat to my surprise, I found that the kind of celebrity that surrounded these women was rather different than that of very well-known figures such as Sarah Bernhardt, whose appeal to mass audiences rested on her supposed exoticism, her transgressive and outrageous behaviour.  Instead, these women’s celebrity appeal was based on their wholesomeness, hard work, dedication to their craft, and modesty: in short, characteristics that made them “sweet Canadian girls.”  These qualities carried over to their involvement in other parts of life, such as charity work and support for World War One: in short, areas in which these actresses claimed citizenship in transatlantic worlds.  Some – not all, by any means – also endorsed woman’s suffrage, although with a few exceptions their support for the cause came later and tended to be based on less radical or emancipatory grounds.

Other themes also struck me.  In line with their identity as sweet Canadian girls (whether chosen or imposed, or a combination of both), these women helped shape transnational middle-class cultural discourses.  The plays they appeared in frequently addressed the concerns, desires, and anxieties of middle -class audiences: ones that, while they had specific local and regional valences, also resonated across national boundaries.  Moreover, as a group these women represented the economic heterogeneity of the middle class in this period: some came from modest backgrounds, while others were from more prosperous and well-connected homes.  In turn, some women’s lives were marked by constant economic struggle; others achieved very high levels of economic success.

Margaret Bannerman featured in Just Fancy and Beauty, 1920.  Author’s Personal Collection.

Yet although they were not a homogenous group, the women in my book all shared one thing, their identity as white women.  And that was no accident.  As I point out, race was intertwined with gender and class in their careers in multiple ways.  It structured late 19^th-century theatre, being an important determinant of who would appear on what stages and which audiences would see them.  Moreover, I found it quite striking that so many of the plays in which they performed dealt with the themes of race and empire in multiple ways: they might be set in the U.S. West or South, South Africa, and English villages in which the British Empire underpinned important plot developments.  And it’s worth remembering that the societies in which they moved more generally, whether Canada, the United States, Britain, or (for those who toured across the Pacific) Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, saw an increasing hardening of racial categories and increasing racially-charged violence, the latter exercised both at home and abroad.  Sweet Canadian girls were, in this context, white Canadian girls.

Annie Russell, The Royal Family, 1900.  The Royal Family Souvenir Programme, 1900.  Author’s Personal Collection.

Cecilia Morgan is professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, University of Toronto.