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Abstract
This article extends recent scholarship on women’s rhetorical education and practices, which has focused primarily on the experiences of American women, by analyzing the career of Canadian elocutionist Edna Sutherland (1869–1956). Despite the tendency in Canada’s postsecondary institutions to marginalize public speaking instruction as a merely “practical” concern, Sutherland pursued a 35-year academic career, teaching voice culture and becoming Dean of Women successively at the University of Manitoba and Manitoba College. The article examines her negotiation of local circumstances to achieve this success as an instance of rhetorical resilience. Ultimately, Sutherland’s performative abilities complemented her private and college teaching, while the cultural authority she gained as a result supported her contributions to public life, many focused on opportunities for women. The article considers as well how American and British influences on her advocacy for speech training may reflect broader national trends.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the University of Winnipeg for its generous support of the research undertaken for this article through travel funding and research leave; Ashleen Scott for research assistance; staff at the Archives and Records Centre, University of Winnipeg, and at the Northumberland County Archives (Cobourg, Ontario) for allowing me access to their collections; and Brian Turner and two anonymous reviewers for the American Review of Canadian Studies for their helpful suggestions.
ORCID
Judith Kearns 
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4255-5285
Notes
1. The Manitoba Free Press became, in 1931, the Winnipeg Free Press. For the sake of convenience, references to the newspaper from this point will be cited simply as FP.
2. The I.O.D.E. is a charitable organization founded during the Boer War in support of the British Empire. From its first chapter in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the I.O.D.E. spread across Canada, undertaking philanthropic and educational work; it is still active today. A 1916 report from the Lord Selkirk chapter, whose members included suffrage activist Nellie McClung and pioneering journalist Cora Hind, outlines its objectives as follows: “We intended to be, and were until the war broke out, primarily a studying chapter; we hoped to have a membership composed of women of quick intelligence and warm hearts, most of them in business and professional life…; we aimed at democratic principles in conducting affairs; and we decided to take as our special outside interest the helping of women and children” (160). The report includes a warm tribute to the chapter’s first regent, Edna Sutherland, “this gifted daughter of Canada,” who among “many other pressing activities” furthered the chapter’s Settlers’ Welcome work until it was interrupted by the war.
3. Highlighting the precariousness of the record, though, is the disappearance of the Journal for a ten-year period after the November 1894 issue; it reappears, fortuitously, with the November 1904 issue in which it is announced that “A new and pleasing feature in the Theological classes this year is the teaching of Elocution by Miss Sutherland.”
4. Interestingly, this makes Sutherland an exact contemporary and possible playmate of Leila Kerber, later to achieve fame as the actress Marie Dressler; she too was born in Cobourg, on November 9, 1869. With a population of about 5,000, Cobourg was certainly small enough that it is tempting to see an association between Kerber, who is described as participating in community dramatics as a young child, and Sutherland, later a gifted elocutionist. Kerber’s family, however, did not stay long in Cobourg, and her childhood was spent in various towns in Ontario and Michigan. Sutherland, whose early years were set entirely in Cobourg, described herself in the Woman’s Who’s who of America as an ardent imperialist, an allegiance evident in her later activities.
5. The Brantford Ladies’ College calendars for 1890–91 and 1898–99 are available online at http://brantford.library.on.ca/files/pdfs/localhistory/ladiescollege1890.pdf and at http://brantford.library.on.ca/files/pdfs/localhistory/ladiescollege1898.pdf. They identify Miss Gertrude Hart, graduate of the Boston School of Oratory, as teacher of elocution and physical culture. A notable predecessor was Professor A. Melville Bell, father of Alexander Graham Bell, who taught at the college circa 1874–78. Information about the Ontario Ladies College, where Miss Teskey, another Boston graduate, taught elocution, is provided by Johanna M. Selles (Citation1996) in Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1924; like Alma College, the Ontario Ladies College offered a diploma in elocution. In “English Composition in Canadian schools,” Nan Johnson (Citation1987) provides information about the course of study in English typically offered in the nineteenth-century Canadian high school curriculum, including the place of elocution.
6. The Executive Committee of the Manitoba College Board of Management moved “that Miss Edna Sutherland be charged $70.00 per month as living expenses in the Women’s Residence with a proportionate amount to be deducted for meals she doesn’t take in the College dining room and that the regular charge be made for her sister’s meals when staying with her” (November 16, 1920; MC-9, Committee minutes, University of Winnipeg Archives and Records Centre). Despite its distance from Shanghai and her advancing years, Harriet visited Winnipeg in 1921, 1924, 1928, and 1932 (when she was 74, and Edna 63). Her husband, who began his work in China in 1865, at the age of 30, was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1906 and died in 1920.
7. Together with contralto Merrielle Patton and violinist Frank Smith. Sutherland traveled on this tour as far as San Francisco; the trio put on more than a hundred performances. Winnipeg was a regular stop on North American tours. It is one of the cities where Sarah Bernhardt appeared, in “Camille,” in her farewell tour of 1905–06.
8. Sutherland’s contemporaries had expected that she would return to Boston or to eastern Canada, which “have the prior claim.” Clearly, she perceived opportunities here of which they were not so confident, among them, perhaps, working with such notable Manitoba women as McClung and Hind.
9. It may be, of course, that Cann received a call to minister to a parish outside of Winnipeg and was no longer able to continue teaching at the College. Sutherland herself was not included in the regular faculty listing in the Manitoba College Calendar until 1912. Her salary had risen considerably by the 1920s; when she gave up decanal responsibilities in 1922 to focus entirely on her teaching, which by that stage included evening classes, she was paid $1500 per annum.
10. Evans’ apparently unsuccessful letters of application for the years 1894 through 1896 can be found in the Manitoba College Archives: MC-11 Files #3 and 10, letters from J.F. Evans to Dr. King, University of Winnipeg Archives and Records Centre. A graduate of the University of Toronto, he taught elocution both at Knox and at the State University of South Dakota.
11. Though the article is unnamed, the student writers are no doubt responding to J.F. MacDonald’s “Public Speaking as a College Subject.” MacDonald attributes “the American college man’s readiness of speech” to the course in public speaking that is so regular a feature in the American curriculum, and contrasts that circumstance to the situation nearer home: “In our Canadian colleges we have left the subject severely alone. Spasmodic efforts by short courses in Elocution, especially in Faculties of Theology, have been our only attempts to improve what we admit to be a distressing rawness in the average Canadian graduate” (Citation1908, 149). Describing a typical course at the University of Chicago, which he notes has a strong staff in this area, and no doubt aware of xenophobic attitudes such an instance might arouse in his Canadian readers, MacDonald claims that the course “acts as a wholesome corrective to anything approaching bombast or mere rhetoric. The man who takes the course at Chicago will come out with as healthy a dislike for the arts of the ‘spellbinder’ as the most hard-hearted Canadian businessman has” (Citation1908, 151).
12. References to national cultures that contrast American to British behavior in these terms have a long history; Campbell cites a New Brunswick woman’s observation, in an 1840 letter, that “the American are proverbial for show, and the English for plainness” (Citation2006, 77). Without commenting on the nationalities of either team, a student writer in the Manitoba College Journal (Citation1887–1913) praises the “Toba winners of an intercollegiate debate on ‘the careful preparation of their subject and on the clear, manly, unostentatious way in which their speeches were delivered’ (February 1905), demonstrating a similar set of values. More recently, Thacker has argued “that anti-Americanism is very much a part of English-Canadian cultural ethos” (Citation1995, 43) and, in particular, “is a cultural trait which has, to a large extent, driven the development of English studies in Canada” (45). Its impact on the curbing of writing instruction in Canadian universities has received considerable attention (see, especially, Brooks’ (Citation2006) “National Culture and the First-Year English Curriculum”); this article suggests that it had a similar effect on matters of expression and the teaching of delivery.
13. Johnson (Citation2006, 53–54) similarly notes that “English” culture “held few attractions for nineteenth-century Americans but … implied a host of unimpeachable virtues to Anglo-Canadian educators who believed that cultural continuity with Britain was essential to the progressive development of the ‘Young Dominion’”.
14. One of the most influential of the latter was Elizabeth Parker, whose own career was inspired by Sutherland. Having complained to the editor of the Free Press that Sutherland’s 1903 Browning recital had not received enough attention in the press, she then took up Defoe’s challenge to write a review of her own. Better known today as one of the founders of the Alpine Club of Canada (of which Sutherland was also a member), she wrote for 36 years under the pen name “The Bookman”—a role that helped, no doubt, to shape the popular profile of her protégé.
15. The tour seems to have resulted in a cancelation of Sutherland’s elocution classes at Manitoba College. A Journal article is headlined “No Elocution class this winter!” and raises again the argument for making the subject a regular feature in the college curriculum:
It is very wrong of a College to let men go out to their life work for which it professes to equip them, unaware of their vocal defects and of the dangers to which they are open as public speakers. What is the use of all the labored study in the different branches of Theology if the great instrument of communication—the organ of speech—is defective? We repeat that the training of the voice should be considered of first importance. If it is urged against the above suggestion that no colleges have adopted it our reply is that in this new country of new ideas and methods we must lead the way and proclaim innovation where most needful. We must not be in bondage to cast-iron structures and usages of older and less progressive countries.
It seems likely that several years of Sutherland’s teaching have added weight to the argument expressed here, as well as influencing its concern with possible afflictions of the voice that may be suffered by those whose careers involve public speaking. The security of her position, once she returned from the farewell tour, indicates that College authorities responded to the students’ appeal that “our Church in Canada, especially in the West, recognize … its duty toward its students in this respect.”
16. The initiative Sutherland proposed seems to have benefited a number of charitable organizations, especially during the First World War, when fund-raising demands multiplied. The Free Press observes in August of 1916 that “Last spring a number of Manitoba societies took advantage of Miss Sutherland’s offer to settle the question of finances for the summer. Every recital was a success, according to both treasurers and publicity committees”; it notes the following year that the Young Ladies’ Club of Augustine Church will give to the Red Cross money it intends to raise by “secur[ing] the services of Miss Sutherland for a series of five interpretative readings to be held monthly” (September 29, 1917). The cooperation of cultural, charitable, and patriotic impulses noted here is, of course, not unique to Winnipeg; as Tippett notes in Making Culture, “during both the Boer War and First World War drama, choral, art, and instrumental groups across the country gave the proceeds of their performances or exhibitions to patriotic fund-raising campaigns” (Citation1990, 11).
17. Early reports on Sutherland’s first visit assumed that she would return to Boston or eastern Canada after only a short stay, and her decision to settle in Winnipeg was presented as something of a cultural coup, occasionally threatened by the possibility that she would accept a position elsewhere. In 1917, for instance, a rumor circulates that she is considering an offer from the University of California at Berkeley.
18. The Free Press writes of the London Society’s honoring Sutherland with an appointment to their executive that “[a] close relationship leading to the exchange of ideas and practices between the organizations is expected to develop” (November 10, 1933).
19. Sutherland had been appointed to teach Voice Production, Expression, and Public Speaking at the University of Manitoba after several years of student requests for such instruction; the provincial university’s historical dependence on the teaching resources of the denominational colleges no doubt made her a familiar figure to the English Department Chair seeking “a mature instructor with special training” (University of Manitoba Annual Reports Citation1914–Citation15, 30). Her return to Manitoba College may have resulted from a sense that her talents were better appreciated there: At the University of Manitoba, her “very popular and helpful” classes “earn students who take them no academic credit” (University of Manitoba Annual Reports Citation1918–Citation19, 6–7).
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Judith Kearns
Judith Kearns has served as director of the Centre for Academic Writing (1995–2001), acting Dean of Humanities (2001–02), and chair of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications. Her research interests include the life-writing of early modern women, the history of writing instruction in Canada, and writing program curriculum and administration. She has also co-authored articles on writing studies at the University of Winnipeg.