If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll see that I’ve changed the header image. After half a year at this blogging business, it seemed to me that the site needed something visually fresh. WordPress regularly introduces new “themes” or blog templates but none so far quite duplicate what I like about my current Cutline theme.
So I’m sticking with Cutline, but the header can be changed, and perhaps for now, that’s fresh enough. Continue reading
I will, as promised in the last post, write about Katie Funk Wiebe and her book You Never Gave Me a Name, within the week I hope, but first this….
I’m just back from the launch of Leaders Who Shaped Us, a book of 25 biographies of Canadian Mennonite Brethren. (This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Mennonite Brethren denomination, and the centennial of the Canadian part of it.) Harold Jantz (left) planned the book, served as its editor, and also wrote six of the biographies. This evening, in his usual passionate and persuasive way, he highlighted the significance of some of them. Abram Kroeker, for example, not only a key early player in the potato growing industry of Manitoba, but a tireless promoter of Sunday school in churches, so much so that he became known as Mr. Sunday School. And entrepeneur C.A. DeFehr who was always on the scene, it seemed, when it came to building up the institutions of the church.
It was while he was on holidays, Jantz said, and thus energized, that the idea for the book came to him. He realized that he knows a great deal of early Canadian MB history, and he also knows how quickly memory can disappear. He put together a list of 25 names out of a great many he could have chosen — 25 people who demonstrate influence and “shaping” of the Canadian church in various ways over the century. A number of the biographical subjects, including Herb Neufeld, John Redekop, Nick Dyck, and others, are still alive. David Ewert, who is also written of in the book, is unfortunately very seriously ill following a stroke several days ago.*
Nineteen writers contributed to the volume in all, and those of us from Winnipeg who were around — Ingrid Koss, Dorothy Siebert, Sarah Klassen, Doug Heidebrecht, and myself — participated by reading a portion of our piece or talking about the experience of researching and writing our particular subject. I had written the article on B.B. Janz, “Moses” to some 20,000 Mennonites who managed to leave the Soviet Union in the 1920s and subsequently a leader in many aspects of Mennonite life here in Canada. I found him quite compelling. He was intelligent, sensitive, and persistent to the point of stubbornness. I liked his position on how conscientious objectors might have participated during World War II (as non-combatants, but providing service in the interests of life even on the battle front), though he annoyed conservative Mennonites by it and had no success with the government in developing such a program either. There was even a small personal connection, as my mother whispered to remind me after my little spiel tonight; B.B. Janz had ordained my father for church ministry.
I saw the completed book for the first time this evening. It looks great and I can hardly wait to read it.
Dorothy Siebert contributed 2 biographies: on Marie Wiebe and H.S. Rempel
Ingrid Koss wrote about Anna Thiessen
Doug Heidebrecht wrote about Katie Funk Wiebe
Sarah Klassen authored the story of missionary Katy Penner
*David Ewert died April 23, 2010. See post in his honour.
What am I reading these days?
Well, thanks for wondering (if you did, that is). I’ve been reading the lives of two feminists: Gloria Steinem and Katie Funk Wiebe. (I’m not sure KFW called herself a feminist, but she dared call herself a theologian, so close enough; plus I know one of her daughters gives her that label.)
These two women were born about a decade apart. Funk Wiebe is 85 now, and Steinem is 76. In many respects they were quite different, but both are writers, and both are known for their leadership in the women’s movement, Steinem as an internationally recognized icon of the “revolution,” and Funk Wiebe on the smaller but still significant stage of the Mennonite world.
I picked up The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995) at the local used bookstore. I was drawn to it for two reasons. It seemed a good way to recall an era that I, though younger, also lived through. And who wasn’t aware of Steinem, so often in the papers, on the covers of major magazines, founder of Ms. magazine, author of books like Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Revolution from Within (1992)?
Steinem was a journalist and political activist, for causes like migrant farm workers and then on behalf of women’s rights, including abortion, and, as already stated, leader and spokesperson for the Women’s Liberation Movement (as it was called then), in the 1960s and 70s.
Yes, it takes me back all right, to the controversies, the milieu of the world I was entering as a teen and young woman. Consciousness-raising. It’s been a long time since I heard that expression! Consciousness-raising groups were “intimate assemblies, in which women discovered that their problems were not singular but ubiquitous and widely shared…” The phrase eventually referred, I think, simply to making people aware of sexist language and attitudes, and inequalities between men and women.
I was also interested in this book because I wanted to see how author Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who studied how women’s lives are written (Writing a Woman’s Life, 1988), would approach this biography. I felt she was too analytical of Steinem at times, and thus stood between Steinem and the reader, but her work also seemed thorough and it was well written.
I found myself very much liking and admiring Gloria Steinem. Though I disagree with some of her views, I’m thankful to her, and of course many other women as well, for their courage and convictions about the rights of women. Steinem was quite relentlessly attacked, both within the movement and without – too radical for some, not radical enough for others. She was articulate, confident, and willing to defend herself when necessary, but refused to respond to much of the hostility directed at her. “She is … an extraordinary combination of change-maker and peacemaker…,” someone said of her, “genuinely humble and kind.”
(In reference to the “trashing” within the women’s movement, Pat Schroeder wrote, “Women have not yet learned the game of ‘rumps together, horns out’.”)
She was an especially beautiful woman, which was considered an advantage in reassuring those who imagined feminists as some kind of hideous harridans, but her looks also garnered no end of unwelcome comment and celebrity.
The Woman’s Liberation Movement may already seem ancient history to many. In “Remembering the 70s,” an article I wrote for the MB Herald back in 2001, I noted, “When the earth is altered in some way, say by cutting trees or planting them, bulldozing in a road or excavating for a new housing development, we soon forget the contours of the earlier terrain; we soon imagine that this is the way this particular space has always looked.” Yes, one easily forgets. Reading Gloria Steinem’s life, I remember earlier spaces, and I remember changes, and I’m grateful.
And in a subsequent post, I’ll say something about reading the life of Katie Funk Wiebe.
Borrowing Bones 