A GIRL SHOULD BE

A Girl Should Be  is the title of my new book, to be published later in 2021 by Baico Publishing of Ottawa. It's a stand-alone sequel to my novel, 

Votes, Love and War, published by Baico in 2019.  Votes is about the Manitoba Women's Suffrage movement and the First World War. It centred on a fictional character, a farm girl named Charlotte, but brought in historical figures such as the Beynon sisters, Nellie McClung, and other pioneers of the 20th century women's suffrage movement.

Charlotte was of a generation that came of age just before or during the First World War.  I am particularly interested in the history of the 1920s and 1930s, and decided to write another novel, focusing on Charlotte's younger sister, Annie.  Annie is as much of a "flapper" as she can be in rural and small town Manitoba in the 1920s.  Then, with the onset of the Great Depression, starting with the stock market crash in 1929, Annie's life changes.

Although Annie's chief interest is in fashion, she qualifies as a teacher and finds a job at a remote school in Northwestern Ontario, where she makes a success of a difficult job - but not so much in her personal life.

The title A Girl Should Be, is from a quote attributed to Coco Chanel, who is reported to have said, 

"A girl should be anything she wants to be."  The novel is about women's changing roles and the various social expectations of women at that time  (many of them unfair.)

In writing about Ontario backwoods schools of the 1930s I was inspired by the experiences of my mother and three of her sisters who were rural teachers during the Depression years and afterwards.  I hasten to add that none of these ladies was the real Annie, who is a fictional creation.