¶ … Nellie McClung's book In Times Like These chronicles the struggles of common, Canadian women on the frontier in a series of speeches and essays by the author that were intended for the public at large or the audience of suffrage and temperance organizations. In Times Like These celebrates the rural and western ideal of life on the homestead for both women and men. It extols the moral superiority of Canadian country life over Canadian city life even while it strives to consciously uplift the Canadian urban locale through improved social policy. In her fiction, McClung once compared the country life to a nutritious and life-sustaining diet of "good brown bread" in contrast to the insubstantial "popcorn and chocolate" fare of the cities of the East. This practical comparison of life through the 'staff' of life, of the goodness of home-cooked food often prepared by women vs. The mass produced capitalist comestibles of the city, is at the heart of McClung's maternal and idealist ideology. McClung was an advocate of women's equality, but an equality-based best realized on the home front, which offered women the ability to shine in the skills they excelled in, such as teaching, cooking, and the raising of the next generation.

This philosophy of the superiority of country life is reflected in the author's own biography. Helen McClung was born "Helen Mooney" in 1873 in Ontario. It was said, "it was a disappointment to her eldest brother Will. What a pity to have another girl!" he cried!

In 1880, Helen Mooney moved with her family to farm near Milford. At the age of sixteen, after only five scant years of formal education, Helen moved to Winnipeg where she attended Normal School and qualified as a teacher. In 1890, she went to teach at Manitou, where she boarded with the family of the Reverend James and Annie McClung and became profoundly influenced by the couple's faith. Helen was born to a Scottish Protestant Father and a Irish Catholic...

Women should strive only to improve society as a whole, not for themselves as women alone, although the temperance cause was particularly devoted to alleviating the suffering of women and children from alcoholism -- but always in a maternal rather than a female-empowering ideological fashion.
Nellie McClung's In Times Like These is a testimony to the popularity of its author. It is a collection of long-standing, collected speeches and essays drawn from McClung's extensive career as a speaker for a Manitoba suffrage and temperance organization and shows that McClung was a popular enough speaker and public figure to have confidence that there was a demand to see her speeches in print that she had already given to a wide public audience. The…