Gender and the Great Experiment: ‘Feminine and Canadian Eyes’ See Soviet Women, 1926–1936Article by Kirk Niergarth published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association in 2015. Article focuses on the travelogues of five educated, professional, middle-class Canadian women who visited the Soviet Union in the interwar period: Alexandrine Gibb, Margaret Gould, Agnes Macphail, Margaret McWilliams, and Ella Smith. For these visitors, Soviet women were a point of emphasis, and on this subject they claimed special insight and relative expertise. Gibb, for example, offered readers a “pair of feminine and Canadian eyes and ears ready to give you mysterious Russia.” Whatever else feminine Canadian eyes saw in the USSR — for Soviet reality varied considerably between 1926 and 1936 when these women travelled — they gave Canadian audiences a more-or-less consistent impression that the great experiment was providing Soviet women opportunities denied women in Canada. This was an impression that not all Canadian audiences were prepared to accept.
