My friend Clarissa Harwood is a sweet, self-effacing Canadian who nonetheless has a fiery fearlessness to her — just like her unforgettable characters. She is the author of three historical novels, and I had the pleasure of chatting with her recently on the occasion of Women’s History Month.
What great book have you read recently about women's history? Fiction or non-fiction.
One real-life woman I've read about recently is Mary Morrow, a neurologist who fought the expectations of her family and her society in the 1950s to gain the education and experience she needed to work in her chosen field. She asked the director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Dr. Ewen Cameron, to hire her, but he convinced her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation first. Mary, a brilliant doctor, was forced into the role of patient and became one of the many unwitting subjects tortured by Cameron in his attempt to find a quick cure for mental illness (the torture took the form of repeated electroshock treatments, drug cocktails including LSD, and medically-induced comas that lasted as long as several weeks). Cameron died before he could be held accountable for ruining the lives of Mary and many other people (several of whom suffered from conditions as common as postpartum depression), but Mary spent the rest of her life fighting for justice. Cameron's work turned out to have been funded by the CIA as part of their MKUltra mind-control project. Anne Collins's book In the Sleep Room is a riveting account of the whole mess. If I don’t write a historical novel about Mary Morrow, I hope somebody else does!
Mary Morrow sounds fantastic! I do hope you’ll write about her. For your existing books, was there anything in your research about women's history that surprised you? What was it?
In the early stages of my research for Impossible Saints, I was most surprised by the violent way the suffragettes were treated by police and prison officials. The militant suffragettes were represented in the media at the time as “unwomanly,” disorderly criminals, but even their most extreme activities such as setting bombs in letterboxes or empty buildings paled in comparison to the backlash against them. During public speeches and peaceful protests, they were assaulted physically and sexually by bystanders and the police. When they were arrested for destroying property and went on hunger strikes, they were force fed in brutal ways. Whatever one’s opinion may be of their militant activities, they didn’t hurt people, only property. Yet they were attacked physically, and some of them died later from the injuries they sustained in prison.
I was also surprised by the very forthright language these women used. I came across a suffragette’s speech from 1913 in which she basically said that men think not with their minds but with . . . er, a different part of their bodies. And she wasn’t the only woman who spoke her mind so plainly. As extreme as my protagonist Lilia is, I actually toned her down a little because I knew readers would think she was too modern. Based on my research, I believe feminism was actually at its peak during the pre-WWI years. The rest of the 20th century saw some gains for women, but for every step forward there were several steps back. I know it’s a controversial opinion, but I stand by it!
Clarrisa’s debut novel, Impossible Saints, with its fierce suffragettes.