Interview about "A Striking Woman"

 Interview with Ruth Latta about A Striking Woman (Ottawa, Baico, 2023)

Q: Who and what was the inspiration for A Striking Woman?

A: The novel was inspired by a period in the life of the trade union leader Madeleine Parent (1918-2012). I won’t say that it is “based on” her life because to say that suggests that it is one hundred per cent faithful to her life events, and it isn’t.  A Striking Woman is historical fiction; it isn’t biography and it isn’t scholarly history.  That’s why I’ve called my central character, “Jacqueline,” not “Madeleine.”

Like all novelists, I have created scenes and characters and have given fictional names to some people, organizations and places, but not to others. Characters derived from real people mingle with imagined ones and composites. I’ve changed family configurations and certain characters’ backgrounds.

The emotions, behaviours, beliefs and opinions that I have given my characters are the product of informed guesswork and some of the characters hold opinions that I do not share.

Q: That sounds intriguing. Did you ever meet with Miss Parent and discuss her life and career?

A: I met her once back in the 1990s when I was researching a non-fiction book about the Canadian Youth Congress, a Canada-wide young people’s organization across Canada which existed during the last half of the Great Depression, from 1935 to 1941.  It became a casualty of war.  

Madeleine was a student at McGill University for part of this time period and was involved in the CYC and also in another student organization, the Canadian Students Assembly, so that was what we talked about.  She was very kind and cordial, but our conversation was confined to the youth movements of the 1930s.  I wish we’d had time to discuss her work in the union movement and the women’s movement.

Q: Your previous Canadian historical novels have been praised for the amount of research you’ve done and for making history come alive. What research did you do for A Striking Woman?

A: I already knew a fair amount about the Great Depression and the Second World War, and the changes in the political atmosphere between the 1930s  to the mid-1970s - the time frame of the novel. Back in the days when I was “Ruth Olson,” I earned a Master’s in History at Queen’s University, and I still find the subject compelling. 

In preparation for A Striking Woman,  I read up on the 20th century trade union movement in Canada and on Madeleine Parent’s life - the articles she’d written and others’ articles about her. There is no biography of Miss Parent as yet.

Q: The character, Jacqueline, in your novel, doesn’t come from the kind of background that one would expect a trade union leader to arise from.

A: That’s right. She comes from a middle class French-Canadian Montreal family. She attends elite private schools and then McGill University. 

Q: What prompts Jacqueline to get involved in the trade union movement?

A: Her social conscience and her observations of people struggling during the Great Depression. From early on, she is concerned about people in need and tries to help them.  This awareness stems in part from her religious education, although, as she grows up, she sees the Church as an obstacle to social progress. 

Observing the effects of the Depression on everyday people, she questions the fairness of the society in which she lives. She switches from French Literature to Sociology at university because the latter field seems more in tune with examining and remedying social ills. She also gets involved with progressive groups..

In one part of the novel, she interviews the family of her former household helper for a Sociology project.  This woman, from a Quebec textile mill town, is now married and raising a family, and she and her relatives have much to tell Jacqueline about the terrible wages and working conditions in the mill, and about a failed strike earlier on. Jacqueline decides that the union movement is the best source of help for working people.

Q: The war clouds gathering in the late 1930s seem to have had a profound influence on Jacqueline and other young adults in that era. Is that so?

A: Yes. Young people (and many older adults too) were frustrated that the western democracies were unable to nip Hitler’s aggressions in the bud. Youth realized that if war came, the young men would be called up to fight and die. All had heard about the carnage of the First World War and didn’t want it to happen again, but it did. The Spanish Civil War,  a proxy war for the later World War II, radicalized Jacqueline and others of her generation.

Q: A Striking Woman is presented from Jacqueline’s point-of-view, but in the third person. Why did you choose this narrative technique?

A: “Third person limited” is  like “first person”  in that the reader knows only what one character is thinking and feeling, yet provides some distance, allows for irony and  reminds the reader that the author and the narrator aren’t one and the same.  In life one rarely has complete insight into others’ feelings and motivations; often the best we can do is to understand our own. 

Q: You show, in a humorous way, that during that era, many men on the left of the political spectrum failed to extend their progressive ideas to women’s issues.

A: That attitude  has lasted a long time. Jacqueline, a socialist and a feminist,   found a male ally who treated woman like grown-up human beings.

Q: I liked the ending but found it heart-rending.

A: Thank you. In a way, I bring the novel around full-circle, showing that Jacqueline has resolved some of the issues that concerned her in her youth, and that her working class connections sustain her when life gets tough.