About the Book
Received an Honourable Mention for the 2018 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing
The first book on Agnes Deans Cameron, BC’s first female principal, itinerant traveller, and journalist.
Agnes Deans Cameron was an extraordinary woman who was ahead by a century. Born in Victoria in 1863, she was the first female school principal in the province, but she worked tirelessly to achieve work equality and voting rights for women. One of Canada’s most well known writers of her time, she put western Canada on the map through her writing, which was published internationally including in the Saturday Evening Post. She was also a trailblazer in sports, becoming the first “Lady Centurion” in the West.
A consummate trailblazer, in the summer of 1906, Cameron travelled 10,000 miles down the Mackenzie River and out into the Beaufort Sea—something no other European woman had done—in one short season.
Cameron was named one of the top 150 most significant individuals in the history of the province of British Columbia. This is the first book commemorating her life.
Reviews
“A dramatic, thoroughly-researched biography of a woman in British Columbia, Canada, who was a leading educator, a writer, a fighter for work-place equality and voting rights for women (100 years ahead of her time) and, to add to the lustre of her achievements, she was also an avid cyclist, a journalist, a silk-lavender model, and a woman who became the first to travel 10,000 miles down the Mackenzie River out into the Beaufort Sea in one season. Read it for the fun of it, the history of it, and ask whether today’s feminists have done as much as this fair lady accomplished.” —Peter Warren, former host of Warren on the Weekend
“[Agnes Deans Cameron] was an extraordinary woman for any time; an extraordinary person for any time.” —Sheryl Mackay, CBC’s North by Northwest
“Agnes Deans Cameron[‘s] . . . unconventional life story is captivating. Cathy Converse’s characteristically approachable writing style and thorough archival research leaves readers with a strong sense of who Cameron was as a person and the times in which she lived.” —BC History
“Agnes Deans Cameron was unstoppable.” —The Ormsby Review