A Great Restlessness: The Life and Times of Dorise Nielsen
by Faith Johnston (9780887556906)

Dorise Nielsen was a pioneering feminist, a radical politician, and the first Communist elected to Canada's House of Commons. However, despite her remarkable career, little has been known about Nielsen. It is only now, after 20 years of painstaking research and appeals through the Access to Information Act, that her story can finally be told. From her youth in London during World War I to her death in Beijing following the Cultural Revolution, Nielsen lived through tumultuous times that demanded a response. In Saskatchewan, her rebellion against poverty and injustice and against her own constricted life as a homesteader's wife led her first to the CCF and then to the Communist Party of Canada. In the 1940s, when leaders of the Communist Party were either interned or underground, Nielsen was their voice in Parliament. In the end, however, it cost her. As a single mother in Ottawa, she sacrificed her children for her career; as a Communist living in China, she dedicated her life's work to a cause that went seriously awry. With vivid and evocative prose, author Faith Johnston illuminates the life and politics of a woman who faced daunting challenges with remarkable courage and tenacity, who tried to be both a good mother and a good revolutionary and failed on both counts, but who refused to give up on either.

USD $24.95

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