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wanted to be an artist. There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with that ambition. Artistic flair was considered an asset in a woman. The ability to sketch, along with some musical ability, and perhaps an aptitude to write light verse, added to a woman’s attractiveness. And if a woman did persist in painting, the subjects thought suitable for her talents were flowers, children, small animals, and delicate landscapes in watercolour.
    The language used to describe women was also applied to their art: delicate, graceful, charming, modest, sensitive— a language of passivity.
    A career as a professional artist just was not considered suitable for a lady. Men could marry and remain artists. Women were expected to be wives and mothers, and little else. A man could be an artist and remain a bachelor, but an unmarried woman was pitied as a spinster. Even in Paris and London, where artistic milieus existed that were opening to women, an artist’s prospects were still determined, in part, by gender.
    Many young women did go to art school. In fact, they tended to dominate in numbers, but as students only, very seldom as teachers. Most never came near to being artists. The only outlet they could find for their talents was as teachers in the regular school system. And if they did form clubs and arts organizations, the names were always prefixed by the words “Ladies” or “Women’s.” Men gave their clubs and organizations more important titles, like Academy, Salon, or Royal Society. And if women were given the opportunity to study in these academies and societies, it often was in segregated classes. The histories of art written at the time made absolutely no mention of a single woman artist.
    When women’s art was reviewed in the newspapers, as Emily’s was, the articles generally appeared in the women’s section. When Emily held an exhibition of her work from France, the paintings were discussed in the Vancouver Province on the page for “Casual Comment on Women’s Activities and Interests,” alongside articles on fashion and social gossip. Men’s art was never relegated to a page otherwise devoted to carpentry and fishing.
    Higher education was effectively closed to women. They were not accepted into most faculties at most universities. Women lawyers, judges, physicians, or engineers simply did not exist. Other than taking menial jobs, they could be typists, secretaries, or clerks. Women did not live alone or travel without a chaperone, and to be unmarried past a certain age carried a social stigma that veered between pity and condemnation. In Canada, women were barred from voting both provincially and federally until 1917–18.
    When the Group of Seven painters began to achieve some positive notice after 1920, they were often portrayed in heroic terms as brave Canadian artists. But when a handful of serious and talented women—contemporaries of Emily’s, if only in age—formed the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal at around the same time, they received nothing like the attention devoted to the Group of Seven, even though they were accomplished painters working in the progressive styles. It is worth noting that of the ten women in the Beaver Hall group, only one married, and only briefly.
    The artistic climate in Victoria, what little there was of it, remained conservative throughout Emily’s lifetime. Art was more often than not displayed at annual fairs along with handicrafts, agricultural products, and horticultural exhibits. The society in which Emily lived viewed art, especially the modern variety, with suspicion, and saw its practitioners as social outsiders, unless they had been lauded already in the dominant European institutions. A modern artist who made no sales and received no commissions was beyond the pale. Because women’s roles were so circumscribed and the expectations of how they should act were so defined, a woman like Emily, who