Introduction : strong statement, trenchant ideas, promising plans -- Anges Maule Machar, Christian radical -- The uses of wit : Sara Jeannette Duncan's self-fashioning -- 'This graceful olive branch of the Iroquois' : Pauline Johnson's rhetoric of reconciliation -- Gossip, chit-chat, and life lessons : Kit Coleman's womanly persona -- Heroines and martyrs in the cause : suffrage as holy war in the journalism of Flora MacDonald Denison -- Nellie McClung and the rhetoric of the Fair Deal -- Conclusion.