Community Events Calendar

Join Rebecca Beausaert for the Tillsonburg launch of Pursuing Play: Women’s Leisure in Small-Town Ontario, 1870–1914(University of Manitoba Press) featuring a reading, book signing, and refreshments. The launch will be hosted at Annandale National...

Join Rebecca Beausaert for the Tillsonburg launch of Pursuing Play: Women’s Leisure in Small-Town Ontario, 1870–1914 (University of Manitoba Press) featuring a reading, book signing, and refreshments. The launch will be hosted at Annandale National Historic Site on Sunday, October 20, 1–3pm.

Life in the Canadian countryside at the turn of the twentieth century is often generalized as insular, backwards, and arduous. These assumptions are redressed in Rebecca Beausaert’s Pursuing Play, which highlights the complexity of small-town culture through a lively examination of women’s efforts to negotiate space for themselves and their leisure pursuits. Amply illustrated, Pursuing Play draws on diaries, letters, and newspapers to investigate women’s recreational activities—including sports, “armchair travelling,” gambling, and Spinster Conventions—in Dresden, Tillsonburg, and Elora between 1870–1914.

Rebecca Beausaert is an adjunct professor in the Department of History, University of Guelph, and co-founder and co-director of the “What Canada Ate” website. She was also Annandale House's summer research assistant from 2003-2006.

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