Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis

The 1901 census listed 50 women journalists at a time when the population of Canada was about 5.4 million and newspapers were wildly popular—the equivalent of the internet today. Widespread literacy and rapidly increasing urbanization had made the daily newspaper “indispensible” to city dwellers, according to author Linda Kay, a journalism professor at Concordia University, in The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club. “As early as 1883, the average Toronto family bought two newspapers a day,” she writes, pointing out that in Montreal “Le Monde declared the newspaper to be ‘un article de première nécessité, comme le pain et la viande.’” Publishers would be laughed out of their own newsrooms if they dared to make such a statement today.

This slim book speaks volumes about how little we know about the history of early female journalists in this country. Partly that is because women were relegated to society and advice...