Hi. I'm Nancy Millar.
I write books and plays and skits and whatever else sneaks onto my plate. I do speeches too.
Most of my writing is about history, mostly about women’s history. For instance, I was part of the original group of women in Calgary who created the Famous Five Foundation and brought that terribly important story into our textbooks and consciousness.
The original five from the 1920s- Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Henrietta Muir Edwards and Louise McKinney- were a gutsy bunch. I love them a lot and write about them a lot, speak about them a lot.
That’s what I’m doing in the Emily Murphy hat, (above) talking to a classroom about the Alberta Five who fought for equality.
By the way, Emily would have loved that hat- the bigger the better for her.
Nancy Millar with a corset circa 1930
Before I began the more recent Famous Five research and writing, I had already explored and found all sorts of history in interesting places. Graveyards, for one. People thought I was nuts when I began seeking history through the epitaphs on our gravestones but those same gravestones told story after story. I was blessed to learn so much about our country among the silent stones.
Then I got thinking about weddings. Did they hold history for me? Of course, they did. Weddings are loaded with significance and tradition.
And then I found this old corset in mom's trunk.
This is the sort of corset my mother wore in the 1930s and 40s. It’s not as tight or as structured as Queen Victoria’s would have been but it nevertheless imposed a certain amount of control. A woman’s body was not intended to roam around unfettered inside her clothing in earlier times; it had to be held in check. So as I tried to figure out how to lace this thing up, I began to wonder- just what did that control do to women over the last 100 years, say, both physically and psychologically? That’s how The Unmentionable History of the West started.