In Times Like These — Themes and Context

The War Metaphor as Structural Device

The chapter titles—"The War That Never Ends," "The War That Ends in Exhaustion Sometimes Mistaken for Peace," "What Do Women Think of War? (Not That It Matters)"—signal McClung's sustained use of martial language to describe gender conflict. The opening poem personifies nature as a battlefield where "little struggling blades of grass" fight toward the sky, aligning women's cause with organic, irrepressible forces. This metaphor recurs in the prose: McClung describes the church as having "not the use of one wing of its army" by excluding women. The war frame allows her to reframe women's demands as a natural, inevitable struggle rather than a political aberration.

Satirical Dedications and the Rhetoric of Fair Play

The book contains two dedications. The first targets those who believe women speaking in public is "not natural," comparing it to a pony walking on its hind legs—"clever but not natural." The second dedication, longer and more earnest, appeals to readers born with a "sense of fair play" and dismisses those with "mental strabismus" as beyond human correction. This dual structure mirrors McClung's strategy throughout: she alternates between mocking opponents and appealing to shared principles. The phrase "fair deal" appears as a moral anchor, suggesting that women's suffrage is fundamentally a matter of justice rather than novelty.

The Church, the Liquor Traffic, and Political Hypocrisy

McClung devotes significant attention to the church's role in opposing women's emancipation. She argues that churches have "deliberately set its face against the emancipation of women," benefiting the liquor traffic, which fears "the woman with a ballot in her hand." Temperance sermons and resolutions are dismissed as harmless outlets for "hot talk." McClung recounts Aesop's fable of a man who removes his dog's teeth to prevent being bitten, then is eaten by a wolf—a parable for the church disarming itself by excluding women. She notes that while religious bodies pass resolutions favoring suffrage, the state remains unimpressed, and she suggests the church should first grant women equality within its own institutions.

Readers approaching In Times Like These should expect a polemical essay collection rather than a novel or memoir. McClung's arguments are built on analogy, satire, and direct address, with little narrative development. The excerpts show a writer who assumes her audience is familiar with biblical stories, Aesop's fables, and contemporary political debates. Pay attention to how she uses humor to soften criticism—her mockery of "Superior Persons" is sharp but often playful. The book's structure, with its poem prefaces and dual dedications, rewards careful reading of paratextual elements.

The rain drummed steady on the window while I sat with Nellie McClung’s sharp, laughing anger, her sermons turned inside out. Afterwards, the quiet crept in, and I found myself opening her gentler ancestor, a Victorian voice about what reading does to a soul. Sesame and Lilies — Reading Companion felt like stepping from a crowded street into a hallway, the same locked door, a different key left on the sill.