"Max and her 'pard": the Rocking P gazette (1923-5) and the cultural production of settler girlhood in southern Alberta

Abstract

Published between 1923-25 by teenage sisters Dorothy and Maxine Macleay, the Rocking P Gazette is a unique example of girl-made media. Comprising seventeen issues averaging eighty pages each, the Gazette documented daily life on the Macleay’s ranches, the Rocking P and Bar S. Its imaginative fiction and artwork draw inspiration from the girls’ interpersonal relationships and experiences growing up on a ranch, making it an invaluable source for the history of childhood and girlhood in early twentieth century western Canada. This thesis argues that (1) the Macleay girls engaged with, appropriated, and adapted adult-made media for their homemade magazine, which produced and reproduced settler-colonial silences and cowboy culture, and (2) that they challenged conventions of age and gender by expressing a class-based power over their audience of adult male ranch hands. Drawing examples from Dorothy and Maxine’s written and artistic work, this thesis aims to demonstrate how girls in rural 1920s Alberta could be active cultural producers.