She smelled of ammonia. Her feet were big. She looked at least ten years older than she actually was. Her hands were stained with ink, and so were her clothes: maybe a wrinkled old blouse or a drab dress, sometimes a man’s smoking jacket. Her hair, which was red and curly, she wore up, just because it was more practical that way. “I simply detest fashion,” she once declared. She had a temper. Some said her face was hard and cruel. Her writing, certainly, could be blunt and without mercy. She was sharped-tongued and quick-witted. Kit Coleman did not suffer fools lightly.
But for decades, she was also the reigning expert on Canadian hearts, the author of the country’s first “advice for the lovelorn” column. Every week, she dispensed her romantic wisdom to thousands of readers. She got bags full of letters asking her to help win a heart or solve marital woes. In her own life, she would marry three men and attract proposals from at least five more.
They called her the Queen of Hearts.
Still, while Kit Coleman may have once been among the country’s most famous journalists, it’s not easy to trace her personal history. She was a public figure but a private woman; much like Mazo de la Roche, she was prone to mixing lies with the truth when it came to her own past. She lied about her age and about her family background. She burned most of her letters and diaries, openly encouraging her readers to do the same. Even her gender could be something of a mystery; when her androgynous name led some readers to accuse her of being a man, she toyed with them, refusing to give a straight answer.
What we do know is that she was born in a small Irish village during the winter of 1856, to a middle-class farming family in the hard years that followed the Great Famine. To secure her future, her family arranged a marriage for her; whether she liked it or not, she was going to marry a wealthy landowner. Some sources say she was just sixteen years old at the time. The marriage was destined to be short and loveless. Her husband was much older — some say by a full forty years. He was unfaithful. And their life together was marked by tragedy: their young daughter died in childhood. Her husband followed close behind. Just eight years after their wedding day, he fell off his horse during a fox hunt and was killed. His money went to his mother, leaving Coleman with practically nothing — a penniless widow in her twenties.
The time had come, she decided, to take control of her life.
With her husband dead and his fortune gone, she would leave Ireland behind. She sold enough furniture to get to England. From there, she planned to book passage to South Africa. Or maybe Australia. But the next ship out of Liverpool wasn’t heading to either of those places. And she couldn’t bear to wait. That’s how Kit Coleman ended up on a ship bound for Canada.
In her new country, it didn’t take long for her to meet a new man; when she got a job as a secretary, her boss quickly fell in love with her. But the travelling salesman from Toronto was no better than her last husband. He was an alcoholic who slept around. Coleman’s second marriage was just as doomed as her first. Some historians suggest that when she demanded a divorce — still a rare and controversial process in Canada requiring an act of Parliament for every new request — she learned that he had a second wife in England. Another version of the story says he died — that she was thirty-three years old and already a widow twice over. Either way, only five brief years after arriving in Canada, Coleman found herself alone yet again. This time as a single mother with two children.
That’s when she decided to write.
Coleman had grown up surrounded by intellectuals. Her parents might have been farmers, but they were also part of the Irish literary community: her father had an impressive library; their friends were writers and artists. Her uncle was one of the most respected and liberal priests in Ireland, preaching to overflowing crowds. Her first husband, though a terrible match, had sent her to one of the better schools in Dublin. Now, she put all that experience to work. Her own writing was good enough to soon land her a job as Canada’s first full-time editor of a women’s page.
The Toronto Mail was one of Toronto’s leading newspapers. It was the brainchild of prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, founded a decade earlier to support his federal Conservative Party. The new paper got off to a quick start; it immediately drove the Toronto Telegraph out of business, with the Toronto Leader following a few years later. Soon, the Mail had a fancy new building on the corner of King and Bay. But in recent years, the newspaper had declared its independence from the Conservative government — beginning with its opposition to the execution of Louis Riel. It was a risky move. Macdonald responded by starting a new Tory paper: the Toronto Empire.
The Mail now had more fearsome competition than ever before, making it an important time to attract new readers. Under general manager Christopher William Bunting — he’d gotten his start by setting printing type for George Brown’s Globe — the newspaper set out to redefine itself. It embraced modernity by introducing photographs and hired exciting new columnists.
And there was one particularly big audience Bunting wanted to attract: women.
Women, it was generally agreed by all the most learned men, didn’t read newspapers. Bunting was looking for someone to prove them wrong. As he imagined it, “Woman’s Kingdom” would be a half-page of domestic tips, recipes, and fashion advice — he believed it was the kind of soft news women would buy the Mail to read. And having enjoyed one of her first articles, he hired Kit Coleman to write it.
It was quite a bold career move for her. There were barely any women working as journalists in Canada — only about thirty-five, compared to more than seven hundred and fifty men. Journalism wasn’t considered a respectful profession for a woman — just a step or two above sex work. But Coleman threw herself into it. She spent her days writing while her children were at school, hunched over a rolltop desk for hours on end, her nearsighted eyes just a few inches from the page. Meanwhile, her white rat, Patsy Brannigan, scampered around the unkempt apartment. Once a week, when her scribbling was finally done, she would venture out on her bicycle or by streetcar, making her way over to the Mail building at King and Bay to deliver her column in time for the Saturday edition.
But the column that rolled off the press wasn’t exactly the column Bunting had imagined. Coleman had plans of her own. “Woman’s Kingdom” was more than just domestic tips and fashion advice. She wrote about politics, literature, business, religion, science, and many other fields traditionally considered the domain of men. “I think it is paying us women a poor compliment,” she explained, “to imagine we cannot take an interest in the highest and the very deepest questions of the day.”
“Woman’s Kingdom” became an instant success. It proved to be one of the most popular features in the Mail, driving the paper’s sales up by a third. She would eventually expand her column to a full page, writing an average of six or seven thousand words a week. Even the new Liberal prime minister Wilfrid Laurier was a devoted follower, known to buy the conservative paper just so he could read Coleman’s pieces.
To find her stories, she was willing to travel far beyond the borders of Toronto. Coleman had been an eager and determined traveller ever since she was a girl. As a youngster, she had disguised herself as a boy so she could join her uncle, the preacher, on his tours through the Dickensian slums of London. Now, at a time when a woman travelling alone was still a scandalous sight, she was equally willing to dress as a man to explore places thought to be unfit for a woman. She traced the steps of Jack the Ripper through the back alleys of Whitechapel and explored the ruins of San Francisco after the Great Earthquake, just as she covered the Chicago World’s Fair and Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In Cleveland, she landed a breathtaking scoop by slipping into the prison cell of the Canadian woman who’d conned American banks out of millions of dollars by claiming she was the daughter of the wealthy Andrew Carnegie. In New York, she attended the infamous murder trial of a jealous millionaire who’d shot a renowned architect on the roof of Madison Square Garden in front of hundreds of witnesses — the first trial ever called “The Trial of the Century.”
When war broke out in Cuba between Spain and the United States, Coleman decided she was going to cover that, too. The fact that no woman had ever been accredited as a war correspondent wasn’t about to stop her. Neither was the American military’s outright ban on women journalists.
Convincing the Mail she should cover the Spanish-American War wasn’t much of a challenge; they signed on, thinking the novelty would help sell papers. But when Coleman headed to Washington and barged her way in to meet with the U.S. secretary of war, he burst into laughter when she told him why she was there. “I hate awfully to have you go down into that frightful country,” he explained. “Why, the men may pitch the camp almost anywhere, in any kind of rough place, and there, where the heat is so great, they will be lounging about half-dressed. It would be no place at all for a lady.”
Coleman wasn’t about to take no for answer. She returned to his office over and over again until he finally said yes. One hundred and thirty-five journalists were given accreditation to cover the war. Coleman was the only woman.
But as it turned out, even that official permission did her little good. When her ship sailed for Cuba, filled with reporters, Coleman wasn’t on board. The captain had refused to take her. And when she managed to find room on a medical ship instead, that fell through, too; the founder of the Red Cross hated her on sight. Coleman was stuck in Florida for weeks, trying to find her way onto a boat. Even while she was stranded, though, she got to work, digging up scoops, uncovering secret arms shipments to Cuban rebels, all while trying to find her passage south.
“I’m going through to Cuba,” she wrote, “and not all the old generals in the old army are going to stop me. I beat them in Washington and I’ll beat them here.”
She finally talked her way aboard an old American supply ship, arriving in Cuba just in time to witness the final battles of the war. She wrote about dead bodies lying in the streets under the hot summer sun. Surveyed battered troops from the back of a mule. Visited wounded Spanish soldiers in a field hospital — “living ghosts of men.” Examined the charred hulks of warships halfsunk off the beaches.
“Awful was the ruin everywhere,” she wrote about those ships. “You would think an army of demons had been let loose from hell to twist and smash and batter the ships, to torture and burn and wreak impish cruelties on the men and beasts. What the Spanish soldiers must have suffered on that July day in the smoke and heat and stress of this terrible battle cannot be told by human lips, nor written by any hand.”
Coleman was in Cuba for a month, eating where she could, bathing in streams and well water, suffering through a case of malaria, and sending vivid dispatches back to Toronto. When the month was done, she returned to the United States on an American troopship, tending to the wounded soldiers on board.
By then, Coleman was known around the world: her experiences in Cuba had made newspaper headlines far beyond Toronto. The secretary of war, who had laughed in her face just weeks earlier, was now deeply impressed. He tried to convince her to go on an American tour as “the world’s first female war reporter.” She refused. “If I tell the women of the United States the awful things I have seen,” she said, “you will have riots on your hands.”
She did, however, agree to give one single lecture in Washington, DC. And while she was there, her thoughts turned back to love.
For a while now, a Canadian doctor by the name of Theobald Coleman had been ardently wooing her. He’d been very persistent: one of the many men who could see past her gruff exterior to recognize how warm she could be, admire the beauty of her sherry-brown eyes, or be struck by her resemblance to the famous red-headed actor Sarah Bernhardt, as well as her prodigious talents. After the utter failure of her first two marriages, she must have been reluctant to pursue another romance. “Is love eternal?” she once wrote in response to a reader’s question. “Pray, how should I know? My experience of it has been that it is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper — and not as useful for it will not light kitchen fires. But then one is only an ordinary, middle-aged woman and such do not inspire love. My fairy prince, Little Woman, turned into a pumpkin stalk so long ago that I begin to believe he never existed as a prince, but was always a weed.”
Despite her reluctance, in the end Kit couldn’t resist Dr. Coleman’s insistent charms. In Washington, they were finally married, and then they returned home to Canada. Their life together wouldn’t be filled with burning passion and Kit did have her complaints, but he was a far better man than her first two husbands: kind, soft-spoken, and good with her children. Kit’s third marriage was destined to be the one that lasted for the rest of her life. And it gave her the family name we remember her by.
Her own experiences with love and heartbreak — and her professional life — undoubtedly helped her give advice to her women readers. The end of the 1800s was a time of radical change in gender relations. The “New Woman,” as the new feminists were called, was demanding more and more control over her own life, challenging the strict gender conventions that had ruled the Victorian era. To the horror of many, she rode a bicycle — giving her a new kind of freedom. She smoked. Demanded the right to attend university. She maybe even had a job, so she wouldn’t have to depend on a husband. And as the century came to a close, an increasing number of suffragists were organizing in support of women’s right to vote.
The implications for romantic relationships were staggering, leaving many disoriented. But they did, at least, have Kit Coleman doling out her weekly advice on love and marriage in the “Our Letter Club” section of “Woman’s Kingdom.” She got so many questions every week — hundreds of them came in the mail — she didn’t even have room to print them, just her responses. And while the column wasn’t always on the cutting edge of feminism — Coleman did still believe in traditional gender roles within marriage and publicly condemned homosexuality — many of her columns sound remarkably modern. She demanded she get paid the same as a man and supported the idea of equal pay in her column. She wrote about women’s working conditions. She co-founded the Canadian Women’s Press Club and served as its first president. And she tried to help her readers wrestle with issues of gender, sexuality, and romance.
To one reader, she wrote, “Every girl should respect her own body absolutely. She should never permit herself to be kissed and embraced even by a man old enough to be her great-grandfather. Faugh!”
To another, “No man has any right to shower a girl employee with gifts or flowers or candy, or ask her to go out to the theatre with him and accept his attentions unless he is prepared to go to the length of asking that girl to be his wife.”
And to a third, “You make rather sweeping assertions. A pretty face does not necessarily imply ‘no brains.’ The old idea that clever girls are dowdy, plain and untidy must surely be exploded by now. Have you travelled much?”
Her readers were dear to her heart — she called them her “paper children” or her “shadow children” — but she didn’t pull her punches. She was just as happy to call them “foolish woman,” “silly chap,” or “a sour-soul-pickled misanthrope.” Her advice was as blunt as it was witty. “How could you think of marrying such a flabby poltroon?” she responded to one woman. “I am afraid that you will not be very much better than him if you do. Perhaps this is for the best, as then you will be well-mated.”
In response, Coleman was adored by her readers. When she was too sick to write a column, her editor’s office would be flooded with gifts: flowers, chocolates, home remedies — one follower even gave her some cheese, worried she might not be well enough to shop for Patsy Brannigan that week.
And her readers were there in the moment she needed them most. In 1895, the Mail merged with the Empire to become the Mail and Empire (which would later merge with the Globe to become the Globe and Mail). Her new bosses demanded a change; they wanted Coleman to stick to the domestic tips and fashion advice of a typical women’s page. But Kit wasn’t about to throw away the freedom she’d won, and the loyal following she’d built. She asked her readers what they believed. “I want the candid, honest opinions of Canadian women,” she wrote. “Do you enjoy fashion articles more than other kinds of writing?” The response was overwhelming. They say Coleman dumped the flood of letters on her editor’s desk and kept writing what she wanted to write.
It wasn’t the last time she’d have to fight for her editorial freedom. She was willing to risk everything for it. Years later, when her boss threatened to cut “Our Letter Club” entirely while refusing to give her a raise, it was the last straw. She quit. If they weren’t going to let her write what she wanted and pay her what she deserved, she would go it alone. She began to sell her weekly feature herself — becoming Canada’s first syndicated columnist — and refused to let the Mail and Empire publish her writing ever again, no matter how much they offered to pay. She made even more money in syndication than she had when she was on staff.
As a young woman, Coleman hadn’t had much control over her own life, married off to a man she didn’t love. But over the course of her six decades on earth, the world began to change — and she helped change it. She fought relentlessly for the freedom to make her own decisions: whether it was the words that appeared on her page of the newspaper, or the events she travelled around the world to witness, or the man she shared her life with. And in the hundreds of thousands of words she wrote, she helped the women of Toronto navigate that same evolution. In her column and in the way she lived, Kit Coleman helped lead a new generation of women who challenged the conventions of the past and seized control over their own lives, their own careers, and their own hearts.