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While short essays by feminist historians like Veronica Strong-Boag give Framing Our Past a quick glance feminist credibility, this encyclopedic book is no source of feminist inspiration. What to say about a book that gives more ink to Zoe Laurier, wife of Wilf, who admittedly "left no diaries or memoirs and almost no correspondence," so that "it is impossible to know what she thought about her life and times," while Conservative leader Kim Campbell is mentioned only in passing as first female Canadian prime minister in 1993.

Historian Barbara Freeman has a chapter on Ontario female journalists of the early 20th century. But what a wussy bunch: Ontario's Kit Coleman refused to endorse suffrage. Meanwhile, the Manitoba sisterhood of journalists that included the Beynon sisters, Nellie McClung and others whose efforts led to Manitoba becoming the first province to extend suffrage to female British subjects in 1916 are-how to put this-absent.

One solution would have been to have called the book, Ontario Women's History in the Twentieth Century. Except that its geocentric lens isn't its only shortcoming. This book actually manages to diminish some of its subjects. Ottawa's famous female mayor, Charlotte Whitton, who had a life partner, Margaret Grier, is described as someone who "never married or bore children." The writer then goes on to state-as fact-that Whitton and her partner did not have a sexual relationship because they both held religious views.

Come to think of it, unimaginative pretty much sums up this book.

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Subtitled "A Playful History," Beauty Queens is a wonderful, uncritical look at the evolution of beauty pageants in North America seen through the eyes of a historian and told from the heart of a feminist. Savage wants readers to know that the women who have participated in the pageants often blamed for creating oppressive beauty standards, are not 'the enemy.' In fact, Savage writes, they were often gutsy women with few resources of their own looking for a big break in Hollywood or, later, a free college education.

From the get-go, Savage chronicles the historic pageant of 1968 where New York Radical Women crowned a sheep as Miss America and proceeded to toss symbols of women's oppression into a Freedom Trash Can: high heels, copies of Cosmopolitan and at least one very unattractive brassiere.

Savage exposes the origins of bathing beauty contests in this beautiful picture book, and the irony of that 1968 protest. Imagine that 50 years earlier, women who dared to wear rolled down hose and one-piece swimsuits were seen as radicals for defying the dictates of Victorian conformity. A writer for Vogue suggested around 1915, the "bathing-girl … deserves credit for firing the first shot in the Battle of Modern Dress."

Sewers take note: The photos in this book are a fascinating record of the history of women's bathing attire.