Alice Amelia Chown was a Canadian feminist, pacifist, socialist and author. She was brought up in a strict Methodist family, and remained at home until she was forty attending her mother, who died in 1906. Chown then embarked on a life of travel and involvement in many reform causes. She was an original and iconoclastic thinker, and became one of the leading social feminists of her day. She is best known for her 1921 book The Stairway in which she recounts her life and growing freedom after 1906.

The Christian Guardian was a Wesleyan Methodist journal founded in Upper Canada in 1829. The first editor was Egerton Ryerson. It ceased publication in 1925 when the Methodist Church of Canada merged with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada, and merged their journals to create The New Outlook, later renamed the United Church Observer.