A Much-Fathered Nation: Feminist Biography and Confederation Politics

Abstract

Although many Confederation biographies were written before the gender turn, even recent studies often neglect gender as a category of analysis. This neglect implies that thinking about gender would, at best, add to the story of Confederation but could not change it. It also leaves men's experience of gender unexamined, perpetuating the idea that men's monopoly over politics in this era was simply a fact – perhaps regrettable, but indisputable, and therefore unworthy of study. This article considers how dividing political (men's) history and gender (women's) history into separate domains has affected how biographers have written about Confederation. It also proposes that critical feminist biography can help historians re-entangle politics and gender and, thereby, re-evaluate what was at stake in the Confederation negotiations and on what bases support for this ongoing political project was won, lost, regained, and reconfigured.