Canadian Women's History Research Articles

No One Becomes a Feminist to Be Appreciated

Abstract: In her memories of her “life in history,” Wendy Mitchinson integrates her private life with that of her work in the academy. As a member of the first major cohort of historians researching Canadian women's history, she relates her years as a student at York University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of feminism, and the way in which her work on women and becoming a feminist altered people's view of her and her own self-image. It was an exciting period of history, and she acknowledges that life choices open to her had not existed for her mother's generation.

<i>I won't be a slave! Selected Articles on Finnish Canadian Women's History</i> (review)

<i>I won't be a slave! Selected Articles on Finnish Canadian Women's History</i> (review)

The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood (review)

Reviewed by: The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood Catherine Cavanaugh The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood. Robert J. Sharpe and Patricia I. McMahon. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. 272, $50.00 cloth, $27.95 paper The broad outline of the Persons Case is familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Canadian women's history. The 1929 decision of [End Page 177] Britain's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, determined that women were 'persons' and eligible for appointment to the Senate. At issue was section 24 of the British North America Act that allowed the governor general to appoint 'qualified Persons' to the Senate. The reference case, brought by the federal government at the request of five women from Alberta, asked if the word persons included women. At the time the act was passed in 1867, women were excluded from the vote and denied the right to hold public office. A narrow, technical construction that adhered to the framers' original intent would hold that women were not included under section 24 and were therefore ineligible for Senate appointment. This was the view taken by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1928. It was left to Britain's Lord Chancellor, John Sankey, and his fellow law lords to give Canadian constitutional law a broader and more liberal interpretation. Likening the constitution to a 'living tree,' Sankey found that, rather than being stuck in the past, it should reflect contemporary attitudes and values. As Sharpe and McMahon point out in their introduction, 'The Famous Five . . . sought to transform the Senate and ended up changing the fundamental tenets of Canadian constitutional interpretation' (15). Sharpe (a justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal) and McMahon (a practising lawyer) provide a lively account of the key personalities associated with the case while presenting a clear, easy-to-read account of events surrounding the case and the legal arguments advanced by both sides. They also clear up several long-standing misperceptions. For example, the oft-repeated suggestion that Murphy uncovered an obscure provision in the Supreme Court Act that allowed any five interested citizens to petition the court for an interpretation of the constitution is not correct. Also, under the terms of the act it is the government, not an individual, who can request an interpretation from the Supreme Court. Once the government (on the advice of the Department of Justice) determined to allow a reference case, the court decided who should be notified and heard (106). This context is important for understanding Prime Minister Mackenzie King's role in the case. The authors provide compelling evidence to support their conclusion that, rather than championing the women's cause, King acted out of political expediency when his government referred the case rather than seeking a political solution. But, as Sharpe and McMahon point out, reference to the Court did not place the question beyond politics. The authors offer plenty of evidence of the blatant sexism of most of the politicians, policy makers, lawyers, and judges involved in the case without critically assessing the persistence of these attitudes in the [End Page 178] immediate post-suffrage period. Indeed, the achievement of suffrage enlivened the debate over the role of women in Canada's public life and, far from being a spent force, the women's movement continued to press for and win important legal rights during the 1920s. The Great War of 1914–18 had ushered in widespread social changes, and women had gained a foothold in new occupations, including the law. Anglophone editorial opinion generally supported Murphy (francophone Quebec, of course, did not include women in that province's franchise until 1940) and, with one woman already sitting in the Lower Chamber, some saw the persistence of women's exclusion from the Upper Chamber as a curious anomaly. The authors fail to adequately explain why the question of women's access to the Senate, first raised in 1919, took such a long and protracted route to resolution. Why were most Canadian politicians so reluctant to extend full citizenship rights to most women? Did...

Canadian Women's History

Canadian Women's History

Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta 1929–31 (review)

Reviewed by: Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta 1929–31 Sarah Carter M.P. Jackson . Suitable for the Wilds: Letters from Northern Alberta 1929–31. Edited by Janice DickinUniversity of Calgary Press. x, 324. $24.95 A popular play at Edmonton's 2007 Fringe Festival was Letters from Battle River: The Adventures of Mary Percy Jackson. In 2004 Australian scholar Maggie MacKellar included an analysis of Jackson's letters in her book Core of My Heart, My Country: Women's Sense of Place and the Land in Australia and Canada, and in 1996 Canada's National Film Board produced an award-winning documentary on her entitled Wanted: Doctor on Horseback. The letters a young doctor wrote to her family in England from the Peace River country in northern Alberta from 1929 to 1931 continue to captivate a wide audience. Jackson (then Mary Percy) was twenty-five years old and working at Birmingham General Hospital when she answered an advertisement placed by the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf for 'strong energetic medical women' to do 'country work in Western Canada.' The sponsoring organization sought to reinforce the strength of the Church of England and to help 'keep Canada British and Christian' in this outpost of empire by sending out educated British women. Jackson's first choice was India but that option was not available at the time, and she took the Canadian post, planning to stay for one year. She lived alone in a small cabin in the middle of her 250-square-mile district and she travelled by horse, dogsled, car, and steamboat, attending to maternity patients and treating accidents, frostbite, and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. A strong attraction and attachment to the land and the people soon developed. She wrote in October 1929 that while she was homesick for a few minutes, 'Most times I wonder how on earth I could possibly go back to England to live.' Jackson stayed in northern Alberta for the rest of her life, marrying, in 1931, widower Frank Jackson, an English-born fur trader and farmer with three sons. Jackson continually tried to articulate her growing comfort and fascination with the land in her letters, which challenge tired myths of settler women as alienated and intimidated by 'wilderness.' [End Page 360] Jackson's letters are engaging and significant. She emerges as a remarkably lively, confident, independent person who was resourceful, resilient, and adaptable. Her writing was not structured and limited by conventions such as the narratives of timid, nervous, and vulnerable single women in the 'safe passage' literature circulated by British female emigration societies. Yet as editor Janice Dickin points out, she wanted to be positive for the sake of her parents' grimmer situations and details were left out. The letters also convey her sense of superiority to 'foreigners,' initially hoping that she did not have to practise among them, but her attitude changes somewhat as she grows to respect the people of this demanding environment. The letters document the extreme poverty and often squalid living conditions of the homesteaders and Metis settlers. Those interested in the history of medicine will find much fascinating detail, such as the burden medical care payments placed on impoverished people. The interviews Dickin did with Jackson in 1994, which appear in an appendix for the first time, provide keen insight into a number of aspects of her lifelong practice, including her most unusual cases. Some of Jackson's letters were published in 1933, heavily edited by an organizer of the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf. In the early 1990s Dickin learned that Jackson (who died in 2000) was living in northern Alberta and that she still had the original letters. A collaboration between the two resulted in a University of Toronto Press book, out of print until now. Dickin's introduction to the first edition is reproduced here without changes or updates beyond a new preface, and that is one of my few criticisms. A new introduction could have pointed to the wealth of literature on Canadian women's history, gender, and empire, and the history of medicine for example, that has appeared since 1994 that could provide a richer and deeper context. The...

Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Feminists Rewriting Canadian History

address here the issue of gendering national historiographies in Canada by considering national narratives and counter narratives and the efforts to integrate more effectively gender, class, race, and sex in Canadian his- tory. I will accentuate the positive, but then comment on difficulties. Over the last thirty-five years, Canadian feminist historians—whether they have identified primarily as a women's or gender historian or some other type of historian—have been critical to the writing and teaching of far more inclusive, if uneven and contested, Canadian histories. Certainly, in contrast to Central Eastern Europe and Mexico, women's and, more recently, gender history in Canada has enjoyed a degree of on- going institutional support. There is an established and growing literature in Canadian women's history and a rapidly growing number of gendered histories—which include many studies that do not fit a homogenizing postmodern gender history label but are grounded analyses of gender relations and power within different social arenas. Specific figures are not available but qualitatively speaking, there are Canadian feminist historians in history departments, women and/or gender studies, and Canadian stud- ies programs across the country. There is no specific journal in Canadian women's and gender history but the established Canadian women's studies journals and history journals are receptive venues for publication. Faculty teach specific courses in these fields and integrate women and gender into their surveys and other courses. The Canadian Committee on Women's History (CCWH, founded in 1975) is the most successful of the societies affiliated with the Canadian Historical Association. Although the most prestigious awards and endowed chairs still go mostly to men, and men still outnumber women at the full professor rank, the greater influence of feminist historians within the wider profession is evident in their increased presence as journal and book series editors, the many scholarly prizes, the strong presence of women's and gender history on conference programs, and the growing number of their students who are in full-time positions. One can pursue a career in Canadian women's and gender history but most scholars simultaneously train in various fields. We are acutely aware of U.S. scholarly domination and that Canada is a rich but not particularly powerful country, and suspect that many of our U.S. colleagues regard Canada, apart from Quebec, as a similar but less interesting place than their own. My involvement in a transnational project on Italian women

The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1996 (review)

In the late 1970s, scholars in Canadian women's history first drew attention to the significance of manuscript diaries by women to be found in national, local, and private archives. Since then a number of individual diaries, regional collections, and anthologies of short excerpts from diaries have been published. They provide an entry point into the detail of women's lives which would otherwise largely be lost. Diaries that were never meant to be published differ considerably from the settler accounts and literary writings of well-known women such as Susanna Moodie and Anne Langton, who wrote for their family or for a broader audience. By and large, diaries from the nineteenth century, as well as many from the twentieth century, record daily events and activities, often in an abbreviated fashion and with little introspection. Diaries were more likely to be used as a safe place for emotional outpourings and self-discovery in the twentieth century.

Framing our past: Canadian women's history in the twentieth century

With introductory essays by historians, Framing Our Past emphasizes the lived experiences of women: their participation in many areas of social life, such as social rituals with other women; organized sporting clubs; philanthropic, spiritual and aesthetic activities; study and reading groups. The authors then focus on women's roles as nurturers and keepers of the hearth B their experiences with family management, child care, and health concerns. They consider women's varied contributions within formal and informal educational systems as well as their instrumental political role in consumer activism, social work, peace movements, and royal commissions. Canadian women's shaping of health care and science through nursing, physiotherapy and research are discussed, as is women's work, from domestic labour to dressmaking to broadcasting to banking. Using diary accounts, oral history, letters, organizational records, paintings, quilts, dressmaking patterns, milliners' records, posters, Framing our Past offers a unique opportunity to share what is rarely if ever seen, offering insights into the preservation and interpretation of historical sources.

Tackling the Twentieth Century: Ten New Books in Canadian Women's History

Tackling the Twentieth Century: Ten New Books in Canadian Women's History

Changing women, changing history: a bibliography of the history of women in Canada

This bibliography, an expanded second edition of Diana Pedersen's indispensable reference tool, is a reflection of continued development of women's history in Canada. With almost 5,000 references, new edition is not just bigger, but better. The improved indexing system (by author and by subject) makes it easier to find specific sources or particular writers and also to explore general themes. Since first edition appeared in 1992, most teachers of Canadian women's history would testify that this has become their most consulted guide. For anyone preparing new courses in women's history or gender history, this is place to start. Possibilities for reading lists and essay topics abound, and happily, with so much being published, problem becomes one of trying to keep up with all of it. But Pedersen's new bibliography reflects more than just numeric growth.Researchers and students of history will find new mini-essays that introduce each section very helpful. In these pithy little pieces (usually four or five paragraphs in length), readers will get a sense of how subject area has developed and current debates that capture writers' attention. With reference to feminism, for example, Pedersen notes that historians are moving beyond problematic 'first-wave' and 'second-wave' model because its implicit emphasis on discontinuity is at variance with research findings about organizational activity that characterized 1920s to 1960s (p. 64). In addition, Pedersen pinpoints areas where few publications exist (World War One is much less studied than World War Two, for example). She even predicts some trends, noting for example that heightened interest among graduate students and organizational developments suggest that the history of sexuality will emerge as one of major growth areas in Canadian history over next decade (p. 187). Graduate students will find bibliography useful, not just to prepare fields and papers, but to help them deduce which areas remain unexplored, underdeveloped, or in need of revisionist attention. Pedersen suggests, for example, that recent interest in post-structuralist approaches and discourse analysis suggests potential for future in area of sport and physical education (p. 191).The book is divided alphabetically into 19 theme sections, so that beginning with table of contents, users can search out sources from arts, education, or ethnicity to sport, unions, or work. In most of these sections, there are further subdivisions -- evidence of more developed areas of women's history. For example, section on Families/Life Stages contains entries of a general nature and demographic studies, but also girlhood, marriage, courtship, couples, motherhood, illegitimacy, aging, widowhood, etc. The section on Work/Economy is another example where publications abound, and eight different sectors of work are considered in addition to general literature on topic. These are a reflection of fact that women's history emerged as part of social history that has dominated Canadian historiographic developments since 1970s. …

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus

MIRA CROUCH and LENORE MANDERSON, New Motherhood: Cultural and Personal Transitions in the 1980s.STEPHEN KLINE, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children's Culture in the Age of TV Advertising.DIANNE NEWELL, Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada's Pacific Coast Fisheries.DANIEL WIGHT, Workers Not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Employment in Central Scotland.MARK ROBERT RANK, Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America.EDWARD BELL, Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta.PEGGY BRISTOW (ed.), “We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up”: Essays in African Canadian Women's History.

'We're rooted here and they can't pull us up': essays in African Canadian women's history

'We're rooted here and they can't pull us up': essays in African Canadian women's history

"We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us up": Essays in African Canadian Women's History

Despite the increasing scope and authority of women's studies, the role of Black women in Canada's history has remained largely unwritten and unacknowledged. This silence supports the common belief that Black people have only recently arrived in Canada and that racism is also a fairly recent development. This book sets the record straight. The six essays collected here explore three hundred years of Black women in Canada, from the seventeenth century to the immediate post-Second World War period. Sylvia Hamilton documents the experiences of Black women in Nova Scotia, from early slaves and Loyalists to modern immigrants. Adrienne Shadd looks at the gripping realities of the Underground Railroad, focusing on activities on this side of the border. Peggy Bristow examines the lives of Black women in Buxton and Chatham, Ontario, between 1850 and 1865. Afua Cooper describes the career of Mary Bibb, a nineteenth-century Black teacher in Ontario. Dionne Brand, through oral accounts, examines labourers between the wars and their recruitment as factory workers during the Second World War. And, finally, Linda Carty explores relations between Black women and the Canadian state. This long overdue history will prove welcome reading for anyone interested in Black history and race relations. It provides a much-needed text for senior high school and university courses in Canadian history, women's history, and women's studies. Winner of the Ontario Historical Society's 1996 Joesph Brant award.

We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us up. Essays in African Canadian Women's History

We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us up. Essays in African Canadian Women's History

Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto 1900-1939.

In the first half of the twentieth century, many of Toronto's immigrant Jews eked out a living in the needle-trade sweatshops of Spadina Avenue. In response to their expliotation on the shop floor, immigrant Jewish garment workers built one of the most advanced sections of the Canadian and American labour movements. Much more than a collective bargaining agency, Toronto's Jewish labour movement had a distinctly socialist orientation and grew out of a vibrant Jewish working-class culture. Ruth Frager examines the development of this unique movement, its sources of strength, and its limitations, focusing particularly on the complex interplay of class, ethnic, and gender interests and identities in the history of the movement. She examines the relationships between Jewish workers and Jewish manufacturers as well as relations between Jewish and non-Jewish workers and male and female workers in the city's clothing industry. In its prime, Toronto's Jewish labour movement struggled not only to improve hard sweatshop condistions but also to bring about a fundamental socialist transformation. It was an uphill battle. Drastic economic downturns, hard employer offensives, and state repressions all worked against unionists' workplace demands. Ethnic, gender, and ideological divisions weakened the movement and were manipulated by employers and their allies. Drawing on her knowledge of Yiddish, Frager has been able to gain access to original records that shed new light on an important chapter in Canadian ethnic, labour, and women's history.

Colonization and Canadian Women's History

Colonization and Canadian Women's History

Writing women's history: international perspectives

Part 1 Conceptual and methodological issues: challenging dichotomies - perspectives on women's history, Gisela Bock demographic history and its perception of women from the 17th to the 19th century, Anne-Lise Head-Konig uneven developments - women's history, feminist history, and gender history in Great Britain, Jane Rendall finding our own ways - different paths to women's history in the United States, Phyllis Stock-Morton experience, difference, dominance and voice in the writing of Canadian women's history, Ruth Roach Pierson women's culture and women's power - issues in French women's history, Cecile Dauphin et al global women's history - organizing principles and cross-cultural understandings, Ida Blom. Part 2 The state of the art in women's history: writing the history of Australian women, Patricia Grimshaw the development of women's history in Japan, Noriyo Hayakawa women's history in India - a historiographical survey, Aparn Basu writing women into history - the Nigerian experience, Bolanle Awe women's history in Norway - a short survey, Ingeborg Floystad the state of women's history in Denmark, Nanna Damsholt the state of women's history in Sweden - an overview, Yvonne Hirdman women's history behind the dykes - reflections of the situation in the Netherlands, Francisca de Haan women's history in Austria, Brigette Mazohl-Wallnig issues in women's history in the Federal Republic of Germany, Ute Frevert and Christina Vanja historical research on women in the German Democratic Republic, Petra Rantzsch and Erika Uitz women's history in Switzerland, Regina Wecker women's history in Brazil - production and perspectives, Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva two decades of women's history in Spain - a re-appraisal, Mary Nash women's history in Yugoslavia, Andrea Feldman women's history in Greece, Efi Avdela the development of women's history in Ireland, Mary Cullen women's history in Italy, Paola Di Cori women, gender and family in the Soviet Union and Central/East Europe - a preliminary bibliography, Mary F.Zirin.

Margaret McWilliams: an interwar feminist

PETTICOATS AND PREJUDICES: WOMEN AND LAW IN NINETEENTH CENTURY CANADA. Constance Backhouse. Toronto: Women's Press, 1991.FROM PUNISHMENT TO DOING GOOD: FAMILY COURTS AND SOCIALIZED JUSTICE IN ONTARIO, 1880-1940. Dorothy Chunn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.THE NATURE OF THEIR BODIES: WOMEN AND THEIR DOCTORS IN VICTORIAN CANADA. Wendy Mitchinson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.MARGARET MCWILLIAMS, AN INTERWAR FEMINIST. Mary Kinnear. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991.One of the au current words in Canadian women's history is regulation. This concept is used to explore a longstanding issue, the social reproduction of gender relations and oppression, but its adherents stress that every mode of regulating gender is fraught with contradictions. The very methods used to assert control, for example, may create entirely new contradictions and new problems needing regulatory solutions.(f.1) This concept of regulation, which draws on French theories of social regulation and some post-structuralist writing, is counterposed to a more limited Marxist political economy, or to inadequate theories of social control, supposedly utilized by the more naive historians of the past. I didn't think anyone ever talked about social any more, commented one Canadian historian dismissively at last year's Learneds, confirming the political incorrectness of this concept. Social control, continues this view, denotes the conscious, one-way attempt by those in power to the behaviour of the more socially marginalized, while regulation denotes a complex process in which varieties of overt and inner may be exerted (sometimes unsuccessfully) and through which the oppressed also exert forms of power. While this discussion of regulation may have exaggerated the simplicity of social-control theories in order to present regulation as a more sophisticated concept, it has nonetheless raised important questions about the many ways in which both the state and civil society shape women's life choices, and how women react to these forces of regulation.Three recent works in Canadian women's history explore in some detail the regulation and of women's physical, mental and social lives. These books, by Constance Backhouse, Dorothy Chunn and Wendy Mitchinson, indicate that various kinds of instruction, regulation and control, both subtle and not-so-subtle, were evident in the legal system and the emerging male-dominated medical profession of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attempts to shape and women's lives documented by these authors were by no means always conscious, or successful, and they were sometimes resisted by women. In the long run, as all three authors indicate, the process of regulation -- or even control -- tended to reproduce and reorder systemic power imbalances based on gender and class, rather than fundamentally to alter them.The nineteenth century legal system, argues Constance Backhouse in Petticoats and Prejudice, provides an almost perfect example of a formal patriarchal institution. Backhouse's argument is well supported by her extensive analysis of the ways in which the law dictated women's rights or lack of them, and shaped dominant notions of womanhood in nineteenth century Canadian society. For women, the legal system was characterized by glaring contradictions: though women could not be jurors or judges, their lives were inevitably and powerfully shaped by the law and its understanding of their proper social and economic roles.Backhouse's chapters are developed around individual cases, often of ordinary women: using these cases as examples, she goes on to show the legal consensus on each issue at the time, the historical roots of the law, its application in the courts, and any changes it may have undergone over the period studied. Her ability to evaluate this legal consensus, as well as its social origins and consequences, through the use of varied sources (from court reports and newspaper accounts to fiction of the time) and particularly through the technique of extensive narrative, is commendable, though, at times, the sheer length of her narrative may be overwhelming. …

Crossing Borders: The Influence of American Women's History on the Writing of Canadian Women's History

Any Canadian who has crossed the border into the United States feels a certain trepidation at the point of entry, particularly those who lived through the era of Woodstock, the Vietnam War, student protest or, more recently, the antidrug campaigns. There is a sense of crossing into genuinely "foreign" territory, into a country with a different system of government, different social and political traditions, and different expectations. A recent Canadian film by Bruce McDonald, Highway 61 (1991), contains a quintessential scene that underlines these clashes of cultures, recognizing some commonalities between Canadians and Americans, yet at the same time accentuating the ambivalences. In the film, an unlikely pair of protagonists—a young, naive, small-town barber and a tough, experienced woman roadie, drive up to the border with a coffin strapped to the roof of his car. The barber had dis- covered the body in an old bathtub in his back yard; the roadie, fleeing with drugs from a heavy-metal rock band, arrives in town and convinces the bar- ber, the undertaker, and the town that she is the sister of the dead man. Contriving to be alone with the body, the resourceful woman plants the dope in the corpse and sets off for New Orleans hitchhiking with the coffin. Enter the young barber, itching to free himself from a staid existence and longing to take to the open road and see America (Highway 61 stretches from northern Ontario to New Orleans), and a modern picaresque journey begins.

Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

STEVEN WINEMAN, The Politics of Human ServicesMAURICE GODELIER, The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea BaruyaMENNO BOLDT AND J. ANTHONY LONG (eds.), The Quest for justice: Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal RightsERVE CHAMBERS, Applied Anthropology: A Practical Guide. Englewood CliffsJOHN VAN WILLIGEN, Applied Anthropology: An IntroductionRICHARD M. SWIDERSKI, Voices: An Anthropologist's Dialogue with an Italian‐American Festival. London, Ont.: Centre for Social and Humanistic Studies and Bowling GreenALISON PRENTICE AND SUSAN MANN TROFIMENKOFF (eds.), The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women's History Volume Two. TorontoHENRY VELTMEYER, Canadian Class Structure. Toronto