Postwar Canada Research Articles

Book Review: Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada by Stanley, Heather

Book Review: <i>Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada</i> by Stanley, Heather

Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada by Heather Stanley (review)

Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada by Heather Stanley (review)

Physicians, Public Discourse, and Passive Euthanasia of Infants with Down Syndrome in the Late-Twentieth Century.

Through the late-twentieth century, physicians endorsed the denial of life-saving surgeries to infants because they had Down syndrome. Grim physician assessments of the inevitable burden of Down syndrome found ideological footing in the 1970s crusade to eradicate the condition, a public health goal made possible by new genetic diagnostics and a weakened abortion law. What is most striking about this physician-sanctioned passive euthanasia is that it persisted even in an era of unprecedented expansion of disability rights. Physician endorsement of the euthanasia of infants with Down syndrome offers a powerful corrective to the notion that post-war Canada was marked by waning support for eugenics. Medically sanctioned euthanasia of babies because of their Down syndrome, eugenics of the most extreme type, thrived in late-twentieth century Canada.

The Post-war Revival of Canadian Planning: Assessing the Impact of the Community Planning Association of Canada.

The Community Planning Association of Canada (CPAC) advocated for the re-establishment of planning in post-war Canada. During this period, the federal government set reconstruction objectives, and both Central (now Canada) Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the CPAC were formed. We believe that 1944-1947 was a critical juncture establishing planned suburban development in Canada as a path-dependent process with tremendous momentum into the 21st-century. Using a historical-institutional approach, the role of CMHC and the influence of the CPAC is examined. Analysis relying on extensive archival material demonstrates that the CPAC gave a tremendous push along the path-dependent process of suburbanization.

Ronald Gostick, the Canadian Intelligence Service, and the “Paranoid Style” in Postwar Canada

ABSTRACT This article examines the activities of Ronald Gostick who, in the 1950s and 1960s, was Canada’s leading far-right conspiracy theorist. While active for more than half a century, Gostick rose to prominence in the postwar period, years of great changes in Canadian politics, government, society, and culture. At the far right of political opinion, Gostick had much to say and write about these developments, which he traced to a vast Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy Canadians’ individual freedom and, ultimately, Canada’s supposed Christian heritage. Gostick’s views epitomized what American historian Richard Hofstadter labeled a “paranoid style,” an outlook rooted in conspiracism. What is evident from this study of Gostick’s ideas and activism is that in several areas his extremism differed little from more respectable viewpoints, signifying that the separation between fringe and mainstream opinion is often only a few degrees of difference.

Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Post-war Canada by Jennifer Elrick (review)

Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Post-war Canada by Jennifer Elrick (review)

The art of Inuit administration: Post-war Canada, cultural diplomacy and northern administration

Abstract In this paper, we expand on existing studies of Canadian Inuit art in the international arena by examining ways in which this new art served domestic purposes, focusing primarily on the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government developed and promoted Inuit art as part of its project to transform Inuit from semi-independent hunters into modern Canadian citizens. In this effort, Canada took up and assimilated Inuit art as a genuine Canadian cultural product, presenting it as diplomatic gifts and for other forms of international cultural diplomacy. Previous studies of Canadian Inuit art from that era have noted the ways that the promotion of Canadian Inuit art supported the young nation’s claims to a deep history, while simultaneously marking the country’s distinction from both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of Canadian Inuit art also asserted Canada as an Arctic power. Labelled as “primitive modernist” fine art, Inuit sculpture and prints provided a stark contrast to the contemporaneous socialist realist art of the Soviet Union and its allies. We argue that the success of the Inuit art program sustained a belief among government officials that their programme to remake Inuit lives and livelihoods would succeed. Inuit art likely deflected attention from the many things that were going wrong with that northern modernisation project.

Heather Stanley, Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada

Heather Stanley, <i>Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada</i>

Review: What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada, by Mary-Ann Shantz

Review: <i>What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada</i>, by Mary-Ann Shantz

Animals, Affect and Annihilation: Campaigns against Canids in Postwar Canada

Abstract This essay suggests that culling campaigns against canids in postwar Canada have striking affective dimensions. Drawing on examples of canid management in the 1950s and 60s from Nunavik, Alberta, and Ontario, we contend that the killing of supposedly rabid dogs and wild canids was predominantly about affective excess and emotional management. The wildness of these animals was perceived to lead to excessive nonhuman affectivity, which was seemingly exacerbated by rabies. Human encounters with these animals were characterised by excessive affective responses, a result of long-standing fears of rabies, anxieties about northernness and assertions of ‘civilisation’ in the context of settler colonialism. This fear was then channelled into round ups and killings of canids. The killing was what Monique Scheer calls an ‘emotional practice’ designed to soothe anxieties, to cleanse and to civilise. Drawing on archival and other documentary sources, we aim to show the value in exploring more fully the intersections between affect and animal histories.

Making Sense of "Insanity": Law, Psychiatry, and the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases.

In 1954, the Canadian government established the Royal Commission on the Law of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases. While its final report had little impact at the time, the creation of the commission points to the emergence of insanity as a newly complex problem within the context of postwar Canada. Spurred on by the growing psychiatric profession and the destabilization of capital punishment as a viable sentence, the commission quickly realized that the building blocks of its solution - legal and psychiatric expertise - were largely incompatible. This article explores the commission's problematization of insanity, which, far from providing solutions, highlighted the difficulties surrounding the integration of both psychiatric and legal knowledges of the day. The commission played an important role in upholding the status quo, and it provides an early example of the stasis that would characterize this area of the law until the early 1990s.

The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada. Paul A. Evans

<i>The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada</i>. Paul A. Evans

Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada by Heather Stanley

Sex and the Married Girl: Heterosexual Marriage and the Body in Postwar Canada by Heather Stanley

What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada by Mary-Ann Shantz

What Nudism Exposes: An Unconventional History of Postwar Canada by Mary-Ann Shantz

Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada

Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism: Immigration Bureaucrats and Policymaking in Postwar Canada

Paul A. Evans, The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada, 1945-1967

Paul A. Evans, <i>The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada, 1945-1967</i>

Paul A. Evans, The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada, 1945-1967

Paul A. Evans, <i>The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity: The Politics of Immigration in Postwar Canada, 1945-1967</i>

Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada by TinaLoo, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2019, 296 pp., paperback $29.95 (ISBN 978‐0774861014)

Moved by the State: Forced Relocation and Making a Good Life in Postwar Canada by TinaLoo, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 2019, 296 pp., paperback $29.95 (ISBN 978‐0774861014)

“Don’t Mess Around with Gordie”: Hockey Violence, the 1959 Gordie Howe-Lou Fontinato Fight, and Postwar Masculinity

This article explores cultural constructions of hockey, violence, and masculinity through a close examination of one of the game’s most successful and prominent players in the postwar period, Gordie Howe. By combining skill and scoring ability with toughness, physicality, and a willingness to fight when necessary, Howe epitomized many qualities of the ideal hockey player over the course of his lengthy professional career, which extended from 1946 to 1980. In particular, this study focuses on media coverage of Howe’s highly publicized fight against Lou Fontinato of the New York Rangers on February 1, 1959. Using Canadian and American newspapers and magazines as the primary research base, we analyze media representations of Gordie Howe in the context of ideals and anxieties related to North American masculinity following the Second World War. Historians have identified this period as a time when Canadian and American manhood was perceived to be in decline. We argue that Howe demonstrated a combination of controlled violence and humble manliness suggested by his early nickname in the Detroit press, the “Bashful Basher.” Howe’s rational and expert application of violence – especially in contrast to the emotional Fontinato – firmly established his masculine credentials within the culture of hockey, while positioning him more widely as a “modern” yet rugged role model for masculine renewal in postwar Canada. Howe’s example of gentlemanly masculinity normalized and celebrated a culture of fighting in hockey while establishing a standard of conduct for superstar players that persists to the present day. At the same time, cultural constructions of Howe’s manhood contributed to the entrenchment of a dominant version of heroic, white, heteronormative hockey masculinity in Canadian life.

Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s

Drawing on the voluminous government records as well as selective interviews in a large oral history archive created over several years, this article explores Canada’s recruitment of Greek female domestics in the 1950s and early 1960s within the context of the feminist scholarship on female labour schemes as well as more recent whiteness literature on the in-between racial status of peripheral Europeans. In considering the contradictory features of a large but little-known labour scheme through which more than ten thousand Greek women arrived, many of them before their families, it documents the role of the bureaucrats – who envisioned the domestics’ transformation into models of modern domesticity while portraying them as victims of their patriarchal communities and manipulators of Canadian immigration policy – and that of the women who negotiated various challenges. To account for the scheme’s remarkable longevity, a key argument probes the mix of factors that repositioned a traditionally non-preferred Southern European group of women into a desirable white source of immigrant labour and future Canadian motherhood. Ultimately, Greek women enjoyed a racial privilege and mobility not afforded to later arriving women from the Caribbean and Philippines.