Making Up the State: Women in 20th-Century Atlantic Canada (review)

With the publication of Making Up the State: Women in 20th-Century Atlantic Canada, historians of women, of Atlantic Canada, and of the Canadian state have gained a valuable new source of information and insights. Along with a useful introductory discussion by the editors, this book brings together fourteen essays that explore topics typically associated with studies of the state. They explore government policies relating to welfare and social services, struggles to gain the vote and access to political power, legislative changes regarding individual and collective rights and freedoms, and the formation and evolution of state institutions and agencies. As Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton note in their introduction, the book works through two 'standard narratives' concerning women's relationships with the twentieth-century state: the increasing ability of the state to regulate women, and the history of women's efforts to expand their own economic and political rights and opportunities. Guildford and Morton indicate that when reviewing the contributions to the collection, they were most impressed by the essays' illustration of the ad hoc and uneven way in which the state was formed in Atlantic Canada during the twentieth century - and especially during the period before the Second World War. As the essays in this collection clearly demonstrate, there was nothing neat and tidy about the state's evolution. Competing visions and agendas, the agency of multiple interested parties, and the powerful influence of local circumstances all affected the work of the state, though not necessarily in an easily predictable manner. This attention to the ways in which women's relationships with the state were multi-faceted, complex, and not necessarily the result of purposeful design will perhaps be the book's most significant historiographical contribution.

While it is impossible for a collection of essays - some of which are case studies - to provide a comprehensive survey history of four provinces, each of which contains a variety of socio-political regions, this book does a good job of conveying the depth and breadth of its subject. Geographically and thematically, Making Up the State is wide-ranging. Temporally the book is a study of the whole of the twentieth century. Whereas earlier studies of women and the state tended to focus on either relatively well-educated women's struggles to gain greater political, educational, and employment rights or lower-classed women's efforts to resist oppressive social reform-oriented policies, this collection of essays is consciously designed to suggest the diversity of ways in which women engaged with and were affected by the state in the twentieth century. For example, Sharon Myers shows us the state at work in relation to Minnie McGee, an economically and socially marginal woman of rural pei, who spent most of her life within prisons and asylums after being convicted of infanticide. From Lisa Perley-Dutcher and Stephen Dutcher we learn about the impact of Bill C-31 (designed to reinstate status rights) on the women and children of the Tobique First Nation in northwest New Brunswick. We are encouraged to contemplate the problematic socio-political dynamics that public health workers had to negotiate through Sasha Mullally's study of Phyllis Lyttle's work as a nurse in Cape Breton. From Suzanne Morton we learn about the significance of women's invisibility in the state's interactions with people working in the fishing industry. There are articles about strikes, taxes, and community 'modernization' projects, as well as articles on individuals and groups of female lawyers, politicians, reformers, and activists who were at the forefront of battles to expand women's rights and opportunities across Atlantic Canada.

No doubt, most readers will be able to think of subjects that, if added, would have enhanced the collection (for example, I feel that a piece on the state's engagement with the residents of Africville, Nova Scotia, might have made an excellent addition to the range of issues covered here; likewise I would have enjoyed the inclusion of a...