Households of Faith: Family, Gender and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 ed. by Nancy Christie (review)

your native language.' Lundy agrees with Dumont that such attitudes disempower Indians, not only because oftheir inconsistency but mainly because of their lack of realism. He sees relationship with the land as fundamental to all who live on it, Indian as well as others; the prior residency ofAboriginal peoples does not exclude the experiences oflater arrivals who are 'willing to look and listen.' His approach is somewhat qualified bythe book's editors, Patrick C. Douaud and Bruce W. Dawson, who see the priority ofAboriginals as giving them an advantage. As they express it, 'several thousand years of pre-contact experience have produced a consciousness and a resilience that can hardly be matched by less than two hundred years of European settlement.' Even though Europeans have been here for double the time the two editors have allowed, their point still has some merit. This collection's sharing of personal views and experiences with some aspects of that fundamental relationship puts into dear focus the richness of Canada's cultural heritage. OLIVE PATRICIA DICKASON University ofOttawa Households of Faith: Family, Gender and Community in Canada, 17601969 . Edited by NANCY CHRISTIE. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2001. Pp. xiv, 386 $75.00 Nancy Christie is to be congratulated on this extremely important collection , a pathbreaking contribution to the emerging field ofthe social and cultural history ofreligion in Canada. This work is particularlysignificant in the context ofEnglish Canada, where we still know very little about the religious beliefs and practices of'ordinary people.' While English Canada has laggedbehind, Quebechistorians have been publishing excitingwork in this field. Perhaps because this research is generally published in French, it has not been widely read in English Canada. The two most impressive achievements ofChristie's collection, then, are that it publishes new and important pieces on the social history of religion in English Canada, which significantly advance the state of the field, and that it bridges the academic 'two solitudes' by including important new articles on Quebec, including two translated pieces. This volume is also to be commended for focusing on the intersection ofreligious practice and belief and gender and family life. Most English Canadian gender and family historians have paid little attention to the religious dimensions of their subjects' lives, making this work an important and welcome contribution not only to the social history of religion but to gender and family history. 290 The Canadian Historical Review The contributors, ranging from graduate students to established scholars, cover a range ofimportant topics. Some are new, others involve a new look at older subjects, and all the authors draw on a vibrant international literature. The majority ofessays focus on the 185os-193os period, but the book extends back to the seventeenth century and forward to the 1960s. The postwar period, which has been particularly neglected by social historians ofreligion, marks another welcome departure for this volume. Christie is also to be commended for her ambitious introduction, which places the contributions to this volume within a bold conceptual framework- one that challenges current paradigms ofreligious, gender, and family history. I cannot do full justice to the complexity ofChristie's argument here, but will focus on a few key points. Echoing British historian Amanda Vickery, Christie challenges the concept of separate spheres, arguing that, in light ofmen's involvement in domestic life and with little evidence of dramatic change within the family as a result of industrialization, an ongoing model of patriarchal domesticity is more appropriate than separate spheres. While Christie makes important points, she risks exaggerating the rigidity with which the concept of separate spheres has been used by most scholars. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, the authors of Family Fortunes, the seminal work on separate spheres in the British context, recognized that separate spheres left room for men to be involved in domestic concerns and allowed women an active role outside the home in church and charity work. Davidoff and Hall would therefore probably not have been surprised by the findings ofcontributors to this volume, such as Jack Little's study of a mid-nineteenth-century Anglican clergyman in the Eastern Townships, in which Little uses the Rev. James Reid's published and private writings to...