In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History
  • Dorothy Sue Cobble
Joan Sangster, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press 2011)

Joan Sangster’s new volume of her collected essays is a rich and thoughtful addition to women’s history. It includes substantial original material as well as ten previously published articles, carefully chosen to reflect “the changing [End Page 289] concerns and debates in women’s history.” (2) Organized chronologically and grouped into five thematic sections, the articles span over three decades of historical scholarship from the late 1970s to the present. In a long and amply annotated introductory essay written expressly for the collection, Sangster offers a sweeping interpretative overview of the shifting course of Canadian women’s history since the 1960s. She also prefaces each of the book’s five sections with an extended critical commentary on her own essays and the intellectual and political moment in which they were written.

The subjects Sangster engages with range broadly. There are essays on strikes and women’s labour activism in turn-of-the-century Toronto; the Canadian Communist Party and the woman question in the 1920s; corporate paternalism and female wage-earner consciousness in mid-20th-century Peterborough; cross-cultural encounters between white and Inuit women in the Canadian North in the 1940s and 1950s; women’s letters to Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women in the late 1960s; the “labouring bodies” of Indigenous and white women “skinning, sewing, and selling” in the fur industry in the 1950s; and women, criminalization, and the law in Ontario.

Yet despite the varied subject matter, Sangster’s consistent concern in these essays is with unequal relations of power and how such relations are experienced and sustained. These are the “feminist eyes” through which history is viewed. As she elucidates in the introduction, what matters is not the distinction between “women’s history” and “gender history” but whether what we practice is “feminist history.” For Sangster, feminist history means, among other things, “understanding the ‘why’ of women’s agency, analyzing women’s inequality where it existed, and probing the multiple power relations that have created and sustained social inequalities.” (4)

Sangster’s deep engagement with the theoretical debates within women’s history since the 1960s is evident throughout the collection. In many of the essays Sangster passionately defends her “theoretical proclivities favouring feminist historical materialism.” (392) Her general framework is thus a co-mingling of Thompsonian cultural Marxism (with its appreciation for the particularities of time and place and the agency of individuals) and feminism (with its attention to multiple sites of exploitation and the differentially situated positions of men and women). She can be quite critical of post-structuralism, particularly the writings of Joan Scott, but she also draws fruitfully on Foucault and a wide range of other postmodern theorists in analyzing the meaning and significance of historical sources.

The essays themselves skillfully combine her theoretical and political concerns with empirically grounded history. Each essay opens with a broad and pointed critical review of the relevant theoretical and historical literature. A thickly researched historical case study follows. Regardless of her evidentiary base – whether the dozens of interviews she conducted in Peterborough, the legal records underpinning her tales of female criminal defendants, or the travel diaries of sojourning white women in Northern Canada – Sangster scrutinizes her sources with keen intelligence, ever attentive to their limits and possibilities. Indeed, her commentary on the process of writing and researching history, its joys as well as its frustrations, is a kind of metanarrative accompanying the historical tales she constructs. Many of the essays would be excellent for teaching precisely because of their critical engagement with a wide range of scholarly literature and their astute commentary on historical method and craft. [End Page 290]

Sangster closes the volume with one of her most impressive recent articles, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History,” first published in 2007. The essay is a superb theoretical addition to “body studies,” rightly noting the need for attention to the labouring body as well as the erotic body; the producer as well...

pdf

Share