Domestic Reforms: Political Visions and Family Regulation in British Columbia, 1862–1940 (review)

In a span of six decades from the early 1860s to 1920s British Columbia witnessed three waves of reforms in property, inheritance, maintenance, and guardianship laws. Clarkson’s Domestic Reforms provides a useful history of these events, concerning itself with two sets of questions: (1) the economic, political, and social conditions within which the laws were passed and how the reformers persuaded the legislature and the community; and (2) how the laws were received and utilized by the judges and those it targeted. The book opens with a clear and concise discussion of feminist liberalization and state patriarchy interpretations of the legal history of family regulation, both of which, despite their obvious tensions, have informed Clarkson’s analysis. Given the apparent centrality of colonial themes to the study, it is surprising that the analytical framework does not engage with scholarship on colonial power and family law in comparative contexts. The first three chapters narrate the reforms of legislation on married women’s property, homestead, and inheritance in the 1860s and 1870s. Clarkson argues that these legal developments were the product of colonial demographic concerns and a liberal, capitalist ‘yeoman dream’ of widespread property ownership, entrepreneurship, and egalitarian democracy among white men. The following chapter discusses a shift in legislative vision that was more concerned with market stability and creditors’ rights, as reflected in a series of amendments to earlier family property protection legislation. The last three chapters examine statutes extending maintenance rights to deserted wives and illegitimate children as well as those providing for equal guardianship rights to women. The author’s thematic concerns – legislators’ motivations, discourse strategies, and the extent of regulatory power – are attended to throughout the chapters. The integrated discussions of lawmaking and case law are especially enriching.

This book is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the history of family and welfare law reform. It also promises to be a good resource for studies of domestic laws’ articulations with state formation and colonialism. Indeed, the reforms in British Columbia were not original and followed much of the Anglo-American world, but Clarkson piqued readers’ interests by alerting at the beginning of the book that the study shows that the British Columbia reforms were shaped by its colonial history, nation-building project, and racialized pro-natalist politics. This remains a largely unfulfilled promise, as the persuasiveness of the argument often suffers from a lack of direct evidence. While this line of argument is plausible, given the political and social contexts of these reforms, how they manifested in the legal reforms still needs to be documented. The case for colonial motivations and racial logic underpinning laws providing for homestead exemptions is adequately demonstrated. However, the links between the laws protecting wives’ rights to property, maintenance, and guardianship and their links to colonial population anxieties were inferred, rather than substantiated with data. Take the example of the discussion of the Deserted Wives Act, 1862. The primary source for it is a brief newspaper report of comments by David Ring, the champion for the act in the House of Assembly. Ring hoped ‘to protect wives who were so unfortunate as to have drunken, vagrant husbands . . . and it was with a desire to secure to the wives their hard earned property that the bill was introduced.’ This leaves the reader to wonder whether and to what extent Ring was motivated by racialized colonial objectives and how these might have been articulated with concerns for mistreated women. This limitation is likely attributable to the relatively restrictive use of primary data, which consist mainly of periodicals, legislative sessional papers, and court records. Analyses of the circumstances and discourses of the reforms rely heavily on newspaper reports on legislative debates and editorials. Conceivably, examinations of personal papers and papers of pressure groups, especially women’s organizations, would have produced more direct and detailed materials for analyzing the discourses of the reforms.

The passage of legislation such as the Destitute Orphans Act and concerns over...