Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation ed. by Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek (review)

In her back-cover endorsement, historian Amélie Bourbeau calls Catherine Carstairs’s and Nancy Janovicek’s new edited collection “A refreshing book!” I am in full agreement with this characterization of Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation. In their introduction to this collection, which emerged out of the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (ccwh) Conference held in Vancouver in August 2010, the editors remark upon the fact that many of the themes dealt with here have been constants in Canadian women’s history since its inception in the 1970s. This is true; nonetheless, the treatments of these themes that we find here are new, sometimes strikingly original, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I especially appreciated the focus on women’s work that runs through this collection – much of it (but not all) the work of educated, professional women (social workers, physicians, teachers, university professors, scientists) such as Marion Hilliard, studied by Catherine Gidney, or Claudette MacKay-Lassonde, whose engineering career is examined by Ruby Heap. I also liked the biographical approach taken by the overwhelming majority of the authors, who use diaries, memoirs, obituaries, and especially correspondence in attempts to understand the lives of individual women. Some of these are relatively ordinary individuals, such as the young working women whose “singleness” is analyzed by Heidi MacDonald, or Hazel Chong, the British Columbia schoolteacher interviewed by Kristina Llewellyn, or the two Quebec City domestic workers interviewed by Catherine Charron and featured in her chapter. At other points in the book we meet women who for one reason or another are better known to historians, such as Shakespeare scholar Julia Grace Wales, whose international pacifism is studied by Lorna McLean, or Amelia Connolly, glimpsed here with her husband, James Douglas, in a portrait by Adele Perry. And I loved the close look at women’s transnational networks, associational life, and friendships that we find here: this focus is explicit in Karen Balcom’s fine study of the child welfare experts employed by the Canadian Welfare Council and the United States Children’s Bureau (most notably Charlotte Whitton and Katharine Lenroot), but transnationalism is also at the very heart of the chapters by Perry and McLean.

Edited collections are quite frequently presented by their editors as works that break new ground, whether theoretically or thematically. The contributors to this book generally adopt a more modest tone: we rarely find, in these pages, claims to path-breaking or “pioneer” status. Carstairs and Janovicek suggest, rather, that this is a book that allows us to take stock of a now mature field of history, a book that “provide[s] us with an opportunity to reflect on how forty years of feminist scholarship has shaped women’s and gender history and to assess its impact on the broader field of Canadian history.” (3) This relatively modest claim can be explained, in part at least, by historical timing and the state of the discipline: with notable exceptions, such as the chapter on New Brunswick diary-keepers by pioneering historian of women Gail Campbell, these studies represent the work of the second and third generations (or at least cohorts) of women’s historians in Canada. Nonetheless, it is important not to understate the significance of their contributions: many of these studies are absolutely compelling.

As Carstairs and Janovicek note, most of the authors gathered here appear to favour “an empirical scholarship grounded in the rich details of people’s daily lives.” (7) Where gender is employed as a category of analysis, it is generally used to analyze the lives of women, not men (Perry’s study of James Douglas and masculinity and, to a lesser extent, Campbell’s analysis of male New Brunswickers’ diaries constitute exceptions). But we certainly see here how systems – of rule, of governance, of education, and of employment, for...