- Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation ed. by Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek
This collection of papers originated in the first stand-alone conference sponsored by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History, an affiliate of the Canadian Historical Association. According to editors Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek, the thirteen essays address four themes of current (and recurrent) interest: women’s work, biography, activism, and transnationalism. Some of the essays return to earlier preoccupations of the fledgling field of women’s history, such as women’s paid and unpaid labour and women’s activism, while biographical approaches and transnational analyses add rich dimensions to the scholarship on women and gender. The theme of women’s work appears in essays on men’s and women’s diaries in nineteenth-century New Brunswick (Gail Campbell), saleswomen and advertising in Canadian department stores (Donica Belisle), social work professors at Laval University (Hélène Charron), history teachers in Ontario (Rose Fine-Meyer), in Depression-era diaries of single women (Heidi MacDonald), and in the domestic service sector in Quebec City (Catherine Charron). Biographical approaches inform many of the previously cited essays, while a number of others focus on specific individuals, particularly mixed-race couple Amelia Connolly and James Douglas (Adele Perry), peace activist Julia Grace Wales (Lorna McLean), and pioneer Chinese educator Hazel Chong (Kristina Llewellyn). Activist women are the focus of Karen Balcom’s piece on international child welfare reformers; Catherine Gidney writes about professional women at Victoria College, University of Toronto; Ruby Heap looks at pioneering women engineers in the 1970s and 1980s; and Anthony Hampton examines New Brunswick feminist responses to the Meech Lake Accord.
This new collection underlines the prominence of qualitative evidence in this area of Canadian history. In addition to the use of diaries, personal papers, and visual culture, several essays interrogate oral history sources. As Perry notes, oral sources have been viewed as “less stable” than official, written sources but she also points out how important such evidence is for capturing women’s and gender history. In the case of Connolly, the Metis wife of Governor James Douglas (himself [End Page 666] from a mixed-race family), the historian has little written evidence from her but much evidence from the official and family archives, illustrating “the uneven relationship between oral indigenous cultures and literate European or imperial ones as well as the variable access men and women had to writing and archival preservation” (34–5). Perry’s essay provides the transnational context of the Atlantic world, including Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean, for her portrait of Connolly and Douglas. Like Llewellyn’s study of Hazel Chong, which also uses oral history, Perry’s work takes us into multiracial identities and how they are understood. This is a rich and thoughtful essay on imperial intimacies, which won the 2014 Hilda Neatby Prize in Women’s History.
Regional representation is also key in this collection. Whereas early women’s history tended to focus on Ontario and to a lesser extent on Quebec, three essays use New Brunswick research subjects. Gail Campbell’s analysis of nineteenth-century, middle-aged men’s and women’s diaries concludes that both are needed to understand the shared worlds of family and community but that women’s diaries provide a broader picture of family and community life. Heidi MacDonald’s piece selects young diarists from Ontario, Alberta, and New Brunswick to explore the extent to which young women chose to remain single in the Depression years. Anthony Hampton examines the New Brunswick Ad Hoc Committee on the Constitution, a feminist-led organization that challenged the Meech Lake Accord and the lack of citizen consultation on the agreement. Three essays are based in Quebec, two of them translated into English and focused on Laval University academics and Quebec City domestics, rather than on those in Montreal, which has more often been the subject of women’s history research. The third essay focuses...