Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 by Constance Backhouse (review)

Book Reviews 385 Anglo-Saxon Protestant world-view. However, even in these letters, it is clear that she did not breach gendered boundaries, and her primary concerns were her extended family and the welfare ofher soul. This volume is greatly enhanced by a pleasing combination of commentary , illustrations, and bibliographical information. Whiteley shows studied restraint in her annotations. However, the introduction would have been strengthened by more detailed discussion of the ongoing theoretical debate about decoding life writings and the distinctions among letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies. It is also surprising that Whiteley did not explore the potential of Tuttle's scrapbook. Surely this document represented another aspect ofher quest to arrange the pieces ofher life into a mosaic ofmeaning and order. Annie Tuttle's letters and autobiography cast useful sidelights on the history ofhousehold economy, rural childhood, educational reform, and women's religious activities. Shaped by constraints and opportunities, her career epitomized such phenomena as the feminization ofteaching, outmigration, the advancement of women into mission work, and the omnipresent demands of 'family time.' In this way, Tuttle's life reached into many ofthe recesses ofthe female experience and conformed to the patterns ofher time. LAURIE STANLEY-BLACKWELL St Francis Xavier University Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950. CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE. Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History/ University ofToronto Press 1999· Pp. xiii, 485, illus. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper In a spring 1992 review article in Acadiensis, Greg Marquis, one of several historians quoted anonymously in the introduction to this book; observed regretfully that 'the author of a recent major contribution in Canadian legal history holds an LLB and an LLM not an MA or a Ph.D. in history.' He was, ofcourse, referring to Constance Backhouse, professor oflaw at the University of Ottawa and author of Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto 1991), a classic offeminist legal history. In more recent years Backhouse has turned her attention to the interpenetration ofgender, class, and race, and she has now produced a volume of six historical case studies on 'race,' rights, and the law in Canadian courts. I allude here to the title ofJames Walker 's 1997 book (also from The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History) because Backhouse's volume of essays in the history of Canadian racism is really volume 2 to Walker's volume I. 'Racism' is as conspicuous by its presence in the title of Backhouse's book as by its 386 The Canadian Historical Review absence from the title of Walker's. Each work consists of a series of stand-alone historical case studies - four from Walker, six from Backhouse . All of Walker's cases reached the Supreme Court of Canada, compared with only one of Backhouse's. Two of the cases to which Walker devotes a chapter apiece (Quang Wing v. R. and Christie v. York Corporation) are each given two pages by Backhouse. These twin books addressing an identical theme and in the same format are companion pieces and must be read in tandem. Though methodologically their approach is similar, Backhouse is far more opinionated and polemical and she has harsh words for mainstream historians. Walker's book unmentioned in Backhouse's introduction - is better history; Backhouse 's, better historical law. The fundamental difference lies between the legal scholar/law teacher's approach to sociolegal history and the historian's. On a case-by-case basis Backhouse's studies are gripping; they range in time from 1902 to 1947 and, geographically, from Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia. Ontario is granted two, while British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland are unrepresented. Backhouse's deconstruction ofSaskatchewan's infamous White Women's Labour Law of 1912, which prohibited the employment of white women by Chinese businessmen, is especially noteworthy. W.F.A. Turgeon's sponsorship of this discriminatory legislation is a little-known episode in the early career of a white Acadian Roman Catholic New Brunswicker who later became chief justice of Saskatchewan and a prominent diplomat and chair of royal commissions. The notes and bibliography, which take up more than one-third of the book, are really a book...