“Taking Up the Gauntlet”: Historical Writing and Challenges to Class Analysis

out of the hospital without any support system.... Only ... laterdid wesay, 'Hey this is crazy, what about housing, what about recreation?"' (160). On the other hand, thousands of other patients were "deinstitutionalized" into socalled Homes for Special Care in order to qualify as unemployables for federal unemployment assistance funding or, if elderly, ended up as subsidized patients in private nursing homes. The Ministry of Health justified this policyon the grounds of"moving people back into the community" and into a "homelike atmosphere" but, as Simmons points out, most of these facilities were located in isolated rural areas and few could be called "homelike" (114). Private nursing homes reaped a windfall with deinstitutionalization , not because Queen's Park was "eager to line the pockets of private entrepreneurs , but simply because the nursing homes were already in place, and because they could relieve the province ofsomeofthe administrative and financial burden of the residential units" (120). Indeed, it seems that at leastone-third ofOntario'sprivate nursinghome beds in the 1960sand early 1970s were filled byelderly ex-inmatesofthe province's mental hospitals. Mostofthese mistakes, Simmons argues, can be attributed to ad hoe, incremental decision-making, the absence ofany coherent overall planning in the mental health field, and above all to the failure of family and friends ofthe mentally iU to developa powerful and effective lobby as a counterweight to bureaucratic expediency or the professional power of psychiatry. This failure is all the more notable compared to the political efficacy of lobby groups for the mentally retarded in Ontarioorthe mental health patients' rights movement in the United States. When itoccurs in Ontario, reform is typically a topdown affairemanating from within the higher echelons of the civil service or through the efforts of an unusually vigorous cabinet minister. As Simmons puts it, "policy has been incoherent and ad hoe because the pressure group network is weak and because there is no strongconstituency for acoherent mental health policy in government" (202), leaving the field "peculiarly subject to the personality and views ofwhoever happened 146 to be the Minister ofHealth"(244). Why this should be so for the mentally ill, but not the mentally retarded, is a fascinating question Simmons raises but does not effectively answer. Although not withoutsuccesses, theantipsychiatry movement in Ontario, bolstered by the CharterofRights, has been more effectiveduring the 1980s in reducing the arbitrary authority of psychiatrists and enhancing the legal rights of patients than in extracting greater resources from the state for community aftercare. "In the political arena," Simmons concludes, "mental health policy still arouse(s] little interestor passion"except on the part of angry ratepayers' groups anxious to keep community services and housing for discharged patients out of their neighbourhoods (256). Ironically, although the mentally ill are now protected bylaw from involuntary and indefinite commital to a hospital, many"wander ... thestreets dressed in rags, living in doorways, and barely able to fend for themselves" (256). Theasy!um is gone, but what have we put in its place? Unbalanced both illuminates previously unexplored social policy terrain and offers us a telling glimpse into our own schizoid response to the needs of the mentally ill. JAMES STRUTHERS Trent University 'Taking Up the Gauntlet": Historical Writing and Challenges to Class Analysis THE CHAILENGE OF CLASS ANALYSIS. Wallace Clement. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988. THE GENDER OF BREADWINNERS: WOMEN, MEN AND CHANGE IN TWO INDUSTRIAL TOWNS, 1880-1950. Joy Parr. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1990. Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 27. No. I (Primemps 1992 Spring) ON THE MOVE: FRENCH-CANADIAN AND ITALIANMIGRANTS INTHENORTH ATLANTICECONOMY, 1860-1914. Bruno Ramirez. Toronto: McClellandand Stewart, 1991. THEAGEOFLIGHT, SOAPAND WATER: MORAL REFORMIN ENGLISH CANADA, 1885-1925. Mariana Valverde. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. The centrality of class to the study of Canadian social history in the past twenty years has meant that few historians in the field have escaped the related conceptual and methodological debates.• Especially in the wakeofE.P. Thompson'sapproach, with its promise to encompass the experiential and cultural elements of class as well as its historically more visible economic and political forms, class as a relational concept has prevailed. On-going refinements have demonstrated that any conceptualization of class is inadequate if it does not take into account...