No Place for the State: The Origins and Legacies of the 1969 Omnibus Bill ed. by Christopher Dummitt and Christabelle Sethna (review)

If there is a famous statement in Canadian political history, it is the one made by Pierre Trudeau in 1967, who borrowed it from Globe and Mail journalist Martin O'Malley: "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" (5). However, the state is still omnipresent in the bedrooms of the nation. This book is a reminder of that.

The objective of the authors here, who are mainly historians but also include researchers in Canadian Studies, criminology, law, sociology, and Women's Studies, is "to explore some of the convoluted origins and legacies of the most controversial parts of the Omnibus Bill of 1969 – those relating to the legal regulation of … abortion, birth control, and homosexuality" (3). In addition to the introduction, the book contains eleven chapters in four parts: those in "Regulation, Rupture, and Continuity" address the changes heralded by Bill C-150 and how they were interpreted by the political actors of the day; in "Activist Responses," as might be expected, are descriptions of how activists mobilized to push back the narrow frontiers defined by the Omnibus Bill; the chapters in "Beyond the Omnibus Bill" discuss the impact of the bill; and in "Back to the Future" the bill's multiple and unexpected repercussions are examined. More specifically, five chapters deal with homosexuality and six with issues related to reproduction (including abortion, adoption, and the birth control pill). The book has an index but lacks a conclusion – a regrettable absence, since one would have provided a space for taking stock and suggesting avenues for future research.

Several books on sexuality in Canada have been published in recent years, and the question is how No Place for the State adds to the existing body of knowledge. I see two main contributions: the first brings to light what was in the shadows, and the second shows that the past influences the present – contributions that I discuss below from the perspective of women. Indeed, works on sexuality often have the unfortunate defect of overlooking women (surprise, surprise), but several chapters in this book foreground strategies used by women to live out their sexualities.

Karen Pearlston discusses a little-known measure introduced by the federal government to regulate sex between women: adding the words "homosexual act" as grounds for divorce to the 1968 Divorce Act was a measure intended, in Pearlston's view, "to give husbands a means to divorce their lesbian wives" (200). Because sex between women was regulated through family law rather than criminal law, a holistic understanding of the state's same-sex policing of sex had to go beyond criminal law, which for the most part captured men's experiences. The failure to do so meant that lesbianism, its repression and regulation, and the strategies of resistance that lesbians have pursued to love each other, will remain in the shadows of the history of sexuality. In her essay on use of the birth control pill in the early 1960s, Jessica Haynes shows that the pill's official illegality did not hinder its use (at least for women who were married or engaged to be married). But, more interestingly, she exposes the strategies pursued by women whose religious convictions (especially Catholicism) raised moral dilemmas regarding their use of the pill: some reinterpreted religious teachings to make their use of the pill acceptable, others remained silent about using the pill when they went to confession, and still others simply turned their backs on Catholicism. These observations are particularly interesting because they contribute to destabilizing the myth of Catholic women being subservient to clerical authorities. I regret, however, the absence of Protestant women and women of other religions.

Anyone adhering to historical institutionalism knows that the present bears the mark of the past. This is evident in several chapters, but Rachael Johnstone...