Gendering Trans/National Historiographies: Feminists Rewriting Canadian History

I address here the issue of gendering national historiographies in Canada by considering national narratives and counter narratives and the efforts to integrate more effectively gender, class, race, and sex in Canadian history. I will accentuate the positive, but then comment on difficulties. Over the last thirty-five years, Canadian feminist historians—whether they have identified primarily as a women's or gender historian or some other type of historian—have been critical to the writing and teaching of far more inclusive, if uneven and contested, Canadian histories.

Certainly, in contrast to Central Eastern Europe and Mexico, women's and, more recently, gender history in Canada has enjoyed a degree of ongoing institutional support. There is an established and growing literature in Canadian women's history and a rapidly growing number of gendered histories—which include many studies that do not fit a homogenizing postmodern gender history label but are grounded analyses of gender relations and power within different social arenas. Specific figures are not available but qualitatively speaking, there are Canadian feminist historians in history departments, women and/or gender studies, and Canadian studies programs across the country. There is no specific journal in Canadian women's and gender history but the established Canadian women's studies journals and history journals are receptive venues for publication. Faculty teach specific courses in these fields and integrate women and gender into their surveys and other courses. The Canadian Committee on Women's History (CCWH, founded in 1975) is the most successful of the societies affiliated with the Canadian Historical Association. Although the most prestigious awards and endowed chairs still go mostly to men, and men still outnumber women at the full professor rank, the greater influence of feminist historians within the wider profession is evident in their increased presence as journal and book series editors, the many scholarly prizes, the strong presence of women's and gender history on conference programs, and the growing number of their students who are in full-time positions. One can pursue a career in Canadian women's and gender history but most scholars simultaneously train in various fields. We are acutely aware of U.S. scholarly domination and that Canada is a rich but not particularly powerful country, and suspect that many of our U.S. colleagues regard Canada, apart from Quebec, as a similar but less interesting place than their own. My involvement in a transnational project on Italian women workers around the globe underscored the importance of challenging U.S. paradigms but also revealed the irony that even when the aim is to decenter the United States, it still gets an awful lot of attention. Still, Canadians do enjoy a degree of North American privilege within scholarly (including feminist) networks.

Canada's history, historiography, and institutional structures have been influenced by many factors, including its historical relationship to Britain (and the British empire) and to its powerful neighbor, the United States; French-English relations; and, more recently, official multiculturalism. Canadian historians, including feminists, were not in the vanguard of earliest efforts to internationalize national history, but early women's history in Canada, as elsewhere, was inspired by second-wave feminism and a western feminist agenda to find the majority's past. While not explicitly transnational or international projects, many of the earlier studies—including those on suffragists and radicals—certainly took account of the broader international movements involved. (A project is now underway to more effectively internationalize Canadian first-wave feminism.)¹

Since the 1970s, Canadian women's and, later, gender historians, along with a diverse group of social historians working with different approaches, have studied an increasingly wide array of once marginal or neglected groups and under-studied processes (capitalist state formation, industrialization, patriarchy, bourgeois hegemony, heterosexuality). In bringing more female subjects to Canadian history's table—including nuns, teachers, Aboriginal fur traders, telegraph operators, homesteaders, immigrant socialists, Black abolitionists, murderesses, asylum patients, battered wives, domestics, and unwed mothers—they did more than simply enlarge the picture. Some also offered compelling critiques of the dominant liberal, elite, white, masculine, and...