Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Work, and Nation.
Nicholas, Jane
Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Work, and Nation,
edited by Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek. Vancouver, University
of British Columbia Press, 2013. v, 290 pp. $34.95 (paper).
Feminist History in Canada consists of thirteen new essays on
women's history. The collection is based on papers given at the
Canadian Committee on Women's History/Comite canadien de
l'histoire des femmes (CCWH-CCHF) 2010 conference "Edging
Forward, Acting Up: Gender and Women's History at the Cutting Edge
of Scholarship and Social Action." Collectively the chapters map
out the continuing and emerging themes in the field. As Catherine
Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek note in their introduction, the focus is
strongly on continuities, with the major themes of the collection being
biography, waged and unwaged work, and activism/agency. As such, the
collection offers a review of the development and major contributions of
feminist Canadian women's history in regard to content, approach,
and methodology.
More conventional topics and approaches are offered by Gail G.
Campbell, Helene Charron, Rose Fine-Myer, and Ruby Heap. Campbell
compares men's and women's diaries in nineteenth century New
Brunswick to show women's care, concern, and contribution to farm
life and community. Fine-Myer provides an institutional history of the
Ontario Women's History Network. Charron studies Laval
University's Faculty of Social Sciences from the 1940s to the early
1970s to "show how social relationships based on sex were
organized" (p. 160), while Heap looks at the emergent group
identity of female engineers in the 1970s and 1980s and the varying
impact of feminism. These essays provide a solid foundation for
understanding some of the core of feminist women's history in
Canada.
The fourth theme of transnationalism brings in new and emerging
perspectives. Adele Perry's rich analysis of the Creole/Metis
family of James Douglas and Amelia Connolly uses transnational
perspectives to flesh out nineteenth century family and gender history
and poke holes in methodological assumptions of the completeness of
national foci and the neutrality of empiricism. The potential of a
transnational focus in biography is explored in Karen Balcom's
essay on Charlotte Whitton and in Loma R. McLean's essay on Julia
Grace Wales. Taken together, these two essays serve to highlight the
sub-theme of women's friendship and professional networks, a theme
that is also explored in Catherine Gidney's essay on female
administrators at Victoria College in the first four decades of the
twentieth century. McLean's and Gidney's work also reinforces
the significance of religion (and especially in this collection,
Protestantism). A biographical approach from a more localized
perspective is also used by Catherine Charron to explore working
women's paid experiences in domestic work in Quebec in the second
half of the twentieth century. Charron's work brings class to the
centre of analysis and reminds us of its persistent significance through
to the end of the twentieth century.
Women's agency is explored by Heidi Macdonald, Donica Belisle,
Kristina Llewellyn, and Anthony S.C. Hampton. Macdonald's essay on
single women in the Depression challenges the common interpretation of
declining marriage rates because of men's unemployment and instead
argues for acknowledging women's agency in remaining single. Her
methodological analysis of diaries is excellent and argues for
understanding diaries not as a text but as an activity. Belisle uses a
combination of visual and textual evidence to read the sexual portrayal
of women in Canadian retailers' magazines from the 1920s to the
1950s. Belisle incorporates the debates between second and third wave
feminists on dominant femininity and objectification. Ultimately, she
concludes that women's self-selected participation in such sexual
spectacles were problematic and at odds with liberatory politics.
Kristina R. Llewellyn uses a sophisticated self-reflexive approach to
her oral history of Chinese-Canadian school teacher Hazel Chong.
Llewellyn resists an analysis that would make Chong complicit in
post-war liberal democracies social failings and instead seeks to
understand how Chong made sense of "subjugated difference" (p.
193). Hampton's work looks more broadly and combines oral and
textual evidence to analyze the interplay between citizenship, feminism,
and opposition to the Meech Lake Accord in New Brunswick. The essay
stretches second-wave feminism's influence to the realm of
constitutional politics in ways that did not necessarily focus on women
or women's issues.
These are well-edited and concise essays on tightly-focused topics.
They do a very fine job of showing how academic feminism and
women's history push the boundaries of scholarship. They offer
discussion on methodologies available as well as the strengths and
limitations of both traditional and non-traditional evidence and
approaches. In particular, variations in the approach to and use of
diaries, oral histories, and visual evidence provide a fascinating
window into the complexities of historical practice for variously
marginalized subjects. As the editors note in their introduction,
sexuality and race are less well represented in the essays than they
would have liked. Intersectionality informs the analysis in papers by
Perry, Llewellyn, and Macdonald who remind us of the importance of being
attentive to other categories of analysis like race and age.
Overwhelmingly the essays in Feminist History in Canada focus on the
strong continuities with women's history developed in the 1960s and
1970s, and yet the contradictions, differences, and multiplicities that
emerge among the essays reveal the importance and complexity of the
field.
Jane Nicholas
Lakehead University
