Book Review: Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History

Since 1986, with the publication of Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History (now in its seventh edition), Canadian women’s history has not been lacking in edited collections that provide wide-ranging overviews of selected work. These collections reflect both the themes that marked the field’s academic inception and those that emerged from debates that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, especially the development of gender history. By focusing on historiography, Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History breaks new ground. The collection’s genesis, editors Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson explain, came from their own curiosity about the state of scholarship in the field and a desire to provide deeper historiographical explorations than introductions of most edited collections can afford. To that end they put out an open-ended call for proposals and organized a one-day workshop based on the responses they received. This book is a result of that process, and it reflects, as a result, a range of Canadian feminist historians’ current preoccupations and concerns.

The book’s thirteen chapters range from the more familiar or expected topics—feminism in Canada from the nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, religion, Indigenous women, immigration, sexuality, reproduction, and work—alongside those that have received somewhat less attention—war and peace; the gendered nature of Quebec nationalist history; the place of class, race, and gender in British North America; and Black Canadian women. The authors themselves also reflect a diversity of generational expertise, one that encompasses very senior scholars to newly appointed assistant professors and postdoctoral fellows.

The majority of the essays conform to the more conventional historiographical treatment of a field, one in which the author lays out and discusses the literature; assesses its contributions, both positive and negative; and then suggests future directions for scholarship. To be sure, there are some notable exceptions to this approach. Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Susan M. Hill’s chapter on Indigenous women’s history takes the form of an extended personal conversation between these two scholars in which their evaluations of the field are intertwined with their own experiences; Denyse Baillargeon explores the gendered nature of Quebec nationalist histories; Joan Sangster focuses on the writing of popular feminist history in late twentieth-century Canada; and Beth Robertson examines religious history by analyzing the intertwined questions of agency, feminist theories, and the potential offered by histories of female mediums. Depending on one’s reasons for using the collection—undergraduate teaching, preparing graduate fields, reminding oneself of “what’s been done,” or becoming familiar with a new research area—the effectiveness of the authors’ treatment of their topics varies. Perhaps not surprisingly, those essays that take a more familiar approach would be more useful in introducing students or scholars less familiar with Canadian women’s and gender history to the field’s dominant themes (McCallum and Hill’s discussion provides similar background). This is not to argue, however, that those essays that differ in their strategies are without merit. Baillargeon’s exploration of the “gender of history” practiced by Quebec male historians stands out for its sophistication and engagement with scholarship outside the field of women’s history, although readers looking for a “better story” might find her conclusions about the unrelenting masculinity of nationalist historiographies (old and new) depressing. Sangster’s examination of feminist history-writing also provides an important counterpart to the oft-repeated—but not, as she points out, always accurate—claim that Canadian feminist histories in the 1960s and 1970s was marked by an exclusive preoccupation with the pasts of white, middle-class women. I also wonder if readers would have been better served by a thorough exploration of the work of Canadian feminist historians of religion, although I found Robertson’s discussion of agency and spirituality fascinating and provocative.

Although the topics covered are wide-ranging, they are linked by the varying ways relationships of power and dominance have shaped the writing of Canadian feminist history, a process that all too frequently has resulted in the exclusion of particular groups of women’s histories and experiences. The two most-commonly addressed absences are the histories of Indigenous and Black Canadian women, a theme that runs throughout the essays. The authors call for either more research specifically directed at these areas or for work that explores other themes, such as the histories of sexuality, work, reproduction, migration, and feminism, to be cognizant of the need to pay attention to these histories; in a number of instances they suggest that both strategies should be employed. Such arguments are not new; one can find them in many of the edited collections published in the field for at least thirty years, although the collection makes this argument in a particularly cogent and urgent manner. Furthermore, there is much excellent and path-breaking work in Indigenous and Métis women’s history, ranging from Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties and Jennifer S. H. Brown’s Strangers in Blood to Sarah Carter and Adele Perry’s insights into the centrality of Indigenous women and gender relations to the formation of settler colonialism in Western Canada and colonial British Columbia. What is needed now is work that incorporates Indigenous knowledge produced by Indigenous scholars, a point made most clearly McCallum and Hill but that is also taken up by others, especially Shannon Stettner, Kristin Burnett, and Lori Chambers in their chapter on reproductive justice.

The case of Black women’s history, however, is a rather different matter. As Karen Flynn and Funké Aladejebi point out in their chapter, there is much work to do to recover Black women’s experiences, which in its “themes, trajectories, and focus might appear passé in light of new and recent interventions in Canadian’s women’s history” (64). Furthermore, they argue that the trope of “rootedness,” which has played a critically important role in disrupting our amnesia about “Black women’s presence on Canadian soil,” needs to be complicated, augmented with an awareness of Black women’s histories of transnational lives and mobility. Such histories range from the mid-nineteenth-century journalist Mary Ann Shadd to those women who migrated from the Caribbean to Canada as part of the state-sponsored domestic worker scheme. Flynn and Aladejebi also call for historians to recognize a wide range of sources—autobiographies, biographies, and diaries—as legitimate materials in writing Black women’s histories, given the lack, for example, of subject headings in archival collections (79). Flynn and Aladejebi acknowledge that writing “all-encompassing” narratives of Black women’s histories will likely be an impossible task; historians must be ready, they caution, to accept “an unfinished narrative” or sources that require more imaginative approach to gain insights into the lives of those who left little or nothing behind (78). While their suggestions are well taken, women’s historians, along with those social historians who write the histories of the marginalized, have long faced the need to be creative in their use of sources and methods in their work. Moreover, while their search for evidence of Black women’s voices and expressions of subjectivity is understandable, they also demonstrate that there is much value in looking at actions when words cannot be found.

Other chapters take up Flynn and Aladejebi’s point about the importance of transnationalism in Canadian women’s and gender history, most notably Nancy M. Forestell’s exploration of feminism as well as Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta’s discussion of the histories of immigration and migration. Both chapters stand out for their sophistication and depth of analysis, but also for their argument that Canadian women’s and gender history and, moreover, Canadian history in general cannot be neatly hived off from other places. The borders of the nation-state, they remind us, are important, but they have never been impermeable. Although the collection tends to focus on women’s experiences and the construction of femininity, several contributors make valuable points in their discussions of the histories of masculinity, even though the latter’s treatment by Canadian historians has been partial and fragmented. Many of the authors— for example, those by McCallum and Hill, Flynn and Aladejebi, Baillargeon, and Katherine McKenna’s study of British North America—explore forms of patriarchy. In some cases, they point to the ways in which certain fields would benefit from an analysis of masculinity; Tarah Brookfield and Sarah Glassford’s chapter on war, as a case in point, should be required reading for anyone working in the field of military history.

Even a collection as comprehensive as this cannot cover everything. As the editors admit, they did not receive submissions about the more obvious areas in which much work has been done, such as education or the family. Nor, they argue, has there been enough research in other areas, such as the history of the emotions or the body, for thorough historiographical treatments (4). I would add other areas that would benefit from sustained feminist analyses, such as environmental history, a field that continues to burgeon in Canada. Cultural history as a specific field of inquiry is also largely absent. To some extent this is not surprising, since Canadian historiography overall tends to pay less attention to culture than do other national fields. However, feminist historians, such as Donica Belisle, Patrizia Gentile, and Jane Nicholas have explored consumption and representation in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada. Furthermore, from the mid-eighteenth century on, the histories of Canadian female artists and cultural workers encompass a wide range of backgrounds, genres, and national borders. Including their work would incorporate not just white and/or middle-class women’s history into narratives of Canadian history but also that of women from First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Black, and other racialized and ethnic communities. Yet another topic that appears to have made little impact on Canadian women’s and gender history is that of women in right-wing, white supremacists, and/or fascist movements. Although historians have examined the relationship between eugenics and social reform and feminism, to date, there is a distinct lack of work comparable to Kathleen M. Blee’s research on white-supremacist women in the United States or Julie V. Gottlieb’s studies of Fascist women in Britain. Given the historical presence of such groups in Canadian society, not to mention their contemporary resurgence, it would be timely to analyze them through a gendered lens. Finally, despite McKenna’s chapter on colonial British America, the collection leads one to believe that much of the work in Canadian women’s and gender history favors the late nineteenth and, in particular, twentieth centuries. To some extent this chronological skewing is not surprising and, as McKenna notes, not a new phenomenon; it may also be a reflection of the particular process that brought the collection to fruition. Yet by focusing on the more recent (and more easily retrievable) gendered past we risk creating a very foreshortened understanding of its significance and meaning.

Those concerns aside, the collection as whole demonstrates incontrovertibly the richness and depth of Canadian women’s and gender history. Whether the field will continue to grow and develop is, unfortunately, another question, given the past decade’s decline in enrolments in history programs in universities and the challenges that face the humanities in general. Moreover, as Forestell points out, while we have seen a significant expansion of women’s and gender history in Canada, “the number of its practitioners remained modest in comparison to the rest of the discipline” (176), a point that deserves further reflection. Feminist historians, though, have a rich history of working through and around obstacles; let’s hope that a second volume of this book will appear before too long.