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Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s. Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and...
Until the late 1960s, the authorities on abortion were for the most part men—politicians, clergy, lawyers, physicians, all of whom had an interest in regulating women’s bodies. Even today, when we hear women speak publicly about abortion, the voices are usually those of the leaders of women’s and abortion rights organizations, women who hold political office, and, on occasion, female physicians. We also hear quite frequently from spokeswomen for anti-abortion groups. Rarely, however, do we hear the voices of ordinary women—women whose lives have been in some way touched by abortion. Their thoughts typically owe more to human circumstance than to ideology, and without them, we run the...
McWilliams began her career in public life when she arrived in Winnipeg at the age of thirty-five. A graduate in Political Science from the University of Toronto, she had a vision of women university graduates as "pilgrims of peace abroad and pilgrims of understanding at home." During her years in Winnipeg she became the first president of the Canadian Federation of University Women, wrote a number of books on history and politics, served as a city councillor during the Depression, and in 1943 chaired the subcommittee on Postwar Problems for Women for the federal government's committee on Reconstruction. For more than thirty years she held regular "current events" classes, providing educatio...
Authors provide a much-needed analysis of the dynamic decades after 1945, when both Canada and the United States began using federal funds to expand health-care access, and biomedical research and authority reached new heights. Focusing on a wide range of issues - including childbirth, abortion and sterilization, palliative care, pharmaceutical regulation, immigration, and Native health care - these essays illuminate the ironic promise of biomedicine, postwar transformations in reproduction, the varied work and belief-systems of female health-care providers, and national differences in women's health activism. Contributors include Aline Charles (Laval University), Barbara Clow (independent s...
Gossage uses a family-reconstitution method, drawing on local parish registers and manuscript-census schedules, to focus on marriage, household organization, and family size in this context of social and economic change. Family formation was profoundly affected as couples adjusted to the new urban, industrial setting. Gossage demonstrates that demographic behaviour was increasingly differentiated by social class, with distinct marriage and fertility patterns emerging among bourgeois and proletarian families. Bourgeois women who married in the 1860s, for example, were already limiting family size, a crucial shift that did not occur in working-class families until almost a generation later. Fa...
In this provocative new book -- the first one to examine print and broadcast news coverage of women's issues in English Canada -- Barbara Freeman explores what the media were saying about women and their concerns during an important period in our history -- and why. The Satellite Sex is both a social history and a media case study of the years 1966-1971, when the feminist movement began once more to gather support. Women wanted equal treatment under the law, and they wanted rights they had not gained when they won the vote many years earlier. In response, the Canadian government appointed a federal inquiry on the status of women, and hundreds of women came forward to talk to the Commission about the injustices they experienced at school, at work, in public life, in their homes, and even in their bedrooms. The Satellite Sex demonstrates that the print and broadcast media coverage of women's issues at that time were much more complex and fragmented than revealed by research in the United States on the same era. This book, released thirty years after the Canadian Commission presented its report, also raises questions about the lack of strong feminist voices in today's news media.
The lives of many lesbians prior to 1965 remain cloaked in mystery. Historians have turned the spotlight on upper-middle-class “romantic friends” and on working-class butch and femme women, but the lives of the lower-middle-class majority remain in the shadows. Awfully Devoted Women offers a portrait of middle-class lesbianism in the decades before the gay rights movement in English Canada. This intimate study of the lives of women who were forced to love in secret not only challenges the idea that lesbian relationships in the past were asexual, it also reveals the courage it took to explore desire in an era when women were supposed to know little about sexuality.
Examines the real world of women's health status and health-care delivery in different countries, and the assumptions behind the dominant medical model of solving problems without regard to social conditions. This book asks what feminist health-care ethics looks like if we start with women's experiences and concerns.
Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of British Columbia. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspired with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress. He reveals that the province has a long tradition of thinking and acting vigorously in ways meant to control and shape biological communities of humans, and suggests that imperialism, race, class, and gender have historically situated population issues at the centre of public consciousness in British Columbia.
Inspired by the question of "what's next?" in the field of Canadian women's and gender history, this broadly historiographical volume represents a conversation among established and emerging scholars who share a commitment to understanding the past from intersectional feminist perspectives. It includes original essays on Quebecois, Indigenous, Black, and immigrant women's histories and tackles such diverse topics as colonialism, religion, labour, warfare, sexuality, and reproductive labour and justice. Intended as a regenerative retrospective of a critically important field, this collection both engages analytically with the current state of women's and gender historiography in Canada and draws on its rich past to generate new knowledge and areas for inquiry.