Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History

Ions on t h I rt y y e a r s of Wom en 's h IstoryI did not grow up wanting to be a historian.As a well-socialized child of the 1950s, my early fantasies centred more on the frilliest wedding dress possible.Luckily for me, I abandoned the 'say yes to the dress' dream for a life in history.After an undergraduate career in which I managed to avoid Canadian history almost completely and focused instead on African subjects, I worked, travelled to Africa, and came back thinking about the radical possibilities of history on the home front.From the time I returned to school, first part-time at Glendon College, then to do graduate work at McMaster University, I had a dual devotion to labour and women's history, though there were inevitably tensions and challenges in that pairing.Yet as I was a relatively new feminist at that time, women's history often felt like 'home,' and I have never lost the sense of discovery, excitement, involvement, and pleasure that reading women's history entails.Trying to pass a fraction of that excitement along to students has taken up almost thirty years of my life, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the 'wow' factor in students' responses to previously unimagined views of the past, whether it was Sylvia Van Kirk's wonderful reinterpretation of women in the fur trade, Constance Backhouse's disturbing account of the Ku Klux Klan and intermarriage, or Rusty Bitterman's tale of Isabella MacDonald, a stick-wielding rural woman defending her family and property against Prince Edward Island landlords.1 This collection grew out of a desire to reflect critically on the evolution of women's history over the past thirty-some years.My original intent was to pen a historiographic text, but other research passions always intervened.Another feminist historian suggested using my own writing as a basis around which to discuss women's history in Canada, and Athabasca This "moment of discovery" was very much a project of the women's movement, for feminists recognized that women needed an understanding of the past in order to reshape our present and imagine a better future.Popular women's publications were hungry for any tidbit of women's history.In Kinesis, a feminist newspaper produced in Vancouver, for example, a feature article on women's history in 1976 insisted that revising our understanding of history was essential to the feminist project.History books reflected the ideas of those in power, thus "excluding women, the non-white and the poor."A history of "working women, Native peoples, and the poor," the author argued, would reveal a completely different story, including their struggles for "equality and justice."This popular article relied on the limited research to date, including material on the vote, social reform, and British Columbia women elected to office from project of discovery and diminishes how important (and thus radical) even adding women and stirring was in the eyes of many establishment historians.In the 1970s, women's history was typecast in some graduate studies programs as marginal at best, trendy at worst, and there were almost no women professors teaching in this area.Those of us who survived in unsympathetic environs often found sympathetic male supervisors (as I did), but a refrain I heard from faculty and students was that women's history was too political, biased, and partial, "an excuse for our prejudices" as someone put it.How could we not study men's gender roles as well, we were asked, and those who asked were not usually early advocates of gender history; rather, they often assumed the 'minimal' importance of women's history!Women were a smaller proportion of the graduate cohort than now, and though we treasured those few, beleaguered, kind women faculty who offered us support, we could also see that they were the targets of masculine marginalization: those who stuck their necks out on issues like sexual harassment might be mocked or sidelined.Adding and stirring also misses the sense of unbounded and exciting potential at a time when almost no women's history was written; moreover, the intent to add women to history, in its most basic form, persisted well into the 1990s and beyond, producing invaluable accounts of women within certain time periods, as well as in the professions, politics, unions, and so on.17 Nor was the intent of early writing to reconstruct a world of women, severed from society and the larger social formation.One of the initial Canadian statements on the subject urged that women's history be integrated into social history to create an entirely new history of society.18 Influential writers like Joan Kelly (whose work inspired me) declared that we needed a more holistic history that took in a "double vision" of productive and reproductive relations, while Gerda Lerner called for a "new vantage point" and new questions for traditional history, rather than simply 'filling in the blanks.'We need a new "history of humanity," she too declared, a slogan similar to one popular in the women's movement at the time: "Women's liberation is human liberation."19 This dual commitment did not seem at all contradictory: as I began to explore women's history, I was won over by feminist writers like Linda Gordon and Sheila Rowbotham, who produced impassioned and pointed feminist indictments of male domination, while simultaneously conveying a critique Those critical of a poststructuralist emphasis on impermanence, fluidity, and 'not knowing' are not all in one older, passé generation, nor do they necessarily reject the need for diversity or the insight that society and history, not biology, lie behind the construction of gender and race, as Parr suggests in her article.To be critical of poststructuralism is not the same as being critical of gender history or feminism.Poststructuralists see positions as "multidimensional and specific" rather than "universal and totalizing," Parr claims, again making those she criticizes appear to be inflexible absolutists.109 Others have argued that an emphasis on seeing history as 'unfinished,' on questioning "interpretive assumptions" and the "strategies used in constructing texts," are not specific to poststructuralism and have long been tenets of historical practice.110 Even though Parr concedes this might be so, she adds that poststructuralism is a needed antidote "after three decades of the social sciences" leading historians to seek out "immobilized structures" and ignore "local colour."111 This is not a characterization that to my mind reflects Canadian social history in the mid-1990s, which had long welcomed local studies and which was increasingly sceptical of mechanical 'structural' interpretations.Parr's influential article also undoubtedly reinforced the view that a focus on women was limited because, as she put it, the very questions asked about 'woman' "presupposed" the answers given, "isolating woman from the social relationships that created her." 112 In her discussion of masculinity, however, Parr discusses similar problems of assuming a 'unitary'

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