Preface

There has always been a women's history in Canada.Women's historians, especially, have been recording it both orally and in writing since storytelling began.First Nations women, teaching and nursing sisters in New France, nineteenth-century British imperialists, and early twentieth-century feminists are only some of many who, individually or collectively, have passed down stories or have documented Canadian women's lives.There were accounts of mythic women, like Aataentsic, or of mortal heroines, like Madeleine de Vercheres, Laura Secord, and Lady Aberdeen, but there were also social histories of and historical novels about ordinary Canadian women.It is surprising, then, that women's history had to be rediscovered in the last three decades of the twentieth century.For those of us involved in that exciting task, there at first seemed little to go on and only gradually did we become aware of the abundance of fascinating work that had preceded our own women's history movement.The reasons for the relative inaccessibility of this early women's history are many.Mid-century "professional" historians defined themselves almost exclusively as university-trained and university-employed men; women historians were for a time almost shut out of the business.History, as defined by those boundary-creating professionals, was about political, military, and diplomatic events, with perhaps a little economic history thrown in.Cultural, labour, local, or domestic matters, of interest to many women and to some men, were seen to be of little or no importance.Such prejudices sadly continue, although fortunately they are shared by fewer and fewer historians, both inside and outside of the academy.A prejudice that academic historians have had a harder time shaking is their bias against writers of popular history.For those who care about women's history, this is a dangerous bias.It was, after all, the problematic line drawn between the professional and the amateur historian that in part accounted for the old sense that women were not really part of the Canadian historical record -or capable of being historians.Popular history (much of which is regional or local history) has never lost its appeal in Canada and women historians never ceased to write, but many academics dismissed both.With that dismissal, it could be argued, also came the dismissal of women's history.This present book demonstrates what a mistake that was.It is thus with great pleasure that I have followed the work of the editors who created this book.The past quarter-century has seen the development of a vibrant literature dealing with the history of Canadian women; there are now many collections of scholarly essays and we also have both English and French textbooks on the subject.Documentary collections exist as well, although they are not as easy to find, even in the university bookstores where most women's history books are sold.What we need more of, however, are well-researched and well-written works of a more popular nature, intended for the general public.This volume addresses that need.

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