Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada

It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfil in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions, and by the culture and various subcultures. Yet how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? Gendered Pasts, a collection of eleven engaging essays, seeks answers to this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendereddimensions of 19th- and 20th-century Canadian history. Topics covered include: the use of gender in the highly charged political discourse of Upper Canada in the 1820s and 1830s; female vagrancy in Montreal in the early 19th century; church discipline in regard to gambling, drinking, and sex in Ontario during the first part of the 19th century; the impact of class and race on sex crimes in British Columbia and Ontario; the shifting effects of Anglo contact over more than a century on the womenand men of a BC Native community; the curiously gendered desires--from across North America--for orphans of the 1917 Halifax explosion; the moral regulation of the Mothers' Allowance in Ontario; the role of the miner's wife in a northern community; the portrayal of gay men in an urban tabloid of the forties and fifties; the sharply defined role that nurses from Nova Scotia to BC were expected to meet for most of this century; and the effects of gender in two strikes in the Toronto constructiontrade during the 1960s. The editors' introduction explores the sometimes controversial evolution of gender history as it relates to women's history and other dimensions of social history--labour history, the history of class and of race, and analyses of masculinity.