Feminist Historians and Family History in Canada in the 1990s

Abstract

This review article considers the contribution that monographs and collections of articles published by feminist scholars during the 1990s make to family history in Canada. Feminist historians have successfully exposed the workings of class, gender, and ethnicity in a range of Canadian towns and cities. They have begun to chart the relationships between families and other institutions—most notably religion, leisure, and the law. Recent works contribute to a much clearer understanding of the ways experts and the state have worked to shape families and especially motherhood in Canada and to the discursive role of the white wife and mother in the racial politics of the settlement of the West. And recent work has laid the groundwork for a better understanding of the regulatory discourses around gender, sexuality, and heterosexuality especially in Canada’s most studied province, Ontario.