You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book of personal essays by over forty women and men who founded women’s studies in Canada and Québec explores feminist activism on campus in the pivotal decade of 1966-76. The essays document the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society, and they challenge some current preconceptions about “second wave” feminist academics. The contributors explain how the intellectual and political revolution begun by small groups of academics—often young, untenured women—at universities across Canada contributed to social progress and profoundly affected the way we think, speak, behave, understand equality, and conceptualize the academy and an acad...
Grandmothers, mothers and daughters speak to us of their personal lives, their triumphs and achievements. Encompassing three generations, their histories give us a sampling of the rich diversity of women's life experiences in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Nunavut, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Introductions contextualize the stories and provide comprehensive overviews of the social, economic, political and feminist developments in the province or territory during the last century.
The first history of the battered women's shelter movement in Canada, No Place to Go traces the development of transition houses and services for abused women and the campaign that made wife battering a political issue. Nancy Janovicek focuses on women's groups in small cities and rural communities, examining anti-violence activism in Thunder Bay, Kenora, Nelson, and Moncton. She also pays close attention to Aboriginal women in northwestern Ontario, where the connections between family violence and the devaluation of indigenous culture in Canadian society complicated effots to end domestic violence. This book lays bare the aims and challenges of establishing women's shelters in non-urban areas. The local histories presented here show how transition houses became hubs in a larger movement to change attitudes about domestic violence and to lobby for legislation to protect women.
Bob Davis examines official high school history teaching and related government policies from the 1940s to the mid-1990s, providing essential background for those concerned with how history will be taught in the 21st century. Davis traces the demise of the old historiographical narrative of progress, the rise of an essentially content-free "skills"-based approach to education, and the emergence of the new orthodoxy of post-modern theory, identifying the weaknesses of each and suggesting fruitful directions for future development of history teaching. Whatever Happened to High School History? is a passionate and insightful account of crisis and decline in a subject that used to be the pillar of the secondary curriculum. An Our Schools/Our Selves book.
As one of the most difficult periods of the twentieth century, the Great Depression left few Canadians untouched. Using more than eighty interviews with women who lived and worked in Toronto in the 1930s, Breadwinning Daughters examines the consequences of these years for women in their homes and workplaces, and in the city's court rooms and dance halls. In this insightful account, Katrina Srigley argues that young women were central to the labour market and family economies of Depression-era Toronto. Oral histories give voice to women from a range of cultural and economic backgrounds, and challenge readers to consider how factors such as race, gender, class, and marital status shaped women's lives and influenced their job options, family arrangements, and leisure activities. Breadwinning Daughters brings to light previously forgotten and unstudied experiences and illustrates how women found various ways to negotiate the burdens and joys of the 1930s.
A collection of essays based on Smith's unique rebel sociology. Smith turns wit and common sense on the prevailing discourses of sociology, political economy, and popular culture to inquire directly into the actualities of peoples' lives.
Citing a lack of strong feminist voices in contemporary Canadian media, Freeman (journalism, Carleton U., Ottawa) was motivated to write this first book-length analysis of news media coverage of women's issues in Canada. The period 1966-1971 is seen as a critical period in Canadian feminist history, during which time the Canadian government appointed a federal inquiry into women's issues (the Royal Commission on the Status of Women). Freeman examines the relationship between the Commission and the media, the reporters' understandings of professional practice, and the ways in which they covered issues from the hearings and the Commission's Report. She argues that an understanding of media coverage of gender issues is the past may lead to thoughtful and effective coverage now and in the future. Accessible to a general audience. c. Book News Inc.
Challenging readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment, Prescribed Norms concludes with a gesture to chaos theory as a way of critiquing and breaking out of prescribed physiological and social understandings of women's health.
Many Canadian women fiction writers have become justifiably famous. But what about women who have written non-fiction? When Anne Innis Dagg set out on a personal quest to make such non-fiction authors better known, she expected to find just a few dozen. To her delight, she unearthed 473 writers who have produced over 674 books. These women describe not only their country and its inhabitants, but a remarkable variety of other subjects: from the story of transportation to the legacy of Canadian missionary activity around the world. While most of the writers lived in what is now Canada, other authors were British or American travellers who visited Canada throughout the years and reported on what they found here. This compendium has brief biographies of all these women, short descriptions of their books, and a comprehensive index of their books’ subject matters. The Feminine Gaze: A Canadian Compendium of Non-Fiction Women Authors and Their Books, 1836-1945 will be an invaluable research tool for women’s studies and for all who wish to supplement the male gaze on Canada’s past.
Despite well documented health risks, young women are still drawn to the act of smoking and continue to smoke at an alarming rate. A century ago, women were vocal leaders of campaigns against tobacco across North America. In Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes, Sharon Anne Cook explores the history of the paradoxical relationship between women and the cigarette, in a sensitive and lively description of the many different meanings that smoking has held for women. Focusing on the social context of smoking, Cook explores its allure for elite, middle-class, working, and marginalized women from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. She argues that smoking's attraction is rooted in women'...