Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Feminity and Masculinity in Canada

Linda Cullum is an assistant professor of sociology and women’s
studies at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

In 11 essays, the editors deliver a complex and intriguing picture of
shifting historical discourses and constructions of femininity and
masculinity intersected (and altered) by relations of race, age, class,
and ethnicity. The comprehensive and thoughtful introduction carefully
traces the changing analytical approaches found in feminist Canadian
historical writing, from materialist to discursive analyses, to the
Foucauldian concept of multiple, diverse, and historically shaped
formations and expressions of power. The essays reflect working-class,
gay, Native, and women’s history, and examine rural and urban
historical moments in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Manitoba, and
British Columbia.

Gendered Pasts testifies to the assertion that there is “no single
‘gender history’, no single history of Canada with gender ‘written
in’.” Essays address three distinct periods in Canadian history:
patriarchal colonial society, the period of industrialization and
federal formation (1880–1920), and modern society from 1920 to the
1960s. Discourses of gender, morality, sexuality, racialized
“villains,” and the later preoccupation of the welfare state with
each of these categories of regulation are addressed. Some chapters
focus specifically on the construction of femininity, some on
masculinity, while others offer analyses of competing versions of gender
identities. The historical asymmetry of gender relations and power in
Canadian society remains central to each discussion.

Dubinsky and Givertz’s examination of masculinity and sexual danger,
expressed through anti-Asian racism in British Columbia and Ontario in
the late 1800s and early 1900s, reminds us that not all heterosexual
males had access to equal resources of power in Canadian society. The
establishment of Canada, in and through the gendered processes of
colonization, is explored by Lutz in his analysis of the “interplay”
of the economy, with gender, race, age, and social position in the
Lekwammen (Songhees) people of British Columbia. McPherson employs
Butler’s concept of gender as performance to illuminate the tensions
between sexuality and respectability in the occupational identity of
nurses in 19th- and 20th-century Canada. Finally, Setliffe examines the
depiction of stereotypically “effeminate” gay men in the
Toronto-based tabloid “scandal sheet” called Hush Free Press in the
decade following World War II.

Gendered Pasts makes for enjoyable and accessible reading, with much to
recommend it to both scholarly and general audiences.