Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

The 17 essays in this volume testify to the increasing sophistication of
feminist research, which now draws on a wide range of theoretical
perspectives, probes differences as well as similarities among women,
and focuses as much on women’s agency as on their victimization. More
nuanced in its approach than the groundbreaking earlier volume on
immigrant and ethnic women, Looking into my Sister’s Eyes, published
in 1986 by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Sisters or
Strangers? highlights the complexity of minority women’s experience in
the context of white settler society and raises important questions
about how Canada was constructed.

The essays’ topics range broadly from missionary work among the
Natives of Upper Canada and the recruitment of white women for the
colonization of British Columbia, to the experience of black immigrant
nurses between 1950 and 1980 and the memories of female Holocaust
survivors. While the editors group the essays into
sections—“Nation-Building,” “Justice,” “Encounters with the
State,” “Family Relations,” “Symbols and Representation,” and
“History and Memory”—each essay stands on its own. Together, they
call into question easy generalizations about immigrant women, ethnic
experiences, or racial relations. Midge Ayukawa finds, for example, that
“picture brides” played an important role in sustaining community
among the Japanese in British Columbia, but Armenian women who married
outside their ethnic community, Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill suggests,
may have had less agency. Nor are the interactions between minorities
and mainstream society as straightforward as they may once have seemed.
Enakshi Dua argues convincingly that Indian male migrants to Canada were
as complicit as white settlers in demanding racial purity and ethnic
integrity, reinforcing the very politics that they hoped to undermine.

Through their careful research, the authors of these essays make it
difficult to conflate the experiences of immigrant, ethnic, and
racialized women in Canada. This is an important insight. There is, of
course, more work to be done. Like the 1986 volume, this one still tends
to focus on Central Canadian topics and a post-Confederation time frame.
The boundaries of time and space could be extended just a little.