Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada

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–

This book offers a deep reading of three classic Canadian texts: Anna
Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838); Theresa
Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney’s Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, a
narrative by two women held captive during the 1885 Northwest
Resistance; and Emily Murphy’s “Janey Canuck” books published in
the early 20th century. In a long and wide-ranging introduction,
Henderson situates her analysis in post-colonial theory and Foucauldian
concepts of governmentality that implicate Anglo-Saxon, middle-class
women in the larger North Atlantic “liberal experiment” to locate
“the political at the level of morals and manners, norms of individual
character and conduct.” Nineteenth-century Canada, Henderson argues,
was a settler society that served as “a privileged testing ground”
for the diffuse new mechanisms for coercion and control, among them
asylums, courts, churches, prisons, and schools. In this context,
notions of race became attached not only to bodies and skin colour but
also to forms of conduct. Privileged women, who help to construct the
moral economy wherein people are socialized to self-governing
personhood, figure prominently in the processes of regulating themselves
and others.

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada began as a thesis, and it
bears the marks of its origins. For those unfamiliar with the language
of discourse analysis, the densely packed prose will be difficult to
follow. Nevertheless, the new readings of old texts are sophisticated
and highly revealing. However, the epilogue, which focuses primarily on
applying the author’s theoretical framework to “squeegee kids” and
to Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, strikes me as an unnecessary
addendum or, better still, ideas for another research project.