Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

This collection of essays is one of the first produced by the “second
generation” of feminist scholars. Unlike their predecessors, most of
these scholars were trained in women’s history or women’s studies,
fields that developed quickly in the 1970s. Their topics include the
racist attitudes of first-wave feminists; “Hallelujah Lasses” in the
Salvation Army; women in early socialist parties; and the treatment of
immigrant women by social workers in the 1950s. In two essays, one
focusing on the crime of seduction and another on the cases of two
working-class women accused of murdering middle-class men, the legal
system is used to characterize gender relations at the turn of the
century. The T. Eaton Company Limited serves as the site of two
particularly richly textured studies relating to gender, race, class,
and culture.

Both the topics discussed and theoretical approaches used in these
essays testify to the growing sophistication of the field of women’s
history. There is, however, a closer connection between the old and the
new generations of women’s history scholars than the editors claim in
their well-crafted introduction. The first major collection of articles
on Canadian women’s history (Women at Work: Ontario, 1850–1930
[1974]) also looked at the interaction of class, race, and gender, also
focused primarily on Ontario, and even addressed some of the same
topics: sexuality, protests by Jewish women, and the plight of domestic
servants such as Carrie Davies, who killed her millionaire employer,
Charles Massey, in 1915. It is the continuity with earlier work in
women’s history that is most striking about this collection, and that
makes it such an important addition to the literature in the field.