Looking Into My Sister's Eyes: An Exploration in Women's History

Virginia Gillham is Associate Librarian in the Public Service Library at
the University of Guelph.

Actually the proceedings of a conference, Immigration and Ethnicity in Ontario: an Exploration in Women’s History, which took place at the University of Toronto in May of 1985, this volume offers thirteen studies of the situations of women of thirteen separate ethnic groups in Canada in the twentieth century. The stories of British immigrants of several different social classes, Italians, Finns, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Macedonians, Armenians, Chinese, and Mennonites are detailed, and to a lesser extent analyzed, by authors with a cultural affinity to the group being described. Each study is predominantly historical, although in a few cases sociological themes are identified.

A wide variety of attitudes to women’s roles has existed in this diversity of cultures; however, if a common theme can be identified it is that women have always played a supportive role without which their societies could not have functioned, that this robe has been taken for granted and undervalued, that they have been largely excluded from decision-making positions in their societies, and that the need and desire for equality and independence has always existed among women everywhere. The various paths followed in various cultures and eth-nic groups to achieve this common goal make interesting reading. This collection stimulates an interest in additional reading; useful bibliographies are appended.