Through Feminist Eyes

Essays on Canadian Women’s History

By Joan Sangster
Categories: Political Science, History, Canadian History
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Ebook (Kindle) : 9781771990783, 440 pages, May 2011
Paperback : 9781926836188, 400 pages, May 2011
Ebook (PDF) : 9781926836195, 440 pages, May 2011
Ebook (EPUB) : 9781926836409, 440 pages, May 2011

Table of contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction
Reflections on Thirty Years of Women’s History 1

Discovering Women’s History 49

The 1907 Bell Telephone Strike
Organizing Women Workers 53

Looking Backwards
Re-assessing Women on the Canadian Left 81

The Communist Party and the Woman Question, 1922-1929 95

Manufacturing Consent in Peterborough 127

The Softball Solution
Female Workers, Male Managers, and the Operation of Paternalism at Westclox, 1923–1960 135

Pardon Tales’ from Magistrate’s Court
Women, Crime, and the Court in Peterborough County, 1920–1950 173

Telling Our Stories
Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History 213

Foucault, Feminism, and Postcolonialism 2443

Girls in Conflict with the Law
Exploring the Construction of Female ‘Delinquency’ in Ontario, 1940–1960 251

Criminalizing the Colonized
Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–1960 293

Constructing the ‘Eskimo’ Wife
White Women’s Travel Writing, Colonialism, and the Canadian North, 1940–1960 327

Embodied Experience 3555

Words of Experience/Experiencing Words
Reading Working Women’s Letters to Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women 359

Making a Fur Coat
Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-class History 391

Publications by Joan Sangster 4255
Publication Credits 429

Description

Through Feminist Eyes gathers in one volume the most incisive and insightful essays written to date by the distinguished Canadian historian Joan Sangster. To the original essays, Sangster has added reflective introductory discussions that situate her earlier work in the context of developing theory and debate. Sangster has also supplied an introduction to the collection in which she reflects on the themes and theoretical orientations that have shaped the writing of women's history over the past thirty years.

Approaching her subject matter from an array of interpretive frameworks that engage questions of gender, class, colonialism, politics, and labour, Sangster explores the lived experience of women in a variety of specific historical settings. In so doing, she sheds new light on issues that have sparked much debate among feminist historians and offers a thoughtful overview of the evolution of women's history in Canada.

Reviews

“Sangster does an extraordinary job of situating her work within the literature of women's history and politics and engages with theoretical debates in feminist ideologies since its first emergence in academia. She goes beyond a historical examination of gender and women's history by interweaving her own experiences and challenges as a feminist academic conducting research in the field for over thirty years. This text is a vital contribution to the scholarship of Canadian women's history.”

- Marlene Mendonça