Abstracts
/ Résumés
Reforming Women's Reformatories:Elizabeth
Fry, Penal Reform, and the State, 1950-1971
Joan Sangster
This article explores the social
and ideological contours of women's penal reform in post-Second World
War English Canada, using a case study of the Toronto Elizabeth Fry
Society as a means of probing the rationales for and methods of women's
reform work. Elizabeth Fry's responses to three issues in the 1950s
and 1960s are examined: their analysis of women's criminality; their
efforts to obtain legal and social reform for First Nations women;
and their role in a public inquiry into the Mercer Reformatory for
women.
While Elizabeth Fry initially
drew on a rhetoric of maternalism as an organizing strategy, it was
intertwined with investment in the professional guidance of medical,
criminological, and social work experts. Later, a feminist rationale
for reform was increasingly utilized, though activists faced ongoing
dilemmas about the unequal relationships between reformers and clients
and difficult relations between reformers and the state. Indeed, female
penal reformers engaged in a complex and contradictory relationship
with the state, involving cooperation, gentle critique, and sometimes
active opposition, a persisting feature of women's penal reform today.
In the post-Second World War
period, the reform work of Elizabeth Fry helped to broker some important
changes for female prisoners, including a new discourse on prisoners'
rights, though it also remained constrained by its strong investment
in the dominant social-science and medical theories of female criminality,
and by the state's own correctional agenda.
Governing 'Unwed Mothers'
in Toronto at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Karen Bridget Murray
This paper shows that the
emergence of a field of social welfare for unwed mothers in Toronto
at the turn of the twentieth century marked a broad shift within liberal
governance. For most of the nineteenth century, an out-of-wedlock
birth was considered a private dilemma, and there were few public
or private resources for women in this situation. As Toronto urbanized
and industrialized, this classical liberal approach proved insufficient,
and new institutions and practices emerged that were based on liberal
welfare sensibilities, as witnessed in the development of religious-run
maternity homes and the subsequent expansion of social work with unwed
mothers. Although provincial legislation contributed to these developments,
for the most part female charity workers took the lead in forming
this social field, which was shaped by white, middle-class, patriarchal
sensibilities.
Populism and the 1952 Social
Credit Breakthrough in British Columbia
Gordon Hak
The 1952 provincial election
was one of the most interesting and important in the history of British
Columbia. A marginal organization, Social Credit, stunned pundits
by defeating the established parties to form a minority government.
W.A.C. Bennett, who became leader of the party shortly after the election,
built on this victory to rule the province until 1972. Commentators
have listed several factors to explain this complicated election,
typically concluding that the freakish rise of Social Credit was merely
a protest against political misrule. This article, drawing on the
theoretical literature on North American populism, looks beyond Vancouver
and Victoria, and beyond a narrow focus on politicians and parties,
to consider the political economy at mid-century. It argues that Social
Credit victories in the Fraser Valley and the Interior, where the
party was most successful, represented a populist revolt in a time
of rapid economic change.
The 'Cat's Paw': Canada
and the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea
John Price
Canada played an important
role in the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea that was
established in 1947. The long-forgotten commission supervised elections
in the southern half of the divided peninsula in 1948 and found them
'fair and free.' This legitimized the emerging state of South Korea
and provided the basis for United Nations intervention in the Korean
War of 1950. This essay probes the formation of the commission, the
role that Canada played within it, and the commission's impact on
Korea at the time. In contrast to more conventional interpretations
of the Canadian role in the commission, this article suggests that
the Canadian role displayed fierce fluctuations but eventually became
closely linked to the us position. In its quest to prove itself a
faithful ally of the United States, the Liberal government subordinated
the interests of reunification of the Korean peninsula to confrontation
with the Soviet Union, helped polarize the politics of the peninsula,
and facilitated the creation of a brutal regime in the South in a
flawed election. The author suggests the problems associated with
Canadian foreign policy toward Korea at the time are rooted in Eurocentrism
and in misguided notions of us 'isolationism' among makers of foreign
policy of that era.
Mémoire et récit
de l'aventure historique du Québec chez les jeunes
québécois d'héritage canadian-français:
coup de sonde, amorce d'analyse des résultats, questionnements
Jocelyn Létourneau et Sabrina Moisan
Based on the collection of
more than 400 essays written by students attending high school, general
and vocational college, and university in the Quebec City region,
the authors refute the popular belief that young people do not know
the history of the community to which they belong. By analyzing the
students' views of the Québécois historical adventure
found in the texts, the authors question the sine qua none education
responsible for this view of Québécois history and by
extension, touch the core of the students' historical memory. The
authors attempt to discover the foundations of the Quebec collective
memory. Lastly, the authors suggest the possibility of revisiting
this memory in the context of a renewed teaching methodology.
Contributors
Gordon Hak teaches history
at Malaspina University-College. He is the author of Turning Trees
into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry, 1858-1913
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2000).
Jocelyn Létourneau est
titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire et en économie
politique du Québec contemporain à l'Université
Laval. Il est l'ancien fellow de la School of Social Science, Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey et l'auteur de A History
for the Future. Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec Today (Montréal
et Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004).
Sabrina Moisan est titulaire
d'une maîtrise en histoire de l'Université Laval. Elle
est actuellement contractuelle auprès d'organismes œuvrant
dans le domaine des études historiques.
Karen Murray is an assistant
professor at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton.
John Price teaches Asian history
at the University of Victoria. His article is the result of an ongoing
research project on Canada and the Cold War in Asia.
Joan Sangster is director of
the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies at Trent
University, where she teaches working-class and women's history. Her
most recent book is Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in Canada (Between
the Lines Press, 2002).
