Through Feminist Eyes Essays on Canadian Women’s History

Joan Sangster

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.

About the Author

Joan Sangster is a professor of women’s studies and history at Trent University, where she also teaches at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies. Her most recent books are Girl Trouble: Female ‘Delinquency’ in English Canada and Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar 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.

Canadian Women’s Studies

Table of Contents

  1. Acknowledgements
  2. Introduction: Reflections on Thirty Years of Women’s History
  3. Discovering Women’s History
  4. The 1907 Bell Telephone Strike: Organizing Women Workers
  5. Looking Backwards: Re-assessing Women on the Canadian Left
  6. The Communist Party and the Woman Question, 1922-1929
  7. Manufacturing Consent in Peterborough
  8. The Softball Solution: Female Workers, Male Managers, and the Operation of Paternalism at Westclox, 1923–1960
  9. Pardon Tales’ from Magistrate’s Court: Women, Crime, and the Court in Peterborough County, 1920–1950
  10. Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History
  11. Foucault, Feminism, and Postcolonialism
  12. Girls in Conflict with the Law: Exploring the Construction of Female ‘Delinquency’ in Ontario, 1940–1960
  13. Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–1960
  14. Constructing the ‘Eskimo’ Wife: White Women’s Travel Writing, Colonialism, and the Canadian North, 1940–1960
  15. Embodied Experience
  16. Words of Experience/Experiencing Words: Reading Working Women’s Letters to Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status of Women
  17. Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-class History
  18. Publications by Joan Sangster
  19. Publication Credits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 CA). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.

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