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The Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) was established in 1922 to publish selected papers presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA), which was founded the same year with a mission to foster “the scholarly study and communication of history in Canada.” The JCHA reflects the CHA’s broad mission, publishing articles in French or English in “any field of history” that are “innovative” in theory, methodology, or approach.[1] Seeking to understand how the Journal has approached women’s and gender history since its founding is a daunting task, but one that provides a fascinating overview of the development of women’s history and larger changes within the historical profession.

Women’s history was almost invisible in the JCHA until the mid-1970s. It grew slowly in the 1970s and 1980s and was consolidated in the 1990s as historians increasingly focused on how gender had been historically and discursively constructed, and how gender was imbricated in political, economic, and cultural systems. This is not surprising: the JCHA’s mission has always been broader than the Canadian Historical Review, which positions itself as the “benchmark” journal in Canadian History, and the interdisciplinary journals that emerged as the historical profession expanded.[2] Grounded in a quantitative analysis of research articles in the Journal, this article links that data to historiographical trends in women’s and gender history, debates about the meaning and definition of “woman,” and assessments about how the historical profession responds to challenges to disciplinary authority.

The Journal has published innovative and foundational articles in women’s and gender history, reflecting and occasionally challenging larger historiographical debates about the connection between public and private spheres, transnational and postcolonial turns, and the relationship between women’s and gender history. Methodological and theoretical tensions emerged as new approaches to writing histories of women and gender developed, including an emphasis on the discursive construction of gender, the history of masculinity, and the deconstruction of the category of woman. But a close analysis of articles in the Journal confirms that women’s and gender historians have mutually engaged in a generative analysis of gender and power; as Laura Lee Downs argues, the fields of gender and women’s history have developed in ways that are “inextricably linked.”[3]

Despite publishing innovative research that engages with theoretical and historiographical currents, however, there are still powerful silences within the Journal. Most publications are in Canadian or British history; although transnational work has increased over time, there is little representation of women’s history in regions outside of North America, Europe, or Great Britain. This echoes other systemic silences. The intersections of gender and ethnicity have been generally well represented, but few articles have analyzed the intersection of gender with racism, racialized communities, or Indigeneity. There are few publications in French and an underrepresentation of francophone women’s and gender history outside of urban Montreal. These areas of underrepresentation point to stubborn silences on race and racism, a finding that supports the arguments that other authors in this centenary series have made.

Because women’s and gender history has constituted a minority of the publications in the JCHA, interdisciplinary journals, edited collections, women’s presses, and conference presentations have been important vehicles of scholarly knowledge production and community building. When women’s and gender history was criticized by establishment historians as a divisive force in the early 1990s, the field was still underrepresented in leading academic journals, and women were a minority in the profession. Critiques of women’s historians reflected the challenge by feminist historians to the disciplinary authority of the historical profession and the purpose of history itself. Disquiet emerges when scholars push against commonly accepted national storytelling. But that discomfort is best understood as productive: it asks historians to reimagine what stories we define as valuable, and to rethink the structural ways that the profession acknowledges and respects the people who tell them.

Chronologies of Women’s and Gender History

To trace the relationship between women’s and gender history over time, I defined articles that explicitly centre the experiences of women or explore the constructed category of “woman” as women’s history, and those that explore the discursive construction of gender, examine gendered experiences relationally, or foreground the study of masculinity as gender history. Between 1922 and 2022, approximately 10 percent of JCHA research articles were in women’s and gender history. All but one of these articles were published between 1967 and 2022, and 83.5 percent were published between 1990 and 2022. The majority of articles (58 percent) can be characterized as women’s history and a smaller proportion (42 percent) as gender history. Additional articles incorporate some gender analysis by exploring a larger topic (aging, family structure, or demographic trends, for example) with partial attempts to differentiate experiences based on gender. And presidential addresses and prize-winning book roundtables have offered opportunities to explore histories of women and gender. But the boundary between women’s and gender history is permeable, and most historians currently publishing in these areas work across these definitions, simultaneously embracing, challenging, and refining aspects of both.

The field of women’s history emerged slowly in North America, beginning in the late 1960s. Not surprisingly, women’s historical experiences in the home, family, professions, and public life were almost invisible until the mid-1970s, reflecting the domination of the profession by male scholars.[4] The first article about women was a 1952 hagiography of Marie de L’Incarnation by Jesuit priest Adrien Pouliot, written in the tradition of “women worthies.”[5] In “Les Ursulines de Québec,” Pouliot interpreted the life story of Ursuline sister Marie Guyart/ Marie de L’Incarnation as an unfolding of divine action, of God working through human history. For Pouliot, Marie de L’Incarnation is “an Amazon of God, her work foundational to the social structure of New France and the spiritual development of the nation itself. Fifteen years later in 1967, the Journal published a second article in women’s history by American historians Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease. Drawing on traditions of contributory and compensatory history to write female abolitionists into the history of American antislavery, the authors argued that abolitionist activism challenged the narrow opportunities offered to nineteenth-century white women. Part of historians’ growing interest in histories of racism and movements for social justice during the civil rights era, the authors nonetheless did not examine the role of African American women in abolitionism, or how white women upheld enslavement and racism.[6]

The 1970s and 1980s were a turning point in the publication of women’s history. But that point turned slowly. Between 1972 and 1979, the Journal published seven articles in women’s history, on topics grouped loosely around themes including women’s rights and feminism in England, and women and work (the Second World War, Indigenous women in the fur trade, and family economies and industrialization). The rate of publication marginally increased in the 1980s with another five articles on women, and several articles in the newly emerging area of gender history, including Mark Rosenfeld’s research on the gendered rhythms of work, Susan Brown’s reading of the gendered language of eighteenth-century political radicalism, and Gail Savage’s article on legal patriarchy in English family law. By this decade, topics were slowly expanding from work, industrialization, and women’s rights to include unwed mothers, marriage, social work and the professions, and gender and mental health.[7]

The growing field of women’s history was tied closely to the new social history. A new generation of academic historians were interested in how “ordinary” people made their own history, and as they began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s, the Journal published articles in social history, urban and social reform history, family history, labour and working-class history, and regional history. Although historians now acknowledge that women’s activism shaped reform movements, and that women’s labour sustained family survival strategies and underpinned modern capitalism, women were secondary figures in research about industrialization, urbanization, and social movements. The JCHA published articles on marriage, inheritance, and household structures, but most authors tended to see the family unit as relatively untouched by gendered power relationships.[8] Later articles in family history drew more explicitly on insights from historians of demography, gender, and colonialism. John Belshaw’s research on Nanaimo and Kamloops draws on census material to tell a more complex story of British Columbia, one in which family relationships were as central to union and labour organizing as the “unattached” men imagined as the engine of the frontier. Stormie Stewart’s research on elderly men and women who entered institutional care in Ontario parsed the motivations for institutionalization by gender, showing that men entered due to lack of employment income and women due to lack of familial support. More recently, Elyse Bell’s examination of transatlantic and familial identities focuses on how letter writing constructed ideas of home in the lives of early settlers, drawing on insights from historians of gender, family, imperialism, and colonialism.[9] But early trends in the Journal reaffirm that the development of women’s history rested largely on feminist academics’ willingness to challenge professional gender inequity, and their commitment to placing women at the centre of historical analysis.

Although women’s history emerged slowly, influential articles were published in the 1970s and 1980s as historians engaged with questions of marriage, family and reproduction, the welfare state, the sex-segregated labour force, and industrialization, urbanization, and colonization. Bettina Bradbury’s 1979 article on the nineteenth-century urban family economy was a complex analysis of the intersection of gender, women, childhood, ethnicity, and class in industrializing Montreal, and an early call to think about economic processes in gendered terms. Andrée Lévesque’s research on single mothers in Montreal drew on records from Montreal’s Hôpital de la Miséricorde to understand how women pregnant outside of marriage were “rehabilitated” by church-run institutions, showing not just the ideological underpinning of such institutions but also how women resisted incarceration. James Struthers’s 1983 article argues that social workers were crucial to the expansion of the welfare state in English Canada, but as part of a female-dominated profession associated with care for children and families, they were segregated into low-paid professional labour. Historians still engage with Ruth Roach Pierson’s groundbreaking research on women in the Second World War (published in 1976 and 1978), particularly her arguments about the impact of wartime labour economies on women’s status. The earliest article on Indigenous women’s history in the Journal was published in 1977: Sylvia Van Kirk’s research on fur trade society constituted part of her influential rethinking of Indigenous-settler relations, Indigenous women’s agency, and the impact of colonization.[10] Notably, many of the women’s history published in these decades formed the basis of field-defining and award-winning monographs in Canadian history.[11]

During the 1980s, increasing numbers of CHA papers were delivered on topics related to women’s and gender history, and by the 1990s, there was a visible increase in the number of women’s and gender history articles published in the Journal, including the first article that explicitly engaged with the lived history of masculinity. Prior to 1988, the field of gender history was relatively small, although some historians had answered Natalie Zemon Davis’s call to explore the history of “both women and men … to understand the significance of the sexes, of gender groups in the historical past.”[12] Taking up the influential work of Joan Scott, historians publishing in Canada in the 1990s emphasized discursive constructions of gender and explored how binary understandings of sex and gender constituted gender identities as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.”[13] But attentiveness to the intersection of gender and power existed in the JCHA prior to the broad circulation of Scott’s influential work. Susan Brown’s “Rational Creatures and Free Citizens” is a careful discussion of how political radicalism and debates about liberty, equality, rationality, and independence shaped both women’s rights discourses and conversative responses to radicalism, both of which were understood as contributing to a breakdown of class and gender hierarchies with a destructive impact on political and private spheres.[14] Mark Rosenfeld’s influential oral history of men and women in a Barrie, Ontario railway community appeared in the same 1988 issue and examined how gender — “masculinity and femininity both” — shaped paid and unpaid labour, and the rhythms of work and family life.[15] By the early 1990s, articles in the Journal reflected increasing interest in the history of masculinity, as historians explored men’s gendered experiences and argued that masculinity was worthy of careful study.[16] After 1990, most volumes of the Journal included multiple articles in both women’s and gender history, and there is only a rare volume without any publications in the field.

Historiographies of Women’s and Gender History: Arguments and Absences

Quantitative data locates important moments in the development of the field of women’s and gender history. But this data is best interpreted through a historiographical lens that places those chronologies in conversation with how historical approaches to women and gender have changed over time and how research on gender has intersected with questions of masculinity and power, the relationship between public and private, the interrelationship of gender, the nation-state, and empire, and the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity.

Women’s and gender history has been influenced by feminist theoretical work that explores women’s social, political, and economic subordination over time and place. Feminist historians have long asked questions about how history was written in ways that excluded women’s experiences. But even as early feminist history projects focused on recovering women’s experiences to correct the historical record, women’s and gender history has also embraced feminist theory’s self-reflexivity—particularly, its critical approach to interrogating what it means to be a woman, how the category of woman intersects with other vectors of oppression, and how that category shifts over time. This reckoning with the meaning of “woman” has a history that predates the 1980s, but was made explicit by Joan Scott and Denise Riley, whose work influenced historians trained in the early 1990s. By this decade, historians were engaged in debates over the relationship between material and discursive constructions of identity and questions of how to interpret the notion of “experience.”[17] These debates were fraught because they were not simply abstract theoretical questions: women’s and gender historians were grappling with the implications of “undoing” the category of woman just as women’s history itself had become a recognizable field of study.

Perhaps the relatively quick development of gender history and the history of masculinity seemed surprising, especially since women’s history had taken decades to achieve recognition. But women’s and gender history developed in relational and interconnected ways. As gender history became increasingly common, the Journal published articles that wove together methodological and theoretical approaches of both women’s and gender history and that reflected the intellectual complexity of both fields. Sara Burke’s analysis of social service at the University of Toronto, for example, is a multifaceted examination of gender, education, and professionalization. She traces how turn-of-the-century professional responses to urban reform and poverty at the University of Toronto understood such work as best undertaken by “university-educated men who … possessed skills in research and civic leadership that were uniquely masculine.”[18] Constructing social service as masculine devalued the emerging female-dominated profession of social work and encoded gender inequality in newly developing professions. Reading Burke alongside Struthers’s article on social work in English Canada fleshes out how the welfare state reflected gendered assumptions of skill, professionalism, and caring labour. Jacqueline Holler’s 1993 article on Elena de la Cruz — a sixteenth-century nun tried in Mexico for heresy — centres the experience of a woman charged with challenging the Papacy and Catholic hierarchy. Through Holler’s careful reading of primary materials, Elena emerges as a vivid and outspoken personality who “thumbed her nose at the church hierarchy” and read “bad books” associated with heresy. Holler challenges assumptions that nuns were uneducated or passive victims of patriarchal religious structures. But she also explores how gender shaped the legal defence of Elena’s behaviour and links together how sixteenth century ideas of anger, bodily maladies, and biology differentiated between female “uncontrolled” anger and the controlled anger and violence associated with masculinity.[19]

Gender history was also influenced by new ways of understanding empire, Britishness, religion, sexuality, and citizenship and by calls to understand how gender was one way of forming and enacting power relations. This approach encouraged historians to undertake analyses of gender in innovative ways. Cecilia Morgan’s article on Laura Secord and Upper Canadian history does not “reclaim” women in Loyalist history, for example, but explores links between nationalism, feminism, and gender. Middle- and upper-class Anglo Celtic women celebrated the iconic figure of Laura Secord as a way of writing themselves into the history of the nation, asserting their status as loyal citizens of the British empire, and presenting themselves as political actors worthy of respect.[20] The question of gendered citizenship is explored carefully in Stephen Heathorn’s 1996 article on gendered citizenship education in turn of the century England, which weaves together histories of women, gender, and masculinity by exploring how schools inculcated ideals of citizenship and values of “loyalty, duty, and obedience” within working-class youth. Good citizens were fundamentally imagined as masculine: good men were loyal to nation and empire, willing to sacrifice for the nation, and respectful and obedient to superiors, while good women were expected to embrace citizenship through “racial motherhood” and domesticity. Heathorn’s article is at once a gendered history of citizenship and patriotism, an exploration of boyhood and youth, and a class analysis of education.[21]

The expansive range of articles in gender history published in the 1990s often challenged assumptions about resistance to patriarchy and power and offered new ways of seeing institutions of reform or radicalism. Historians of religion, including Nancy Christie, Marguerite Van Die, and Tina Block, have brought the insights of gender history to the experience of faith and the structure of religious institutions. Larissa Taylor’s analysis of sermons in the Middle Ages draws on histories of women, church leaders, and religion to demonstrate that male churchmen held a wider range of beliefs about the ideal attributes of Christian women, and a more nuanced set of gender attitudes, than stereotypes of religiosity would allow for. Jarrett Rudy’s 2001 article explores the gendered history of religious and reform activism in Montreal by focusing on how the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union attempted to introduce provincial restrictions against smoking. The campaign failed in the face of Catholic and Anglican resistance to evangelical moral regeneration, a position strengthened by cultural associations of smoking with adult masculinity. But despite these failures, Rudy argues that such activism strengthened women’s demand for representation in the political sphere. Todd McCallum’s story of sexual scandal in the One Big Union is a good example of how heterosexuality and gender are imbricated in union and labour history, showing how union leaders embodied a version of masculinity that was shaped by beliefs about male breadwinning and women’s sexual innocence, leaving little space for sexually assertive women in positions of labour leadership.[22]

Critical men’s studies grew quickly, with influential work published on masculinity, race, fatherhood, and boyhood.[23] The Journal kept apace, publishing innovative articles in the history of masculinity. Prior to this decade, there were a few tantalizing glimpses into the private lives of men and the close connection between the intimate and the political, and the family and the nation: Michael Cross and Robert Fraser’s article on the private life and marital relationship of Robert Baldwin comes to mind, as does Marc La Terreur’s story of the intimacy between Wilfrid Laurier and Mme. Lavergne, and J. M. S. Careless’s article on the marriage of George Brown.[24] But as Mark Rosenfeld argued in 1988, “histories of men have largely been gender blind”: men were not understood as historically constructed gendered beings but as the universal or normative historical subject.[25] Some women’s historians feared that gender history — especially the history of masculinity — would fail to incorporate feminist questions of power. Laura Lee Downs argues that the development of men’s studies and the history of masculinity felt to some prominent women’s historians like an “assault on the still fragile achievements of second-wave activists.”[26] Women’s history always had something to say about men, because the attention to women as specifically gendered beings helped undo the equation of men as the universal norm/the one and women as the non-universal/the other.[27] But historians of masculinity further explored how masculinity was encoded in mainstream gender ideals, lived and negotiated by men, and deployed within institutions as a mechanism of maintaining and consolidating power.

Far from rejecting feminist insights on power, historians of masculinity have engaged in a productive conversation with feminist history and furthered a nuanced exploration of how masculinity intersected with ethnicity, class, religion, nationality, and whiteness. Steve Hewitt’s 1996 article was an early Journal publication that focused explicitly on masculinity. Using the iconic figure of the Mountie to explore gendered and racialized power in Canada, Hewitt argues that the force reflected and inculcated values of manly physical strength, military discipline, and loyalty to Britishness and Anglo-Canada, a set of themes developed further in Kevin Woodger’s article on twentieth-century Scout and Cadet programs. John Sainsbury’s article on English radical John Wilkes takes place in an earlier period but points to similar questions about how institutional and cultural forms — in this case, the tradition of aristocratic duelling — upheld codes of honour, virility, and assertiveness at a time of increasing anxiety about masculinity.[28] Drawing on histories of fatherhood, Christopher Dummitt took a light-hearted approach to a gendered cultural form — the BBQ in the postwar family — to explore how family activities for fathers increased in ways that maintained their status as family breadwinners.[29] Scholars of religion have also explored the complex intersection of Christian faith, religious institutions, and manhood. Nancy Christie traces how the Methodist church tried to counter the trend of female-dominated church membership, arguing that leaders explicitly set out to “masculinize” the church by reaching out to young men, with the goal of bringing them into membership and leadership roles.[30]

In recent years, historians have followed theoretical work in masculinity studies to argue that masculinity is not a single hegemonic norm; instead, it is best understood as multiple and diverse. Jane McGaughey’s analysis of Northern Irish soldiers explores the competing claims of Protestant Unionist and Catholic nationalist masculinities, and the intersection of masculinity with discourses of courage and bravery, during the First World War. Willeen Keough’s 2010 oral history of twentieth-century sealing masculinity in Newfoundland highlights the importance of understanding plural and multiple masculinities. As sealers and environmental activists fought over the Labrador seal hunt, they employed competing ideas of masculinity: men who hunted to provide for their families versus male eco-warriors saving the environment from a “cruel” seal hunt. But sealers themselves had identities immersed in a tradition of skilled working-class hunting and providing and a sense of pride in their professionalism and care for the environment. Jane Samson takes the concept of multiple masculinities to the history of Melanesian colonization and Christianization. Christian convert George Sarawia, ordained in the 1860s, lived what Samson calls the “different scripts” of masculinity; an Indigenous man who ran a mission station and village while simultaneously drawing on Indigenous ceremony, kinship, and governance structures as well as his Anglican faith.[31]

The relationship between masculinity and the nation-state has been productively explored by historians publishing in the Journal; alongside those writing on gender and citizenship, historians of masculinity have argued that the nation-state was imbricated with idealized norms of masculinity. Ross Cameron’s close reading of iconic Group of Seven artist Tom Thomson positions the mythology of his life and art in the context of a gendered Canadian antimodernism, in which urban and middle-class men were positioned as feminized in opposition to a rugged, virile, and independent Canadian nation-state. Ariel Beaujot’s article on manliness and power takes an iconic material item — the British top hat — to explore how Victorian class identity and masculine authority was displayed and consolidated. The top hat evoked authority and status, especially in Parliament, where politicians’ sartorial expression was a mechanism to demonstrate class, gender, and political solidarity. Colin Grittner’s analysis of changes to electoral politics in the colony of Prince Edward Island demonstrates how gender history deepens historical conceptualizations of responsible government. He examines a period when the vote was expanded to men who worked as statute labourers on colonial infrastructure projects. By upholding their manly duty to local colonial authorities, men were welcomed into the political sphere at a time when other colonies in British North America excluded non-propertied men from the right to vote.[32]

The relationship between masculinity and the nation-state is most fully explored in Journal articles about militarism, masculinity, citizenship, and nation building. Geoff Read argues that the 1930s Croix de Feu reached out to patriotic veterans in postwar France but expanded its adherents though masculinist discourses steeped in the ideals of the “fascist new man”: a loyal and dedicated servant of the state who would sacrifice his selfhood and body for the collective good of the nation. Read’s article can be read alongside Matthew Hendley’s research on the right-wing interwar British Primrose League, which employed patriotism, maternalism, and political education to marshal female support for the Conservative Party. Jane McGaughey centres male bodies in her examination of political conflict in Northern Ireland, exploring the claims to masculinity and sacrifice made by Unionist Protestant First World War soldiers and veterans. As soldiers celebrated their manly courage, they claimed loyalty to Empire in ways that diminished the sacrifices of nationalist veterans and deepened political and religious divides in Northern Ireland.[33] McGaughey’s attention to the discourse of sacrifice, courage, and loyalty echoes Lara Campbell’s analysis of First World War veterans who embraced the language of manly citizenship to make claims on the Canadian state for greater access to social welfare.

Histories of men at war complement Journal articles that explore women’s experiences in the military or on the home front. Pierson’s early research on women’s work in the Second World War, Bonnie White’s reading of the complications of memory in the Women’s Land Army, Isabel Campbell’s oral history of Cold War military families, and Linda Quiney’s research on Canadian voluntary nurses serving in Great Britain all explore how women’s work and intimate lives were deeply entwined with national war efforts, or how women remembered their experiences of war. Magda Fahrni’s article on Second World War veterans creatively draws together family history, military history, and gender history to explore the gendered conflicts and challenges of family reunification in postwar Montreal.[34] Perhaps it is possible to write a history of masculinity without addressing relationships of gender and power. But historians publishing in the JCHA have been attentive to how gender and masculinity have intersected with institutional structures and power relationships, class and ethnicity, war and the nation-state, and religion and politics.

Concern that histories of masculinity and gender would ignore how power functioned or the historical experiences of women have not come to pass. The JCHA has continued to publish important research on the lives and experiences of women, sometimes focusing on the material lives of women and at other times exploring the discursive construction of womanhood and gender. The influence of social history, with its attentiveness to how marginalized people have resisted and negotiated institutional structures, has influenced women’s history in the Journal: Kathryn Harvey’s work on nineteenth-century violence against women, Tamara Myers’s analysis of early twentieth-century female police officers and the young women they placed under surveillance, and Gordon Desbrisay’s research on seventeenth-century Scottish philanthropists and wet nurses all show that women actively participated in their communities while negotiating economic, legal, and political subordination to men.[35] Jane Nicholas’s reading of sideshow performer Celesta Geyer addresses the complex relationship of body image and femininity, simultaneously showing how one woman in the public eye negotiated oppressive expectations of the female body while also deconstructing mid-century notions of self-improvement.[36]

Read comparatively, five articles in the JCHA provide readers with a complex analysis of how gendered violence has been understood, experienced, represented, and regulated over time, contributing innovative research to feminist concerns about the impact of violence on the bodies of women.[37] Kathryn Harvey draws on a careful reading of court and police records to explore not just how middle-class women’s organizations began to understand violence as a gendered crime, but also how working-class Montreal women negotiated domestic violence within a limited range of options. Sandy Ramos’s research on sexual violence in nineteenth-century Montreal traces how violence was differentially experienced, resisted, and explained by a wide range of the city’s residents, including women, men, and medical and legal professionals. Both Susan Johnston and Lesley Erickson historicize sexual violence: Johnston examines how female sex workers and the public explained the violence visited upon the bodies of those who worked in the sex industry, and Erickson examines women’s experiences of sexual violence in farming communities while noting that immigrant, non-Protestant male workers were more likely to be charged with and convicted of a crime than Canadian-born settlers. Elsbeth Heaman shifts the methodological and theoretical lens in her article on sexual violence in Upper Canada to look at how sexual violence was represented in national print cultures in times of war and political violence. Both women’s and gender historians have attended to the interplay between the construction of gendered norms and ideals and how women resisted and talked back to those with power.

The JCHA has also continued to publish important biographical research on women, linking the experiences of individual women with larger historical currents of empire, colonialism, and labour. Katherine McKenna’s biographical article on E. Cora Hind, an accomplished Manitoba journalist who celebrated farm women’s labour, endorsed unionization and suffrage, and passionately supported the British empire and the assimilation of European immigrants, frames one woman’s life within multiple streams of political activism. Biography can help women’s historians trace the connections between individual women’s experiences and larger historical themes even when the historical subjects are not well known: as Stephen Brooke argues in the Journal, biographies offer the opportunity to explore complexities of “agency, power, emotion and affect” in all of the “wonderful unevenness of history.”[38] Martha Walls draws on biographical research to detail the professional education and work of six Mi’kmaw teachers from New Brunswick who taught in the federal Indian day school system. Janice Cavell profiles Mrs. Rudolph Anderson, a woman who drew on her status as the wife of a scientist and extensive political connections to memorialize the men who died on a Canadian Arctic Expedition, placing her and other women into narratives of northern polar expeditions. And Joan Sangster’s analysis of author Irene Baird waves together her work as a federal civil servant and travels in the Arctic with a close reading of her novel Climate of Power, exploring how Baird’s experience shaped her fiction, which revealed Ottawa’s masculinist power structures and the “gendered ordering of the workplace.”[39]

Private and Public Worlds

Early research by leading women’s historians reclaimed and reconceptualized women’s domestic spaces, developing theoretical paradigms that linked the idea of separate spheres to middle-class formation and maternal feminism. Yet there have been few Journal publications on the “private” lives of women, domesticity, or how maternalism was sustained and deployed. One exception is Marjorie Theobald’s article on middle-class women in colonial Australia, which analyzed the “accomplishments” curriculum in women’s education. And although the JCHA published family history that contributed to understanding families’ standard of living, poverty rates, patterns of employment, and infant mortality, these articles rarely systematically parsed those findings by gender.[40]

Research on gender, family, marriage, reproduction, and maternalism are not missing, but the Journal has tended to publish articles that trouble boundaries between public and private worlds.[41] Drawing on rural merchant record books in Quebec, Béatrice Craig has recently argued that production and consumption are interrelated and that both men and women “consumed to produce.”[42] Jack Little’s research on the family lives of elite women and men in the Eastern Townships shows how public and private spheres were deeply interconnected rather than distinct, and how anti-Americanism and class divisions were more powerful boundaries than those of gender. The careful examination of nineteenth century evangelical Christian manhood by Marguerite Van Die suggests that faith, religion, and the ties of family life — areas often associated with femininity —shaped the identities of Christian men even as those ties were challenged by their connections with business and public life. In a later period, Tina Block probes the connection between postwar religiosity, marriage, and sexuality, exploring how Christian denominations upheld heterosexual marriage and gender norms while also shaping alternatives to living outside of it. The postwar domestic ideal is complicated by Valerie Korinek, who challenges assumptions about how much postwar women absorbed gender norms of domesticity and caregiving. Reading letters to the editors of the popular women’s magazine Chatelaine, Korinek argues that women criticized aspects of restrictive gender norms even as they embraced some aspects of expert advice.[43]

Similarly, publications in the Journal have explored reproduction, sexuality, mothering, and relations of care in complex ways, beginning in the early 1980s with Lévesque’s work on unwed mothers and Peter Ward’s analysis of the legal and community implications of unmarried women having children outside the legitimacy of heterosexual marriage. Ted McCoy draws on case files and biographical data to explore pregnancy and parental love in the context of an incarcerated woman in the Kingston Penitentiary, where one woman’s desire to embody a maternal role conflicted with the institution’s intention to separate her from her child. Sexual desires and unwed motherhood frame Sharon Wall’s research on how white adolescent girls in postwar Canada experienced sexuality as opportunities for sexual intimacy outside of marriage increased. Drawing on medical and social work literature, Wall shows that young women’s experiences of sexual pleasure were changing prior to the so-called Sexual Revolution, although she is careful to show that constraints — of heterosexuality, birth control access, and gendered inequality — remained in place as they negotiated the changing landscape.[44] The research of Patrick Dunae on sex work in Victoria focuses less on the experiences of sex workers themselves, but his research positions sex work as female-dominated labour, and as part of the “moral geography” in a city transformed by economic and demographic change.[45]

Although there are few articles explicitly on maternal feminism, feminism as a social movement has been addressed by authors in the Journal in multifaceted ways. Some of the first women’s history articles in the 1970s addressed suffrage and women’s rights in England, including Kathleen McCrone’s analysis of the middle-class origins of early English feminism and its links to philanthropic and reform movements. Jacques Kornberg’s close reading of J. S. Mill’s 1869 essay “The Subjection of Women” in the context of liberalism and Susan Brown’s analysis of gendered debates on women’s rights in eighteenth-century England both analyzed early women’s movements through the lens of intellectual history. Judith Allen brought a comparative approach to origins of first-wave Anglo-American feminism, although she explicitly noted that Canadian feminism had been largely ignored. Allen’s 1990 remark was prescient: it would not be until 2010 that Veronica Strong-Boag’s reassessment of suffrage appeared in the Journal. Strong-Boag uses standpoint theory to examine historians’ approaches to first-wave feminism, arguing that assessments of suffragists fluctuate in relation to theoretical discussions about class, race, and colonialism. If first wave feminism was rarely addressed outside the British context, however, questions about how women engaged with feminist discourses appear in articles on professional women, “bluestocking” academic women, and national and international reform movements.[46] Later twentieth-century feminism is covered in more detail by Barbara Freeman’s analysis of women working at the CBC, Laurie Laplanche’s research on the discrimination faced by women at Radio Canada, and Gail Cuthbert Brandt and Naomi Black’s comparative research on rural women’s organizations in Canada and Quebec. Jenny Ellison’s research on the 1980s Vancouver fat acceptance group Large as Life uses oral histories from former group members to situate their activism within social movement history, noting that such activism cannot be understood solely with regard to traditional feminist movements.[47]

The Journal has a long tradition of publishing research on workplace discrimination and pay inequity, beginning with Pierson’s research on women’s wartime work and Alison Prentice’s groundbreaking research on academic women. Bonnie Schmidt’s oral history of the first female RCMP cohort of 1974 reads as a counterpart to Hewitt’s earlier examination of Mountie masculinity. Female officers struggled in a highly masculinized work culture that resisted women’s presence and implied they were unsuitable for the job. Schmidt utilizes oral histories to show how women officers resisted their sexualization and attempted to develop alternative policing practices.[48] Articles by Laplanche, Freeman, and Mary Lynn Stewart follow professional women as they negotiated inequity and discrimination in the male-dominated media. Freeman shows how second-wave feminism and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women sparked feminists at the CBC to fight workplace discrimination, unequal pay, and sexist media representation. Shifting to academia, El Chenier, Lori Chambers, and Anne Toews look at the publication record of women historians in Canada, arguing that women publish disproportionately fewer sole-authored scholarly books than do men, a trend that impacts their professional recognition and status.[49] Women’s historians in Canada have long rejected easy assumptions about the private lives of women and have pushed against historiographical trends that emphasized the separation of public and private spheres. Rather, historians publishing in Canada have long been interested in the interplay of gender with class, work, religion, and institutional structures.

Histories of the Nation, Empire and Transnational Worlds

With a few exceptions, the majority of women’s and gender history articles in the JCHA were in Canadian history, with some regional representation from Great Britain, France, or the United States. By the mid-2000s, historians were slowly moving into global spaces, reflecting historiographical turns toward transnational and global history. Ruth Compton Brouwer’s biographical examination of medical missionary Florence Murphy weaves together histories of the professions, religion, and medicine to place Murphy’s life in the context of her Presbyterian Nova Scotia upbringing and work in Japanese-occupied Korea. Brouwer outlines the imperial and nationalist frameworks that complicated Murphy’s expectations about Korean Christians and challenges historians to rethink assumptions about Christianity’s role in nationalist movement building. Similarly, Rebecca Hughes’s article on evangelical British missionary women living in Africa in the interwar period finds that such women challenged secular representations of African women as dangerous or in need of rescue. Influential missionaries imagined the possibility of cross-racial friendships — although they expected African women to help Christianize African men.[50] Both Larry Hannant and Kirk Niergarth explore the transnational political activism of left-leaning women, placing the political commitments of individual women into a global framework.[51] Hannant traces three Canadian women whose anti-fascist, feminist, and leftist politics motivated them to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and Niergarth analyzes five feminist Canadian women who travelled to the Soviet Union to report on progress toward gender equality and social security. Not all women who engaged internationally did so for clearly defined political reasons, however. Tarah Brookfield examines the motivations of Canadian women who ran international adoption agencies and themselves adopted children from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh in the 1970s, placing their work in the context of maternalist politics, humanitarianism, and child saving. The Canadian nurses who volunteered to work overseas in the First World War were working in the context of the British Empire, but Linda Quiney argues that they experienced conflict as “colonial” volunteers who were not fully welcomed by their professional British counterparts.[52] These articles do important work placing Canadian women within transnational circuits of work, faith, and social movements, and are complemented by a small number of articles on women who worked and lived in the context of empire. French historian Mary Lynn Stewart follows French journalist Andrée Vollis, whose reporting challenged colonial exploitation in Vietnam, and Charlotte Macdonald complicates the political views of treaty rights held by Sarah Selwyn, wife of the first Anglican bishop of New Zealand. Brandt and Black’s research on Catholic farm women’s activism in Quebec and France is a rare example of a conceptually comparative approach to women’s social and political movements, and a welcome reinterpretation of rural women as engaged political actors.[53]

However, most publications employing a transnational approach have continued to centre North American, British, and European women’s experiences, or have examined how ideas of gender were circulated within those national contexts. Jacqueline Holler’s 1993 article on a Mexico City nun was the first women’s history publication with a regional focus outside of Europe or North America. Fourteen years later, the Journal published additional articles on women and gender outside of the Canadian or European national framework. The 2007 contributions by Tina Chen, Joyce Chadya, and Micheline Lessard were published in a Women and Global Histories edition, and drew from transnational, colonial, and anticolonial historiographies. Micheline Lessard’s research on how Vietnamese women became political activists even as they engaged with French colonial education systems is an example of how the framework of empire and colonialism has enriched women’s and gender history. Joyce Chadya employs a similarly nuanced approach to the space that Zimbabwean women negotiated during the Liberation War of the 1970s; caught between “repressive colonial government and coercive nationalist guerilla armies,” women found ways to resist while attempting to survive militarism and war. Chen’s gendered reading of Soviet film stars, as media travelled through transnational circuits during the Sino-Soviet era, takes gender and sexuality from the realm of individual experience to explore how Maoist China imagined the meaning of womanhood and sexuality in a modernizing communist state.[54]

The following year, a special edition on Migration, Place, and Identity included three innovative articles by Cecilia Morgan, Patricia Grimshaw, and Charlotte Macdonald on migration, colonialism, and the gendered workings of empire.[55] Patricia Grimshaw explores how Indigenous women and families within a charismatic Pentecostal revival in Australia during the First World War embraced the language of Christian freedom, human rights, and justice to claim religious freedom and resist attempts to force them into respectable mainstream worship. Charlotte Macdonald’s biography of Sarah Selwyn places her within the transnational world of the British Empire in the 1840s. Both Selwyn and her husband brought beliefs of British Christian superiority in gender roles, marriage, and education, yet both were critical of colonial attempts to undermine Māori treaty rights. Cecilia Morgan’s article on domestic relationships between Indigenous and settler men and women within transatlantic British North America explores how bodies, lives, and emotions developed from the circuits of empire, which included travel, politics, and missionary evangelism. She argues that such couples experienced emotional sustenance as well as conflict and stress while grappling with the racism of empire, showing that intimate relationships could both deepen assimilation and support anticolonial resistance. These articles are supplemented by a 2018 roundtable on Nora Jaffary’s award-winning Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905, which provided commentary on the links between reproductive and medical history, Indigenous birthing practices, modernization, and nation-state building in Latin America.[56] These special editions and roundtables have given historians the opportunity to address questions of race, power, colonialism, and modernity, and they make up the few contributions that decentre the Western framework in women’s and gender history.

Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Articles in the JCHA have added new dimensions to understanding colonialism and nationalism in Canada and globally, but rich interdisciplinary work at the intersection of race and gender — especially work outside the category of global — remains largely absent. Despite the growth of critical race and area studies in North America, for example, the JCHA has published little on gender and racism outside the context of settler colonialism or normative ideals of racialized citizenship. Other authors in this centenary series have found similar trends. James Walker has found that increasing numbers of articles in the 1990s understood race as a causal force in history, yet this research has rarely engaged with women’s and gender history. In her analysis of Black history in the JCHA, Claudine Bonner sees a story of silence, with only a handful of articles centring Black history. The histories of Black women’s lives and gendered resistance to racism are largely invisible in the Journal.[57]

Research at the intersection of gender and race is largely indebted to histories of empire and colonialism rather than the critical race work done by North American feminist historians and theorists. This absence may reflect how gender history constructed itself as an academic field in the 1990s, as historians embraced feminist theories that reckoned with how gender was constituted discursively and challenged scholars to undo the “unifying” category of woman. But this theoretical genealogy over claimed epistemic originality and rarely cited foundational work undertaken by Black feminist writers and writers of colour, all of whom had long challenged assumptions that women shared a common experience of sexism.[58] By 1989, African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw had built on this body of work and introduced the term “intersectionality” to mainstream feminist discourse.[59] But the contours of gender and women’s history in Canadian publishing reflect Sara Ahmed’s argument that “citation is feminist memory,” a process that “lays out other paths, paths we call desire lines, created by not following the official paths laid out by disciplines.”[60] In this case, the citation lines followed by women’s and gender historians upheld long-standing scholarly exclusions based on race.

Although historians of gender and women took longer to engage with the paths built by intersectional scholars, practices are slowly changing. Francesca D’Amico’s interdisciplinary research on rap music in Canada draws on histories of gender, race, migration, and multiculturalism to argue that Black music has been discursively excluded from the category of Canadian music. Male and female Canadian musicians adopted the masculine and racialized “scripts” of American rap to make themselves visible as performers, challenge their exclusion from the whiteness of multicultural Canada, and name their experiences of racism. Similarly, Kevin Woodger’s 2017 research on the Scouting movement and the Cadets is explicitly antiracist in its understanding of how these boyhood movements maintained and enforced Anglo-Canadian whiteness, “character building,” and the value of military discipline. In the postwar era, such organizations expanded to Canadianize “ethnic others” from Southern and Eastern Europe and existed in creative tension with francophone Scouting organizations. In the case of Indigenous boys, however, such organizations were projects of settler colonialism and were active in residential schools, where they attempted to train Indigenous children to adopt Anglo-Canadian cultural practices.[61]

Perhaps because of the influence of social history, the history of immigration, and critical multiculturalism, historians publishing in the JCHA have stronger scholarly engagement with the intersection of ethnicity and gender. Royden Loewen explores the impact of urbanization on gender and ethnic identities in rural Manitoba, as Mennonite families shifted their focus from practices of Christian separation and humility to a quest for modern and middle-class economic stability.[62] As Marlene Epp argues, Mennonite women who arrived as refugees or migrants to Canada negotiated displacement in the context of an ethno-religious and transnational diaspora; their experiences differed over time but they continually navigated complex relationships with community, family, and faith.[63] Ashleigh Androsoff revisits stereotypical images of Doukhobor women, arguing that media representations of naked Doukhobor women in the Sons of Freedom emphasized their immigrant “otherness” or “stranger” status within mainstream twentieth-century Canada.[64] Ethnicity and gender also shaped the experiences of men and representations of masculinity: Hewitt links the Britishness of the idealized Anglo-Canadian Mountie to the RCMP’s surveillance of ethic “radicals,” and Lesley Erickson examines ethnicity in court cases of men accused of sexual violence, finding that immigrant men were framed as sexually “dangerous” and more likely than men born in Canada to be criminally charged or convicted.[65] Multiple articles have been attentive to how Anglo-Celtic identity formation was constructed relationally to gender, religion, region, and nationality, and how middle-class settler women could leverage conceptions of national loyalty and Britishness to carve out wider public roles.[66]

Francophone women’s and gender history is well represented in the Journal, although largely in urban Montreal, perhaps reflecting the influence of the Montreal History Group established in the late 1970s.[67] Articles by Jarrett Rudy, Kathryn Harvey, Sandy Ramos, Tamara Myers, Andrée Lévesque, Bettina Bradbury, and Magda Fahrni all convey the rich histories of Montreal and explore intersection of diverse ethnic and linguistic communities: anglophone, francophone, Irish, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant. Despite these strengths, however, there has been little published on francophone gender and women outside of urban spaces, although Jack Little and Marguerite Van Die’s explorations of Anglo-Canadians in the Eastern townships are an important addition to Quebec historiography. Furthermore, most of the work has been published in English, suggesting that francophone historians of women and gender are seeking alternative publication venues. Laurie Laplanche’s thoughtful examination of the gendered organizational culture at Radio-Canada between 1965 and 1982 is a welcome intervention in the histories of professional women, media policy, and pay equity. She looks closely at internal promotional material, staff publications, and magazines, and places those publications in context of the work culture and opportunities for professional women in media production. Like the women studied by Barbara Freeman, second-wave feminism inspired francophone women at Radio Canada to research and challenge workplace sex discrimination. Their complaints ranged widely: inequitable pay between men and women, male managers who claimed that women were satisfied with low-paying work (“elles sont satisfaites d’être de simples secrétaires”), and ongoing sexual harassment.[68] Yet absences remain: there is little representation of francophone women in rural communities or outside of Quebec, and little explicit interrogation of allophone women’s role in community building in Quebec, particularly in the twentieth century.

Indigenous Women’s and Gender History

Over the last century, only nine research articles and one book panel on Indigenous women’s and gender history have been published in the JCHA. In this centenary series, Allan Downey argues that until the 1990s, most Indigenous history was absorbed into larger discussions of Canadian history. The number of articles in Indigenous women’s and gender history has been similarly small, but innovative and important. Drawn from groundbreaking research that read against the grain of HBC sources, Van Kirk’s 1977 article on Indigenous women in Western Canada placed their expertise at the centre of the fur trade economy. By the mid-2000s, the Journal published articles at the intersection of gender, race and Indigeneity in the North American and global context. Moving beyond questions of “authenticity” to explore rodeos and stampedes, Mary-Ellen Kelm explores how settlers and Indigenous peoples interacted in constructed and hybrid spaces, which she sees as places of both colonial dispossession and Indigenous resistance.[69] Articles by Cecilia Morgan and Patricia Grimshaw similarly explore the agency of Indigenous women as they negotiated racism and dispossession in white settler societies in the British Empire. In recent years, the Journal has published innovative articles that explore gender and Indigenous history. Through the history and cultural politics of lacrosse, Allan Downey examines Indigenous masculinity. Rooted in Haudenosaunee culture, lacrosse was taken up in the nineteenth century by settler men, who explicitly excluded Indigenous men from the sport. As men from the Six Nations attempted to reclaim lacrosse and form a competitive team in the 1980s, they reasserted sovereignty through a reference to traditional cultural forms that were in turn marked by exclusions of gender, specifically in relation to women’s attempts to build their own league.[70] The imbrication of masculinity with colonialism grounds Jane Samson’s analysis of George Sarawia, who converted to Christianity, was educated in New Zealand, and was ordained in the 1860s. Sarawia lived in multiple ways: as a leader of high rank within his own community and as a man aware of racial barriers who also saw himself as a member of a larger Christian community. As Samson and other historians argue, empire was experienced, resisted, and reframed by Indigenous peoples who lived within its structures of power.

Other historians have brought questions of gender, colonialism, family, and Indigenous history together in foundational ways. Martha E. Walls’s article on the six Mi’kmaw women who taught in New Brunswick day schools in the first two decades of the twentieth century complicates the understanding of Canadian colonialism, showing how Indigenous teachers were expected to assimilate Indigenous students even as they employed practices of resistance, such as insisting that schools hire Indigenous teachers and use Mi’kmaw language in instruction.[71] Both Krista Barclay and Erin Millions draw on family history, women’s history, and histories of colonialism to position Indigenous women, men, and families as central to the histories of the nation. Barclay uses letters, wills, and material artifacts to explore the HBC families who moved from the West to settle in other colonies. Indigenous women and children carefully negotiated life in settler communities, yet their complicated histories were often erased — or simplistically appropriated — from private and public memory. Erin Millions similarly employs a range of sources including photographs, gravestones, and letters to trace the movement of Métis students and fur trade families across the British empire, showing how families negotiated Indigenous knowledge and kinship ties as they pursued British education and middle-class respectability. Finally, the roundtable on Jean Barman’s award-winning French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest foregrounds Indigenous women’s agency in British Columbia, showing how their knowledge shaped the French-Canadian fur trade and relationships between traders and Indigenous peoples, and in so doing, linked together the complex histories of French Canada and Indigenous nations.

Research on the intersection of gender with ethnicity, race, and Indigeneity has not been absent from the Journal despite deep silences on the intersection of gender and race in African Canadian and Asian Canadian communities, underrepresentation of histories of gender, Indigeneity, and race, and little on the histories of francophone women and gender outside urban Montreal. These silences indicate that much creative and interdisciplinary research is not making its way through the publication pipeline in the JCHA, and that like many authors in women’s and gender history, historians working in these fields are publishing in specialized journals or in edited collections that allow them to engage more deeply with the material and with alternative networks of academic support.

Circuits of Knowledge Production

The publication of women’s and gender history in the JCHA echoes Joan Sangster’s analysis of the Canadian Historical Review, which did not publish substantially in the field until after it had reached “begrudging” acceptance in the 1990s.[72] Given that women’s history was largely invisible in both the JCHA and CHR until the 1970s and remained a footnote through the 1980s, how did the field establish itself? Exclusion led women’s historians to consolidate the field in alternative ways. Some feminist historians published in interdisciplinary journals such as Labour / Le Travail (est. 1976), Atlantis (est. 1980), Histoire Sociale / Social History (est. 1968), or the Journal of Canadian Studies (est. 1968). Francophone historians published in French in the JCHA, but more widely in Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française.[73] Women’s, independent, and regional presses in French and English Canada played a crucial role in circulating women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s, acting as a necessary route to publication but also, as Sangster argues, a political choice to circulate research outside of mainstream publication models.[74] In these two decades, both edited collections and summative textbooks have laid the foundations of the field and played a significant role in setting research agendas.[75] Edited collections challenged disciplinary gatekeepers and embraced interdisciplinary journals, conference papers, unpublished research, and popular publications. By the 1990s, the diversity of the field was reflected in collections focusing on gender, families, immigration, work, Indigeneity, race, and masculinity, and such collections remain a crucial way for feminist historians to publish new scholarship.[76] Finally, the JCHA tradition of publishing the titles of papers presented at the CHA demonstrates that conference presentations were more diverse than the Journal’s content.[77] Circuits of knowledge production that emphasized verbal conversation were as crucial as peer-reviewed publications in developing the field and consolidating academic networks.[78] The development of the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (now the Canadian Committee on Women’s and Gender History) in the 1970s also played a role in knowledge production, bringing women’s historians into the orbit of the CHA while providing a separate means of acknowledgement for women’s history. The organization helped build academic connections across French and English Canada, and across Canadian and non-Canadian history, at a time when female historians were a minority of the professoriate in Canada.

The History Wars: Gender and the Making of History

By the early 1990s, establishment historians were growing increasingly concerned about women’s and gender history. Jack Granatstein first made his infamous quip about the history of housemaid’s knee in 1991 — an attack on women’s history, working-class history, and social history that he repeated later in his best-selling book on the decline of Canadian history. Michael Bliss offered a more nuanced analysis but still argued that the shift from national political stories to that of private relationships — including that of gender and the family — had led to the disintegration of the study of Canada.[79] Embedded in these concerns about the fragmentation of national narratives, women’s history was seen as undermining a unitary framework for explaining the nation-state. Yet these critiques emerged when women’s and gender history, although a growing field, constituted a small minority of peer-reviewed articles in Canadian history journals.

This disconnect between the fear of women’s history as a divisive force and its actual stature in Canadian history affirms arguments made by women’s historians that such critiques arose because its practitioners spoke uncomfortable truths about the closed doors of the discipline, criticized those who held disciplinary authority in the academy, and asked historians to reconsider whose stories were central to history itself.[80] CHA president Gail Cuthbert Brandt took on this discourse in her 1992 Presidential Address, telling members that “nationalist alarm bells” were complaints about “too much history of the wrong kind.” Brandt argued that writing the history of women and gender — and more broadly of all marginalized groups — would reinvigorate the discipline and build a more dynamic and relevant Canadian history:

Il fault remettre en question les demarcations artificielles et les hierarchies stériles quenous avons acceptées jusqu’ici. Le grand defi est de construire une histoire de ce pays qui reflète toute sa diversité et toute sa complexité.… En écrivant l’histoire des groupes jusqu’ici marginalisés dans les récits nationaux, nous aurons plus de chance de rendre cette histoire plus intéressante et plus pertinente aux yeux d’un public plus nombreux.[81]

Historians today are still discussing these issues in ways not dissimilar to debates from over thirty years ago. Most recently, the “challenge” to a unified history is framed as the undoing of the nation by focusing on settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. In each decade, a “divisive” story is identified, and that story bears the weight of accusations that attentiveness to difference undermines the value of history and the project of Canada itself. African American feminist Audre Lorde directly confronted this fear in 1977 when she argued that embracing difference demonstrated strength rather than disunity: the “discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal,” she wrote, but a way to “birth change.”[82] The persistence of these debates is a reminder that discomfort emerges when historians tell new stories and embrace new approaches, interpretations, and actors. When the discipline’s doors are challenged, as they were by women’s historians in previous decades, the result is disquiet, discomfort, and resistance. Yet as Brandt argued three decades ago, new historical stories can reinvigorate the study of history itself.

Conclusion

As the JCHA moves into its next one hundred years, it will find ways to embrace new voices in history and better reflect the rich intersectional and interdisciplinary research on women and gender. Given the importance of the CHA for emerging scholars, the Journal might seek emerging voices in women’s and gender history, with an explicit commitment to mentoring young scholars researching gender, Indigeneity, and race from intersectional perspectives. The more informal roundtables at the CHA often act as places for scholars to creatively explore emerging ideas and might be translated into shorter articles that allow historians to quickly communicate ideas-in-motion. The Journal might even consider a special issue on women’s and gender history: previous special editions on migration and empire suggest that such targeted publications increase diversity and representation.

There is no doubt that much has changed since the Journal published hagiographies of “women worthies” or articles on abolitionist women without a mention of race. In 2007, Elizabeth Jameson reflected on how it felt to be told as a graduate student that women’s history was “just the history of dishwashing.” She notes that “recovering women’s lives” has been an important yet unfinished collective feminist accomplishment, because women still remain at the margins of conceptual frameworks in history.[83] Building on decades of groundbreaking research by feminist historians publishing in Canada, expanding the diversity of publications in the JCHA might help to address continued silences in women’s and gender history, and better reflect the innovative research that is leading historians into the future.