“Taking into account ethno-cultural
differences, trace the evolution of Canadian gender roles and identity, as well
as the family, from the pre-industrial to the industrial/post-industrial era.”
Gender
and family roles and identity are mammoth in scope, yet not monolithic. This
paper will therefore consider a series of examples that illustrate the multiple
complex constructions of gender in overlapping categories of cultural
production and work. As “identity” is a fluid and individual, internal and
invisible category, it presents significant analytical challenges. Gillian
Poulter suggests that identity is embodied through cultural practices, so that
cultural artifacts and performances can serve as a window into gender identity.
Historians cannot always determine the intent behind cultural practices, but
can see what sorts of practices and performances are normalized. Gender
differences in many contexts in Canadian history have been a site for
articulating other differences, and asserting ideas about settlement, class,
and modernity. These categories did not evolve, but were constructed,
performed, and reconstructed through highlighting and policing differences of
race, culture, and class.
The complexities of gender and family relations in
Canada, and their interweaving with constructions of race, is perhaps most
apparent in Adele Perry’s work. Perry’s monograph is replete with analyses of
songs and poetry describing the experiences and perceptions of a variety of
settlers. These verses show evolving and often contradictory images of
Aboriginal peoples and settlers, predicated upon gendered representations,
furthering Perry’s argument that colonialism was about contact between two
peoples specifically as men and women, rather than in the absence of gender
relations. For example, by portraying Aboriginal women as opposite to white
women, colonists could define womanhood to be the exclusive purview of white
women; on this basis, Perry claims that “woman” as a category had clear “racial
contours.”
Through her post-structuralist approach, Perry makes a compelling case for
considering gender and race as mutually constitutive constructed categories,
and for analyzing men’s experiences and masculinity alongside women’s
experiences and femininity.
Perry’s
analysis of homosocial culture among white men in colonial British Columbia
shows how gender and race dovetail with class, as homosocial culture formed
alongside British Columbia’s gold rushes and as a component of resource
extraction industries.
For these men, physical labour served as a marker of class.
In homosocial environments where housework was by necessity a male task, men
saw their ability to cook and maintain a home as a triumph of domestic
competence.
This subversion of the tradition division of public and private spheres
illustrates the importance of considering men’s work in private spaces.
Homosocial culture in British Columbia was a disruption of a traditional organization,
resulting in the construction of “a particular if fragmented vision of what it
meant to be white and male.”
Allan Greer’s Mohawk
Saint illustrates how representations and symbolism can be conflated with
identity, as Jesuits priests such as Claude Cauchetiere took a central role in
portraying Catherine Tekakwitha’s life in hagiographic representations. After
Tekakwitha’s death, Jesuits constructed her as separate from other Mohawk
people as a means of stressing her potential for sainthood. This
entailed selective portrayals of her life experiences, such as assuming that
she lacked awareness of violence and flattening her suffering as individual
rather than part of a collective Mohawk trauma. While
settlers have since highlighted her difference from her ancestral community and
their own—a common phrase referring to her is “a lily among thorns”—and Mohawk
ancestry in their own quest for spiritual healing, Cauchetiere portrayed
Tekakwitha as Indian, as Greer puts it, “only superficially and accidentally.” Given
the variable representations of Tekakwitha, it is hard to pinpoint any elements
of her internal identity, although externally one can see layers in her Mohawk
and Christian names as well as her clothing and accessories.
Greer’s work shows how historians must use a high degree of caution in
ascribing identity, as racial and gender power imbalances have given men more
voice and authority in historical sources.
Cecilia
Morgan argues that in Upper Canada, masculinity and femininity were ascribed,
respectively, to politics and the public and to religion and the private. These
identities were not natural, but discursively created, as a social and
political construction replete with symbolism. One such symbol is that of Queen Victoria. To Upper Canadian reformers
during the Rebellions, Queen Victoria signified an inadequate mother of the
empire, as she was too emotional and powerful and insufficiently maternal or
caring. Reformers in Lower Canada took up similar imagery. Patriots cast
Loyalists as being “governed by a little girl,” using their scorn for Queen
Victoria to bolster their conception of “the people” as exclusively male, in
line with Rousseau, who saw women as supposedly equal to men, yet inappropriate
candidates for citizenship. Involvement in the “public” had dramatically divergent connotations for
men and women. In a society where men’s downfall was in political corruption
and women’s in sexual corruption “public man” had a connotation of
honourability and independence from patronage. This is a stark contrast to the idea of a “public woman,” a phrase
evoking promiscuity echoed in the Patriots’ cry of “The Queen is a Whore!”
The
imagery of women as unsuited for public activity had real political
consequences. In 1834, the removal of women’s franchise reflected Papineau’s
concerns that women’s franchise would challenge the “domestic sexual order,”
entrenching separate spheres as part of a Patriot concept of liberation and
making the Rebellion “a significant moment in the process of gender formation
in French Canada.”
Rather than acting in more politically visible, “public” roles, women
participated in the Rebellion by making cloth to provide an alternative source
to textiles imported from Britain.
Overall, Greer argues, “the Patriot movement was a fundamentally masculine
phenomenon.”
Through a
case study of the Allaire family in Peasant,
Lord, and Merchant, Allan Greer has considered the division of labour in
peasant households in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Habitant
labour, he argues, was fairly traditionally gendered. In this context, marriage had important economic underpinnings, with
marriage contracts giving security to women in the case of a husband’s death,
under an assumption that husbands and fathers held legal mastery. Since the family was a central site of production and consumption,
marriage was largely essential in this society.
Beatrice
Craig has noted similar tendencies in her study of the Upper Saint John Valley,
covering roughly the same era. She suggests that historians must consider
women’s economic agency as both producers and consumers, and highlights a need
to question the binaries that gender the economic sphere as public and, thus,
as male. Craig
notes that within each farm, there existed two gendered economies through a
division of labour.
Home manufacturing of textiles was an important component of this, persisting
through the late nineteenth century in Madawaska and showing women’s
responsiveness to markets and industrial developments.
Women could use this textile production as a source of independent income.
Women’s consumption, for themselves and on behalf of their families, was a
meaningful way to assert both individuality and a collective identity, serving
as “an economic activity with symbolic meaning.”
Willeen
Keough shows how women’s roles could be part of their self-image in her study
of Irish women on the Southern Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. In these
communities, families usually operated with a flexible division of labour and
significant cooperation.
Family work was critical for maintaining the fishery, and women therefore
undertook physically challenging, skilled labour in shore work. This, Keough argues, was a means of
maintaining a strong self-image, as the work was both essential and respectable.
Women’s labour in the fishery and in subsistence agriculture was key to the
community’s survival, and in contrast to the ideologies of other regions, women
were not seen as weaker or gentler than men.
Despite lacking official recognition, women’s status as community healers on
the Southern Avalon was equivalent to that of male doctors, reflecting an
overall image of women as competent community leaders.
These
examples from three separate areas illustrate how women participated in the
economy in regionally specific ways as both producers and consumers in a
pre-industrial society. Thus, while settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries seem to have conceptualized men and women in binary terms, their
economy cannot be framed as a neat binary of public and private.
Parr details the shaping of gender through work, and
work through gender, in a dual interaction of patriarchy and capitalism. In
her examination of the “women’s town” of Paris, Ontario, in which women textile
mill workers were central to the economy and social relations, Parr notes that
definitions of men’s and women’s work were complex and evolving, linked to
workers’ shifts and use of equipment.
Despite the relative power that women had in this community, mill-owner Penman
took on a paternalist role in managing the labour force, protecting and
providing for the women workers.
Women shaped their work by deploying ideas about gender; this can be seen in a
case where women highlighted their domestic roles during a labour dispute, to
highlight their respectability.
Parr
builds a parallel between Penman’s mill in Paris and the Knechtel plant in
Hanover, Ontario, comprised of individual male furniture craftsmen for whom
woodworking was a component of their German Anabaptist ethnicity.
By the 1920s, masculinity had become less rooted in the physicality of male
work, necessitating new sites of difference for men to assert their roles.
Masculinity in Hanover came to be redefined based on the male authority of
being a breadwinner or “family man.”
Men also framed their masculinity in terms of working with machines that
demanded a significant amount of focus to avoid potential danger,
a trend that is also apparent in Dummitt’s consideration of masculinity later
in the century. It is important to note that this association of risk and
rationality with masculinity was not unique product of an industrializing era.
Cecilia Morgan has also commented on how, in Upper Canada, masculinity was
associated with self-restraint and control, as well as the protection of the
social order.
Industrialization produced new iterations of a persisting ideology that
constructed differences between men and women. In Parr’s study of
industrializing towns, it is apparent that the division of labour took shape
through a fluid interaction of gender and class.
The interaction of gender and class is also apparent
in Christopher Dummit’s work, which shows how ideas of masculinity and
modernity have been interwoven. Since
a binary gender model was naturalized in the post-war era, gender was a site
for articulating other differences. This
is evident in his example of the 1958 Second Narrows Bridge collapse, which
illustrated gendered notions of progress and risk, highlighting rational
self-discipline as an element of masculinity by positioning working-class men
as skilled risk-takers. This
construction of working-class men’s role in bridge construction was an element in
the ideological issues behind the absence of a working-class protest concerning
work conditions on the construction site.
As
previously discussed, men’s work in the domestic sphere was an important
element in constructions of masculinity. It is similarly important to consider
women’s work in multiple contexts, including unpaid work both inside and
outside of the home. Lynne Marks considers how, in Ontario, the feminization of
church involvement reflected complex Christian notions of masculinity and domesticity,
in which women’s voluntary work feminized sacred spaces, constituting a threat
to male leadership.
Women could also gain a public voice through religious activities, which Marks
illustrates in the example of women Salvation Army preachers. These women
challenged Victorian ideas about femininity by acting in a public role, but
this was legitimized by the religious underpinnings of their work.
This illustrates porosity of divisions of public and private spheres,
reinforcing the need for a more conceptually sophisticated model.
Denyse Baillargeon’s oral history of working-class
Quebec women’s lives in the Great Depression similarly illustrates the
intersections of class and gender. Working-class women, she argues, were
instrumental to overcoming their own poverty during Depression.
Baillargeon’s oral history participants drew from pre-existing strategies to
manage their precarious economic conditions. Their
housework was significant not just for household maintenance, but as paid work,
and these women therefore did not distinguish between public and private
spheres. Motherhood,
as the core of domestic labour, presented both economic and physical challenges
for these women, a challenge they rose to using skills from both paid and
domestic work prior to marriage. The
majority of working-class Quebec women Baillargeon interviewed had engaged in
paid work as adolescents to contribute to their parents’ families, and had
significant domestic responsibilities from early childhood. Similarly
to pre-industrial communities where women’s production in the home was integral
to family survival, the working-class family in Depression-era Quebec was
primarily a site of production, not consumption, given their limited disposable
incomes.
Work and
cultural production are knit together in complex, gendered ways. In The Quest of the Folk, Ian McKay argues
that the “Folk” of Nova Scotia were a culturally constructed category. Helen
Creighton, a self-appointed researcher and collector of ballads, undertook much
of the work in this construction. Creighton’s social location, as an upper
middle-class gentlewoman, had an impact on her work, which fit comfortably
within the acceptable pursuits of a “gentlewoman.”
While Creighton was caught between models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
womanhood, McKay illustrates that she was unquestioning of her own class
position and its implications for her research on folk songs, and used her
paternalist outlook to shape an essentialist image of the Folk.
Creighton’s work, ultimately, used an essentialist vocabulary of identity and
thus “naturalized conservative assumptions about class, gender, and sexuality,
race and ethnicity.”
McKay
highlights the connections between Innocence as an essentialist framework and
the traditional family values and gender roles that proponents of the Folk
assumed to be inherent in Nova Scotia as a “therapeutic space” away from the
challenges of modernity.
In doing so, he positions the Folk as a gendered category—though not as
individual men and women. This illustrates the complex role of gender in anti-modernism,
which celebrated pre-modern gender roles of domestic femininity and thriving
masculinity. These traditional roles stood in stark contrast to the realities
of gender relations in Nova Scotia, which experienced changing reproductive
patterns consistent with those of other parts of North America. Thus, McKay
highlights the gendered nature of Innocence as an ideological formation through
which “a politics of cultural selection” cherry-picked, from an otherwise
modernizing society, those aspects of gender and sexuality that were
anti-modern.
As Greer
and Morgan made evident, women held important political symbolism. This spilled
over into large events, which combined political motivations with cultural
performances. In celebrations for Quebec’s tercentenary, a woman served as an
important symbol in Earl Grey’s monument to memorialize Quebec’s battlefields,
in the form of the “Angel of Welcome and Peace.” This symbolism of femininity
as a central welcoming figure was, Nelles argues, an attempt to encourage elite
women to become involved in fundraising for the tercentenary. Nelles describes pageantry as a public ritual of group therapy and
societal transformation. It was also a site for publicly engaging women in an acceptable social
and cultural context. Women were thus visible in both the organization of the pageant and in
its performances.
Keith
Walden argues that cultural events were gendered affairs. Fairs such as the
Toronto Industrial Exhibition were “instruments of hegemony,” shaping support
for a white, male, middle-class, capitalist culture.
As with the Quebec tercentenary, organizers of the Toronto Industrial
Exhibition used symbolism of women linked to fertility, peace, nature, and
creativity to cast the fair as a celebration of humanity rather than merely
commercialism, and to portray it as an acceptable public space for women.
This was not a simple shift of ideologies, but a collision; women’s
participation in the exhibition was subversive, as it fell outside the usual
containments of the Victorian cult of domesticity.
Women’s movement through the fairground thus both subverted and affirmed gender
norms as they participated in buying and selling goods and as participants and
audiences of performances.
While events such as the sideshow catered to white male viewers, it had the
potential to seduce a wider audience; Walden emphasizes that gazing, and being
gazed upon, was a general experience of the fair.
Exhibition performances were also an opportunity for the transgression of
social categories and norms, showing alternatives to a dominant social order.
Performances could be implicit or explicit, intentional or more subconscious;
while schoolgirls intentionally crossed boundaries of femininity by mimicking grown
men in drill routines, selling and consuming goods was also a type of
performance, with women’s bodies linked to the goods they were selling in
displays.
Sexuality
and family roles could also be performed in scripted ways. Karen Dubinsky’s
study of Niagara Falls tourism emphasizes the role of the honeymoon as a
“public declaration of heterosexual citizenship” that displayed both gender
roles and their sexual manifestations.
Entrepreneurs recognized the honeymoon as an element of performative sexuality,
and reflected this in their marketing.
In this “theme park of heterosexuality,” gendered and sexual imagery was
central to Niagara’s “imaginary geography.”
Marketing for the area gendered the Falls themselves as a female “icon of
femininity,” which was often sexualized.
This imagery was also racialized, as can be seen in the fake “Indian legend” of
the “maid of the mist,” which claimed that an Iroquois woman, disgraced by her
sexual liaisons with a white man, had descended the falls in a canoe to appease
her father and angry gods. The thundering sound of the falls was promoted to
tourists as the lingering spirit of this fallen woman.
Gendered
and racialized performances and cultural representations could be a site of
agency rather than merely an opportunity for cultural appropriation and
misinterpretation. This can be seen in Mary-Ellen Kelm’s analysis of rodeos.
Rodeo, she argues, is storytelling and ritual “in which the values and the
social structures of the North American West were displayed and where settler
hegemony was legitimized.” In this context, however, she notes that hybridity was as important as
hegemony. In Kelm’s work, one can see the destabilization of categories on
which identity could be premised. On rodeo circuits, she argues, gender
differences eclipsed racial ones. Cowgirls redefined femininity through emphasizing their toughness in an
otherwise male world that variably emphasized the need to manage risk as a
component of masculinity, and presented femininity as a risk. Women participating in rodeo did so in political ways, troubling
binaries by highlighting their toughness and ability (92) and, for Aboriginal
women, discussing First Nations struggles in their role as “rodeo queen”
contestants. Thus, political activism underpinned this cultural production.
Kelm notes that women’s rodeo participation was often
defined as performance, when men’s was defined as sport, as sport entailed
rationalization that performance did not. Similar issues
arise in conceptualizing the overlap between performance and work, as rodeo
entailed the convergence of the two. Definitions of performance, sport, and
work rest upon conceptualizations of gender, class, and race, as the
performances of marginalized identities are emphasized over those of dominant
ones. The hegemony of whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity risks
rendering the performances of these identities invisible, but several
historians have risen to the challenge of destabilizing these categories by
showing their performative elements.
Across
eras of unevenly increasing industrialization, gender and family roles and
identities did not evolve, per se. Instead, they were constructed through
lenses of culture, ethnicity, and class, in a fragmented and often
contradictory fashion. Ideals and performances of gender and the family can be
framed as a reaction to “crises” of modernity coinciding with moments and trends
in Canadian history such as urbanization, industrialization, and the Cold War.
Such an approach, seeing gendered performances as manifestations of modernism
and anti-modernism, is indeed tempting. This is, however, a somewhat simplistic
approach, because, as McKay illustrates in his examination of Helen Creighton,
it gives agency to individuals with the privilege to define such a “crisis.”
Historians
evaluating gender have gradually moved away from a reliance on the binary
conceptual framework of public and private, seeing this as a problematic
simplification of men’s and women’s identities, roles, and experiences.
Destabilizing the binary of modern and anti-modern is a similarly worthwhile
project. Christopher Dummit sees modernity as a complex confluence of forces
including control, planning, rationality, efficiency, and science, situated
within an ideology of laissez-faire liberalism.
I have previously argued that the complexities of liberalism and its limited
treatment of colonialism as a central force make it an important yet
insufficient framework for analyzing state formation. With gender and family
constructed and reconstructed at the nexus of colonialism and liberalism, I
would suggest that, in addition to modernism and anti-modernism or public and
private, historians increasingly consider gender in terms of intersecting
spheres of oppression and privilege. This would foreground power and
performance, rather than implying that gender and family roles and identity
changed on a trajectory or was natural.
Works
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