In this groundbreaking study of the relations between workers and the state, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker examine the legal regulation of workers' collective action from 1900 to 1948. They analyze the strikes, violent confrontations, lockouts, union organizing drives, legislative initiatives, and major judicial decisions that transformed the labour relations regime of liberal voluntarism, which prevailed in the later part of the nineteenth century, into industrial voluntarism, whose centrepiece was Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907. This period was marked by...

Nursing embodies the seemingly timeless characteristics of feminine healing, caring, and nurturing, yet this archetypally female vocation also boasts a distinctive and complex history. Bedside Matters traces four generations of Canadian nurses to explore changes in who became nurses, what work they performed, and how they organized to defend their occupational interests. Whether in the apprenticeship method of the early twentieth century or in the present day restructuring of hospital work, the position of nurses within the health-care system has been structured by class, gender,...

Working Families takes the reader onto the streets of Montreal and into the homes of its working-class families during the years that it became a major, industrial city. Between the 1860s and 1890s the expansion of wage labour changed the bases of family survival. It offered new possibilities and created new points of tension within the families of the emerging working class. Here we meet the men, youth, and children who worked for wages. We see the women who stayed home with their young, cooked and sewed, planted gardens and tended animals, stretching their often meagre family...

It is commonplace today to suggest that gender is socially constructed, that the roles women and men fulfill in their daily lives have been created and defined for them by society and social institutions. But how have men and women negotiated and navigated the gender roles that have been thrust upon them? With Gendered Pasts, Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell have collected eleven engaging essays that seek to answer this question in a wide-ranging exploration of specific gendered dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history.

The...

We tend to think of contemporary concern for reform in education as unprecedented in its intensity and scope. But as this book about mid-nineteenth century educational ideology shows, the urge to improve society through its schools has been with us a long time. The author examines the attitudes that shaped the Ontario public school system during its formative years, when Upper Canadians first explored and the provincial government finally adopted the principle of compulsory mass schooling under the auspices and control of the state.

Examining the history of human rights in Canada from 1930 to 1960, the period just before the emergence of contemporary human rights groups, Repression and Resistance focuses on the activists who fought against what they perceived to be the major human rights injustices of the time: the Quebec anti-communist padlock law, the violation of civil liberties during the war, the post-war attempt to deport Japanese Canadians, campaigns to obtain effective anti-discrimination legislation, civil liberties violations during the Cold War, and the struggle to obtain a Bill of...

Many studies have concluded that the effects of early industrialization on traditional craftsworkers were largely negative. Robert B. Kristofferson demonstrates, however, that in at least one area this was not the case. Craft Capitalism focuses on Hamilton, Ontario, and demonstrates how the preservation of traditional work arrangements, craft mobility networks, and other aspects of craft culture ensured that craftsworkers in that city enjoyed an essentially positive introduction to industrial capitalism.

Kristofferson argues that, as former craftsworkers themselves, the...

After the First World War, many Canadians were concerned with the possibility of national regeneration. Progressive-minded politicians, academics, church leaders, and social reformers turned increasingly to the state for solutions. Yet, as significant as the state was in articulating and instituting a new morality, outside actors such as employers were active in pursuing reform agendas as well, taking aim at the welfare of the family, citizen, and nation. Citizen Docker considers this trend, focusing on the Vancouver waterfront as a case in point.

After the war, waterfront...

Many studies have concluded that the effects of early industrialization on traditional craftsworkers were largely negative. Robert B. Kristofferson demonstrates, however, that in at least one area this was not the case. Craft Capitalism focuses on Hamilton, Ontario, and demonstrates how the preservation of traditional work arrangements, craft mobility networks, and other aspects of craft culture ensured that craftsworkers in that city enjoyed an essentially positive introduction to industrial capitalism.

Kristofferson argues that, as former craftsworkers themselves, the...

On 5 July 1899 Hilda Blake, a 21-year-old maidservant in Brandon, Manitoba, who had come to Canada from England ten years earlier as an orphan immigrant, shot and killed her mistress. Two days after Christmas she was hanged, one of the few women in Canadian history to die for her crime.

Blake unintentionally left a remarkable documentary record, ranging from Poorhouse records, courts dockets of custody and criminal cases in which she was the central figure, popular, journalistic, and professional assessments of her character, and a poem, 'My Downfall', that she penned in Brandon Gaol...