With the turn of the century came increased industrialization and urbanization, and in Toronto one of the most visible results of this modernization was the influx of young, single women to the city. They came seeking work, independence, and excitement, but they were not to realize these goals without contention.

Carolyn Strange examines the rise of the Toronto 'working girl, ' the various agencies that 'discovered' her, the nature of 'the girl problem' from the point of view of moral overseers, the various strategies devised to solve this 'problem, ' and lastly, the young women's...

Oscar Skelton (1878-1941) was a prominent early-twentieth century scholar who became a civil servant and political advisor to prime ministers Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett. He wrote a number of important books and one, Socialism: A Critical Analysis, was highly praised by Vladimir Lenin. His wife, Isabel Skelton (1877-1956), wrote extensively about literature and history; she was the first historian to treat women from the country's past individually in their own right rather than as a generalized category. Both husband and wife promoted the idea that Canada was an independent...

Frequently dismissed as a 'nature poet' and an 'Indian Princess' E. Pauline Johnson (1861-1913) was not only an accomplished thinker and writer but a contentious and passionate personality who 'talked back' to Euro-Canadian culture. Paddling Her Own Canoe is the only major scholarly study that examines Johnson's diverse roles as a First Nations champion, New Woman, serious writer and performer, and Canadian nationalist.

A Native advocate of part-Mohawk ancestry, Johnson was also an independent, self-supporting, unmarried woman during the period of first-wave feminism. Her...

Originally launched in 1928, by the 1950s and 1960s nearly two million readers every month sampled "Chatelaine" magazine's eclectic mixture of traditional and surprisingly unconventional articles and editorials. At a time when the American women's magazine market began to flounder thanks to the advent of television, "Chatelaine's" subscriptions expanded, as did the lively debate between its pages.

Why?

In this exhilarating study of Canada's foremost women's publication in the 50s and 60s, Valerie Korinek shows that while the magazine was certainly filled with advertisements...

"On the Edge of Empire" is a well-written, carefully researched, and persuasively argued book that delineates the centrality of race and gender in the making of colonial and national identities, and in the re-writing of Canadian history as colonial history. Utilising feminist and post-colonial filters, Perry designs a case study of British Columbia. She draws on current work which aims to close the distance between 'home' and away in order to make her case about the commonalities and differences between circumstances in British Columbia and the kind of 'Anglo-American' culture that was...

When public drinking returned to much of Canada with the end of Prohibition, former hotel saloons were transformed into closely regulated beer parlours, where beer was served in glasses and only to seated patrons. No entertainment was allowed, not even singing, and eventually there were separate entrances and seating for women. The parlours catered to a working-class clientele, and class, gender and sexuality, race, age, and decency were regulated as well as alcohol.

Campbell argues that the regulation of the environment of the classic beer parlour, rather than being an example of...

In Giving Birth in Canada, the first historical study of childbirth in Canada, Wendy Mitchinson has written a fascinating account of childbirth rituals in the first half of the twentieth century. Thorough and comprehensive, the work is based on a rich variety of sources, including medical textbooks, the medical periodical press, popular medical advice books, literature published in women's magazines, patient records, and interviews with women who gave birth and physicians who practiced during the period.

Mitchinson follows the birthing experience, from the initial diagnosis...

The transnational migrations of the early twentieth century had a profound impact on the lives of many people, but none more so than those who were left behind. In this lively interdisciplinary study, Linda Reeder examines the lives of rural Sicilian women and the changes that took place as a result of male migration to the United States.

Tracing the changing notions of female and male in rural Sicily, Reeder uses a wide variety of primary sources, including birth and death records, government records, novels, and newspapers, to explore the impact of industrialization on motherhood,...

During the tumultuous formative years of the Canadian welfare state, many women rose through the ranks of the federal civil service to oversee the massive recruitment of Canadian women to aid in the Second World War. Ironically, it became the task of these same female mandarins to encourage women to return to the household once the war was over. Pick One Intelligent Girl reveals the elaborate psychological, economic, and managerial techniques that were used to recruit and train women for wartime military and civilian jobs, and then, at war's end, to move women out of the labour...

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed as many as fifty million people worldwide and affected the vast majority of Canadians. Yet the pandemic, which came and left in one season, never to recur in any significant way, has remained difficult to interpret. What did it mean to live through and beyond this brief, terrible episode, and what were its long-term effects?

Influenza 1918 uses Winnipeg as a case study to show how disease articulated abd helped to re-define boundaries of social difference. Esyllt W. Jones examines the impact of the pandemic in this fragmented community,...