Abstract
This review essay considers three important new books from established scholars of Canadian women’s and gender history: Julie Guard’s Radical Housewives, Valerie Korinek’s Prairie Fairies, and Wendy Mitchinson’s Fighting Fat. Although covering different topics and employing different kinds of approaches, taken together, these three studies highlight the long-standing commitment of women’s and gender historians to embrace interdisciplinary insights and to link the past to the present. This review also suggests that, given the analysis of power and interpretive innovations represented by these three studies, the field of women’s and gender history should be seen as a source of some of the best “new political history.” Finally, considered in light of important historical works that draw on queer theory, fat studies, and the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, and colonialism, these three books open the door to crucial questions that historians in the field must continue to ask.
Publisher
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Subject
Religious studies,History
Reference30 articles.
1. Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson, “Introduction: Feminist Conversations,” in Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History, ed. Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 3.
2. Two other recent collections that showcase the thriving field of women’s and gender history include Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek, ed. Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013); Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta, ed. Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).
3. Julie Guard, Radical Housewives: Price Wars and Food Politics in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 8.
4. Ibid., 32.
5. Ibid., 17.