Celebrate Women's History Month
Discover stories of the trailblazing women of the past and present.
Discover stories of the trailblazing women of the past and present.
The Widowed Self
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?
Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated their lives in new, unsuspected ways. The widows speak about how they relate to their children, their friends, to men. With powerful emotions they describe their husbands’ final illnesses and deaths, and the challenging early days of widowhood. Disputing stereotypes about older women and widows, The Widowed Self allows the reader to visualize the impact of losing one’s life partner and offers a new way of thinking about widowhood.
This new book by Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard fills a void in previous work on widowhood. Rather than seeing these women as unfortunate, passive victims of life, the reader will come to appreciate the strength and creativity with which these women face one of life’s greatest challenges, a challenge that affects more than half of all women over the age of sixty-five.
Widows and their families, scholars, social workers and other professionals who work with older adults will all be interested in reading The Widowed Self: The Older Woman’s Journey through Widowhood.
Love Strong as Death
Regular price $41.99 Save $-41.99A transcription of Lucy Peel’s wonderfully readable journal was recently discovered in her descendent’s house in Norwich, England. Sent in regular installments to her transatlantic relatives, the journal presents an intimate narrative of Lucy’s Canadian sojourn with her husband, Edmund Peel, an officer on leave from the British navy. Her daily entries begin with their departure as a young, newlywed couple from the shores of England in 1833 and end with their decision to return to the comforts of home after three and a half years of hard work as pioneer settlers.
Lucy Peel’s evocative diary focuses on the semi-public world of family and community in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships, and fulfils the same role as Susanna Moodie’s writings had for the Upper Canadian frontier. Though their perspective was from a small, privileged sector of society, these genteel women writers were sharp observers of their social and natural surroundings, and they provide valuable insights into the ideology and behaviour of the social class that dominated the Canadian colonies during the pre-Rebellion era.
Women’s voices are rarely heard in the official records that comprise much of the historical archives. Lucy Peel’s intensely romantic journal reveals how crucially important domesticity was to the local British officials. Lucy Peel’s diary, like those of such counterparts as Catherine Parr Traill, also suggests that genteel women were better prepared for their role in the New World than Canadian historians have generally assumed.
Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00The Work of Their Hands
Regular price $34.99 Save $-34.99Impelled by a call to share their gifts through service, Russian Mennonite women immigrating to Canada organized their own church societies (Vereine) as avenues of mission and spiritual strengthening. For women who were restricted from leadership positions within the church, these societies became the primary avenue of church involvement. Through them they contributed vast amounts of energy, time and financial resources to the mission activity of the church. The societies thus became a context in which women could speak, pray and creatively give expression to their own understanding of the biblical message.
Using primary sources such as reports, letters, minutes, etc., as well as society histories, interviews and survey data, Redekop charts the development of these societies, from the establishment of the earliest ones in the 1870s to their flowering in the fifties and sixties and their decline in the eighties and nineties.
The Work of Their Hands elucidates the context in which Mennonite women lived their identity as Christian women, one considered appropriate by themselves and the institutional church. It also shows how changes to the societies, including declining membership and a shift in their primary focus from sewing and baking to one of spiritual fellowship, reflect the changing roles of women within the church, the home and the wider society.
The Work of Their Hands is an important book in the history of Mennonite women’s spirituality and will be a valuable resource for religious studies, women’s studies and Canadian history.
Gender, Genre and Religion
Regular price $32.95 Save $-32.95Many feminists today are challenging the outmoded aspects of both the conventions and the study of religion in radical ways. Canadian feminists are no exception.
Gender, Genre and Religion is the outcome of a research network of leading women scholars organized to survey the contribution of Canadian women working in the field of religious studies and, further, to “plot the path forward.” This collection of their essays covers most of the major religious traditions and offers exciting suggestions as to how religious traditions will change as women take on more central roles.
Feminist theories have been used by all contributors as a springboard to show that the assumptions of unified monolithic religions and their respective canons is a fabrication created by a scholarship based on male privilege. Using gender and genre as analytical tools, the essays reflect a diversity of approaches and open up new ways of reading sacred texts. Superb essays by Pamela Dickey Young, Winnie Tomm, Morny Joy and Marsha Hewitt, among others, honour the first generation of feminist theologians and situate the current generation, showing how they have learned from and gone beyond their predecessors.
The sensitive and original essays in Gender, Genre and Religion will be of interest to feminist scholars and to anyone teaching women and religion courses.
The Moral Parameters of Good Talk
Regular price $45.99 Save $-45.99Should we not apply the same moral standards to language as we do to behaviour? Should we not demand fair treatment in how others speak to us or include us in conversations?
In The Moral Parameters of Good Talk, Ayim contends it is ludicrous to exempt language from the moral standards we apply to other behaviours. Language, like any other behaviour, is capable of creating harm or good — we should strive to talk in morally appropriate ways. While freedom of expression is a right we strive for in a democratic society, it is acceptable only when it is conducive to freedom of expression for all. Racist and sexist speech fails the moral test.
Ayim discusses her proposed moral criteria for language on two levels: on a theoretical level, where she applies her moral analysis to the major competing theories on the relation of gender and language, and on a practical level, when she examines one circumstance where such moral criteria have been applied to a study of women in educational administration.
With passion yet with logical rigour, Ayim provides a topical and controversial moral discussion of speech patterns which will interest everyone concerned with the effects of language use, in addition to scholars in the areas of gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, sociology and education.
Dear Editor and Friends
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99How did women in the early twentieth century, newly arrived in North-West Canada, cope with their strange new lives — so very different from the lives they used to lead? How did they see themselves and their role in frontier life?
In the early twentieth century, drawn west by the promise of free land, economic success or religious and political freedom, women moved from eastern Canada and overseas to farms and ranches in North-West Canada. They discovered that it was not the utopia touted by government propaganda or land agents. They also discovered that there was a select but diverse group of rural women who shared their common experiences of isolation, of hard work and duty, of poverty and neglect. But, more importantly, they shared knowledge of independence and self-reliance and of pride in what they had accomplished.
Through letters written to the women’s pages in agricultural newspapers, they forged a vital network that supported, encouraged and educated women in ways to improve their rural lives. Their letters show how these rural women made significant and vital contributions to the settlement and development of the Canadian North-West.
Canadian Women Shaping Diasporic Religious Identities
Regular price $40.99 Save $-40.99Going by the Moon and the Stars
Regular price $34.99 Save $-34.99So, it was January the 18 and it was the middle of the night. And it was very, very cold. Snow was — we went just about knee deep in snow — And we went on the road going toward Posen, capital of Wartegau. And so we said, “Let’s take that direction.” Just going by the moon and the stars. (Katja Enns)
Going by the Moon and the Stars tells the stories of two Russian Mennonite women who emigrated to Canada after fleeing from the Soviet Union during World War II. Based on ethnographic interviews with the author the women recount, in their own words, their memories of their wartime struggle and flight, their resettlement in Canada and their journey into old age. Above all, they tell of the overwhelming importance of religion in their lives.
Through these remarkable stories Pamela Klassen challenges conventional understandings of religion. The women’s voices, intimate and powerful, testify to the importance of religion in the construction of personal history, as well as to its oppressive and liberating potential.
Going by the Moon and the Stars will be of great value to all those interested in the Mennonites and Mennonite history, religion, women’s studies, ethnic studies and life history.
Working in Women’s Archives
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99What comes to mind when we hear that a friend or colleague is studying unpublished documents in a celebrated author’s archive? We might assume that they are reading factual documents or, at the very least, straightforward accounts of the truth about someone or some event. But are they?
Working in Women’s Archives is a collection of essays that poses this question and offers a variety of answers. Any assumption readers may have about the archive as a neutral library space or about the archival document as a simple and pure text is challenged.
In essays discussing celebrated Canadian authors such as Marian Engel and L.M. Montgomery, as well as lesser-known writers such as Constance Kerr Sissons and Marie Rose Smith, Working in Women’s Archives persuades us that our research methods must be revised and refined in order to create a scholarly place for a greater variety of archival subjects and to accurately represent them in current feminist and poststructuralist theories.
Killing Women
Regular price $51.99 Save $-51.99The essays in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence find important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. The book’s extensive cultural contexts acknowledge and engage with contemporary theories and practices of identity politics and debates about the ethics and politics of representation itself. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society.
Making Do
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99Life in the Great Depression — long lines of unemployed, soup kitchens, men riding the rails, public works projects — these are the graphic images of the Great Depression of the 1930s, popularized by the press and seared into our memories. But outside of a few distinctive stories gathered from the oral and anecdotal writings on strategies used to survive, we know next to nothing about the daily life of the working class during those long and hungry years.
How did the families survive when the principal breadwinner was unemployed? How did they feed, shelter and clothe themselves when relief payments covered barely half of their essential needs? To answer these questions Denyse Baillargeon looks at the contribution of the housewives. By interviewing Montreal francophone women who were already married at the beginning of the 1930s, and by examining their principal responsibilities, she uncovers the alternative strategies these housewives used to counter poverty. Their recollections made it possible to shed light not only on the impact of the economic crisis on their household duties during the Depression but also on their lives from childhood to World War II, and on the living conditions of the working class from which most of them came. This material is all the more valuable because it proceeds from a generation of women that will soon disappear and who have left very little in the way of written evidence behind.
This study, which draws us into the intricate lives of individuals, reveals a previously unexplored dimension of the Depression and shows the importance of considering the domestic sphere for understanding the complete history of the working class.
Quiet Rebels
Regular price $95.00 Save $-95.00“It’s a girl!” the Ontario press announced, as Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers for the next six decades, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession.
Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers called to the bar from 1897 to 1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. Comprising a small handful of students—or even a single student—at the Law School, women were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades.
This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created—or foreclosed on—women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, despite their increased numbers, must remain “quiet rebels” to succeed.
Be Good, Sweet Maid
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99January 21, 1995: Dorothy Joudrie is arrested for attempting to murder her estranged husband. Soon after, Audrey Andrews begins to write her book. Audrey and Dorothy had known each other as children, but the identification of Andrews with Joudrie goes beyond merely the accident of a childhood acquaintance. It has to do with being subjected to the same societal constraints placed on girls and women during the years immediately following World War II, the years in which they had prepared for their adult lives. Expectations, placidly accepted then, are now seen as unrealistic and unreasonable. Did these expectations have some part in causing the tragedy in Dorothy Joudrie’s life?
When Andrews attempted to understand why Dorothy Joudrie had tried to kill her husband, and to write Joudrie’s story, she began to examine her own life, her own expectations — those she had of herself and those others had of her. She also realized that telling the story of anyone is an intricate and often ephemeral pursuit. Any story she wrote could only be her version of Joudrie’s experience. Nevertheless, it was important to be as honest as she could about her interpretation of that life. She determined to show carefully and accurately the damage that had been done to one woman — damage that is still being done to many others — through prejudice, attitudes, traditions and the institutions that are still the foundation of our society, and of our lives, everyday.
The result is a fascinating account of events leading up to the trial, the trial itself and the effect of Joudrie’s trial on the life of Audrey Andrews.
Minds of Our Own
Regular price $51.99 Save $-51.99This book of personal essays by over forty women and men who founded women’s studies in Canada and Québec explores feminist activism on campus in the pivotal decade of 1966-76. The essays document the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society, and they challenge some current preconceptions about “second wave” feminist academics.
The contributors explain how the intellectual and political revolution begun by small groups of academics—often young, untenured women—at universities across Canada contributed to social progress and profoundly affected the way we think, speak, behave, understand equality, and conceptualize the academy and an academic career. A contextualizing essay documents the social, economic, political, and educational climate of the time, and a concluding chapter highlights the essays’ recurring themes and assesses the intellectual and social transformation that their authors helped set in motion.
The essays document the appalling sexism and racism some women encounter in seeking admission to doctoral studies, in hiring, in pay, and in establishing the legitimacy of feminist perspectives in the academy. They reveal sources of resistance, too, not only from colleagues and administrators but from family members and from within the self. In so doing they provide inspiring examples of sisterly support and lifelong friendship.
Feminist Pedagogy in Higher Education
Regular price $43.99 Save $-43.99Rage and Resistance
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99On December 6, 1989, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle entered an engineering school in Montreal and murdered fourteen women before killing himself. Responses to what has come to be known as “The Montreal Massacre” varied, from the initial shock and mourning and efforts to “make sense” of the tragedy to an outpouring of writing, art, conferences, and political lobbying. Rage and Resistance: A Theological Reflection on the Montreal Massacre examines, from a theological perspective, how the massacre was “taken up” by the media, experts, politicians, and a variety of individuals and groups.
A practical exercise in Canadian contextual theology, Rage and Resistance analyzes responses to a tragic historical event by engaging with the work of theologian Gregory Baum and sociologist Dorothy Smith. Baum articulates the theological imperative to address the context in which our lives are embedded, calling for critical social analysis in order to understand, and possibly convert, social evil; Smith takes the standpoint of women as a determinate position from which society may be known.
If one of the tasks of theology is to articulate and clarify the struggles in which we are engaged—to name our reality, both the forces that oppress and the possibilities for resistance and healing—this book takes on that task by focusing on an event indelibly etched into the minds of many Canadians. It analyzes some of the artistic, memorializing, and activist responses as manifestations of a spirituality of resistance and urges ever greater resistance to violence against women.
Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution
Regular price $157.99 Save $-157.99Volume 8: Florence Nightingale on Women, Medicine, Midwifery and Prostitution makes available a great range of Florence Nightingale’s work on women: her pioneering study of maternal mortality in childbirth (Introductory Notes on Lying-in Institutions), her opposition to the regulation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts (attempts to stop the legislation and otherwise to facilitate the voluntary treatment of syphilitic prostitutes), her views on gender roles, marriage and measures for income security for women and excerpts from her draft (abandoned) novel. There is correspondence with women friends and colleagues from childhood to old age, on a vast range of subjects. Correspondents include old family friends, royal and notable personages, nuns and colleagues in various causes. Most of this material has not been published before and some letters wil be new even to Nightingale scholars. Altogether a very different view of Nightingale emerges from what normally appears in biographies and other secondary sources. This material will enable a new assessment of her feminism, her relations with women and her contribution to improving the status of women of her time.
Currently, Volumes 1 to 11 are available in e-book version by subscription or from university and college libraries through the following vendors: Canadian Electronic Library, Ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Netlibrary.
Limelight
Regular price $62.99 Save $-62.99At the heart of fame is the tricky business of image management. Over the last 115 years, the celebrity autobiography has emerged as a popular and useful tool for that project. In Limelight, Katja Lee examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women like L. M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame and in writing about that experience.
Arguing that the celebrity autobiography is always negotiating historically specific conditions, Lee charts a history of celebrity in English Canada and the conditions that shape the way women access and experience fame. These contexts shed light on the stories women tell about their lives and the public images they cultivate in their autobiographies. As strategies of self-representation change and the pressure to represent the private life escalates, the celebrity autobiography undergoes distinct shifts—in form, function, and content—during the period examined in this study.
Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography is the first book to explore the history and development of the celebrity autobiography and offers compelling evidence of the critical role of gender and nation in the way fame is experienced and represented.
Working Memory
Regular price $43.99 Save $-43.99Incorrigible
Regular price $34.99 Save $-34.99 On a May morning in 1939, eighteen-year-old Velma Demerson and her lover were having breakfast when two police officers arrived to take her away. Her crime was loving a Chinese man, a “crime” that was compounded by her pregnancy and subsequent mixed-race child.
Sentenced to a home for wayward girls, Demerson was then transferred (along with forty-six other girls) to Torontos Mercer Reformatory for Females. The girls were locked in their cells for twelve hours a day and required to work in the on-site laundry and factory. They also endured suspect medical examinations. When Demerson was finally released after ten months’ incarceration weeks of solitary confinement, abusive medical treatments, and the state’s apprehension of her child, her marriage to her lover resulted in the loss of her citizenship status.
This is the story of how Demerson, and so many other girls, were treated as criminals or mentally defective individuals, even though their worst crime might have been only their choice of lover. Incorrigible is a survivor’s narrative. In a period that saw the rise of psychiatry, legislation against interracial marriage, and a populist movement that believed in eradicating disease and sin by improving the purity of Anglo-Saxon stock, Velma Demerson, like many young women, found herself confronted by powerful social forces. This is a history of some of those who fell through the cracks of the criminal code, told in a powerful first-person voice.
The Queen of Peace Room
Regular price $29.99 Save $-29.99Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past.
On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes.
In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century.
Where I Come From
Regular price $38.99 Save $-38.99“Where do you come from?”
When Vijay Agnew first immigrated to Canada people would often ask her “Where do you come from?” She thought it a simple, straightforward question, and would answer in the same simple, straightforward manner, by telling them where she had been born and where she grew up.
But over the years she learned that many so-called third-world people resent being asked this question, because it implies that having a different skin colour (which is what usually prompts the question) makes a person an outsider and not really Canadian. This realization inspired her to look more closely at the question — and the answer. The result is this book.
Where I Come From is a reflective memoir of an immigrant professor’s life in a Canadian university. It covers the period from 1967, when Canada was opened up to third-world immigrants, to the present. The book illustrates the ways in which identity is socially constructed by tracing some of the labels that were applied to the author at various stages during her thirty years in Canada — “foreign student,” “Indian woman,” “immigrant,” “Indian feminist,” and “third-world woman.” She shows how each of these names has affected her relationships with other people and contributed to making her the woman she is now perceived to be: a feminist, anti-racist, activist professor. This multilayered story reveals the complex ways in which race, class, and gender intersect in an immigrant woman’s life, and engages readers in a conversation that narrows the distance between them, showing not only what is different, but what is shared.
Haven’t Any News
Regular price $27.99 Save $-27.99“Ruby wrote letters home almost every week....She wrote anything that came into her head: about her children and Fred, her housekeeping, food, clothes, her friends, activities, schemes for making money, her dreams for the future....Her letters, nave, intimate and lively, were always optimistic or poignant. We’d read them to each other on the phone or pass them around. Often we saved them.”
So writes Edna Staebler in her introduction to this edited collection of her sister Ruby’s letters from the fifties. In 1957 when Edna first began to collect and edit these letters she did so simply because she was sure that others would enjoy reading them as much as her own family did. Over fifty years later, the letters remain a joy to read and reclaim the ordinary voice of a housewife. Remarkably, these letters echo themes academics want to isolate in order to analyze women’s roles in the modern world — drifting (“life just happened to me”) and contingency (“women’s lives depend on relationships”), for example, as well as the balance between family and work. As a fine example of women’s life writing they also illustrate the literary patterns of overt and covert stories and of textual and subtextual meaning.
Haven’t Any News: Ruby’s Letters from the Fifties includes an Afterword by Marlene Kadar, Associate Professor of Humanities at York University and a leading expert on women’s life writing. All those concerned with women’s studies and with the social history of twentieth-century Canada will find this book of enormous interest and it will delight Edna Staebler fans everywhere.
Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace
Regular price $43.99 Save $-43.99Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace
Regular price $89.99 Save $-89.99Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.
Motherlode
Regular price $22.99 Save $-22.99Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience is Carolyne Van Der Meer’s creative reinterpretation through short stories, poems, and essays of the experiences of her mother and other individuals who either spent their childhoods in Nazi-occupied Holland or were deeply affected by wartime in Holland. The book documents the author’s personal journey as she uncovers her mother’s past through their correspondence and discussion and through research in the Netherlands. Motherlode also considers mother–daughter relationships and the effect of wartime on motherhood.
Motherlode is not about recording precise historical data; rather, it attempts to recover and interpret the complex emotions of the individuals growing up in wartime. The book is based on interviews with the author’s mother and other Dutch Canadians, interviews with and letters from Canadian Jewish war veterans, and information provided by individuals with direct or indirect experience of the Dutch Resistance. The creative pieces explore onderduik (going into/being in hiding), life in an occupied country, the work of the Dutch Resistance, liberation, collective and individual cultural memory, and the way in which wartime childhoods shaped adulthood for these individuals.
Not the Whole Story
Regular price $28.99 Save $-28.99Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and status vulnerability, struggles with custody, and poverty—these factors, combined with a lack of support, contribute to their continued struggles.
The themes that recur across stories illustrate that the issues the women face are not just about individual struggle; they demonstrate that major issues in Canada’s social system have been neglected in public policy. In order for these issues to be addressed we need to challenge the flawed public policies and the negative discourse that continue to marginalize single mothers—in terms of the opportunities in their own lives and in terms of how they are understood by other Canadians.
The first-person narratives of the struggles and issues faced by low-income single mothers provide narrative richness and are augmented by introductory and concluding chapters that draw the narrative themes together and offer overarching discussion and analysis.