Kirjahaku

The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering Canadian suffragist and politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy.A rich product of archival and public sources, this biography of Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) opens a window onto the political and social landscape of the time. Veronica Strong-Boag chronicles Jamieson's life from orphaned child of marginal Ontario farmers to member of British Columbia's Legislative Assembly and Vancouver city councillor. The last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, Jamieson embraced issues such as factory labour conditions, minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, municipal franchise, employment equality, and internationalism throughout six decades of activism.Strong-Boag's meticulous research and deep knowledge of the history of the women's movement and Canadian politics turn this compelling account of a woman's life into an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada.

The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering Canadian suffragist and politician, a New Woman who tested Canadian democracy.A rich product of archival and public sources, this biography of Laura Marshall Jamieson (1882–1964) opens a window onto the political and social landscape of the time. Veronica Strong-Boag chronicles Jamieson's life from orphaned child of marginal Ontario farmers to member of British Columbia's Legislative Assembly and Vancouver city councillor. The last suffragist in Canada to be elected to a provincial or federal legislature, Jamieson embraced issues such as factory labour conditions, minimum wage, feminist pacifism, housing, municipal franchise, employment equality, and internationalism throughout six decades of activism.Strong-Boag's meticulous research and deep knowledge of the history of the women's movement and Canadian politics turn this compelling account of a woman's life into an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada.

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. Ralph’s 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia's first female MLA and the British Empire's first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for "deserving" British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism's privileging of white women. Ralph's 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada's compromised struggle for greater justice.

Scottish aristocrats John Campbell Gordon (1847–1934) and Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon (1857–1939), known as the Aberdeens, rejected both revolution and reaction in their political careers. The aristocratic progressivism and egalitarian marriage of these fervent liberals confounded both contemporaries and historians. John, as viceroy of Ireland and governor-general of Canada, was a notable ally of feminists, workers, and Irish Home Rulers. Ishbel, his viceregal companion and the long-time president of the International Council of Women, was a liberal feminist and Home Ruler whose commitments stirred up even more controversy. Superbly written and informed by decades of research, Liberal Hearts and Coronets is the first biography to treat John Campbell Gordon as seriously as his better-known wife. Examining the Aberdeens’ remarkable careers as landlords, philanthropists, and international progressives, Veronica Strong-Boag casts the twilight of the British aristocracy in an entirely new light.

Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage explores the missteps and the promise of a century and more of child protection efforts by Canadians and their governments. It is the first volume to offer a comprehensive history of what life has meant for North America's most disadvantaged Aboriginal and newcomer girls and boys. Gender, class, race, and (dis)ability are always important factors that bear on youngsters' access to resources. State fostering initiatives occur as part of a broad continuum of arrangements, from social assistance for original families to kin care and institutions. Birth and foster parents of disadvantaged youngsters are rarely in full control. Children most distant from the mainstream ideals of their day suffer, and that suffering is likely to continue into their own experience of parenthood. That trajectory is never inevitable, however. Both resilience and resistance have shaped Canadians' engagement with foster children in a society dominated by capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal power. Fostering Nation? breaks much new ground for those interested in social welfare, history, and the family. It offers the first comprehensive perspective on Canada's provision for marginalized youngsters from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Its examination of kin care, institutions, state policies, birth parents, foster parents, and foster youngsters provides ample reminder that children's welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents and communities, and reinforces what it means when women bear disproportionate responsibility for caregiving.