Doukhobor women are shown breaking the prairie sod by pulling a plough themselves, Thunder Hill Colony, Manitoba (Library and Archives Canada, Creative Commons)
By Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta
Last week two high profile Canadian Muslim women, writer Sheema Khan and Zunera Ishaq (the woman at the centre of the niqab controversy) publically questioned the safety of Muslims here. Khan lived here in the aftermath of 9/11; she says it’s worse now. These admissions amount to a tragic statement about the use of the niqab as an election issue. Yet as Canadian women’s historians, we have heard it before. Intolerant Canadians, from political elites to ordinary citizens, have long attempted to impose their notions of what it means to be a Canadian on the bodies of immigrant women. Today’s veiled Muslim woman joins a long line of immigrant women whom this country has feared or pitied, but always stereotyped, for at least a century.
Consider those Doukhobor women harnessed to a plough, breaking the tough Prairie. Their photos, faces almost hidden by their babushkas, have graced Canadian history textbooks for decades. The widely shared image – reproduced as a postcard inviting everyone to get a look – struck many Canadians as the personification of a backward European peasant culture that treated its women like downtrodden beasts of burden. These women posed a striking contrast to the prevailing middle-class ideal of the Victorian woman – that morally superior angel in the home. Consider too the distinctive dress of the women who completed the portrait of Immigration Minister Clifford Sifton’s ideal Eastern European peasant “in a sheepskin coat” with “a stout wife and a half-dozen children” grudgingly welcomed to Canada. Someone needed to do the backbreaking labour to settle what was portrayed as an empty Prairie, the original First Nations inhabitants having been shoved aside to a number of reserves. Even Icelandic pioneer women, easily assimilated, one might expect, into the Nordic race, were castigated for their typical headdress: a dark knitted skullcap with tassel. Such women may now be considered Old Stock Canadians, but not so long ago, their Anglo neighbours viewed them as second-class. According to historian Sarah Carter, Anglo women’s organization in Alberta thought Ukrainian girls so deficient in the standards of proper womanhood that they too should be sent to residential schools. Continue reading
For some years I taught an undergraduate seminar on the history of the Canadian left, and one of the things students did at the first meeting was to try to name people who represented the contemporary “left” in Canada. Last year, the answers included Jack Layton, Olivia Chow and Thomas Mulcair, an indication that at least in the student imagination the New Democratic Party is still a force on the left. In the case of Layton, who died in 2011, the student made a strong case for his continued influence after his death. They also identified Elizabeth May and David Coon, the latter being the Green Party leader in our province who was soon elected to the legislature. Two other party leaders were named, Justin Trudeau (Liberals) and Miguel Figueroa (Communists). A local anti-poverty activist was named. I can see why Rick Mercer was included, less so Peter Mansbridge! The previous offering of the course included some of the above plus David Suzuki and Naomi Klein, Ed Broadbent and Megan Leslie, Buzz Hargrove and Pam Palmeter. As you can see, it is an eclectic picture that confirms the challenge students face in identifying the face of the contemporary left. 
At a 1923 meeting of the Great War Veterans Association (GWVA) in Ottawa, General William Antrobus Griesbach, former Member of Parliament for Edmonton West and Senator for Alberta, remarked on the expected role of the ex-soldier in Canadian political life. “I had an idea at one time,” he explained, “that after the war over half of the Canadian parliament would be men who had served in the war. I had an idea it would hardly be possible for a man to be elected to parliament who had not served his country in the war on active service.” To his disappointment, at the time of this speech, only a handful of sitting MPs had fought in the Great War. Although he cautioned against organized political action by veterans’ groups, Griesbach argued, “I say that the ex-service men should be active in politics, active on all sides.”
