Active History

Where We Tell Their Stories: Commemorating Women’s History in Toronto through Plaques and Markers

May 16, 2014 No Comments

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Joyce Wieland in her studio, ca. 1960. Tess Taconis / Library and Archives Canada / PA-137321

When British Labour politician Tony Benn passed away this March, attention was drawn to his efforts in the British Houses of Parliament to install plaques that told histories of the suffrage movement in Britain. Among them was one he installed illegally in the broom closet where Emily Wilding Davison, a suffragist, hid on the night of the 1911 census, so as to be able to legally declare her address as the House of Commons, thus highlighting political inequality.

Toronto is welcoming historians of gender, sexuality, and women’s history to the 2014 Berkshire Conference, and this provides an opportunity to highlight and reflect on the history of women and gender within the context of historical plaques in the city. Heritage Toronto will do so on Thursday May 22, when it unveils three plaques to commemorate prominent women who spent time living or working in Toronto. Part of its Legacy Plaque series, which is inspired from English Heritage’s “blue plaque” scheme, these plaques mark a step towards greater inclusion of women within our public history narrative.

In 2012, Ian Milligan used topic modelling to take a big-picture look at all plaques in Toronto: What he found is that through plaques, we can track perceptions about our past over time. This holds true for plaques broadly, as well as themes. For instance, as we move away from the Modern period of architecture, we gain historical distance and are more likely to feel nostalgia towards it and recognize it as having heritage value.
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As American As Apple Pie: The Lack of Paid Parental Benefits in the United States

May 14, 2014 2 Comments

Source: International Labour Office Maternity Protection Database.

By Elizabeth O’Gorek

My husband and I recently moved to the United States. He accepted an good job offer in a nice city. The company arranged my work visa, and there is a good benefits package. So, in preparation for working and working on a family, I thought I’d research the legislation on paid maternity benefits.

This is what I learned: The United States is the only industrialized nation – and one of only four nations—that has no federally legislated paid maternity leave (let alone paternity leave).^[1]

An American social welfare system exists. It is huge and complicated, combining government spending, tax benefits and breaks with private social benefits. According to a 2012 report by the Rutgers Center for Women and Work, 11 percent of private employees and 17 percent of public employees reported access to paid family leave through their employer. Those without private benefits cobble coverage together from sick days, vacation, and savings.

This lack of legislated benefits surprised me, since American culture is so opinionated about parenting choices. Last month when New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy missed the first two games of the regular season for paternity leave, commentators said that he’d best support his family by earning a paycheque, and that he ought to “get his a** back to” work. Conversely, when Marissa Mayer was appointed CEO of Yahoo! commentators doubted that the pregnant Mayer would be able to “raise both a child and stock prices.” When she returned to work a mere two weeks after giving birth (perhaps to prove she could do just that) bloggers argued that she was betraying female solidarity by minimizing the difficulties associated with childbirth.

Both Murphy and Mayer are affluent and so they have the freedom to do whatever they wish. Still, they were criticized as breadwinner and mother, respectively. I’m not surprised that the internet exploded with opinion at these choices. I’m surprised, given the rhetoric about “the nation’s children” that commentators focus on what these decisions were, rather than the fact that most Americans have no choice.

The explanation must lie in American History. Continue reading →

Women’s History, Active History, and the 2014 Berkshire Conference

May 13, 2014 1 Comment

By Adele Perry

Later this month the University of Toronto’s downtown campus will host the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. This is a big deal for a number of reasons. It is the first time that this venerable and highly visible conference has met outside of the United States. And there is also the sheer scale of the event. There are about 1,300 scholars involved in the conference in over 250 sessions, and still more involved in poster sessions, workshops, film-screenings, and cultural programming. At 167 pages, the conference programme is staggering. The 2014 Berks also suggests some of the ways that women’s and gender history is a particular kind of active history with the power to speak to our complicated present.

The demand that the academic discipline make room for women as subjects, authors, and teachers of history was inseparable from the revival of feminism in the so-called second wave in the 1960s and 70s. Since then, women’s and gender history has had notable success in gaining entry to – and institutional authority within – the academy, at least in the United States and Canada. Joan Wallach Scott was critical to this push for women’s history, and in 2004 she accessed the changing status and meaning of women’s history in the American university. Scott argued that women’s history had attained a substantial level of success as measured by “an enormous corpus of writing, an imposing institutional presence, a substantial list of journals, and a foothold in popular consciousness….”[1] Of course this is a truncated version of Scott’s argument, and hers, in any case, is not the only possible reading. We might access the trajectory of women’s history in light of the capacity of neo-liberal regimes to undermine feminist scholarship, something that becomes clearer every time a women’s studies department is shuttered. We might also more rigorously situate these gains within the particular terrains within which they have been most clearly felt and more carefully register those constituencies that occupy small and insecure places within the mainstream academy.
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Community Engagement in Commemoration

May 12, 2014 2 Comments

By Krista McCracken

Walking With Our Sisters Installation in Shingwauk Auditorium. Photo by Melody McKiver.

Museums, galleries, parks and other heritage sites play a significant role in commemoration. Exhibitions present specific ways of looking at history and attribute significance to particular historical events. Commemoration at heritage sites might take place in the form of a dedicated memorial site such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or the September 11th Memorial and Museum. Heritage sites without a mission to memorialize a specific event still engage in commemoration though the celebration of anniversaries, events, and commemorative exhibits.

Commemoration can be a complicated thing. Creating effective exhibitions and memorials dedicated to events that involve tragedy, marginalized segments of society, and dark moments in our history can be difficult to orchestrate.

From May 5th to May 18th, 2014 the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre is helping host Walking With Our Sisters (WWOS) at Algoma University. WWOS is a commemorative art installation and memorial for the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Canada and the United States. The memorial is made up of over 1,763 pairs of moccasin vamps (tops) created and donated by hundreds of people across the world. Each pair of unfinished moccasins represents a missing or murdered woman. WWOS is much more than an art exhibit. It is a ceremony, memorial and a chance for visitors to honour the lives of missing and murdered women. Continue reading →

Who? The Canadian Rangers?

May 9, 2014 No Comments

Reviewed by Anne Marie Goodfellow

Hands up if you’ve heard of the Canadian Rangers. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of them either before reading this book. The Canadian Rangers are a component of the Canadian Forces (CF) who operate at a local level with community volunteers in Canada’s sparsely populated northern and coastal areas. As an anthropologist with a good knowledge of Canadian history, I was at first a little ashamed of my ignorance, so I conducted a very unscientific survey: I asked three graduate students and two professors in Canadian history education what they knew about the Canadian Rangers. One of the students had heard of the Rangers while visiting Whitehorse. Another grew up in Iqaluit and knew a lot about them. The third student and both professors had no idea what I was talking about – one asked if they were a sports team. Author P. Whitney Lackenbauer notes that many Canadians are unaware of the existence of the Canadian Rangers, including defence officials and Prime Ministers. So, if you didn’t raise your hand, you are excused. If you want to learn about the Rangers, P. Whitney Lackenbauer’s new book, The Canadian Rangers: A Living History, provides a detailed history. Continue reading →

Oil Pipeline Spill History at the National Energy Board of Canada Library

May 8, 2014 7 Comments

National Energy Board Offices, Calgary, Alberta.

By Sean Kheraj

This week, I am taking advantage of some of the historical research materials available at the National Energy Board library in Calgary, Alberta. As we discussed on a recent episode of Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, federal department libraries are incredible resources for environmental history. With the closure and consolidation of so many of these libraries across the country, I wanted to get to the NEB library before any materials got lost in the shuffle.

The trip to Calgary paid off almost immediately. I am currently working on a history of oil pipeline spills in Canada and I wanted to get a broad picture of the frequency of pipeline failures on Canada’s interprovincial and international oil pipeline network. The helpful staff at the library dug through the catalogue and we turned up this:

A binder full of every pipeline incident reported to the National Energy Board between 1959 and 1996.

This was exactly what I was looking for. The binder contains 325 pages of every pipeline incident reported to the National Energy Board between 1959 and 1996. Page after page of spreadsheet charts include dates, locations, incident types, causes, quantities, product types, companies, and annotations for all reported pipeline incidents. This includes every oil pipeline spill. It is basically the mother lode. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Forty: The First World War at the Pierre Savard Conference

May 7, 2014 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

From April 23 to 25, the History Graduate Students’ Association of the University of Ottawa hosted the 10th Annual Pierre Savard Conference. Robert Englebert, professor at the University of Saskatchewan at founder of the conference, joined the ranks of John Ralston Saul, David Hackett Fischer, and James Bartleman, among others, as the conference’s keynotes. In my five years at the University of Ottawa I have been privileged to participate in the conference every year. Over the years the conference has changed and grown, but the presence and bright smile of Mme. Savard has constantly been a welcome sight to all attendees.

One thing that made this year’s conference particularly notable was the presence of a strong contingent of students from the University of Western Ontario. Several members of the school’s history department made the trek from London to Ottawa, a lot of them bringing presentations on the First World War. With the centenary of the war’s outbreak fast approaching, the war has increasingly received attention in the press, including questions on how the country is commemorating the event. And just last week, we highlighted the video series on the war by the History Department at York University.
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Feminist Mentorship @ the Berks

May 6, 2014 3 Comments

By Jennifer Hough Evans

Full disclosure I am very much invested in the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (Berks). My supervisor at the University of Toronto is Franca Iacovetta, the first Canadian President of the Berks. I am the Administrative Assistant for the Berks, finding answers for conference participants’ questions, inputting changes to the conference program and making sure information gets passed along to correct outlets. In 2011 in the lead-up to the Berks, I made a 14-hour round trip in a mini-van with five other historians to attend the Little Berks in Saratoga Springs, New York. From the beginning of plans to bring the Berks to Toronto, I have been witness to many of the conversations and efforts. I am confident the Berks will be a resounding success!

The question I get asked most often by colleagues and professors is, “what have you learned from your work with the Berks?” There are a lot of answers I could give in response, ranging from the mundane to the creative to the work-related benefits. But what I will take away from working for the Berks is the importance of feminist mentorship. Far from just “scut” work, graduate students and junior scholars have made meaningful contributions to this conference. In research for this blog, I had conversations with three colleagues about our work for the Berks and what we will take away from our experiences.
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I Dig the Past

May 5, 2014 No Comments

By Jay Young

With optimistic thoughts of warm summer days soon approaching, I recently decided to tackle the backyard. We moved into a home in Toronto last year and we had anticipated some outdoor projects ahead. This included the widening of a backyard walkway and the erection of a few vegetable planter beds there too. Much of the hard work is now complete, and we look forward to spending some time enjoying the fruits of our labour. Looking back, I’ve come to realize that my recent tasks have a direct relationship with the past.

Even before starting my backyard project, I’ve felt the meaning of the past within my home. An hour of research at the City of Toronto Archives revealed that the janitor of the nearby elementary school lived here during the 1930s and 1940s. A bit more time in the archives would probably show more inhabitants and their backgrounds.

For the past few decades, our house had been home to a family who had migrated from Italy in the early 1970s. They left their own touches on the building by constructing the cantina in the basement, incorporating architectural details, and caring for a deep backyard garden.

My wife and I hoped to keep the tradition of the backyard garden alive. Soon after we moved in, neighbours told us that the family’s mother had worked hard to maintain a productive vegetable garden for many decades. One neighbour remembered her coming into the street and announcing the “insalata” she had to share with anyone interested. Another reflected that the garden was her pride and joy, her passion even late in life. I heard of harvests of tomatoes and many varieties of lettuce. When raking the leaves and weeds that had followed last summer’s fallow, I found a handful of garden markers. This confirmed neighbourly observations, but also revealed other crops: red peppers and zucchini.

I began to see my backyard as a kind of archive made of human actions and the environment around me. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirty-Nine: Corpus, a play about the Holocaust, Memory, and History

May 3, 2014 2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Corpus is currently in the midst of its world premiere run at Arts Court Theatre in Ottawa. Shows run through May 10, 2014. For further information, go to counterpointplayers.com

This past Monday evening marked the end of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The occasion brought with it tributes to those whole were killed and reminders that such atrocities can never be allowed again. But, as can happen with any day of remembrance, it brought questions about how we remember the Holocaust and whose memories have shaped our understanding of the genocide. As the number of survivors who are still alive continues to decrease with time, will our memory of the Holocaust change? Is there room for new memories that may emerge in still unseen journals or still untold stories? What about those memories that we will never have the opportunity to hear? How do we account for them? These questions remind us that there is never a universal understanding of an event, particularly one that elicits such strong reactions.

In Corpus, a young genocide scholar named Megan (Sascha Cole) is forced to confront these questions when she becomes captivated after uncovering an unexpected relationship between the wife of a Nazi officer and a Polish Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz. With the help of her online lover Heinrich (Daniel Sadavoy), Megan pursues the story with the excited energy of a PhD student eager to take her place in the academy. As she delves further into her research, however, she encounters the contested terrain of memory and how elusive the ‘truth’ can be.
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