The Hilda Neatby Prize recognises each year the best articles in French and English on women's history.

Neatby Prize Winners

2010

English-language Article

2009

English-language Article

Sarah Glassford, “The Greatest Mother in the World: Carework and the Discourse of Mothering in the Canadian Red Cross Society during the First World War,” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 10:1 (2008).

This article offers a nuanced and multi-layered study of how a discourse of mothering came to dominate understandings of women’s carework in the Canadian Red Cross Society during the First World War.  Sarah Glassford explores women’s emotional and actual labours in servicing overseas soldiers as well as the possibilities and limitations for their own empowerment and political aspirations. As a national study informed by both the multidisciplinary literature on mothering and the historical scholarship on early twentieth-century maternal feminism, the article treats motherhood as a social and fluid category. It also highlights the roles of prominent women without ignoring the less glamourized work of volunteer “sock-knitters” in local communities across the country.  Glassford has made an important contribution to the study of women’s history, medical history, and citizenship and to studies of the home front during the First World War.

Yolande Cohen, “‘De la nutrition des pauvres malades’ “L’histoire du Montréal Diet Dispensary de 1910 à 1940,” Histoire sociale/Social History 41:81 (Mai-May 2008).

Yolande Cohen’s article on the Montreal Diet Dispensary is a valuable contribution to the Canadian and international scholarship on twentieth-century maternalist politics and welfare state formation. She presents a sophisticated study of the Dispensary and provides a probing examination of the diversity of women – philanthropists, volunteers, professionals (including social workers and nutritionists), activists, and recipients – involved. This theoretically informed and empirically grounded case study of an  institution that preceded the “modern welfare state” sheds light on front-line work and policy making; integrates English-Canadian as well as Quebec feminist scholarship on professionalization and gendered welfare states; and recasts the conventional Canadian national narrative of “colony-to-nation” within a feminist and public health framework. Cohen has also made an important contribution to the study of social policy and social movements and to the history of women and class in early twentieth-century Montreal and Canada.

Cynthia Toman.  "Front Lines and Frontiers: War as Legitimate Work for Nurses, 1939-1945".

In this excellent article, Toman offers important new insights into women’s roles on the front lines, and nurses’ experience on the Homefront at war’s end. The author develops a fascinating argument concerning gender role reversal in the context of medical knowledge, technology and war, an argument that is firmly supported by an impressive array of sources, including 55 oral interviews and 1145 personnel records. The author makes an invaluable contribution to women’s and gender history, together with military history and labour history, while remaining carefully attentive to the international historiography. "Front Lines and Frontiers" is an engaging and vividly written piece.

Rusty Bittermann.  “Lady Landlords and the Final Defence of Landlordism on Prince Edward Island: The Case of charlotte Sulivan”.  Histoire sociale/Social History 38 : 76 (November 2005).

Rusty Bittermann has produced a fascinating case study of Charlotte Sulivan, a member of the London elite who challenged the colonial legislature of PEI, taking her case all the way to the newly established Supreme Court in an effort to retain control of her 66,000- acre PEI estate.  This article is laden with rich and fascinating insight, drawing out the intersection of deeply gendered power networks taht defined business, familial and philanthropic networks linking colony and empire.  Bittermann skillfully and meticulously mines available sources to shed new light on Sulivan’s proprietary motivations as she negotiated her way across the masculinist terrain of colonial economy and imperial justice.  This original contribution illuminates our understanding of colonial economy, while disturbing received notions about the rootedness of separate spheres during this critical period in Canada history.

Cecilia Morgan. “Performing for ‘Imperial Eyes’: Bernice Loft and Ethel Brant Monture, Ontario, 1930s-1960s”, in/dans Katie Pickles and/et Myra Rutherdale, Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006

Cecilia Morgan has produced an innovative and insightful study giving voice and agency to two twentieth century Native women performers of Iroquois identity. She makes sense of their experience and what it can reveal about the ways in which Native women were perceived and perceived themselves by situating them in the wider context of White-Native relations and by analyzing cultural practices inside their own communities. She provides a rigorous treatment of the limited sources at her disposal revealing how aware she is of the complexity of the historian’s task. Truly impressive is the way in which she applies the most recent feminist theoretical scholarship on imperialism and colonialism to read Loft and Monture’s initiatives and attitudes. Through these case studies she also demonstrates the extent to which “performance is not unidirectional” taking into account audience reactions. Indeed, her sophisticated and enlightening use of the literature surrounding performance further deepens our understanding of this conceptual tool and also reveals the promise it holds for other historians who chose to apply it in their own fields of expertise.

Katherine McKenna. "Women's Agency in Upper Canada: Prescott's Board of Police Record, 1834-50," Histoire sociale/Social History

Katherine McKenna's perceptive use of a new documentary source, Police Records, has yielded novel and important insight into the lives of 'lower class' women in Upper Canada. This article offers us a compelling account of the differences between middle and lower class women, the public, transgressive behaviour of the latter group, and their determined efforts to use the law to secure redress and justice for themselves. Women of the common classes, she also shows, increasingly lost their ability to control community moral standards as the implementation of the law was concentrated in the hands of the town fathers. However patriarchal the letter of the law was, we cannot ignore the powerful force of lower class women's actions and "agency" as they attempted to use the local legal apparatus to carve out lives of dignity and security for themselves.

Honourable Mention:

Pamela Sugiman. "Passing Time, Moving Memories: Interpreting Wartime Narratives of Japanese Canadian Women." Histoire sociale/Social History

Pamela Sugiman's account of the war time narratives of Japanese Canadian women weaves together oral histories, censored and stolen letters now in the hands of the state, as well as her own thoughts on memory making into a poignant and significant discussion of women's experiences during the period of wartime internment. Her discussion effectively probes the uses of oral history and also disrupts notions of Japanese women's silent accommodation to internment. On the contrary, she shows that women offered criticisms and resistance to internment policies which they knew were racist and discriminatory at their core.

Karen Duder. Public Acts and Private Languages: Bisexuality and the Multiple Discourses of Constance Grey Swartz in BC Studies, 136 (Winter 2002-3).

In a very strong competition, this article impressed committee members with its innovative theoretical discussion and use of one womans personal writings to make a major intervention in the history of sexuality. It explores the sexual and emotional relationships of Constance Grey Swartz between the 1920s and mid 1930s. Her sexuality, Duder argues, cannot be captured readily in the dominant approaches and questions posed within most writing in lesbian, gay and bisexual history. Duder draws on the rich writings she left to break down the polarities of hetero/homosexual and to offer readers tantalizing glimpses into the life of this middle-class British Columbian woman who, during her twenties and early thirties, relished relationships with male and female lovers.

Honourable Mention:

Patricia Jasen, Malignant Histories: Psychosomatic Medicine and the Female Cancer Patient in Postwar America, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 20, 2 (November 2003).

Patricia Jasen's "Malignant Histories: Psychosomatic Medicine and the Female Cancer Patient in Postwar America" is a mature, compelling mix of theory and meticulous empirical work that concentrates primarily on medical discourses to provide a new understanding of the way in which postwar scientific "experts, created gendered explanations of the causes of cancer.

Because of the very small number of qualified articles, committee members recommend that the articles submitted this year be reconsidered for next years prize.

Renisa Mawani, "Regulating the 'Respectable' Classes: Venereal Disease, Gender, and Public Health Initiatives in Canada, 1914-35", in John McLaren, Robert Menzies and Dorothy E. Chunn (ed.), Regulating Lives: Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual and the Law (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002): 170-95.

Among a number of strong candidates for the English-language Neatby prize, the committee concurred that Renisa Mawani's study was outstanding. Mawani reveals that anti-venereal disease campaigns represented much more than morally driven attack on loose women or a sanitary reformers' war on disease. In this lucid and persuasive article, the author shows that reformers used their state-funded campaign to pursue a much more ambitious aim. They wished to shape or reshape sexual desires so that the entire population would mirror a 'moral subject' who was white, middle class, heterosexual, married, and monogamous.

In this article, Mawani examines the anti-venereal campaign that was launched in Canada in the inter-war period. Taking her inspiration from Foucault's social regulation theories, her analysis of flyers, brochures and other documents disseminated by governmental, medical and religious authorities over the course of this period, shows very convincingly that this public health campaign was aimed not only at marginalized groups or those considered more "at risk," such as young single women or young working-class men, but also at the "respectable classes." Resting on solid argumentation, Mawani's article stresses that the ideas and the strategies deployed were aimed at regulating the sexual practices of all Canadians, men as well as women, a phenomenon that has generally been neglected by historians of the anti-venereal fight. While pointing out the persistence of the double sexual standard and the maintenance of a differentiated perception of venereal diseases and their control according to social class or membership group, Mawani clearly shows evidence of the highly moral character of the prevention campaigns and the manner in which they targeted the two sexes. This being the case, she puts the emphasis on doing away with gender boundaries and on the need to remain open to the alternative readings in our sources.

Laurence Monnais-Rousselot, "La médicalisation de la mère et de son enfant : l'exemple du Vietnam sous domination française, 1860-1939", Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19(1)(2002): 47-94.

In this article, Laurence Monnais-Rousselot retraces the process of maternal and childhood medicalization by the colonial French authorities in Indochina during the period 1860 to 1939. The study is based on a wide variety of French and Vietnamese sources, and shows how the colonial authorities very early on used the health of the mother and child as the principal means of managing local human resources. Her analysis is careful to put this medicalization of childbirth movement in perspective, situating it with regard to work already done in the West on this issue, but without ever losing sight of the distinctive elements linked to the colonial context. She also draws particular attention to the role played by indigenous midwives and emphasizes the manner in which the urban health authorities had to take into account the pathological context, but also the economic and cultural contexts, as well as the region's medical traditions and its inhabitants. Qualified as the "spearhead" of French health policy, the medicalization of childbirth is treated in a nuanced manner that highlights the complexity of a process having both imperialist and humanitarian goals and in which women played an active role.

Susan Dalton, "Gender and the Shifting Ground of Revolutionary Politics: The Case of Madame Roland", Canadian Journal of History XXXVI (August 2001): 259-82.

Susan Dalton's use of gender to reinterpret women's political activity during the French Revolution is a polished, insightful and persuasive piece of historical scholarship. It casts new light on revolutionary politics, on gender norms and on the well-known literary and political figure Madame Marie-Jeanne Roland. Steeped in international feminist scholarship, Dalton offers a fresh view of Mme Roland's correspondence and her political involvement from 1788 to 1793. Mme Roland used the fluidity of French revolutionary society to adapt gender codes and thus combine her intense interest and participation in politics with her own sense of proper female behaviour. In three different guises of woman patriot, each corresponding to personal circumstances and stages of the revolution, Mme Roland successively incited revolution, formulated policy and reported on events. Dalton demonstrates that the changes in Mme Roland's ideas and actions, far from being expedient, represented an increasingly sophisticated understanding of society. None of this of course kept her from the guillotine, but her case, as interpreted by Susan Dalton, does provide us with a model of gender scholarship and perhaps even a model of political behaviour in troubled times.

Micheline Dumont, "Un champ bien clos: l'histoire des femmes au Québec", Atlantis (Fall 2000): 102-18.

To analyse and think of the world in terms of gender is a difficult, even perilous, exercise. However, women historians working on the history of women and gender have given themselves this task. Micheline Dumont's article shows that, after decades of effort in this regard, very few male or female historians have been up to the challenge. By revealing the gaps in what she calls the female historian corporation in regard to this subject, Dumont's article highlights important methodological and historiographic issues. How to judge the contribution of a new field of research? How to evaluate the penetration of this field in historical production? Since the emergence of this dimension of the research, do feminist women historians talk amongst themselves in a vacuum or have they succeeded in turning all their colleagues to a new approach? Dumont suggests that we read the historical production using a rather fine evaluation grid with four levels: the overshadowing of the reality of gender and women, compensatory presence, partial integration, conceptual integration. A reading of the publications selected by Dumont using this grid shows that new acquisitions in the history of women barely find an echo in Quebec historical production; the integration of methodological and theoretical innovations is still thinner especially in francophone historical production, anglophone historical production demonstrating a greater openness in this regard. The challenge is therefore considerable, as much for us women researchers in the history of women as for the others. To award a prize to an article which highlights the low resonance of the research into womens history in the general historical production might seem strange, if not masochistic. But we should thank Micheline Dumont for showing us that we still have a way to go before our ways of thinking are significantly changed.

Rianne Mahon, The Never-Ending Story: the Strugle for Universal Child Care Policy in the 1970s, Canadian Historical Review 81.4 (Dec. 2000): 582-615

The Mahon article is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of women's relation to federal policy making in Canada. Using the feminist demand and the economic necessity for universal child care as the angle of analysis, Mahon probes the intricacies of the federal bureaucracy. There, "state feminists" (federal civil servants with a feminist agenda) attempted to implement the child care recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Stautus of Women (1970) only to run afoul of tradition in the social policy arena. Upheld by both men and women bureaucrats, that tradition meant that ideas about the family, about welfare, about regional equity and about Quebec in Confederation took precedence over the feminist argument for women's equality with men.

Mahon's tight analysis, her lucid and convincing argument, make a triple contribution to women's history. The article reveals how day care became a federal policy issue in the 1970s. It displays the ideological and institutional barriers that feminists in the civil service encountered. And it throws an unusual light upon the relationship between the second wave egalitarian feminism of state feminists and the maternal/welfare concerns of the post-suffrage generations of women professionals.

Joan Sangster, Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920-1960. Canadian Historical Review 80.1 (March 1999), 32-60.

In a richly descriptive account of her subject, Sangster argues that three crucial, interconnected factors contributed to the overincarceration of Native women: "The material and social dislocation precipitated by colonialism, the gender and race paternalism of court and penal personnel, and the related cultural gap between Native and Euro-Canadian value systems, articulating very different notions of crime and punishment." Her use of Mercer Reformatory case files allows her vividly to convey Native women's painful losses and the bitter injustices they suffered, while her extensive reading in anthropological, criminological, and psychological literature, old and new, allows her to explain the logic of both the Euro-Canadian justice system and Native Canadians' responses to it. Confirming the view that cultural difference underpinned the harms she describes, Sangster nonetheless avoids reductively dichotomizing "Native" and "Euro-Canadian" perspectives. With its scholarly and sensitive treatment of an important topic, this article makes a major contribution to Canadian women's history.

Honourable Mention:

Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne and Alison Prentice, eds., Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women's Professional Work. University of Toronto Press, 1999.

This collection is remarkable for the varied picture it offers of women in middle-class Canadian life in the twentieth century. Represented are many of the "women's" professions: nurses, nutritionists, social workers, nuns, and elementary school teachers. But also making an appearance are women in normatively masculine occupations, such as physicists, foresters, pharmacists, professors, accountants, preachers, and physicians. There is even an essay on a professional woman in the arts, composer Jean Coulthard. The lucid and scholarly introduction explains the important historical and political themes that arise when we study women professionals. With its rich array of stories and analysis, the anthology makes a convincing case that to study women in the professions is to learn about many of the ways in which gender and power were interconnected in the twentieth century.

Diane Gervais et Serge Lusignan. De Jeanne d'Arc à Madeleine de Verchères : la femme guerrèire dans la société d'Ancien Régime, dans Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, no 53-2 (automne 1999), p. 171-205.

Gervais and Lusignan compare the stories of three women warriors, all of them situated in the political culture of medieval and ancien rgime France. The authors analyse these narratives as accounts of rituals of inversion. They explain how, for each woman warrior, a symbolic separation from the world of women was achieved, such that her military behaviour was legitimated. But by the logic of such ritual, the inversion was temporary, and the return to feminity confirmed the boundaries that had been briefly, and dramatically, transgressed. Only Joan of Arc was unable to remake herself as feminine, and paid with her life to affirm the norms she had violated. The interpretive framework of the essay provides a fresh and compelling way of understanding the behaviour of these women warriors (and perhaps military women in general. In particular ritualized circumstances, it was acceptable, in spite of its being both remarkable and disturbing within a tradition of western values which has made war by definition men's business.

Donald F. Davis and Barbara Lorenzkowski. A Platform for Gender Tensions: Women Working and Riding on Canadian Urban Public Transit in the 1940s. The Canadian Historical Review.

In this original article on women's occupation of public space in the public transit system during the Second World War, Davis and Lorenzkowski offer a fresh angle of view on women's wartime experience. They place gender at the centre of their analysis showing new ways in which, during wartime, some gender norms were broken, albeit temporarily. They are to be praised for their subtle and complex interpretation of how this very ordinary experience of riding buses offered a challenge to traditional values and ideas about women's nature.

Béatrice Craig. Salaires, niveaux de vie et travail féminin, dans l'arrondissement de Lille au XIXe siècle, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire.

In this contribution to economic history, to women's history and particularly to the history of women's work, Béatrice Craig demonstrates how deep immersion in the history of a particular site, in this instance Lille in France, permits her to develop a remarkably precise casual account of women's position in the labour market. This finely argued article moves forward the debate on the evolution of women's participation in the labour force.

Elsbeth Heaman, Taking the World by Show: Canadian Women as Exhibitors to 1900, Canadian Historical Review

Denyse Baillargeon, Fréquenter les gouttes de lait. L'expérience des mères montréalaises, 1910-1965, Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française

Julie Guard, "Fair Play or Fair Pay? Gender Relations, Class Consciousness, and Union Solidarity in the Canadian UE"

Honourable Mention:

Raelene Frances, Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster, Women and Wage Labour in Australia and Canada, 1880-1980

Joy Parr, Gender History and Historical Practice

France Parent and Geneviève Postolec, Quand Thémis rencontre Clio : Les femmes et le droit en Nouvelle-France

Rusty Bittermann, Women and the Escheat Movement: The Politics of Everyday life on Prince Edward Island

Annmarie Adams, Les représentations des Femmes dans la Revue de l'Institut Royal d'Architecture du Canada, de 1924 à 1973

Joan Sangster, The Softball Solution: Female Workers, Male Managers and the Operation of Paternalism at Westclox, 1923-1960

Martine Tremblay, La division sexuelle du travail et la modernisation de l'agriculture à travers la presse agricole, 1840-1900

Suzanne Morton, Women on Their Own: Single Mothers in Working Class Halifax in the 1920s

Sylvie Murray, Quand les Ménagères se font militantes: la Ligue auxiliaire de l'Association internationale des machinistes, 1905-1980

Dyan Elliott, "Dress as Mediator Between Inner and Outer self: The Pious Matron of the high and Later Middle Ages", in Mediaeval Studies, 53 (1991)

Nadia Fahmy-Eid, "Histoire, objectivité et scientificité. Jalons pour une reprise du débat épistémologique", Histoire sociale/Social History, 24, No. 47 (Mai 1991)

Marie-Aimée Cliche, L'infanticide dans la région de Qubec (1660-1969)

Ruth Roach Pierson, Gender and the Unemployment Insurance Debates in Canada, 1934-1940

Judith Fingard, "College, Career, and Community: Dalhousie Coeds, 1881-1921", Youth, University, and Canadian Society, 1989.

E. Patricia Tsurumi, "Serving in Japan's Industrial Army: Female Textile Workers, 1868-1930", Canadian Journal of History, August 1988.

Joy Parr, "The Skilled Emigrant and her Kin: Gender, Culture and Labour Recruitment", Canadian Historical Review, December 1987.

Franca Iacovetta, "From Contadina to Worker in Toronto, 1947-62", Looking Into My Sisters' Eyes: An Exploration in Women's History, The M.H.S.O., 1986, pp. 195-223.

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Alison Prentice & Marta Danylewycz, "Teacher's Work: Changing Patterns in the Emerging School System of Nineteenth Century Central Canada", Labour/Le Travail, no 17, printemps 1986, pp. 59-80

Honourable Mention:

Veronica Strong-Boag for her articles "Pulling in Double Harvess or Hauling a Double Load: Women, Work and Feminism on the Canadian Prairie",The Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, automne 1986, pp. 32-52 & "Keeping House in God's Country: Canadian Women at Work in the Home" in Craig Heron & Robert Storey (ed.), On The Job: Confronting The Labour Process in Canada, McGill/Queen's University Press, 1986, pp. 124-151.

Diana Pedersen & Martha Phemister, "Women and Photography in Ontario, 1839- 1929", in special issue of Scientia Scientia Canadensis on "Women, Technology and Medicine in Canada", volume 9, number 1.

Honourable Mention:

Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, "Feminist Biography", Atlantis, volume 10, number 2.