Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History

by Lara Campbell (Editor), Tamara Myers (Editor), Adele Perry (Editor)

Now in its seventh edition, Rethinking Canada presents a collection of compelling essays on the fascinating lives, struggles, and contributions of women in Canadian history. Reflecting an interdisciplinary approach, this comprehensive and engaging resource stresses the diversity of women's
history and demonstrates the analytic richness of ongoing research in the field. Featuring insightful chapter introductions that provide scholarly and historical context for each reading, Rethinking Canada helps students gain a more nuanced understanding of women's experiences across Canada's
history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Feminism, Womens, Canada

496 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books is good start into gender history in Canada. It contains many pieces about intersectionality.

My favourite piece was Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Women's Activism by Joanne Barker. An amazing piece of writing that is full of information.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the textbooks we read for a cross-listed history/gender studies class I took. The essays were really varied in subject matter, but overall quite interesting and well written and enlightening. Good place to start your inquiry into Canada and it's history of sex, sexuality and gender from pre-confederation to 2016.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I sighed after reading the last sentence of this book. Sighed in relief. This book is really informative but so dense and time consuming that I feel like I should get a little merit badge for reading it from cover to cover.

Although encompassing a wide array of feminist topics this text does focus on the lives/stories of women who are more in the marginalized groups, such as Aboriginal women and immigrant women, to name a very small few. While the editors claim that the entries are very comprehensive of Canadian women’s lives and whatnot I feel like it was overly Eastern focused. I get the nation started there but the country has expanded a great deal. I also think a few of the entries would have benefited from some editing, a lot of superfluous information and repetition made reading more tedious than it needed to be.

Overall this was an instructive read and had some very poignant points to make. As a starting point I think Rethinking Canada provides an ideal, if somewhat outdated (by which I mean the more contemporary entries), foundation.