The Gender of Breadwinners
The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 Copyright Date: 1990 Published by: University of Toronto Press This is a story of two Ontario towns, Hanover and Paris, that grew in many parallel ways. They were about the same size, and both were primarily one-industry towns. But Hanover was a furniture-manufacturing centre; most of its workers were men, drawn from a community of ethnic German artisans and agriculturalists. In Paris the biggest employer was the textile industry; most of its wage earners were women, assisted in emigration from England by their Canadian employer. Joy Parr considers the impacy of these fundamental differences from a feminist perspective in her study of the towns’ industrial, domestic,...
Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments and the Everyday
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge and laboratories in which to retool our senses and practices in response to changing circumstances. If global environmental changes continue at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of the cascade of new normals, where the air, land, and water around us are no longer familiar? Joy Parr, one of Canada’s premier historians, tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and environmental changes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. The construction of dams, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, and military training grounds; new patterns in seasonal rains; and developments in animal husbandry altered the...
Histories of Canadian Children and Youth
Oxford University Press, copyright date: 2003 Histories of Canadian Children and Youth is a survey of the history of children, youth, and Canadian families from New France and the fur trade to immigrant children in the last half of the 20th century. It covers topics from growing up Metis to sex education to literacy; work and school; raceand ethnicity, including some important articles on residential schools. Each section is carefully arranged by time period and theme and includes both primary and secondary sources. Purchase Oxford University Press: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/histories-of-canadian-children-and-youth-9780195417920 Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Histories-Canadian-Children-Youth-Janovicek/dp/0195417925 AbeBooks:...
Domestic Goods: the Material, the Moral and the Economic in the Postwar Years
University of Toronto Press, 1999. 378 pages Visions of life in the 1950s often spring from the United States: supermarkets, freeways, huge gleaming cars, bright new appliances, automated households. Historian Joy Parr looks beyond the generalizations about the indulgence of this era to find a specifically Canadian consumer culture. Focusing on the records left by consumer groups and manufacturers, and relying on interviews and letters from many Canadian women who had set up household in the decade after the war, she reveals exactly how and why Canadian homemakers distinguished themselves from the consumer frenzy of their southern neighbours. Domestic Goods focuses primarily on the design, production, promotion, and consumption of furniture and appliances....
Gender and History in Canada
Edited by Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld. Copp Clark, Toronto, 1996. 381p. Contents: Categories and terrains of exclusion : constructing the “Indian Woman” in the early settlement era in Western Canada / Sarah Carter –Real men hunt buffalo : masculinity, race and class in British fur traders’ narratives / Elizabeth Vibert –Race, gender and Canadian immigration policy : blacks from the Caribbean, 1900-1932 / Agnes Calliste –Like a Chinese puzzle : the construction of Chinese masculinity in Jack Canuck / Madge Pon –“Of slender frame and delicate appearance” : the placing of Laura Secord in the Narratives of Canadian loyalist history / Cecilia Morgan –Commemorating the woman warrior of New France : Madeline de...
A Diversity of Women: Ontario 1945-80
Joy Parr. University of Toronto Press, 1995. 335pp. Our perception of women’s roles has changed dramatically since 1945. In this collection Joy Parr has brought together ten studies from a variety of disciplines examining changing ideas about women. Mariana Valverde writes about teenage girls in the immediate postwar years and finds that stereotypes of a supposedly simple, secure, politically quiescent, and sexually conformist life do not really hold. Joy Parr follows women shoppers of the early 1950s, in their sometimes comical encounters with male designers, manufacturers, and retailers, in search of the tools and totems of modernity for their homes. Increasingly these homes were in suburban subdivisions, whose pleasures and possibilities for women...
Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980. 181pp. Between 1868-1924, 80,000 British children, most of them under fourteen, came to Canada to be apprenticed as labourers and domestic servents. Joy Parr’s study of these children, first published in 1980, became a significant resource for courses in women’s history, family history, immigration history, and labour history. Out of print for several years, Labouring Children now has a substantial new introduction in which the author examines the historiography of the history of childhood, particularly in the light of recent literature on sexuality and the post-structuralist critique. She also considers recent popular historical views of children and their relationship to professional history....
Canadian Women on the Move 1867-1920
Joy Parr and Beth Light, Eds. Hogtown Press and OISE, 1983. Reviews In Canadian Women on the Move, editors Beth Light and JoyParr provide a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of Canadian women in the half century after Confederation. This second volume in the Women in Canadian History Documentary Series contains selections from a wide range of original sources which reflect the great variations in the female experience across regional, class, and ethnic lines. Extracts from letters, diaries, reminiscences, contracts, and court proceedings, to mention only a few of the many sources explored, furnish a finely textured, sensitive portrayal of the lives of Canadian women.Leila Mitchell McKee, The Canadian Historical Review Purchase Amazon:...
Still Running: Personal stories by Queen’s women celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Marty Scholarship.
Joy Parr, Ed. Queen’s University Press, 1987. This book contains the autobiographical reflections of 15 winners of the Marty Memorial Scholarship, an award founded by the Alumnae Association and given to a Queen’s alumna for a year of further study. Published on the 50th anniversary of the scholarship in 1987, the book contains reminiscences dating from the 1920s to the 1980s and covering careers in the arts, letters, science, medicine, industry, and public service. The book was edited by Queen’s history professor Joy Parr. The foreword is by the late Pauline Jewett, a Marty winner and a long-time MP who also served as President of Simon Fraser University and as Chancellor of Carleton University. The scholarship is named in honour of Aletta and...
Childhood and Family in Canadian History
Joy Parr, Ed. Oxford University Press, 1982. 224 pp. Drawing on archeological evidence, paintings, photographs, census records, case files, and parish rolls, the contributors to this collection of original essays draw a fascinating portrait of the lives of Canadian children from the seventeenth century onward, describing child labor practices,the many different models of child-rearing, the family structure and economy and the lives of children in and outside of institutions. Together, these articles constitute a strong, rich addition to Canadian social history. Reviews What is becoming clear is that an abstracted notion of a “childhood” shared by all Canadian children is none too helpful. Instead, we need to recognize that the centre of all this...