Heather Stanley

Heather Stanley, “Maternity Confined: Mothering and Mental Illness in the British Columbia Provincial Insane Asylum Before World War I“. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 35, no. 1 (2025) : 1–27.

The Journal of the Canadian Historical Association is pleased to congratulate Heather Stanley, winner of this year’s JCHA Prize for Best Article for her 2025 piece, “Maternity Confined: Mothering and Mental Illness in the British Columbia Provincial Insane Asylum before World War I”.

Stanley’s article sits at the intersection of imperial settler-colonial studies and the burgeoning fields of disability and mad studies. Drawing on the experiences of mothers and their families admitted to state care for failing, in some way, to live up to the expectations of white settler motherhood, Stanley illuminates the profound costs of institutionalization on the women themselves and their families. Her larger and more urgent argument, however, is that the settler-colonial project in British Columbia depended fundamentally on a mother’s domestic labour and her continued performance of the expected gendered behaviours of wife and mother. Institutions like the BC Provincial Insane Asylum, in Stanley’s words, “worked as productive sites of colonial meaning and places where that meaning was profoundly disrupted.”

The adjudication committee found this article to be as rigorously researched as it is theoretically sound, and a rare work that moves fluidly across multiple disciplines. It makes a substantial, original contribution to our understanding of gender, madness, and the operations of the colonial state in Canada.