Heidi MacDonald

Heidi MacDonald, “Who Counts? Nuns, Work and the Census of Canada”, Histoire Sociale/Social History vol. 43, no. 86 (November 2010), 369-391.

Heidi MacDonald has produced an impressive and insightful piece of work on the various ways in which women religious (nuns) have been excluded or significantly undercounted in the Canadian census. Drawing on historiography on the under-representation and misrepresentation of women and those holding multiple occupations in the census, but also going beyond this work MacDonald presents a careful, convincing and original piece of work on how and why female religious have been seen (and not seen) by census takers, and the implications this has had for the accurate counting both of nuns and of professional women more generally.