Janice Harvey

Janice Harvey, Their Benevolent Design: Conservative Women and Protestant Child Charities in Montreal. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

In Their Benevolent Design, Janice Harvey powerfully explores two influential women-led charitable institutions providing relief for impoverished women and children in nineteenth-century Montreal’s complex social welfare landscape. Blending social and institutional history approaches, the book traces successive generations of conservative, elite Protestant women claiming an active, authoritative role in this sphere, as well as the ways working-class families made use of the system thus created for their own purposes. Rigorous research, sensitive writing, and a keen command of a vast international historiography allow Harvey to unpack both the opportunities and limitations generated by the gender, class, and religious ideologies shaping these institutions. While openly acknowledging the problematic elements of feminized institutional care, the book gently challenges readers to consider whether its 1920s demise in favour of ‘scientific charity’ was truly the unmitigated good reformers claimed.

HONOURABLE MENTION:

Katherine Crooks, At Home in the Cold: Domestic Culture in Arctic Exploration, 1890-1940. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025.

Challenging conceptual and spatial understandings that define a person’s home based on static ideas of location, At Home in the Cold is a fascinating account of Arctic exploration that invites readers to reconsider the role of domestic ideology in the cultural development of North American society. Employing a comparative analysis of white and northern Indigenous women whose travels spanned the northern areas of the continent between 1890 and 1940, Katherine Crooks lays bare traditional assumptions about femininity while demonstrating a much wider range of colonial interactions with the natural world. Combining historical geography, environmental history, and gender studies in one compelling narrative, historians of women’s history will find much to challenge their thinking in this groundbreaking book.