Katherine McKenna

Katherine McKenna. “Women’s Agency in Upper Canada: Prescott’s Board of Police Record, 1834-50,” Histoire sociale/Social History.

Katherine McKenna’s perceptive use of a new documentary source, Police Records, has yielded novel and important insight into the lives of ‘lower class’ women in Upper Canada. This article offers us a compelling account of the differences between middle and lower class women, the public, transgressive behaviour of the latter group, and their determined efforts to use the law to secure redress and justice for themselves. Women of the common classes, she also shows, increasingly lost their ability to control community moral standards as the implementation of the law was concentrated in the hands of the town fathers. However patriarchal the letter of the law was, we cannot ignore the powerful force of lower class women’s actions and “agency” as they attempted to use the local legal apparatus to carve out lives of dignity and security for themselves.

Honourable Mention:
Pamela Sugiman. “Passing Time, Moving Memories: Interpreting Wartime Narratives of Japanese Canadian Women.” Histoire sociale/Social History.

Pamela Sugiman’s account of the war time narratives of Japanese Canadian women weaves together oral histories, censored and stolen letters now in the hands of the state, as well as her own thoughts on memory making into a poignant and significant discussion of women’s experiences during the period of wartime internment. Her discussion effectively probes the uses of oral history and also disrupts notions of Japanese women’s silent accommodation to internment. On the contrary, she shows that women offered criticisms and resistance to internment policies which they knew were racist and discriminatory at their core.