Women canning sockeye salmon at the Imperial Cannery, Steveston, B.C. 1971-72. National Film Board of Canada. Copyright expired.
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Tag: community
Special thanks to Shannon Stettner for her help with this piece.
If you’ve spent any time either watching television or on social media in the past few months, there is a high likelihood that you’ve run into a commercial, blog post, or Youtube video featuring DNA ancestry tests. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe have been pushing these tests as important ways to find out about your family history. Which sounds pretty cool. However, much like Canada150, many historians find themselves incredibly frustrated by the increasing popularity of these tests. I can neither confirm nor deny that some yell incomprehensibly at the television screen whenever one of the Ancestry.com commercials comes on. Now, there are numerous articles out there explaining the scientific limitations of these tests. For instance, this recent piece on Gizmondo talks about how the results of these tests aren’t always reliable, due to the limited availability of comparative data, which alleles are being used to access ancestry, and just plain error. However, there haven’t really been any detailed discussions about the limitations of these tests from a historical perspective. So, in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about exactly that, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of historical populations, the “science” of race, the role of white privilege, and notions of belonging and community.
Many historians, including myself, tend to overlook various “history months,” mostly because it’s always history month for them. We’re the kind of nerds that do this kind of thing for fun. However, October is Women’s History Month in Canada, and, especially given the recent article by Elise Chenier, Lori Chambers, and Anne Toews, “Still Working in the Shadow of Men? An Analysis of Sex Distribution in Publications and Prizes in Canadian History” on the underrepresentation of female authors in the field, I want to highlight some of my favourite scholarship on the history of women in Canada. Many organizations are getting in on this, and are using the hashtag #becauseofher to spotlight women who have inspired. These are books and articles that I go back to again and again, that I actually enjoy reading, that fired my imagination, and that have shaped my own approach to historical research. I’ve tried to limit this list to women’s history rather than the history of gender and/or sexuality, given the theme of this month. And so, in no particular order, they are….