History, Nation, and Empire: Gender and Southern Ontario Historical Societies, 1890-1920s

Abstract

This article explores the writing of Canadian history by members of southern Ontario historical societies from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Based on the records of a number of organizations (both mixed-sex and women-only groups) and informed by the work of scholars of commemoration and by those who have explored the histories of gender, imperialism, and nationalism, it examines the dominant historical narratives crafted by these organizations. Stories of the coming of the Loyalists, the War of 1812, and the ‘pioneer past’ were the most commonly told accounts of the dominion’s past, popular with women and men historians alike. In the Ontario historical societies examined in this article, women and men often shared conceptions of gender, nation, and empire; their work was marked by notions of the ‘family’ of empire, history as a romantic narrative, and Canadian history as that of the ‘anti-conquest.’ This article also points out that women historians’ work must be seen as a means of creating their own historical and national subjectivities, in a period when Anglo-Celtic, middle-class women were beginning to be formally incorporated into the Canadian nation.