Cecilia Morgan

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

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.

‘That will allow me to be my own woman’: Margaret Anglin, Modernity and Transnational Stages, 1890s–1940s

In Henry Morgan’s 1912 biographical collection, The Canadian Man and Woman of the Time, Canadianborn actor Margaret Anglin — then aged 36 — was presented to the English-Canadian reading public as having created a ‘veritable sensation in the dramatic world’. Morgan cited theatre critics who compared her to Sarah Bernhardt; Bernhardt herself was quoted as speaking enthusiastically of Anglin’s work; and the American press hailed her as ‘one of the few great actresses the American stage possesses’. But Anglin’s reputation was not limited to US theatre circles for, as Morgan declared, she had also made very successful tours of Canada and Australia.2 Anglin, it seemed, was destined to assume a significant place in cultural history, in the country of her birth and internationally.

English-Canadian Actresses and the Multiple Networks of the Urban Atlantic, 1890s–1920s

This chapter explores the urban Atlantic through the media of transatlantic English-language theater in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on two Canadian-born actresses, Margaret Anglin and Julia Arthur, whose careers spanned North America as well as England (Arthur) and Australia (Anglin). These women’s lives illuminate the ways in which theatrical networks and global technologies of transportation and communication (steamships, railroads, and telegraphs) connected Atlantic cities to the interior of the United States and Canada and, as well, to a Pacific world. Their careers also demonstrate how celebrity culture was part of the urban Atlantic, a culture that encompassed the realms of the public and the intimate. Anglin’s and Arthur’s lives suggest that the urban Atlantic was both a material, lived experience as well as being an imagined, albeit powerful, space of fantasy and desire.

Site of Dispossession, Site of Persistence: The Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) at the Grand River Territory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Described as ‘one of the most important accounts’ of late-eighteenth-century British North America, Patrick Campbell’s 1793 Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America was written to assure curious — and perhaps nervous — Britons that these colonies would be suitable places in which to create new homes. As well as assessing colonial topographies, economic conditions, and New Brunswick’s settlements for disbanded soldiers, Campbell also was struck by the community created by the Haudenosaunee people, those members of the Iroquois Confederacy who had moved to British territory in the wake of the American Revolution.2 At the Grand River Campbell was struck by the charm, politeness and hospitality afforded him by Captain Joseph Brant and his family, not to mention the good looks of the ‘handsome young squaws’ whom, it seems, he met wherever he went (but who also refused his offers of Madeira and rum during a vigorous after-supper dance).3 What is most striking about Campbell’s account is his impression of a community in which Haudenosaunee practices and material culture existed alongside those of the Confederacy’s British allies. War and Serpentine dances were followed by Scotch reels, calumets could be found with double-barrelled pistols, older men farmed while young men hunted deer, and Captain Brant’s ‘European manners’ were offered to his guests in the presence of his wife, who was ’superbly dressed in the Indian fashion’ and whom Campbell found so striking that she eclipsed the other women present, whether Indian or European.4

Gender conflicts : new essays in women's history

One of the most striking developments in Canadian history over the past twenty years has been the growth of material focused on the position and experience of women in the Canadian past. Sexuality and reproduction, marriage and the family, work, education, political participation, voluntary activism, and religion are but a few of the most significant areas that have been explored and analysed by Canadian womens historians (as well as those who work in related fields such as sociology). And in this process of historical retrieval and revision, Canadian historians have been informed that a whole raft of significant social and economic developments (major demographic shifts, urbanization and industrialization, the spread of state-supported education, the growth of various social and political movements, and Canadian participation in World Wars I and especially II) have not only included women but often have affected them in different ways and have had different meanings for them