Creating Postwar Canada
Creating Postwar Canada
Community, Diversity, and Dissent, 1945-75
Postwar Canada was far more complex than the well-worn stereotypes of Cold War conformity and 1960s rebellion suggest. Various parts of the country experienced nationalist awakenings; a baby boom was accompanied by increased immigration and an expanding labour force; women were demanding access to birth control; and Canada was rethinking its relationship with the United States.
Creating Postwar Canada: Community, Diversity, and Dissent showcases new research on this period, exploring postwar Canada’s diverse symbols and battlegrounds. Contributors to the first half of the collection consider evolving definitions of the nation in Quebec, Acadian New Brunswick, and English Canada. They examine the ways in which Canada was reimagined to include both the Canadian North and landscapes structured by trade and commerce. The essays that make up the latter half of the anthology analyze debates on shopping hours, professional striptease, the “provider” role of fathers, interracial adoption, sexuality on campus, and illegal drug use, issues that shaped how the country defined itself in sociocultural and political terms.
This collection sheds light on an underexamined era in Canadian history. It also contributes to the historiography of nationalism, gender and the family, consumer cultures, and countercultures.
It will appeal to historians, students, and readers interested in postwar Canada and the history of Canadian identity and culture.
Magda Fahrni is a member of the Department of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Robert Rutherdale is a member of the Department of History and Philosophy at Algoma University College. Contributors: Dimitry Anastakis, Éric Bédard, Joel Belliveau, Michael Dawson, Karen Dubinsky, Steven High, Marcel Martel, Steve Penfold, Becki Ross, Robert Rutherdale, Joan Sangster, Christabelle Sethna, and Robert Wright
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale
Part 1: Imagining Postwar Communities
1 Constructing the “Eskimo” Wife: White Women’s Travel Writing, Colonialism, and the Canadian North, 1940-60 / Joan Sangster
2 The Intellectual Origins of the October Crisis / Éric Bédard
3 Acadian New Brunswick’s Ambivalent Leap into the Canadian Liberal Order / Joel Belliveau
4 The “Narcissism of Small Differences”: The Invention of Canadian English, 1951-67 / Steven High
5 From Liberalism to Nationalism: Peter C. Newman’s Discovery of Canada / Robert Wright
6 Multilateralism, Nationalism, and Bilateral Free Trade: Competing Visions of Canadian Economic and Trade Policy, 1945-70 / Dimitry Anastakis
7 Selling by the Carload: The Early Years of Fast Food in Canada / Steve Penfold
Part 2: Diversity and Dissent
8 Leisure, Consumption, and the Public Sphere: Postwar Debates over Shopping Regulations in Vancouver and Victoria during the Cold War / Michael Dawson
9 Men Behind the Marquee: Greasing the Wheels of Vansterdam’s Professional Striptease Scene, 1950-75 / Becki Ross
10 New “Faces” for Fathers: Memory, Life-Writing, and Fathers as Providers in the Postwar Consumer Era / Robert Rutherdale
11 “We Adopted a Negro”: Interracial Adoption and the Hybrid Baby in 1960s Canada / Karen Dubinsky
12 “Chastity Outmoded!” The Ubyssey, Sex, and the Single Girl, 1960-70 / Christabelle Sethna
13 Law versus Medicine: The Debate over Drug Use in the 1960s / Marcel Martel
Contributors
Index
Epidemic Encounters
Influenza, Society, and Culture in Canada, 1918-20
Edited by Magda Fahrni and Esyllt W. Jones
