Regulating Lives
Regulating Lives
Historical Essays on the State, Society, the Individual, and the Law
This book examines Canadian experiences of social control, moralregulation, and governmentality during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Informed by the wealth of theoretical andhistorical writings that have recently emerged on these subjects, thecontributors explore diverse state, social, legal, and human encounterswith the regulation of lives in British Columbia and Canadian history.Incest in the criminal courts, racial-ethnic dimensions of alcoholregulation, public health initiatives around venereal disease, and theseizure and indoctrination of Doukhobor children, among other issues,are examined in these nine original essays.
This collection will interest scholars, researchers, practitioners,and students of a wide range of contexts including law, history,sociology, criminology, women’s studies, Native studies, socialwork, and political science.
... ably illustrates how thoughtful questions and the willingness to pose such queries will, more often than not, steer engaged inquiries in wonderfully creative, unexpected, and intriguing directions ... And thus, if we can safely take Regulating Lives as an indication of the work to follow, the new Law and Society series from UBC Press will be invaluable.
This book will be of great interest to those intrigued by legal history and, more specifically, the role the law has played in constructing people’s lives, perceptions and experiences.
I hope too that it will be widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, both as containing interesting and important history and as inviting debate on the relationship between the data of historical experience and the concepts around which those data are arranged. I am glad that I read it.
John McLaren’s study of the seizure and indoctrination of Sons of Freedom children 1950-60 ... is a masterpiece that examines the history of the Sons’ attempt to keep their children out of public schools and preserve their unique way of life. Having a firm foot on the ground and in local, provincial, and federal sources, McLaren’s work is a model of legal-historical research and writing. This collection could not be more complete ... This is a model study of how local history can inform our past and the making of public policy in the future.
Acknowledgments
Introduction / John McLaren, Robert Menzies, and Dorothy E.Chunn
1. 'A Strange Revolution in the Manners of the Country':Aboriginal-Settler Intermarriage in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia/ Jay Nelson
2. Control of the Insane in British Columbia, 1849-78: Care, Cure,or Confinement? / Gerry Ferguson
3. Racializing Prohibitions: Alcohol Laws and Racial/EthnicMinorities in British Columbia, 1871-1927 / MimiAjzenstadt
4. Secrets and Lies: The Criminalization of Incest and the(Re)Formation of the ‘Private’ in British Columbia,1890-1940 / Dorothy E. Chunn
5. 'Charity is One Thing and the Administration of Justice isAnother': Law and the Politics of Familial Regulation inEarly-Twentieth-Century British Columbia / Robert Adamoski
6. Regulating the 'Respectable' Classes: Venereal Disease,Gender, and Public Health Initiatives in Canada, 1914-35 / RenisaMawani
7. Race, Reason, and Regulation: British Columbia’s Mass Exileof Chinese ‘Lunatics’ Aboard the Empress of Russia, 9February 1935 / Robert Menzies
8. The Politics of Naming: Constructing Prostitutes and RegulatingWomen in Vancouver, 1939-45 / Michaela Freund
9. The State, Child Snatching, and the Law: The Seizure andIndoctrination of Sons of Freedom Children in British Columbia, 1950-60/ John McLaren Postlude / John McLaren, Robert Menzies, and DorothyE. Chunn
Contributors
Index
