This month at Canada's History

The new Canada's History, just reaching subscribers, has a Vimy feature, with a new piece by Tim Cook.  Also Mathieu Drouin and others on Montreal's 375th anniversary, and Mary Carpenter on the dark legacy of residential schools among the Inuit.

For my own column this issue, I talked to Lori Chambers of Lakehead U and Elise Chénier of Simon Fraser about their recent study of the gender of prize-winners at the Canadian Historical Association awards.

The group of women historians attending the 2014 prize-giving of the Canadian Historical Association all noticed the same thing. “We all kind of looked at each other,” recalled Elise Chénier, who teaches oral history, sexuality, and modern Canadian history at Simon Fraser University. “Are we just noticing this – or is this year a fluke?” she said to Lori Chambers of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, who has written substantial histories of adoption law, women’s property law, and other matters.

What had they noticed? That it seemed men were winning all the big prizes.

My brief column draws on the longer analysis, "Still Working in the Shadow of Men?," which they and Anne Toews wrote for the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (Vol. 26 #1 -- as yet only available to subscribers).