Joy Parr 1949-2024 RIP, historian

I have a list of postable things I have yet to get done. But it's high time to note the death of the great historian Joy Parr, who died May 16 in Southhampton, Ontario, not far from her birthplace. 

There's a tribute to her by Jessica von Horssten on the Niche and Active History blogs (Sensing (everything) Changes: A Tribute to Joy Parr – NiCHE (niche-canada.org)  and an obit from Queen's University where she once taught. (Joy Parr, former Queen's History professor, passes away | Department of History, Queen's University (queensu.ca)  from which I have borrowed this photo.

Her now some thirty-five years old book The Gender of Breadwinners, about mostly women knitting-factory workers in Paris, Ontario, and mostly male furniture-factory workers in Hanover, Ontario, first drew my attention to her work.  Indeed, I published a long profile of her in one of my first columns for The Beaver magazine (now Canada's History) in the early1990s.  It probably was my first discovery of how essential and revealing gender history can be.  And yes, as she tells me in the profile, men have gender too.

Excerpt from "Lives of Men and Women" (The Beaver, 1992)

Talking to the women of Paris -- including some who immigrated in the early years of the century and remained Penmans employees into the 1970s -- Parr learned how women's work in the factories changed life in Paris. More than elsewhere, women owned homes or boarded together in self-supporting groups. They might marry younger men and expect them to share the housework. They would leave the factory for a few years to raise children and expect Penmans to take them back when they chose to return. They were militant about their rights, but they had a hard time with outside unions with traditional ideas about women and work. In Paris, being a woman and a factory worker was always complicated -- but always possible. Paris showed the "women don’t work" rule never applied everywhere. It opened a way for Parr to explore the many curious ways in which ideas about what men and women "ought" to do have shaped work and home – and politics and labour strife, too.

In Hanover, the subject of the second half of Parr's book, wives worked at home and men built furniture in Daniel Knechtel’s factory. That seemed a more normal work situation, but when I told Joy Parr that I had wondered how she would apply her theme of gender, she laughed. "As if only women have gender!"

Book Notes: Undressed Toronto. Anyone for vernacular swimming?

Mostly by accident, I recently came across a 2021 history by Dale Barbour entitled Undressed Toronto. The title was intriguing enough for a glance, but in fact this is an significant and intriguing history with some fresh things to say about Canadian cultural history. I kept reading, and learned some things.

The full title is Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside: How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935, from University of Manitoba Press. (Barbour previously wrote about the evolution of Winnipeg Beach on Lake Winnipeg.)

Basically Barbour observes that (greatly to oversimplify) nobody went to the beach in 19th century Canada. Around Toronto people mostly swam off the wharves in the harbour or here and there in the Don and Humber rivers, or on Toronto Island, or wherever they damn well pleased, pretty much. People meant men and boys: mostly adolescents and unmarried men. They swam without bathing suits.  

Barbour explains the reasons why they could do this in modest, Victorian, church-going, 19th century Toronto. For one thing,  there were no women around. Nineteenth century women did not stroll around industrial areas on the harbour or in the wooded glades along the river, let alone swim. It's a vivid, largely unremarked clue to the degree of purdah that most women endured in the western world not very long ago. Men had the big world mostly to themselves when they wanted it.  

For another thing, a cult grew up celebrating the "bathing boy," as a glorious symbol of young manhood expressing health, strength, and appreciation of nature. Even as social strictures changed,  conservative elite males on city council vigorously supported the cult of the naked bathing boy well into the 20th century, even if it was often boys and young men of the working classes who did the naked bathing. More prosperous Toronto males had bathtubs and could bathe at home, but they defended the principle. 

What Barbour recounts is the long, slow, often contested evolution from what he calls the "homosocial" bathing of the 19th century into the "heterosocial" beach-going of the early twentieth. The occasional "dirty man" or homosexual activity? Bathing-boy culture mostly denied its existence. Beach culture would try to police it out of sight.

Briefly, Toronto invented beaches (sometimes literally dredging to produce them on the shores of muddy York), and it hired lifeguards to patrol beaches, and it stipulated precisely what would be worn at beaches, and it began to define appropriate behaviour at beaches.  At the same time, it introduced Toronto women to the new freedom to swim outdoors. But to do so, they would accept that beachgoing, even in neck-to-knee beachwear, involved a level of personal public display hitherto mostly unknown. 

Beaches, shorelines, and riverside paths quickly became prime sites of unchaperoned courting of a kind largely unknown in the previous bathing-boy era. Like other cities in Canada and internationally, Toronto had successfully "written the beach," "scripted the beach."

Barbour draws extensively on international social and cultural theory, but he uses it wisely and lightly. I laughed rather than groaned to discover his coinage, "vernacular swimming," to describe the 19th century practices that gave way to the more officially scripted and controlled behaviour of later times. 

Undressed Toronto touches on issues of government, environmental ideas, the extension of policing, urban and industrial policy-making, and many other issues of Toronto's development.  Above all, perhaps, Barbour demonstrates how useful gender history can be at opening up new angles on what might seem familiar or inconsequential topics.  

A new kind of beach read, for sure.       

History of research during pandemics

 The editors of the Canadian Historical Review have posted an intriguing, disquieting, post at the UTP Journals blog. 

They keep an eye on the gender of historians submitting articles for publication at the CHR.  And the proportion of men over women among would-be contributors has risen during the Covid lockdowns of the past year. Men have long outnumbered women among those submitting to the journal. Only the "invited contributions" category has shifted the needle toward equality somewhat.  And since the vast majority of submissions are unsolicited -- what they still quaintly call "over the transom."  

But a) who'da thunk the pandemic would change these numbers? and b) isn't it obvious when you do think about it? 

There's lots of testimony that the pandemic has affected women's work experience more than men's and that women have left off work to attend to family matters more than men have. So sure, it will apply to people sitting at their desks banging out research monographs for the scholarly journals.

Kudos to the CHR editors for thinking to check on it.