Scholarly Pieces (Refereed)

“Violence and Profit: Canada's Debts to the Girmitiyas of Fiji.”

Solicited and forthcoming in a special issue of B.C. History Magazine, Summer 2024.

Abstract: This article exposes Canadians’ long involvement in the history of indenture in Fiji. To this day, neither Canadians nor Rogers Sugar - which owned sugar plantations in Fiji from 1905 to 1922 - have apologized for their treatment of indentured people from India, now known as Girmitiyas, in Fiji’s sugarcane fields. And, neither have they acknowledged their long history of reliance upon cane sugar grown in inhumane conditions of violence and starvation in both Fiji and throughout the colonial and post-colonial world.

Is Cane Sugar “Canadian”? The Disavowal of Global Lives and Lands within Canadian Sugar Marketing (2023)

Global Food History (November 2023): 1-19. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2023.2278391. OPEN ACCESS.

Abstract: This article considers the history of global supply chains in relation to Canadian sugar marketing. Now a dietary staple, refined sugar in Canada today is plentiful and affordable. Ninety percent of this sugar is made from imported cane. Yet within Canada little public awareness exists regarding cane sugars’ countries of origin. Inquiring into how Canadian refiners have portrayed their cane sugars’ provenance, this article sketches out the histories of land and labor disavowal within Canadian cane sugar marketing. Looking at advertising produced by the company Rogers Sugar between 1890 and 1931, it finds that during this time a tension existed between portraying Rogers’ sugars as sourced from within the British Empire and as emanating from Canada. As well, in most of its advertising, Rogers’ white Canadian refinery workers are highlighted. Due to these workers’ ubiquity, the omission of international contributors to Rogers’ sugars is especially noticeable.

Eating Clean: Anti-Chinese Sugar Advertising and the Making of White Racial Purity in the Canadian Pacific (2020)

Global Food History, 6 no. 1 (2020): 41-59. DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1712577. OPEN ACCESS.

Abstract: Between 1891 and 1914, western Canada’s largest sugar manufacturer – BC Sugar – constructed a racialized discourse of food cleanliness. This discourse argued that Chinese-made sugars were contaminated while Canadian-made sugars were clean. Through an analysis of this discourse, this article argues that BC Sugar constructed a purity/polluted binary that suggested that white consumers’ racial purity was threatened by Chinese-made sugars. It then links BC Sugar’s clean foods campaign to three broader trends. First, it illustrates that BC Sugar’s construction of pure versus polluted foods supported the effort to establish white supremacy in the Canadian Pacific. Second, it demonstrates that discourses of food purity enabled white settlers to construct bodily purity by the eating of so-called clean foods. Third, it argues that since contemporary discourses of food cleanliness rely on pure versus polluted metaphors, scholars must attend to the motivations driving today’s clean eating movement.

With Kiera Mitchell. “Mary Quayle Innis: Faculty Wives’ Contributions and the Making of Academic Celebrity” (2018)

The Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 3 (2018): 456–86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.2017-0108. OPEN ACCESS.

• Honourable Mention, Hilda Neatby Article Prize, for best English-language article in Canadian women’s history, Canadian Committee on Women’s History, Canadian Historical Association.

• Listen to a podcast about this article.

Abstract: Mary Quayle Innis (1899–1972) was instrumental in forging the career and legacy of her husband, Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952). Her labours on his behalf included typing, editing, writing, researching, preparing indices, curating his papers, revising his publications, and bringing his manuscripts to press. Quayle also ran errands, shopped, did laundry, prepared food, and provided care for Innis and their four children. She further often networked and hosted academic gatherings. All of this work made it possible for Innis to publish prolifically, advance his career, and become central to the English-Canadian academic canon. This article argues that it is time to give Quayle the credit she is due. It is also time to re-evaluate the importance of caring labour within the academy.

Résumé : Mary Quayle Innis (1899–1972) a contribué de manière fondamentale à la carrière et à l'œuvre de son mari, Harold Adam Innis (1894–1952). Son aide comprenait des travaux de dactylographie, de révision, de rédaction, de recherche, d'indexation, de classement, de correction et de préparation des manuscrits pour publication. Elle faisait aussi les courses et la lessive et préparait les repas, en plus de s'occuper de son mari et de leurs quatre enfants. En outre, elle entretenait les liens professionnels et recevait souvent les collègues de son mari. Grâce à cela, Innis a pu publier abondamment, faire avancer sa carrière et occuper une position centrale dans le milieu universitaire canadien-anglais. Aussi est-il temps, soutiennent l'auteure et sa collaboratrice, d'accorder à Quayle le mérite qui lui revient. Il est également temps de réévaluer l'importance du soutien des proches au sein du monde universitaire.

“Conservative Consumerism: Consumer Advocacy in Woman’s Century Magazine during and after World War I” (2014)

Histoire sociale/Social History 47, no. 93 (2014): 111–38. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/546762. 

Abstract: Whereas most historical research into Canadian women’s consumer advocacy presents that activism as progressive, many Canadian women have organized as consumers to serve conservative ends. References to consumer issues that appeared in Woman’s Century, the official magazine of the National Council of Women of Canada between 1914 and 1921, reveal that the magazine’s contributors advocated consumer activism to protect their own pocketbooks and to advance the interests of Canadian manufacturing and the federal state. The consumer politics evident in Woman’s Century would suggest that scholars reconsider the political motives of consumer activism. Maternalism influenced many twentieth-century Canadian women’s consumer movements, as it did those articulated in Woman’s Century. Yet, while many leftist and liberal Canadian women become involved in consumer politics to create broader material equality, Woman’s Century’s writers engaged in consumer advocacy to entrench Christian, Anglo-Celtic, and bourgeois national dominance.

Résumé : Si la plupart des recherches historiques consacrées à l’action militante des Canadiennes dans le domaine de la consommation présentent ce militantisme sous un jour progressiste, de nombreuses Canadiennes se sont pourtant organisées comme consommatrices à des fins conservatrices. Les textes relatifs à la consommation parus entre 1914 et 1921 dans Woman’s Century, le magazine officiel du National Council of Women of Canada, révèlent que c’est afin de protéger leur propre portefeuille, d’une part, et de promouvoir les intérêts des manufacturiers canadiens et ceux de l’État fédéral, d’autre part, que les collaboratrices au magazine préconaient un militantisme sur le plan de la consommation. La politique en matière de consommation manifeste dans Woman’s Century donne à penser que les chercheurs devraient réexaminer les motivations politiques qui sous-tendent le militantisme au chapitre de la consommation. Le maternalisme a influé sur bon nombre de mouvements de consommatrices canadiennes au XXe siècle, comme il l’a fait dans le cas de ceux qui sont exposés clairement dans Woman’s Century. Certes, bien des Canadiennes de gauche ou libérales s’intéressent à la politique en matière de consommation pour accroître l’égalité matérielle, mais les rédactrices de Woman’s Century se sont quant à elles engagées dans la politique relative à la consommation afin de consolider, à la grandeur du pays, une domination chrétienne, anglo-celtique et bourgeoise.

“Guilty Pleasures: Consumer Culture in the Fiction of Mary Quayle Innis” (2013)

In Consuming Modernity: Changing Gendered Behaviours and Consumerism, 1919–1945, ed. Cheryl Warsh and Dan Malleck, 258–73. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. 

Abstract: Between 1922 and 1947, Toronto historian and writer Mary Quayle Innis published over eighty short stories and one novel. Accomplished literary works in their own right, they are especially valuable for their treatment of consumer culture. In story after story, Innis explores consumer longing, conspicuous consumption, material disparity, and spousal conflict over purchases. For Innis, fiction was an outlet for investigating the personal and moral meanings of consumer capitalism, especially as they pertained to women.

“Sexual Spectacles: Women in Canadian Department Store Magazines between 1920 and 1950” (2013)

In Writing Feminist History: Productive Pasts and New Directions, ed. Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek, 135–58. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013.

Abstract: Asking not only why department stores offered sexualized commentary regarding female employees' appearances but also why female employees posed for photographs designed to please the heterosexual gaze, this chapter suggests that scholarly understandings of the sexual aestheticization of women are best attained by combining critical perspectives on objectification with those provided by research into performativity.

“Crazy for Bargains: Inventing the Irrational Female Shopper in Modernizing English Canada” (2011)

The Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 4 (2011): 581–606. 25 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/chr.92.4.581.

• Winner, Hilda Neatby Article Prize, for best English-language article in Canadian women’s history, Canadian Committee on Women’s History, Canadian Historical Association.Honourable Mention, Hilda Neatby Article Prize, for best English-language article in Canadian women’s history, Canadian Committee on Women’s History, Canadian Historical Association.

Abstract: Between the 1890s and 1930s, anglophone politicians, journalists, novelists, and other commentators living in western, central, and eastern Canada drew upon established connections among greed, luxury, hysteria, and femininity to describe women who went shopping as irrational. Their motivations for doing so included their desires to assuage feelings of guilt about increased abundance; articulate anger caused by spousal conflicts over money; assert the legitimacy of male authority; and assign blame for the decline of small communities' sustainability, the degradation of labour standards, and the erosion of independent shopkeeping. By calling upon stock stereotypes of femininity, and by repositioning them to fit the current capitalist moment, English-Canadian commentators constructed disempowering representations of women to alleviate their anxieties about what they perceived as the ills of modernization.

Résumé : Entre les années 1890 et les années 1930, politiciens, journalistes, romanciers et autres commentateurs anglophones vivant dans l'ouest, le centre ou l'est du Canada se sont inspirés des liens établis entre cupidité, luxe, hystérie et féminité pour qualifiés d'irrationnelles les femmes allant magasiner. Parmi les motivations qui orientent leur action figurent leurs désirs d'apaiser un sentiment de culpabilité relativement à l'abondance croissante, d'articuler une colère causée par des conflits domestiques concernant l'argent, d'affirmer la légitimité de l'autorité masculine, et de désigner les responsables du déclin des petites collectivités, de la dégradation des normes du travail et de l'effritement du petit commerce indépendant. En faisant appel aux stéréotypes classiques de la féminité, reconfigurés afin qu'ils fussent ajustés au moment capitaliste d'alors, les commentateurs canadiens-anglais ont élaboré des représentations infantilisantes des femmes pour alléger leurs angoisses concernant ce qui leur semblait être les maux de la modernisation.

“Virtue and Vice: Consumer Culture in English Canadian Fiction before 1940” (2011)

International Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 165–88. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1009459ar. 

Abstract: This article explores references to commodities and consumption in English language fiction either written by Canadians or published in Canada between 1890 and 1940. It confirms and expands existing research into Canadian consumer history by showing that consumer themes were central to authors’ portrayals of class, gender, and morality. Suggesting that fiction offers important historical perspectives on English Canadian culture, it demonstrates that as Canada became an industrial, urban, and capitalist nation, consumer desire and display became central to English Canadian fiction writers’ portrayals of identity, status, and opportunity.

Résumé : Le présent article explore les références aux produits de base et à la consommation dans les romans en langue anglaise écrits par des Canadiens ou publiés au Canada entre 1890 et 1940. Il confirme et fait connaître les recherches actuelles dans l’histoire du consommateur canadien en montrant que le consumérisme occupait une place centrale dans la manière dont les auteurs décrivaient la classe, le genre et la moralité des personnes. Suggérant que la fiction offre des perspectives historiques importantes sur la culture canadienne anglaise, il démontre que, à mesure que le Canada est devenu une nation industrielle, urbaine et capitaliste, le désir de consommer et de paraître est devenu essentiel aux auteurs canadiens-anglais de fiction pour décrire leurs protagonistes en fonction de leur identité, de leur statut et des possibilités qu’ils rencontrent.

“Negotiating Paternalism: Women and Canada’s Largest Department Stores, 1890 to 1960” (2009)

The Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 58–81. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2007.0004.

Abstract: This article explores Canada's largest department stores' relationships with female shoppers and employees between 1890 and 1960. Showing that these giant retailers made paternalism central to their operations, it explains how they enforced broader hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. This article contributes to historical understandings of women's relationships with mass retail by illuminating not only Canadian department stores' treatment of women, but also women's responses to such treatment. It also offers new perspectives on contemporary antiretailing movements by revealing areas of division and solidarity among shoppers and wage earners.

“A Labour Force for the Consumer Century: Commodification in Canada’s Largest Stores, 1890–1940” (2006)

Labour/Le travail 58, no. 2 (2006): 107–44. http://www.lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/article/view/5417.

Abstract: Between 1890 and 1940 Canada’s three largest department stores — Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company — developed a multifacted system of employee commodification. Not only did they encourage their employees to become avid consumers, so did they market their employees’ activities, interests, and bodies. They undertook these commodifying gestures in an attempt to extract value from their workforces. Investigating the rise and operation of commodification at these major retailers, this paper offers new insights into corporate management systems, demonstrates that commodification had negative consequences for employees, and provides fresh perspectives on 20th-century consumer capitalism.

Résumé : Entre 1890 et 1940, les trois magasins les plus grands du Canada — Eaton’s, Simpson’s, et la Baie — ont élaboré un système polyvalent de réification des employés. Ils avaient non seulement encouragé leurs employés à devenir des consommateurs passionnés, mais aussi commercialisé leurs activités, intérêts et même leurs corps. Ils avaient entrepris ces gestes de réification dans l’intention d’extraire davantage de profits de leur main-d’œuvre. En étudiant l’émergence et le fonctionnement de cette nouvelle méthode de gestion, cet article offre de nouvelles introspections dans l’administration des entreprises. Il démontre que la réification avait des conséquences négatives sur les employés et donne de nouvelles perspectives sur le capitalisme de consommation du 20e siècle.

“Exploring Postwar Consumption: The Campaign to Unionize Eaton’s in Toronto, 1948–1952” (2005)

The Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2005): 641–72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/CHR/86.4.641.

• Republished in Joan Sangster, ed., “Women’s Voices,” Canadian Historical Review, Volume 102, Supplement 3 (2021), pp. 728-754. 

• Reprinted in Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History, 3rd ed., ed. James Opp and John C. Walsh  (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2015), 263–77.

Abstract: Exploring an unsuccessful campaign by the Canadian Congress of Labour to unionize 12,000 Eaton's employees in Toronto between 1948 and 1952, this article investigates Canadian unionism's relationship with consumer culture. During the 'Eaton Drive,' organizers appealed to employees' consumer interests to convince them to unionize. They also made standard-of-living arguments central to wage demands and imbued discussions of consumption with assumptions about masculinity and femininity. Analyzing these developments, this article deepens historians' understandings of progressivist debates about consumption, unionism's role in increasing living standards, and gendered ideas about labour, consumption, and citizenship.

Résumé : À la lumière de l'étude d'une campagne infructueuse menée par le Congrès canadien du travail (CCT) visant à syndiquer 12 000 employés de Eaton de la région de Toronto entre 1948 et 1952, cet article aborde la relation entre le syndicalisme et la culture de la consommation au Canada. Pendant ce que l'on a surnommé le « Eaton Drive », les organisateurs ont fait appel aux intérêts de consommation des employés pour les convaincre de se syndicaliser. Ils ont également présenté la question du niveau de vie comme l'un des arguments centraux de leurs demandes salariales et ont mené des discussions sur la consommation qui étaient marquées par des suppositions relatives à la masculinité et à la féminité. En se penchant sur ces développements, cet article permet aux historiens d'approfondir leur compréhension des débats progressistes relatifs à la consommation, du rôle du syndicalisme dans l'accroissement du niveau de vie ainsi que des idées liées aux sexes en matière de travail, de consommation et de citoyenneté.

“Toward a Canadian Consumer History” (2003)

Labour/Le travail 52, no. 2 (2003): 181–206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/25149387.

Abstract: After outlining key concepts in consumer scholarship, this essay discusses topics consumer historians might explore, pinpoints contentious issues that may arise in consumer research, and offers methods consumer historians might employ.