Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Coundouriotis, Eleni

pointing out that in the project of overthrowing capitalism’s rule the problem is that
the working class and the peasantry have not been the subject of history, not that
they have. By the 1960s Dunayevskaya and News and Letters were already positing
African Americans, youth, and women as the subjects of history, and actively par-
ticipating in their struggles. Dunayevskaya understood that postmodernism is one
of the ‘cultural substitutes’ for genuine revolution put in place by people excusing
their failure to fight for the total reorganization of capitalist society (225).
The truth, eloquence and continuing relevance of Raya Dunayevskaya’s
impressive body of work is here, but the reader will need to be patient and open-
minded. Readers up to the challenge will discover Dunayevskaya’s brilliant obser-
vation that Marx’s labour theory of value is really a value theory of labour. They
will come to appreciate Dunayevskaya’s powerful evocation of the need to realize
the innate abilities of the world’s men and women through the negation of class
rule, racism, and misogyny. They will be impressed by Dunayevskaya’s insistence
that News and Letters be a paper edited by a wage worker that features the voices of
workers, women, people of colour, inmates, and other prisoners of the Capitalist
Dream. For these reasons alone Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism
is well worth reading. Readers may emerge from the experience uneasy at Gogol’s
unquestioning adulation of Dunayevskaya, but willing to concede that she points us
beyond totalitarianism, rampant capitalism and postmodernism to a more human
future.
Peter Campbell
Queen’s University
Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties
in African History (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006).
The ambition suggested in Bonny Ibhawoh’s Imperialism and Human Rights is a bit
misleading as the book focuses closely on colonial Nigeria and not the entire con-
tinent, but the issues raised here fit in the bigger discussion among historians who
are trying to map the antecedents of the human rights movement. Ibhawoh traces
the uses of a rights discourse by colonial elites against the colonial government. His
aim is twofold: first, to demonstrate that a rights discourse was appropriated by
Africans who used it to position themselves politically across a broad array of con-
tested issues such as antislavery, property rights, the colonial legal system and cus-
tomary law, and, second, to interrogate the politics of this rights discourse which
often shored up the interests of a colonial elite against other indigenous political
powers.
In concluding his study, Ibhawoh wryly remarks that the practitioners of
the rights discourse who acceded to power after independence abandoned this pol-
Book Reviews206
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 206
itics and human rights became again by necessity the politics of opposition in
Nigeria (171). This irony is clearly indicated by Ibhawoh but one wonders whether
it does not create a false equivalence between the struggle of colonial elites to posi-
tion themselves at political advantage with the riskier struggles of opposition in the
repressive postcolonial era. Ibhawoh also points out the degree to which Nigeria’s
successive military governments were able to manipulate human rights language for
political ends internationally and demonstrates the continued susceptibility of this
discourse to be co-opted, leaving the opposition with an impoverished political dis-
course (172). Although Ibhawoh does not put the emphasis on this point, he traces
a history of failure: the failure of human rights discourse to become the basis for a
legal postcolonial regime. Yet Ibhawoh at once establishes that a rights discourse
played an important role in negotiating colonial political identities providing some
important grounds of legitimacy for postcolonial proponents of human rights.
Thus Ibhawoh answers back to those historians of the human rights movement
who do not find antecedent uses of human rights discourse in colonial Africa.
Perhaps the place where the continuity between colonial and postcolonial
discussions is most evident is in Ibhawoh’s discussion of what he calls “social rights
discourses” which address “marriage and divorce, debates about family rights, and
the agitation for social inclusion by marginalized groups” (115). The history here,
according to Ibhawoh, tells of the closing of ranks of African and British patriarchy
over the rights demanded by women. For example, the easing of divorce laws
which was motivated by an effort to ameliorate the plight of women and shore up
their rights provokes a fraying of family values by shifting the discussion to a debate
over legal reparation for the bride price paid and casting marriage very narrowly
into the mold of a financial transaction (122). As a result we see a retraction from
those freedoms and a closing of ranks of men against women who continue to wage
some of the same struggles today. In his discussion of the petitions by the
Idumuashaba, a people viewed traditional as oshu or indigenous slaves, Ibhawoh
illustrates again the limitations of social rights discourses. The Idumuashaba were
deft and inventive in their appropriation of a rights discourse to petition for social
inclusion and, whereas the colonial government condemned slavery, it would not
go so far as to legislate social inclusion. Ibhawoh thus concludes that the British
“believed that the social residues of the long tradition of slavery in Africa could not
be abolished by legal fiat” (132). Such struggles for social inclusion form the basis
for a fascinating, continuous history of rights agitation.
Ibhawoh’s non-triumphalist but constructive account of a changing
human rights discourse is refreshing. He contextualizes his study within the debate
on culture and human rights, and correctly tries to de-essentialize views of African
identity that have shaped rigid divisions between ideas of communal and individual
identity. Ibhawoh does this without losing track of the historical specificity of his
subject, colonial Nigeria. His introduction provides a lucid summary of the
Africanist discourse on human rights and its ties to cultural nationalism (26-27).
Left History 12.2 207
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 207
His preferred emphasis correctly lies on “the cross-fertilization of ideas between
Africa and the rest of the world” (28).
Thinking of Ibhawoh’s study in the context of the most comprehensive
history of the human rights movement to date, Paul Gordon Lauren’s The Evolution
of International Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), reveals the
tensions between the local and international narratives. Lauren’s is a progressive
history in which empire created the international political stage for the emergence
of a new dispensation of human rights. Lauren is at great pains to demonstrate that
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the product of an international and
hence multicultural political community. The smaller chapter of a local history as
drawn by Ibhawoh disturbs the easy relation in Lauren’s study between the partic-
ular and the general. The international history is limited when it is told as the sum
of the world’s parts, because, if Nigeria is one such part, then unambivalent
progress is a difficult argument to make and the networks of negotiation which
mark the “evolution” (Gordon’s word) of human rights merely shift from one
interested party to another. But, if the emphasis on the international narrative flat-
tens out detail, a comparative context could have usefully broadened Ibhawoh’s
ultimately slim history. Since the title of the book suggests a continental perspec-
tive, one cannot help but wonder how different the nuances of this history would
have been had Ibhawoh used some comparative analysis. One comparison which
might have been particularly fruitful is a comparison with Kenya’s colonial political
history especially given the striking difference in degrees of violent repression in the
two colonies. Ibhawoh’s extensive discussion of land rights in Nigeria, moreover,
could bear comparison to the central role that land rights played in Kenya’s strug-
gles and their eloquent articulation in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya.
Eleni Coundouriotis
University of Connecticut
Marina Sitrin, ed., Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK
Press, 2006).
On the evening of 19 December 2001, soon after Argentine President Fernando de
la Rúa had declared the state of siege, popular protest erupted on the streets of
Buenos Aires and other major cities throughout the country. Banging pots and
pans, Argentines marched towards downtown areas where they met with other
groups demonstrating against the government. The following day, unable to con-
trol the situation, de la Rúa resigned. For the next two weeks, the country had four
different nominal presidents until the situation stabilised with the appointment of
Senator Eduardo Duhalde to serve the remainder of de la Rúa’s term. After the fall
of the de la Rúa’s administration, violent protests and mass demonstrations dimin-
Book Reviews208
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 208


Bonny Ibhawoh - Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights
and Liberties in African History

Theoharis, Jeanne

From the Stone the Builders Rejected: Towards a New Civil Rights Historiography

EDITORIAL NOTE
Domestic service occupies an exceptional role in labour history for its historic and
contemporary intersections with issues of gender, race, and class. As such, the
study of paid domestic labourers—women (and to a lesser extent, men) hired to
cook, clean, perform child care and other services in private homes and public
spaces—has changed. Once seldom acknowledged as ‘real’ labour, its position on
the boundary of home and work, and the often similarly unstable position of
domestic workers in the labour market now make it an important site of study.
Along with considerations of class, race, and gendered identities, domestic service
studies have also provided valuable insights into the impact of government poli-
cies and immigration. The work of domestic servants—and, specifically, women
and men of colour—is consequently both a project of labour historians seeking to
capture the stories of these neglected workers and a site that feminist, Marxist, and
poststructuralist historians and theorists have used to interrogate the concept of
labour itself.
The editors of Left History are pleased to present four articles that we feel
make important contributions to the field. Aside from demonstrating the wide
variety of theoretical approaches that can be employed in terms of studying
domestic service, the articles commonly use the relationship between servants and
employers as a lens to study shifts in popular attitudes and to reveal underlying
social tensions and fears. In “Assessing Men and Maids: The Female Servant Tax
and Meanings of Productive Labour in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain”, Susan
Brown considers the intersections between economic policy and popular under-
standings of work and domestic service. For Brown, studying the public outcry
over a 1785 maidservant tax offers valuable insights into the mindset of servants
and their middle class employers and demonstrates the anxieties that accompanied
shifting notions of domesticity and ‘appropriate’ gender roles. Jumping ahead
more than a century, Lucy Delap finds similar evidence of social unease over the
boundaries of class and gender in her study of Victorian and early-twentieth cen-
tury domestic service class-crossing narratives. Examining folk tales, literary narra-
tives, and social commentaries, Delap’s article investigates the fascination of mid-
dle class women with role reversal plots, which she argues allowed them imagined
access into the occupational roles, psychic spaces, and distinct subjectivities of
domestic servants.
Like Delap’s article, Mary Cathryn Cain’s contribution on the racializa-
tion of Irish and African American servants in Northern U.S. antebellum society
analyses cultural texts as a means of understanding changing popular attitudes
about the home as a workplace. Studying the transition from a system of non-paid
‘helps’ to employed servants, Cain discusses the social conditions that drove
native-born white American women from service and considers the ways in which
white middle-class women increasingly viewed their employees through the prism
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 9
of race in order to protect their own ideological interests and to preserve notions
of republicanism.
Connections between femininity, domesticity, race, and domestic labour
also play a key role in Michele Johnson’s investigation of Jamaican domestic ser-
vants between 1920 and 1970. Examining relations between servants and employ-
ers, Johnson considers the ways in which both parties negotiated and drew upon
popular discourses of ‘proper’ and ‘problematic’ bodies in their dealings with each
other. Like the other contributors, Johnson is interested in the wider social impli-
cations of these interactions, and in particular, gaining insight into the perspective
of the servants themselves through the use of oral histories.
Readers unfamiliar with the existing scholarship may want to start with
Susana Miranda’s review essay “Exploring Themes in the Scholarship on
Twentieth Century Domestic Work in Canada and the United States”. Through an
examination of ten books written over the past twenty years, Miranda carefully
outlines the various theoretical approaches and techniques employed by academ-
ics from numerous fields that have shaped the emerging field of domestic service
studies.
Finally, we would also like to take this opportunity to recognize the con-
tributions of the former editorial team members Mark Abraham, Christine
Grandy, and Ben Lander to this issue and the others they helped produce over the
past two years. As new editors, we endeavour to build on the great work that they
and our other predecessors have established.
The Editors
Winter 2007
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 10


Editorial Note

Levitt, Cyril

Book Reviews
Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age
of Protest (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).
Charles Tilly’s history students used to joke that the title of their teacher’s well-
known work ought to have been: As Sociology Eats History. Gael Graham’s book on
United States high school activism in the sixties has reversed the disciplines in the
joke version. This is a treatise about a neglected topic. Library shelves are full of
thousands of books and articles on university student activism in the decade of
protest, but little comprehensive work on their junior counterparts is to be found.
With the imprimatur of Todd Gitlin, today, Professor of Communications
at Columbia University, in the Sixties, a former leader of the Students for a
Democratic Society—Gitlin wrote the preface—Gael Graham, introduces us to
the various aspects of high school activism in the decade of activism. She roams
widely. Race and civil rights, feminism, student rights, dress and grooming codes,
student government, student media, the war in Vietnam, and disciplinary codes are
presented on the basis of governmental, union and scholarly documents, studies
and reports at the time, political memoirs, archives of the national and local media,
interviews with former students, teachers, administrators which provide spotty
data for her general portrayal of the way it was. The author recognizes that her
data are spotty and they prevent her from making definitive claims. Expressions
such as: “Scanty evidence suggests…” or “difficult to analyze…” or “there is no
evidence that…” or “extremely limited evidence…” are indicative of the problem.
And yet, in spite of these significant gaps, a general picture of high school activism
emerges in the pages of the book.
What emerges is a rather heroic picture of a minority of high school stu-
dents fighting for their rights in the American way against the forces of tradition,
conservatism, and entrenched interests. The lack of data, of course, makes it eas-
ier to tell a clearer, crisper and neater story than what had really occurred. The
sympathies of the author are clearly with the students, in spite of her repeated crit-
icism that they never actually specified what their positive view of themselves and
their role in the schools and as citizens might be. She criticizes liberal teachers and
administrators—the ‘doves’ in her book—for their paternalism and their pusilla-
nimity in the face of the onslaught by conservative ‘hawks’. And yet, the author
is clearly on the side of the doves.
The US is an enormously diverse, regionally and geographically sectioned,
divided society along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, etc. And
the fact that the author, to her credit, adduces data from a wide variety of high
schools in different parts of the country does not give us a coherent national pic-
ture. But there are other problems with this work that might have been avoided
by a sociologically informed (one cannot expect an historian to do the work of a
Book Reviews126
sociologist) analysis of the reasons for the rise of student activism in the sixties.
There is some of this to be sure but the links between the Cold War, the large
number of baby boomers, the changes in secondary and tertiary education in the
post-War era, the rise of the Civil Rights movement, the changing role of women,
the oppressive nature of the culture of the fifties, etc. are not drawn sufficiently
concretely or explicitly in relation to the rise of student activism and to the vari-
ous forms that it took.
The author is at her best when she demonstrates that high school students
who became politically or culturally active in the Sixties were not simply aping their
older brothers and sisters in college. She portrays the tensions between the high
school radicals and those college students who offered to help organize them.
And yet she can not seem to capture the unique contribution of the high school
activists, such as when she states “The degree to which high school dissent reflect-
ed other forms of unrest was less a result of simple mimicry than a demonstra-
tion of how thoroughly dissident ideals and practices permeated American socie-
ty” (199). How much of the high school activism was explicitly high school in
nature and how much of it was generated in other communities and focused on
the high school?  She does not shy away from unpleasant truths concerning the
ambivalent role of Black nationalism in ‘re-segregating’ many schools today. But
she does not tackle this enormously important aspect of African-American protest
then, or now, head on.
Her own sentiments are overwhelmingly supportive of the student activists
and one gets the sense that this parti pris may have taken the place of a more soci-
ologically grounded and hence objective understanding of the origins, nature, tra-
jectory and significance of the high school activism of the sixties: “However we
choose to define ‘the sixties’—as a quest for true democracy, a hunger for authen-
ticity, a revolt against authority—high school students played an active role, con-
tributing to the dynamism and turmoil of the age” (198).
Graham, to her credit, digs out a significant amount of material from many
not-readily-available sources that conveys a flavour of the times to readers who are
lacking in first hand experience. But at times the material reads like a series of
newspaper clippings linked in series to one another. Perhaps I share the prejudice
of cutting edge members of the baby boom generation in relation to our slightly
younger brothers and sisters who suffered in high schools while we were on the
barricades at college. In a way this is their book, a book that might give them a
sense of historical importance too, of not having missed the boat, at least on brag-
ging rights. For participation in the activism of the Sixties became a hallmark of
honour in a world in which the cultural shift occasioned in part by that activism
paid homage to its legitimate progenitors. And this raises another question that
the author does not address as fully as she might.
Did the student activists succeed?  Here the answer is, yes and no. The
activism succeeded in changing the cultural climate of society, even if conserva-
Left History 12.1 127
tive governments get elected now and again. It did not if one considers the
extreme demands of the students, especially after 1968. Perhaps this ambivalence
can best be captured in a recent commercial on television for a large bank which
used Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They are a Changin’ as the musical motif. The union
of students, young workers, feminists, and the Third World, foretold by Herbert
Marcuse and others found its expression in reality in radical Islam thirty years later.
Graham’s book is evocative of a time. As a serious analysis, it is light.
Cyril Levitt—McMaster University
John Hoerr, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in
America’s Cold War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
As the title suggests, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice, tells the story of three men on a
very personal level. The narrative demonstrates how their lives intersect during
the McCarthy era and the repercussions of their actions. While many histories of
the McCarthy era have focused on the impersonal, political analysis of events,
John Hoerr draws on his extensive experience as a journalist to bring the story to
life by demonstrating the human impact of the events his narrative describes. This
provides another perspective to the studies of famous entertainers such as the
Hollywood ten or academics like F.O. Mattheissen.
Harry is Harry Davenport, a rep resentative from Pittsburgh sent to
Congress for one term, never to be re-elected. His 1948 election had been secured
with union support, but the increasing hostility toward some left-leaning unions
severely tested his courage to speak out against the excesses of the anti-commu-
nist witch-hunts. The moment which tested his resolve to the point which, in the
narrative Hoerr presents, ultimately cost him his political career came when the
hearings by a House Un-American Activities Committee turned their attention to
members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).
Father Rice, is Rev. Charles Owen Rice, who made his name as a fervent
anti-communist. His importance to Hoerr’s narrative comes from the attacks he
concentrated on members of UE. During 1949 the CIO, in a move which
strengthened their anti-communist credentials, expelled those unions which were
considered to be left leaning. One such union was UE. Father Rice, closely asso-
ciated with CIO president Philip Murray, provided support for this move and par-
ticularly provided a means through which pressure could be placed on members
of UE.
Tom Quinn, a welder and leader in the local labour movement, was caught
in the anti-communist posturing. A friend of Harry Davenport, Quinn was sub-
poenaed by HUAC following pressure from Father Rice. However, at the point
where Davenport could have offered support to a friend who had played a central
role in his election effort, his convictions failed to materialise. To the leaders of
the East Pittsburgh Westinghouse plant, this was a betrayal of the support which
Book Reviews128


Gael Graham - Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest

Luxton, Meg

Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias - Discounted Labour: Women Workers in
Canada, 1870-1939; Nancy MacLean - Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American
Workplace

Sheinin, David

before, considered their perspectives and proposals as their own. Some found this
disappointing. Now another generation must raise and renew the profound ambi-
tions of these uncompromising elders breathing new life into their ideas. Paul
Buhle’s Tim Hector, summing up and extending the archaeology of postcolonial
Caribbean resistance, has broken new scholarly ground pointing to a landscape of
political thought and intellectual history that rewarding upon first read will get bet-
ter with further research and inquiry.
Matthew Quest—Brown University
Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community
of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-200 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005).
There is no aboriginal community as important to the national myths, histories,
and historical memories of the conquest society that defeated it as the Mapuche
to Chile. Legendary among non-natives for their purported ‘savagery’ and suc-
cessful resistance to European rule, the Mapuche came to epitomize to other
Chileans (and to generations of historians) a dangerous, uncivilized, even subver-
sive cultural challenge to modernization and nation building projects after 1830.
Remarkably, and despite a rich Spanish language scholarship on the subject, very
little has been written in English on the Mapuche. Florencia Mallon has taken a
giant leap toward correcting that neglect with this sophisticated, innovative, and
riveting analysis.
Mallon’s method is striking. A year ago, I taught a university history
course on aboriginal peoples and the state in twentieth-century Latin America. My
history students, most of whom had never cracked open an ethnology, grumbled
that most of the assigned readings were by anthropologists. Over the past decade,
through thoughtful analysis and methodologies that have bridged anthropology
with history, Thomas Abercrombie, Diane Nelson, and other anthropologists have
shaped how historians understand Latin American aboriginal pasts. Mallon is the
first historian working in English to reclaim some of this ground for history by
creatively and effectively drawing on these anthropological works, but by moving
the anthropology/history methodological fusion back toward the historical.
The author describes her methodology as dialogical. While it draws on
oral history and ethnology techniques, Mallon’s interview process is novel. Most
refreshing, it dispenses with the now tiresome apologias of some scholars on their
identity-based limitations as outsiders and non-natives. Mallon is interesting,
blunt, and frank about who she is and what that means. For good or for bad, she
is a white, middle class history professor from Wisconsin who sympathizes open-
ly with the plight of the Mapuche on problems of land rights and power. This is
no mea culpa. It is a thoughtful reflection on a methodology that depends on inter-
view subjects having become the author’s friends, having met and expressed inter-
Book Reviews164
est in her children, and perhaps most important, having opened an ongoing dia-
logue with her in part on the basis of these friendly ties. More specifically, the
author understands that what she has learned depends enormously on what might
represent to a university ethics committee the crossing of reasonable boundaries
between interviewer and subject. At the same time, Mallon is always explicit about
her project and its methodological evolution, as well as the exceptional results it
has produced.
Mallon’s interviews or dialogues might begin informally, continue with a
formal set of questions, allow discussion to diverge in directions opened by the
subject, then return much later for further dialogue. A secondary conversation
might be driven by a variety of factors, including relevant historical documents
that Mallon has found thanks in part to the comments of her subjects. The doc-
uments have sometimes been presented to those same subjects on issues that the
latter had raised earlier in conversations with the author. Interview subjects have
not only primed questions raised by the author, but have shaped the analysis itself
to an unusual degree.
There are many key conclusions. In contrast to how the Mapuche have
been traditionally understood in Chile, this study finds that they are “neither uni-
dimensional, nor independent from the state or from power relations in society
more generally” (242). Before their conquest by the Chilean military in 1883, the
Mapuche had seen their culture and society permeated by the actions of Chilean
authorities. Mallon argues that Mapuche identity has developed for well over a
century in response to a combination of state repression and Mapuche resistance
to those actions. More pointedly, Mallon has reached a number of vital conclu-
sions about the impact of Chilean state land grabs on Mapuche cultures, commu-
nities, and families over the long term. In addition, the author shows that there
were legal and political tensions between Chilean legislation and policy that
defended aboriginal land rights, but at the same time promoted private, non-native
ownership on that same Mapuche land. She further demonstrates that time and
again, those tensions were resolved in favour of private, non-native ownership at
the expense of Mapuche control of traditional lands.
Mallon is at her best in showing how, over time, the results of this two-
faced policy transformed Mapuche society. Communities “adapted creatively to
the conditions of exploitation created by the state, reorganizing their systems of
kinship and authority in order to reproduce their identity in a postsettlement con-
text” (235). This included using extant communal institutions to resist the state.
While the Mapuche scored many victories over the twentieth century, results of
conflict with the state tended toward the disastrous. The most lasting impacts
were the destruction of Mapuche institutional and social structures and, in keep-
ing with the outcomes of equivalent outcomes elsewhere in the Americas, the
entrenchment of persistent poverty in their communities.
David Sheinin—Trent University
Left History 12.1 165


Florencia E. Mallon - Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of
Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-200

Brown, Susan E.

Assessing Men and Maids: The Female Servant Tax and Meanings of Productive Labour in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Horner, Dan

confronts the intersections of the body, the social and gender? Indeed, Butler main-
tains that bodies are politically constituted and manifest permutations of body
extending beyond the normative binary framework. The ‘body’, then, is made and,
as such, is the fulcrum on which the binary is constituted and is the material on
which the symbolic order acts. Although any mention of this burgeoning theoret-
ical literature is conspicuous by its silence, Myers is seemingly attune to this femi-
nist epistemological project. For example, she maintains that ‘girls’ bodies were
barometers of the future’ and that “parents and juvenile justice officials saw bodies
that could not be constrained or constrained, that left home for paid works that
swayed suggestively to modern music, and that were seemingly available for
exploitation by men” (7). Contrasting this ‘deflowered’ and ‘unclean’ body was the
respectable non-sexed corporeal.
I cannot but conclude that this is a significant work; one whose focus and
sophisticated analysis will no doubt resonate with a diversity of scholars engaged in
both traditional and interdisciplinary research focused on contemporary and histor-
ical contexts.
Bryan Hogeveen
University of Alberta
Robert Gagnon, Questions d’égouts: Santé publique, infrastructures et urbanisation à Montréal
au XIXème siècle (Montréal: Boréal, 2006).
Much has been made of the poor sanitary condition of nineteenth century
Montreal. With its rapid industrial growth at mid-century and its frequently flood-
ed working-class slums, mortality rates in what was then Canada’s largest city
dwarfed those in the rest of British North America. Outbreaks of cholera, small-
pox, and tuberculosis left staggering death tolls that often ignited social tensions.
Meanwhile, the stench of waste, human and otherwise, plagued daily life in the city,
and struck a dissonant chord against the marvel of the city’s industrial and commer-
cial development. Sanitary reformers like Philip Carpenter and, later, Herbert
Brown Ames, stirred public attention by emphasizing the links between poor sani-
tary conditions, poverty, and disease. That this state of affairs existed in the shad-
ows of Canada’s most visible opulence was particularly galling to many urban
reformers.
Questions d’égouts, by Université du Québec à Montréal historian Robert
Gagnon, explores how the transformation of scientific and political discourses sur-
rounding drainage and sanitation played out in Montreal during the middle decades
of the nineteenth century. The study is contextualized in two ways. First, Gagnon
shows how the emergence of sanitary reform movement coincided with the rising
authority of professionally trained experts. Secondly, he explores the way projects
undertaken to improve drainage in the city played into the development of its urban
Book Reviews190
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 190
infrastructure and, more broadly speaking, in the emergence of Montreal as a mod-
ern metropolis.
Given the poor sanitary condition of Montreal throughout the nineteenth
century and the outbreaks of epidemic disease that periodically struck the city, local
philanthropists were eager to tap into the evolving international discourse on the
subject. Writers like English lawyer Edwin Chadwick were particularly influential
in this regard. Chadwick’s 1839 report, hailed as the first to draw explicit links
between poverty and mortality, was eagerly read across the Atlantic World, thus
leading to the creation of Boards of Health in numerous cities. Members of
Montreal’s social elite, made anxious by the negative aspects of industrialization
they were witnessing in their own city, snapped up copies Chadwick’s tract, and
began to focus their attention on the dangers of stagnant water and backed-up
drains. Gagnon’s study is effective in connecting the actions of sanitary experts and
politicians in Montreal with a broad international network of ideas regarding urban
reform. This movement was driven by advances in scientific knowledge and a
growing acceptance of state intervention. The actions of its adherents, Gagnon
argues, were instrumental in catapulting Montreal into the modern age.
Gagnon has previously written on the history of the École Polytechnique
and Montreal’s Catholic school board. Questions d’égouts furthers this exploration
into the development of the city’s professional class. This study, though, does not
entirely restrict itself to the elite political and scientific actors of the era. Gagnon’s
research unearths a trove of letters written by the city’s residents to the municipal
government demanding to be compensated for improvements they had undertak-
en to drains on their property. By the 1850s many of these letters explicitly men-
tioned the health threats posed by poor drainage, which suggests that urban reform-
ers were successful in pushing the idea of sanitary improvement to the forefront of
the public consciousness.
Gagnon successfully avoids making this a whiggish story of urban
improvement. Instead, he shows that there was perpetual resistance to calls for the
sort of comprehensive drainage infrastructure that the city so direly needed. More
often than not, of course, this resistance was leveled on financial grounds. The con-
struction of the aqueduct system in the 1850s had left little in the municipal coffers
to satisfy the demands of drainage advocates like the members of the Montreal
Sanitary Association. Furthermore, public outcry for these infrastructural improve-
ments stalled in between outbreaks of epidemic disease. Gagnon suggests that it
was only when investors in urban real estate joined the chorus of voices decrying
the effects of poor drainage that the government saw little choice but to tackle the
issue. Furthermore, the success of this concerted effort of political lobbying was
not immediately transformative. Even when a comprehensive drainage system was
finally completed in 1867, it would continue to coexist with the hodgepodge system
of private unregulated drains for some time. Foremost among the old system’s
frailties was its reliance on flushing the city’s waste a stone’s throw away from
Left History 12.2 191
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 191
densely populated communities, a product of the persistent belief that the current
of the St. Lawrence River was capable of purifying itself.
A comprehensive understanding of the extent to which poor sanitary
practices threatened health and commerce in Montreal only emerged in the decades
after Confederation. Gagnon links this development to the expansion of the city’s
professional middle class, which included in its ranks sanitary experts and bacteri-
ologists. The emergence of such experts and their body of knowledge is another
example of how international discourses were being put into practice at a local level,
where they were adapted to fit Montreal’s unique circumstances. Gagnon argues
that the high costs of improving the city’s infrastructure were brought about by the
need to conceptualize the city as a comprehensive network, one whose growth
would have to be carefully planned by a phalanx of trained professionals. Among
other things, the transformation of drainage from a private undertaking to a public
concern led to a remarkable expansion of the City of Montreal. The costly projects
that local governments were urged to finance by the 1880s sounded the death knell
for a number of small municipalities on the urban periphery, thereby leading to a
flurry of municipal mergers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Gagnon has crafted a useful contribution to the historiography of nine-
teenth-century Montreal, and will no doubt be of interest to those concerned with
the emergence of the professional middle class, both in Quebec and elsewhere.
Questions d’égouts demonstrates how Montrealers engaged with transnational dis-
courses regarding living conditions in the industrial city. Readers, however, will be
struck by the relative absence of the voices of those who suffered most from the
abysmal condition of Montreal’s sanitary infrastructure: its poor families and other
marginalized residents. Gagnon’s portrayal of the concerted resistance in the name
of fiscal austerity faced by those who laboured to tackle the root causes of the city’s
notoriously unhealthy urban environment will prove to be particularly resonant to
the twenty first century reader.
Dan Horner
York University
Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock, eds., With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian
Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 1997).
As historians and scholars continue to delve into the complexities of Canada’s
colonial existence, new and perhaps yet-to-be categorized pieces of this imperial
puzzle reveal themselves. Editors Celia Haig-Brown and David Nock deal with
one such piece, that of Canadians of European ancestry who displayed sensitivi-
ties towards Aboriginals while being fully implicated in the colonization process
Book Reviews192
Left History 12_2x6:12.2 1/28/08 11:17 AM Page 192


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Robert Gagnon - Questions d’égouts: Santé publique, infrastructures et urbanisa tion à Montréal au XIXème siècle

“Married men should, I feel, be treated differently”: Work, Relief, and Unemployed Men on the Urban Canadian Prairie, 1929-32

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