Dostie and Dupre on 1898 prohibition referendum

New in Explorations in Economic History (Vol. 49 Issue 4) an article, '"The people's will": Canadians and the 1898 referendum on alcohol prohibition' by economists Benoit Dostie and Ruth Dupré.

Here's the abstract, the last line of which made me laugh out loud. Economists, what can you say? But as an empircally based case study on a referendum, this seems as though it could be quite useful to legal historians interested in law reform and/or alcohol regulation or the role of religion in law making.

The 1920s American alcohol prohibition is notorious but not unique. Quite a few countries went through a vigorous struggle. But it is in Canada in 1898 that the very first national referendum on prohibition in the world took place. In this article, we focus on this rare and neglected event in Canadian history, in which the government came close but finally did not impose prohibition. In our empirical analysis, we use census district-level data to investigate how the shares of Yes, No and Abstentions vary according to four sets of factors: religious, demographic, social and economic. Our results confirm the literature on temperance and prohibition with religion [Evangelicals against Catholics and Anglicans] as the key explanatory variable, followed by the heterogeneity of the population, measured by the proportion of foreign-born. Urbanization has also the expected (although small) impact. Results for wealth are mixed. The economic interest rationale is not confirmed but that can be explained by the historical context.

Chambers on Married Women and Businesses in Ontario

Lori Chambers has extended her interest in Ontario married women's property law reform to examine its consequences for married businesswomen. Her new article "Married Women and Businesses" appears in the fall 2012 issue of Ontario History (not yet online.) The Ebscohost listing for this article does not include the author's name, but this is Lori. Here's the abstract:

Married women's property law reform in the nineteenth century made it legally possible for wives to run businesses independently of husbands.

However, marital property law reform as interpreted by the courts of Ontario still conceptualized the wife as a dependent partner in marriage who owed labour and services to her husband.

A woman's ability to run a business on her own account was limited by the rules assigned to married women's property ownership, and her labour in a family business was constructed as a labour of love, performed for the benefit of family, and to the profit of her husband.

Women faced significant challenges in obtaining credit and maintaining ownership of enterprises.

By examining Ontario cases in which wives sought to control the assets from their businesses, this paper explores the limitations of reform, and asserts not only that business is not gender neutral, but also that understanding law is essential to understanding why women have been marginalized in the business community and business history

Life and times of Kwakwaka'wakw activist Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951)

And another, published this summer, a life and times style biography from UBC Press, Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las: Jane Constance Cook and the Politics of Memory, Church, and Custom by anthropologist Leslie Robertson and the Kwagu’l Gixsam Clan.  Order here.

Says UBC press:

Standing Up with Ga'axsta'las is a compelling conversation with the colonial past initiated by the descendants of Kwakwaka'wakw leader and activist, Jane Constance Cook (1870-1951). Working in collaboration, Robertson and Cook's descendants open this history, challenging dominant narratives that misrepresent her motivations for criticizing customary practices and eventually supporting the potlatch ban. Drawing from oral histories, archival materials, and historical and anthropological works, they offer a nuanced portrait of a high-ranked woman who was a cultural mediator; devout Christian; and activist for land claims, fishing and resource rights, and adequate health care. Ga'axsta'las testified at the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, was the only woman on the executive of the Allied Indian Tribes of BC, and was a fierce advocate for women and children. This powerful meditation on memory documents how the Kwagu'l Gixsam revived their dormant clan to forge a positive social and cultural identity for future generations through feasting and potlatching.

Legal History of Post WWI Halifax by Michael Boudreau

Also new (last spring) from UBC Law and Society series, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35 by criminologist/legal historian Michael Boudreau from St. Thomas University, Fredericton. Order on line here.

Here's the blurb:

Interwar Halifax was a city in flux, a place where citizens struggled to adopt new ideas and technologies as they dealt with rising levels of poverty, unemployment, and outmigration. Although many Haligonians debated the pros and cons of the modern world, most agreed on one thing -- modernity was corrupting public morality and unleashing an imposing array of social problems, including crime, on their fair city.

 

Michael Boudreau pieces together from case files and archival records a riveting portrait of citizens, policy makers, and officials turning to the criminal justice system to create a bulwark against further social dislocation. Officials modernized the city’s machinery of order -- courts, prisons, and the police force -- and placed greater emphasis on crime control, while residents supported tough-on-crime measures and attached little importance to rehabilitation. These initiatives, in this particular cultural context, gave birth to a constructed vision of a criminal class that provided the police with convenient targets in their effort to build a city of order -- ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders.

 

This absorbing study of crime and culture in interwar Halifax shows how tough-on-crime measures can compound, rather than resolve, social inequalities and dislocations.

 

New book from UBC press on the legal response to Westray by Steven Bittle

New in print from the UBC Press Law and Society Series, Still Dying for a Living, by University of Ottawa criminologist Steven Bittle. Hardcover, $95.00. Order online here.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

In 1992, a preventable explosion at the WestrayMine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. More than a decade later, the government enacted Bill C-45, commonly known as the Westray bill, to hold organizations criminally liable for seriously injuring and killing workers and the public. Yet, while the federal government declared the Westray bill an important step, the law has thus far failed to produce a crackdown on corporate crime.

 

In Still Dying for a Living, Steven Bittle turns a critical eye on the Westray bill, revealing how legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding the bill downplayed

the seriousness of workplace injury and death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but largely unavoidable accidents and in the process obscuring their underlying causes

 

 

 

 

 

Free article from Canadian Review of American Studies

 

 

UTPJournals Focus

 

Included in the free articles for October 24-30, 2012  

Canadian Review of American Studies 36.1 “‘Eighty Years and More: Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment” by Mary Chapma and Angela Mills

Abstract: ‘‘Eighty Years and More – Looking Back at the Nineteenth Amendment’’ is the introduction to a special issue on American Woman Suffrage timed to coincide with the eighty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The anniversary invites us to raise questions about memory and memorialization, about which stories about suffrage endure (such as Susan B. Anthony’s primacy in the campaign) and which figures and activities have been excluded from myth-making chronicles like the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. As an overview of the collection, the introduction outlines both the impetuses for and the implications of dismantling traditional narratives of suffrage and refiguring the campaign as a multilayered, multifaceted phenomenon, functioning on many fronts and involving many figures whose efforts have been hidden from history. The special issue as a whole works to challenge old orthodoxies about the suffrage campaign by re-evaluating the contributions of figures like New York author–activist Lillie Devereux Blake and Wyoming justice of the peace Esther Morris and by reconsider­ing the rhetorical work performed by the creative tactics that characterized the campaign, including oratory, literature, and stereotyping. Reviews of three recent works of scholarship on American suffrage remind us of the persistent interest in interrogating the historiography of suffrage and of the continued need for research that furthers the goals of re-evaluation.

Toronto Legal History Group now Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop

Since there is considerable overlap (probably about 99% plus) between the readers of this blog and the people on Jim Phillips' legal history distribution list, I am always reluctant to post duplicate notices.

However, there are times I do take notice here of announcements Jim has sent to the list which readers may want to be able to consult without rooting through old emails.

This seems like one of those times.

I won't reproduce the entire email (anyone who is not on the list should email Jim at j.phillips@utoronto.ca pronto--you get sent great draft papers to read.)

But here is an excerpt:

...the [legal history] group is continuing to run in the same way that it has for many years. The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History is funding it, and I am very grateful to the Directors for that decision. Its formal name is now The Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop.  Once the new Osgoode Society website is up and running (in a few weeks time I hope) you will be able to access schedules and other information (and at least some papers) on that website, and information will also be posted on the Osgoode Society blog run by Mary Stokes.
For the sake of convenience the sessions will continue to be held at the University of Toronto law school.
I am also happy to say that Osgoode Hall Law School has agreed to make a financial contribution to the workshop. That contribution will be earmarked to bring in one or two speakers from outside Toronto. Again, my sincere thanks to Osgoode Hall for this, and especially to Dean Lorne Sossin.

Jim goes on to say that new or renewed memberships (which include the members' book of the year) and donations (tax receiptable) to the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History are always welcome, and while the workshop is sufficiently funded, anyone who especially wants to support the workshop financially for the future may designate his or her donation to that purpose or to the Stuart Thom fund for special projects.

You can also support the workshop by volunteering to present, attending as many sessions as you can (you don't have to restrict yourself to papers that are squarely in your area of expertise!) and sending Jim any suggestions for occasional out-of-town visitors.

Reminder: there is an extra session of the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop this week, not listed in the orginal schedule. We look forward to seeing many of you at 6:30 pm, Wednesday, to hear Catherine MacMillan of the University of London speak on "Judging the Coronation Cases: Edwardian Advances in Contractual Frustration?".