Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada by Margo Goodhand Copyright © The Ontario Historical Society, 2018 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Document généré le 5 avr. 2021 20:56 Ontario History Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada by Margo Goodhand Lisa Pasolli Volume 110, numéro 2, fall 2018 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1053517ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1053517ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) The Ontario Historical Society ISSN 0030-2953 (imprimé) 2371-4654 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer ce compte rendu Pasolli, L. (2018). Compte rendu de [Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada by Margo Goodhand]. Ontario History, 110(2), 237–239. https://doi.org/10.7202/1053517ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1053517ar https://doi.org/10.7202/1053517ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/2018-v110-n2-onhistory04085/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ 237book reviews put, a reordering of religion in society). Fi- nally, chapter 6 confronts the assumption that Canada has long been in a state of re- ligious decline and argues instead that this phenomenon is recent. The formativeness of this process of de-Christianization has contributed and continues to contribute to a reordering of people’s participation in civic life. While the authors do not ar- gue for religious revival, they do point to the vacuum of social power created by the decline in religious life, and wonder at the consequences of such a vacuum. It would not be hard to make an argument for the growth of political populism as by-product of this vacuum. But that’s a thought for an- other study. Leaving Christianity demonstrates secularization to be a process of religious re-ordering. Clarke and Macdonald ac- knowledge that the growth of world reli- gions within Canada’s cultural plurality has had an effect on the changes to reli- gious culture. However, they also conclude that Christianity itself has “undergone an unprecedented development” (200). Ca- nadians have left the church. They have left because they oppose “organized ex- pressions of Christianity;” they have left because they have found meaning outside of the structure and institution of Chris- tian churches; and they have left as a result of generational shifts in religious iden- tity. This book is an important contribu- tion to our understanding of the extent of religious change in the latter twentieth century. Clarke and Macdonald call atten- tion to the importance of the 1960s as a decade of change, and situate their work within broader scholarship on religious and social history that point to the way the monumental cultural changes (or fallout) reverberated across social institutions and especially organized religion. Julia Rady-Shaw Margo Goodhand’s Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists, a history of the women’s shelter movement in Canada, is engaging, powerful, and touching. Relying heavily on oral testimonies, she puts the spotlight on the creation of five shelters in 1973: Interval House in Toronto; Ishtar Transition House in Aldergrove, B.C.; the Edmonton Women’s Shelter (with a de- tour to the Calgary Women’s Emergency Shelter); Saskatoon Interval House; and Vancouver Transition House. Much like the women she profiles, Goodhand’s his- tory recognizes the importance of the po- litical and the personal. Her book situates the shelters and transition houses in the politics of the women’s movement of the 1970s, but she also gives careful attention to those often invisible and grassroots la- bours that propelled their creation, includ- ing, in the most compelling sections of the book, the emotional support women pro- vided each other during some of the hard- est times of their lives. Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada By Margo Goodhand Halifax & Winnipeg : Fernwood Publishing, 2017. 168 pages. $20.00 Paperback. ISBN: 9781552669990. $19.99 Kindle. ISBN: 9781773630014. (www.fernwoodpublishing.ca) 238 ONTARIO HISTORY This is a trim book—only 168 pages— yet it is packed with details and anecdotes that will be of interest to historians of Canadian feminism. Goodhand’s inter- viewees grapple with many of the issues and themes that appear, for example, in academic studies like Nancy Janovicek’s No Place to Go: Local Histories of the Battered Women’s Shelter Movement (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007). Take the issue of public funding. Virtually all of Goodhand’s inter- viewees identified the importance of Local Initiatives Program (LIP) and Opportuni- ties for Youth (OFY) grants, federal job- creation programs that ran for a short time during the early 1970s and allowed wom- en to pay themselves during the shelters’ founding years. They also, however, point to the trade-offs involved in accepting gov- ernment money. In more recent years, for example, women in the shelter movement worry that the “feminist, collaborative ad- vocacy role” of the 1970s has been lost in favour of the “client and employee” struc- ture demanded of government-supported programs, and that a “cone of silence” has descended on shelters and transition houses who must agree to curtail their advocacy work as a condition of public funding (135-136). The local variations of this story will be important to scholars who grapple with the relationship between feminism and the state. A related tension between ideolog y and action also runs throughout the book. Many of the women Goodhand interviews, especially those in Toronto and Vancouver, were concerned with the silence on domes- tic violence in much of the mainstream feminism of the 1960s and 1970s (violence against women was not addressed, for ex- ample, in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women). They urged recognition of wife battering as a societal rather than a private family issue, and considered their interventions as part of the political work of feminism. They also, though, had to bal- ance their politics with meeting the daily, urgent, on-the-ground needs of abused women and their children. Occasionally, this meant collaborating with those who were indifferent or even hostile to femi- nism. In the chapter about Alberta’s shel- ters, Goodhand tells us about women who came to shelter work not through the wom- en’s movement but through church-based community services. Members of the Cath- olic Women’s League, for example, did not identify as feminist and instead considered their shelter work (and, importantly, their financial donations to shelters) as charita- ble and missionary service. These kinds of adaptations, compromises, and forging cre- ative paths forward is an important part of feminist history, and Goodhand captures 239book reviews these complexities wonderfully. Again and again throughout this book, Goodhand’s interviewees assert that their biggest barrier to confronting vio- lence against women was the failure to rec- ognize the “scope and nature of the prob- lem” (141). Reading this book, one can’t help but reflect on the similarities with our present moment and the almost-daily revelations of entrenched violence that have come to light because of the #MeToo movement. Feminists still battle against an assumption that violence against women is the result of the individual patholog y of a bad man, rather than a manifestation of patriarchy and the oppression rooted in colonialism, racism, disability, and other kinds of inequality. There was widespread reluctance, for example, to identify the ten murders and sixteen injuries that resulted from the so-called Toronto van attack of April 2018 as patriarchal violence, despite the fact that it was perpetrated by a young man who was reportedly motivated by rage at being spurned by women and consid- ered himself “involuntarily celibate.” To- day, as in the early 1970s, “it’s a lot easier to pretend it isn’t a problem” (141) if we don’t recognize the “scope and nature” of gender-based violence. Goodhand’s his- tory captures both the ongoing need for feminist activism at the level of society and state, and, equally importantly, it reminds us of the need to recognize and support the women who do the fundraising, write the grants, organize the meetings, buy the groceries, and clean the houses, doing the daily work of caring for the victims and survivors of violence. Lisa Pasolli Queen’s University Tax, Order, and Good Government A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 By E.A. Heaman Montreal and Kingston: McGill Univer- sity Press, 2017. xiv, 582 pages. $39.95 hard- cover. ISBN 978-0-7735-4962-3. In Tax, Order, and Good Government Elsbeth Heaman makes a compelling case that it is time to write taxes and pov- erty into Canadian history. Framed as an example of the “new political history,” the book studies Canada’s tax history as a social history of politics for the period 1867 to 1917. It does so from both the top-down perspective of the state and the bottom-up perspective of the people. Of