Joan Sangster
Professor
B.A. (Trent), M.A., Ph.D. (McMaster)
Email: jsangster@trentu.ca
Faculty Profile
Joan Sangster has written articles and monographs on working women and labour movement, the history of the Left, feminist theory and historiography, the criminalization of women and girls, and Aboriginal women and the law. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has held a Killam fellowship, as well as visiting professorships at Duke, Princeton, and McGill Universities. Her most recent book was Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (University of Toronto Press). A retrospective collection of her historical and theoretical essays, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History, was published by Athabasca University Press in 2011, and she is currently finishing a monograph, tentatively titled Contact Zones: Images of the Aboriginal North, 1940-1970. Ae recipient of both Trent’s Symons Teaching award and the University Research Award, she is also a member of the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, where she teaches in the MA and doctoral Canadian Studies program.
Selected Books
Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920-60. Don Mills, ON: Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989 (reprinted 2015 by University of Toronto Press).
Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920-1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.
Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family and in the Law, Ontario 1920-60. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Girl Trouble: Female ‘Delinquency’ in English Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2002.
Selected Co-edited Books:
Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s-1940s. (co-edited with Pernilla Jonsson and Silke Neunsinger). Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press, 2007.
Labouring Canada: Class, Race, and Gender in Canadian History (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (co-edited with L.Fink and J. McCartin) University of Illinois Press, 2014.
Recent Articles:
“Reflections on the Politics and Praxis of Working-Class Oral Histories,” in The Canadian Oral History Reader, eds. K. Llewellyn, Freund and Reilly. McGill Queens University Press, 2015.
“Just Horseplay? Masculinity and Grievances in Fordist Canada, 1945-70,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 26/2 (Dec. 2014): 330-364.
“’North and South’ in Irene Baird’s The Climate of Power,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, vol. 23, issue 1, (2013): 283-318.
“Aboriginal Women and Work Across the 49th Parallel: Historical Antecedents and New Challenges,” in Carol Williams, ed., Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism (University of Illinois Press, 2013), 27-45.
“Feminism, Capitalism and the Problems of Amnesia: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” Socialist Register, eds., Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, Vivek Chibber (London: Merlin Press, 2012), with M. Luxton.