History of Childhood in Canada

by

Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers

• LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2017
• LAST MODIFIED: 28 March 2018
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0071

Introduction

The history of childhood and youth in the Canadian context emerged in the 1970s under the rubric of the new social history. The field was first animated by scholars seeking to historicize the state’s, along with civil society’s, concern for young people. Foundational works focused on the progressive reform impulse to expand the state’s responsibility for children and improve children’s status within the nation. This first wave of scholarship, which came out of the history of the family and the history of education, emphasized the history of adult attitudes toward childhood, state policies, and the growth of the welfare state, and it helped to establish the presence of young people within broader themes in social history, particularly family, education, welfare, and delinquency studies. Much of this work offered a critique of the state and its myriad actors for class, race, and gender biases inherent in child-centered initiatives and child rescue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Complementing studies of Progressive Era projects undertaken to save children and childhood, critical studies of the Canadian colonial project have exposed how residential schooling for indigenous youth was central to state formation and, ironically, connected to the ambition of rescuing childhood from poverty and dissipation. A second wave of historical work has been more concerned with teasing out how children and youth contributed to, and responded to, change over time. Contributory works put children into immigration history by focusing on juvenile migration schemes; into labor history with child workers; and into the realm of political and ethnic history by identifying youthful student strikers. This burst of activity in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated how age as a category of analysis could reveal historical agency on the part of young people and contribute to a deeper understanding of childhood as experience. The many books and articles included in this article were the result of extensive archival research, mainly with textual sources produced by adults. Building on the contributory works, scholars then began to emphasize children’s experience and perspectives, which required different methodologies. To get at experience and perspective, historians have read archival materials such as court records “against the grain,” interviewed adults about their childhoods, used memoirs, and interpreted actions of children to deepen our understanding of children as historical actors. The historiography in the Canadian context continues to widen and deepen with new monographs and essay collections published each year. Scholars continue to tackle the many opportunities for further research in a number of areas, including more regional representation, and more attention to children from non-dominant groups, including indigenous, working-class, immigrant, and refugee children, apart from the professionals who intervened into their lives.

General Overviews and Bibliography

A truly comprehensive historiographic analysis of the field has yet to be written, although Gleason and Myers 2017 offers a useful essay in this regard in this collection of readings. Only one comprehensive bibliography of the field has been undertaken: Barman, et al. 1992 is a helpful survey of both printed primary and secondary source materials. Several major works help to sketch out the major contours of the history of children and youth in modern Canada. These works serve to provide insight into the nature of Canadian childhood across the country, while privileging central and western Canada. All emphasize the constructed nature of childhood and adolescence and provide good detail about the meaning of these categories over the 20th century. A groundbreaking book on the Progressive reform impulse to improve the state and status of the nation’s children, Sutherland 1976 is a comprehensive study that exemplifies the foundational works in the field coming from the history of the family and of education. Sutherland 1997 complements this earlier work by utilizing oral history and memoirs of childhood to analyze children’s experience across Canada in the first half of the 20th century. Canadian teenagehood as social construction and lived experience is surveyed in Comacchio 2006. Strong-Boag 1988 and Owram 1996 use a life-cycle approach to examine growing up in the post–World War II and interwar periods, respectively.

• Barman, Jean, Linda Hale, and Neil Sutherland, comps. History of Canadian Childhood and Youth: A Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.

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  This bibliography emerged from the Canadian Childhood History Project, headed by Sutherland, and provides coverage of the English-language literature on children and youth. It covers a broad range of written sources, including professional, journalistic, academic, and governmental, and includes an extensive range of topics of interest to historians.

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• Comacchio, Cynthia. The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920–1950. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.

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  The first comprehensive study of the emergence of adolescence in Canada. Focuses on both the problems posed by young people and their experiences of adolescence. Youth culture and spaces—particularly those pertaining to the pursuit of leisure and identity, consumption, dating, work, and, increasingly, high school—form the bases for this exploration of the construction and experience of youth.

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• Gleason, Mona, and Tamara Myers, eds. Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  Collection of essays showcasing contributions of young people to the history of Canada. Themes explored include working children, political children, gender, masculinity and violence, children and war, popular culture, sexuality, education, and citizenship. See also Edited Collections.

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• Owram, Doug. Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

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  An overview of the generation born in the early postwar period, from the domestic and suburban 1950s through youth’s heady days of optimism, rock and roll, and despair in the 1960s. Draws on demographic, cultural, and political contexts to explain a generation’s development. A familiar, North American story is retold here, with some attention to Canadian distinctiveness, including the rise of anti-Americanism.

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• Strong-Boag, Veronica. The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939. Toronto: Copp Clark Pittman, 1988.

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  An overview of women’s interwar history, employing a life-course approach, with chapters on girlhood, “working for pay,” and courting. Overturns the trope that the federal suffrage victory led to a better future for girls as patriarchy continued to structure their lives and circumscribe opportunities. Generalized assertions about girls’ experiences are set against the importance of class, ethnicity, and region.

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• Sutherland, Neil. Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century Consensus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976.

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  The first major study of children’s role in shaping the Canadian welfare state in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The focus is on adult reformers who wrote laws, argued for policies and procedures, and established institutions that played a major regulatory role in the lives of children in English Canada. Reprinted by Wilfrid Laurier Press in 2000.

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• Sutherland, Neil. Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

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  Sutherland’s second major monograph makes extensive use of oral histories of both urban and rural children who grew up between 1915 and 1950. He employs the framework of “childhood scripts,” or commonly held and recurring experiences in childhood, to explore the culture of childhood as distinct from the adult world.

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Methodological and Theoretical Considerations

As the field matures, historians are turning their attention to questions of methods and theory as it relates to enriching our understanding of the experience of children and youth in the past. Recognizing the unique circumstances of young people, particularly in terms of (often scarce) historical sources they leave behind, scholars have begun to question taken for granted assumptions regarding historical research itself. Alexander 2012 explores the unique challenges that finding the voices of those often silent or marginalized, particularly girls from non-dominant cultures, in archival research. Gleason 2016 offers caveats to historians of young people regarding a key concern that dominants the field: whether children in the past had agency and how that agency was expressed.

• Alexander, Kristine. “Can the Girl Guide Speak?: The Perils and Pleasures of Looking for Children’s Voices in Archival Research.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.1 (Summer 2012): 132–145.

  DOI: 10.1353/jeu.2012.0007Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Exploring the particular silences of voices of young people in many archival collections, including the Girl Guide movement’s collection, Alexander presents to us a multi-sited study of the Guiding movement’s practices and ideals in early-20th-century England, Canada, and India. In so doing, she attempts to expand our understanding of how girls in these different contexts responded and understood the adult-led activities and pedagogy of Guiding.

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• Gleason, Mona. “Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education.” History of Education 45.4 (2016): 446–459.

  DOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2016.1177121Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Gleason problematizes the concept of agency in the history of children and youth, pointing out serious limitations of contributory, binaried, and undifferentiated approaches to it. She suggests ways that historians might theorize differently regarding the concept of agency in their analyses to avoid agency traps.

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Edited Collections

Since the 1980s, articles have been assembled into collections that reflect the state of the field at the time of writing. Introductions provide some of the best historiographical material for understanding Canadian history of childhood and youth. The earlier collections—Parr 1982, Rooke and Schnell 1982, and Smandych, et al. 1991—focused on the field’s preoccupation with children and the family economy, schooling, child welfare, and delinquency. Janovicek and Parr 2003 emphasizes adult-child relations and includes important primary sources generated by adults about children. Barman and Gleason 2003 focuses on schools as a site for learning, regulation, and the perpetuation of colonialism. Gleason, et al. 2010 examines the historical vulnerability of children while proposing children as historical agents in a variety of modern sites of childhood. Most collections are modern in orientation, reflecting the field’s bias toward the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Often, good regional representation is present, although the Maritime and Atlantic Provinces are less well represented. Gleason and Myers 2017 focuses on how children have made significant contributions to our understanding of broader trends in Canadian history.

• Barman, Jean, and Mona Gleason, eds. Children, Teachers, and Schools in the History of British Columbia. Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises, 2003.

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  Focused on the western province of British Columbia, this collection of essays weaves the politics of race, class, and sexuality into the history of education. Strong emphasis is placed on the experience of aboriginal people, and the difference that perspectives of teachers, administrators, students, and parents made to this history.

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• Gleason, Mona, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris, and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds. Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.

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  This collection of fourteen essays explores the history of disadvantaged children. Focused variously on incarceration, hospitalization, policy oversight (or lack thereof), police surveillance, and other adult-driven forces in the modern nation-state, the chapters position children as actors who make meaningful attempts to shape their own lives and futures.

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• Gleason, Mona, and Tamara Myers, eds. Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  Collection of essays showcasing contributions of young people to the history of Canada. Themes explored include working children, political children, gender, masculinity and violence, children and war, popular culture, sexuality, education, and citizenship. See also General Overviews and Bibliography.

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• Janovicek, Nancy, and Joy Parr, eds. Histories of Canadian Children and Youth. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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  A successor to Parr 1982. The orientation is toward children’s experiences and the symbolic importance of childhood. Intended for the classroom, this volume includes primary sources thematically paired with recent and classic articles. Children’s economic value remains an important theme; attention to historiography, indigenous residential schools, children’s rights, and contemporary topics, including homophobia, are included.

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• Parr, Joy, ed. Childhood and Family in Canadian History. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982.

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  The earliest collection of essays on Canadian childhood history containing some of the classics by Moogk, Brown, Bradbury, Houston, Coulter, and Strong-Boag. Temporally wide-ranging, these articles locate children in New France, the fur trade, rural society, and urbanizing, modern society. Emphasis is on children as contributors to the family economy and the state’s interest in disciplining families and children.

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• Rooke, Patricia, and R. L. Schnell, eds. Studies in Childhood History: A Canadian Perspective. Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises, 1982.

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  An early collection of readings that introduced the historical study of childhood into the Canadian context. The editor’s introduction and conclusion foreground the theoretical and methodological problems of historical work in the field. The essays focus primarily on the opinions and observations of adults on children.

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• Smandych, Russell, Gordon Dodds, and Alvin Esau, eds. Dimensions of Childhood: Essays on the History of Children and Youth in Canada. Winnipeg: Legal Research Institute of the University of Manitoba, 1991.

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  Comprising eleven articles, this early compendium features studies of child labor and welfare, schooling, and associated institutions. New to the field in 1991 were articles concerning the recruitment of youth for postwar planning during World War II, the sexual abuse of children, and the advent and administration of juvenile justice in Quebec and British Columbia.

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Child Saving and Child Welfare

An important focus for early history of children and youth was the state’s response to needy children and families. Inspired in Sutherland 1976 (cited under General Overviews and Bibliography), Comacchio 1993 charts the development of a state child welfare bureaucracy in Ontario, while Baillargeon 2009 does the same for Quebec, outlining how distinct yet parallel the histories of Canada’s two largest provinces are. Beyond the welfare apparatus, the state oversaw and shaped childhood through the legal system, as exemplified in Joyal 1999 and Joyal 2000. Marshall 2006 shifts the discussion toward the expansion of the welfare state in the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrating the continuity and change in child welfare policy. McIntosh 1999 provides a good overview of the scholarly literature on child saving and welfare. Pasolli 2015 provides a history of the struggle for working mothers to secure affordable and quality child care in the province of British Columbia. The author’s work demonstrates the deep historical roots of governmental refusals to acknowledge and support working parents, and particularly working mothers.

• Baillargeon, Denyse. Babies for the Nation: The Medicalization of Motherhood in Quebec, 1910–1970. Translated by W. Donald Wilson. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.

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  A detailed study of the medicalization of motherhood in the 20th century that tackles the thorny question of why Quebec’s infant mortality rate was stubbornly high. While focused on adults—mothers, physicians, and policymakers—this book reveals the plight of babies who were born to poverty and at times institutionalized in a province where culture and religion shaped ideas about treatment and destiny.

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• Comacchio, Cynthia. “Nations Are Built of Babies”: Saving Ontario Mothers and Children, 1900–1940. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.

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  Charts the emergence of a state child welfare bureaucracy before the establishment of the welfare state. Shows how Ontario doctors and a new public health regime, intent on reducing infant and maternal mortality, avoided confronting the causal nature of poverty and the need for accessible health care, and instead worked to spread the word on “best” parenting practices.

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• Joyal, Renée. Les enfants, la société et l’état au Québec, 1608–1989: Jalons. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1999.

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  A guide to the laws and institutions that intersected with childhood, from New France to contemporary Quebec. More an annotated survey than historical analysis, this compendium of legislative and institutional change at the provincial and federal levels serves to demonstrate the shifting place of children in Quebec society.

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• Joyal, Renée, ed. Entre surveillance et compassion: L’évolution de la protection de l’enfance au Québec. Sainte Foy: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2000.

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  Examines the status of the child in the eyes of the law from the French regime to Quebec’s 1977 Youth Protection Act. Heavily weighted to the emergence of the ideological and physical apparatus driving child protection in the mid- to late 19th century, this book surveys the major legislative changes affecting children, including those concerning reform schools, juvenile justice law, adoption, and child protection. Underscores the long, slow road taken toward children’s rights.

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• Marshall, Dominique. The Social Origins of the Welfare State: Québec Families, Compulsory Education, and Family Allowances, 1940–1955. Translated by Nicola Doone Danby. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006.

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  A close examination of the emergence of the welfare state in 1940s Quebec, this book points to the ideological and social factors behind, and the implications for children and family of, the federal family allowance program (1944) and the province’s compulsory schooling laws. This is a study of poverty and policy, and while the latter did not eradicate the former, Marshall shows with vivid example how a commitment to children’s rights vastly improved lives. Originally published in French as Aux origines sociales de l’état-providence (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998).

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• McIntosh, Robert. “Constructing the Child: New Approaches to the History of Childhood in Canada.” Acadiensis 28.2 (Spring 1999): 126–140.

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  McIntosh’s review essay revisits scholarship on mid-19th century Canada, highlighting work that focuses on “child saving,” child welfare, health, education, and juvenile delinquency. McIntosh calls for scholarship that positions children as active agents rather than merely preoccupations of more powerful adults.

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• Pasolli, Lisa. Working Mothers and the Childcare Dilemma: A History of British Columbia’s Social Policy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015.

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  A history of struggles for the provision of quality and affordable child care in the province of British Columbia over the course of the 20th century. Pasolli historicizes the persistent uneasiness on the part of the provincial government to support working mothers.

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Child Migration

Despite the fact that Canada, a white settler nation, drew immigrants from all over the world, the literature on child immigration has been dominated by the story of the migration of nearly 100,000 “orphaned” British and Irish children to Canada from the 1860s to the 1920s, when juvenile migration schemes were discredited. The focus tends to the ideological, evangelical, and economic impetus for sending children abroad, which amounted to the need to relieve Britain of its poor in the name of “rescuing” orphans and stocking the empire with white children loyal to the mother country. Parker 2008 stresses the British context for the emigration schemes, while Parr 1980, Bagnell 1980, Kohli 2003 also point to the tough conditions that greeted the children in Canada, and ultimately their survival. Written by both academic historians and popular writers, these studies of Britain’s “Home Children,” their reception and experience of Canada, and their legacy remain important to the history of children and youth, and also to the descendants of these “orphans.” Dunae 2005 examines the one scheme that extended into the mid-20th century; under this regime the children were sent to a school rather than placed in foster care. For a more contemporary treatment of migratory children and the politics of rescue, see Dubinsky 2010, cited under Adoption and Fostering, and Brookfield 2012, cited under Postwar Children and Youth.

• Bagnell, Kenneth. The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1980.

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  The history of over 100,000 impoverished children, some abandoned by their parents, shipped to Canada from the late 1860s to the 1930s to apprentice as farmhands. Bagnell explores the emigration schemes that were sponsored by churches and child savers, and the fate of many of the children once in Canada.

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• Dunae, Patrick. “Child Emigrants, Child Welfare, and the Fairbridge Society in British Columbia, 1931–1951.” In Child and Family Welfare in British Columbia: A History. Edited by Diane Purvey and Christopher Walmsley, 91–122. Calgary, AB: Detselig, 2005.

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  Tells the story of the rise and fall of one of the last child migration schemes from Britain. The Fairbridge Society institution was unique in its design as a cottage school, its attention to Empire unity, and in its relatively late intervention into child rescue. It ultimately faced a negative response from social work professionals similar to that seen earlier in the century.

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• Kohli, Marjorie. Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1883–1939. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2003.

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  A comprehensive look at British children sent to Canada. Kohli tracks the children and provides ample details about their settlement and experience in Canada. Directed at a popular audience.

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• Parker, R. A. Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2008.

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  A deeply researched work that emphasizes the British policies and conditions that created a juvenile migration phenomenon. Like much of the literature in this field, the social and imperial justification for sending impoverished children to Canada features adult voices rather than giving attention to children and migration’s impact on childhood.

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• Parr, Joy. Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980.

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  Parr’s study of the Home Children drew attention to “dark side of evangelicalism, of turn-of-the-century childhood, and of Canadian rural life” (p. 12). Published the same year as Bagnell 1980, Parr’s study has two large sections: one on the British society that helped create and then expel the children and one on the fate of the children in Canada.

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Family Matters

Like the history of schooling, the history of the family has been a major springboard for more focused studies on young people in Canada. The studies in this section exemplify critical thematic areas where a focus on children’s contributions to history has emerged within the family context, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Gaffield 1991 explores the specific strategy of schooling for children as a means to ensure family status and reproduction. Dickinson 1993, Golz 1993, and Gleason 1999 turn the lens to a finer aperture, analyzing the various roles of professionals, state representatives, and experts who have a long history of offering prescriptive advice about “proper” and “normal” children and families. They speak to a preoccupation in the literature with the interaction between the family and the state, both as a source of welfare provision and, as Cliche 2011 explores in the case of family violence and children’s vulnerability, as a disciplinary authority.

• Cliche, Marie-Aimée. Fous, ivres, ou méchant? Les parents meurtriers au Québec, 1775–1965. Montreal: Boreal, 2011.

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  Following her 2007 (Maltraiter ou punir? Violence envers les enfants dans les familles quebecoises, 1850–1969 [Montreal: Éditions du Boreal]) study, this volume takes an even broader look at family violence toward children, its representation in Quebec society, and assessment at the hands of legal and medical experts. Focuses on well-known cases, including Aurore Gagnon, Quebec’s most famous child martyr, who died at the hands of her stepmother.

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• Dickinson, Harley D. “Scientific Parenthood: The Mental Hygiene Movement and the Reform of Canadian Families, 1925–1950.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24 (Autumn 1993): 387–402.

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  Mapping the shifting nature of advice to parents on child rearing, Dickinson’s essay demonstrates the lasting influence of the mental hygiene movement. Professional doctors, psychologists, and educators sought to discredit folk wisdom as a backward and dangerous approach to parenting, advocating instead the application of scientific principles in the realm of child rearing.

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• Gaffield, Chad. “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Canadian Historical Review 72.2 (1991): 157–191.

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  Gaffield offers a reinterpretation of mass schooling in Ontario based on the changing position of children within the “process of family reproduction.” Linking the growth of public schooling with a range of educational experiences in families, Gaffield brings micro- and macro-level changes together.

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• Gleason, Mona. Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

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  In this critical history of postwar Canada, Gleason argues that the “normalcy” promoted in psychological discourse was an unattainable ideal that reflected and reinforced white, middle-class, heterosexual, and patriarchal values. Her focus is aimed at the popular discourse of psychologists found in parenting advice, magazines and newspapers, as well as educational materials.

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• Golz, Annalee. “Family Matters: The Canadian Family and the State in Postwar Canada.” Left History 1.2 (Fall 1993): 9–49.

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  Golz traces the efforts of the Canadian state to reestablish the stability of the Canadian family, particular in light of socioeconomic challenges and gender dislocations caused by the Depression years and the war. Golz argues that the state shored up the traditional Canadian family, despite its gendered inequalities, as a stabilizing force.

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Schools and Schooling

One of the strongest subfields in Canadian social history is the history of education, schools, and schooling. Canadian historians have long focused on the emergence of public, and the continuation of private, schooling in the early 19th century. Traditionally, studies have focused on the educational promoters and reformers, mapping out how and why schools evolved as major social institutions. Issues of class, race, and gender have been strong critical foci in this literature. An early contribution, Stamp 1977 introduces the home economics pioneer Adelaide Hoodless and the role of curriculum in reproducing traditional roles for girls as budding wives and mothers. Barman 1984 similarly examines the power of schools, particularly private schools, to shore up the hegemony of elite white, upper-class British families, and particularly their sons, in mid-20th-century British Columbia. Like Prokop 1989, a study of the experience of immigrant children in Alberta’s schools, these works establish schools and schooling as influential agents of social reproduction, of “Canadianization,” and of class, race, and gender hierarchies. In the 1990s, historians asked more specific questions about the role of schooling and the experience, in particular, of those students and families who did not fit the mainstream. Lenskyj 1990 offers a feminist analysis of the unequal experiences of girls and boys in accessing physical education in late-20th-century Ontario schools, while Curtis, et al. 1992 demonstrates how the practice of “streaming” at this time assigned working-class children to lower rungs on the educational ladder. The difference that race, class, and gender made to the experience of schooling, as Barman and Sutherland 1992 shows in the particular case of urban schooling, takes on heightened relevance in Roy 1992, which explores the schooling of interned Japanese children in British Columbia during World War II. Roy 1992 and Knight 1997, which highlight black parents’ struggles to have their children educated on a par with white children in mid-19th-century Ontario, point to the resistance of those families who faced racism and exclusion at the hands of an education system ostensibly dedicated to social equality and betterment. In Axelrod 2003, an overview of the early development of formal schooling in Canada, the author builds analysis around this key question of whether and how schooling helped or hindered families and children improve their lot over time.

• Axelrod, Paul. The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800–1914. 3d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

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  Axelrod charts the beginnings of formal schooling in Canada, mapping the initiation, expansion, and reformation of school structures. A central question, that of whether claims of the “promise of schooling” to improve, enlighten, and strengthen civic society were realized in the country’s first hundred years, frames the analysis.

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• Barman, Jean. Growing Up British in British Columbia: Boys in Private School. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984.

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  A history of private boys’ schools in British Columbia between 1900 and 1950, Barman explores issues of class formation, mobility, and transformation. She delineates the culture of elite schooling and its connection to the maintenance of British traditions and citizenship, a goal largely out of step with a rapidly changing midcentury society.

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• Barman, Jean, and Neil Sutherland. “Out of the Shadows: Retrieving the History of Urban Education and Urban Childhood in Canada.” In The City and Education in Four Nations. Edited by Ronald K. Goodenow and W. E. Marsden, 87–108. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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  In this survey of urban childhood and urban education in Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors provide a historiographical overview of the major contributions in the field, organized by decade from 1960 to the late 1980s. They demonstrate the close relationship between developments in studies related to urban education with those in the related areas of the history of the family and the history of childhood.

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• Curtis, Bruce, D. W. Livingstone, and Harry Smaller. Stacking the Deck: The Streaming of Working-Class Kids in Ontario Schools. Toronto: Our Schools/OurSelves, 1992.

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  A critical history of the practice of streaming beginning in the mid-19th century, this study demonstrates how the origins of public schooling in Ontario coincided with the practice of sorting children onto unequal educational tracks. The authors demonstrate how the practice worked to limit the life prospects of working-class children.

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• Knight, Claudette. “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West.” Ontario History 89 (December 1997): 269–284.

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  Knight recounts the struggle of black immigrants who came to Ontario from the United States to have their children educated in integrated public schools. Viewing education as a means to escape racism and limited employment opportunities, black parents were met with resistance from white parents who insisted on segregated schools.

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• Lenskyj, Helen. “Training for ‘True Womanhood’: Physical Education for Girls in Ontario Schools, 1890–1920.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 2.2 (Autumn 1990): 1–14.

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  A groundbreaking feminist analysis of attitudes toward the physical education of girls and boys in Ontario. Opportunities for physical activity for girls were constrained by teacher neglect, social attitudes toward femininity, and external funding agencies, such as the Strathcona Trust, which favored boy’s activities. Gendered constraints shaped what was understood as appropriate for girls and boys.

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• Prokop, Manfred. “Canadianization of Immigrant Children: Role of the Rural Elementary School in Alberta, 1900–1930.” Alberta History 37.2 (Spring 1989): 1–10.

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  Remaking new immigrant families into “Canadians” meant a concerted effort on the part of schools. Focused on the prairie province of Alberta, Prokop shows how the encouragement of English language use among children, and as a means to reach their parents and community leaders, was an effective goal of rural schools.

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• Roy, Patricia E. “‘Due to Their Keenness Regarding Education, They Will Get the Utmost Out of the Whole Plan’: The Education of Japanese Children in the British Columbia Interior Housing Settlements during World War Two.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 4.2 (1992): 211–231.

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  The internment of Japanese Canadians in British Columbia interrupted all aspects of their lives, including children’s education. Roy recounts the efforts on the part of the Japanese Canadian community, despite neglect from federal and provincial governments, to ensure that their children attended school inside the camps.

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• Stamp, Robert M. “Teaching Girls Their ‘God Given Place in Life’: The Introduction of Home Economics in the Schools.” Atlantis 2.2 (Spring 1977): 18–34.

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  This classic essay represents one of the earliest works focused on the education of girls for the traditional roles of wife and mother. Stamp introduces the pioneering work of Adelaide Hoodless in promoting home economics as a pathway to domestic and national reform.

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Indigenous Children

Historians concerned with indigenous children have looked to major institutions that shaped their lives, such as the fur trade, highlighted in Brown 1982, a volume on mixed-race children; the residential school, and day schools highlighted in Haig-Brown 1988, Ing 1991, Barman 1995, Miller 1996 and Raptis 2016. These foci on what were essentially colonizing forces unleashed by white European colonization have thereby tended to truncate our fuller understanding of indigenous children’s experiences in their own communities. The impact of residential schools in Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries is, nevertheless, an understandable preoccupation in the historical literature on indigenous children. Although the schools never enrolled even half of indigenous children, the negative impact of this technology of colonialism on virtually all indigenous communities has been profound and enduring. Taken from their home communities and put in church-run schools, often against the wishes of their parents, as Haig-Brown 1988 shows, indigenous children suffered serious and systemic mistreatment. Ing 1991 maps the negative consequences of the residential school era not only on school survivors, but also on entire communities and subsequent generations. The dynamics of a racist white-dominated society played out in every aspect of the schools’ operations and formed another component of the colonial mandate to marginalize indigenous people, take over their land, segregate them onto reserves, and school their children to serve white colonial society. Barman 1995 and Miller 1996 meticulously account for the role of the Canadian government and the various churches in realizing this colonial mandate, ensuring that the schools educated indigenous children for “inequality” and not simply assimilation. Sangster 2002 explores a particular effect of this treatment, demonstrating that racism mixed with the absence of strong community ties precluded aboriginal girls brought before Ontario’s juvenile courts in the mid-20th century from escaping cycles of mistreatment. In her return to the history of Métis children from the fur trade, the author of Pollard 2003 demonstrates what was possible for indigenous people who managed to hold on to strong community support: Métis children and families survived the racism that threatened to extinguish their culture. De Leeuw 2009 returns to the history of residential schooling and places it in a postcolonial framework, demonstrating how deep and insidious the technologies of colonization embedded themselves in Canadian institutions. De Leeuw explores how the physical and discursive regulation of indigenous bodies was key to the success of the colonizing project. An important shift from the focus on residential schools is found in Raptis 2016. This history of day schools attended by Tsimshan children in British Columbia in the mid-decades of the 20th century breaks new ground. Of particular note is the fact that Raptis focuses on the perspectives of former students in her analysis.

• Barman, Jean. “Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children.” In Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia. Edited by Jean Barman, Neil Sutherland, and J. Donald Wilson, 57–80. Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises, 1995.

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  Barman demonstrates how factors such as the assumption of First Nations “sameness,” federal parsimony, and inadequate schooling contributed to the failure of the residential school system in British Columbia. Barman suggests that aboriginal children were schooled not merely for assimilation, but also for inequality.

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• Brown, Jennifer S. H. “Children of the Early Fur Trades.” In Childhood and Family in Canadian History. Edited by Joy Parr, 44–68. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

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  Brown offers one of the earliest studies on children born of mixed-race unions in the fur trade era. Her focus is on the identity construction of Métis children and the divergent ways that French and/or English relations understood children’s place in kinship systems.

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• de Leeuw, Sarah. “‘If Anything Is to Be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young’: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada.” Children’s Geographies 7.2 (May 2009): 123–140.

  DOI: 10.1080/14733280902798837Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  De Leeuw weds a postcolonial framework with an analysis of children’s spaces to show how childhood and children were constructed under the Canadian colonial project. Examines residential schools in British Columbia, demonstrating at once how critical indigenous young bodies were to that project as was constructing the Indian as childlike.

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• Haig-Brown, Celia. Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School. Vancouver, BC: Tilicum Library, 1988.

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  A groundbreaking study of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Haig-Brown interviews survivors of the school and foregrounds their memories of coping with abuse, hunger, and assault on their culture and language. These memories highlight the courage of aboriginal children and the strength of their culture.

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• Ing, N. Rosalyn. “The Effects of Residential Schools on Native Child-Rearing Practices.” Canadian Journal of Native Education 18 (Suppl.) (1991): 65–118.

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  Based on accounts of student survivors, Ing’s study explores the consequences of cultural displacement on subsequent generations caused by the residential school system. Ing argues that the residential school experience denied students the interaction with parents necessary for the development of positive parenting skills. The absence of cultural transmission severely damaged aboriginal communities.

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• Miller, J. R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

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  In this comprehensive history of residential schooling in Canada, Miller demonstrates why and how it was an important part of the colonizing strategy of the government. Sections of the book are devoted to explaining the role of bureaucrats and lay and religious officials in establishing the schools, as well as the experience of students.

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• Pollard, Juliet. “A Most Remarkable Phenomenon: Growing Up Métis: Fur Traders’ Children in the Pacific Northwest.” In Histories of Canadian Children and Youth. Edited by Nancy Janovicek, and Joy Parr, 57–70. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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  Building on earlier work by Jennifer Brown, Pollard traces how and why Métis culture flourished and was challenged in the Pacific Northwest in relation to the fur trade. She demonstrates the capacity for Métis children to develop a wide range of strategies over the 19th century to confront racism and thrive.

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• Raptis, Helen (with members of the Tsimshian Nation). What We Learned: Two Generations Reflect on Tsimshian Education and the Day Schools. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016.

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  Using a collaborative methodological approach, Raptis engages with two generations of Tsimshian students—a group of elders born in the 1930s and 1940s and a group of middle-aged adults born in the 1950s and 1960s—who reflect on their traditional Tsimshian education and the formal schooling they received in northwestern British Columbia. Their stories evoke mixed memories of their youth, their communities, their education, and struggles to retain their culture.

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• Sangster, Joan. “‘She Is Hostile to Our Ways’: First Nations Girls Sentenced to the Ontario Training School for Girls, 1940–60.” Law and History Review 20 (Spring 2002): 59–96.

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  Sangster demonstrates how race and class oppression intersected in the fate of aboriginal girls who transgressed Ontario’s Juvenile Delinquents Act and Training School Act in the 1950s. Like their working-class counterparts, aboriginal girls were believed to need incarceration in order to learn the norms of social citizenship.

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Class, Race, and Children

This area of research began as labor history, examining the ways in which paid and unpaid labor of children contributed to both the family economy and Canadian society more generally. Bullen 1986, on Ontario, was followed in Bradbury 1993, whose focus was industrializing Montreal, then McIntosh 2000, on coal mining. Following the trajectory of working-class history, the focus more recently has been on children in ethnic and economically marginalized families (an early example of which is Ashworth 1993) and children’s participation in radical labor politics, exemplified in Hinther 2007 and MacLeod and Poutanen 2012. Stanley 1990 looks at students’ use of the strike to fight discrimination, and connects Chinese students in Victoria with Jewish students in Montreal. Fahrni 2015 explores how governmental and public reaction to the Laurier Palace theater fire in 1927 allows historians to reconstruct the complexity of urban working-class family life. The author also asks important questions about the motives and aims of historians of childhood, and about the ethics of using tragedy to write about the lives of marginalized people.

• Ashworth, Mary. Children of the Canadian Mosaic: A Brief History to 1950. Toronto: OISE Press, 1993.

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  Following on her first book, The Forces Which Shaped Them (Vancouver: New Star, 1979), this work is aimed primarily at a general readership and focuses on adult attitudes toward children from various nonwhite communities. It focuses primarily on unique experiences of racialized children.

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• Bradbury, Bettina. Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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  Anchoring this work of Irish and French-Canadian working-class family history in 19th-century Montreal is a persuasive argument that the paid and unpaid work of children, youth, and women mattered to family survival and was determined based on family need and local culture. Beyond economic structures, gender, age, class, ethnicity, and family circumstances shaped children’s experience with work.

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• Bullen, John. “Hidden Workers: Child Labour and the Family Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Canada.” Labour/Le Travail 18 (Autumn 1986): 163–187.

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  A classic in the field, Bullen’s “Hidden Workers” revealed how children were integral to the family economy in myriad ways. Depending on age and gender, children could be found working for pay, forming a key part of the cheap unskilled labor force in the 19th century. Despite the introduction of compulsory schooling laws, children’s economic value persisted.

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• Fahrni, Magda. “Glimpsing Working-Class Childhood through the Laurier Palace Fire of 1927: The Ordinary, the Tragic, and the Historian’s Gaze.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8.3 (Fall 2015): 426–450.

  DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2015.0047Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Fahrni explores the tragedy of the Laurier Palace cinema fire in working-class Montreal in 1927, which killed seventy-eight children to reconstruct the complexity of urban working-class family life. She also encourages historians of children and youth to engage thoughtfully with the ethical challenges surrounding tragedy and death in the history of children and youth.

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• Hinther, Rhonda L. “‘Raised in the Spirit of Class Struggle’: Children, Youth, and the Interwar Ukrainian Left in Canada.” Labour/Le travail 60 (Fall 2007): 43–76.

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  An examination of Ukrainian children in Canada who contributed to the making of a radical left youth movement. Shows how adult preoccupations with politics and identity, especially through the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association, were understood by children, and how children in turn shaped the era.

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• MacLeod, Roderick, and Mary Anne Poutanen. “Little Fists for Social Justice: Anti-Semitism, Community and Montreal’s Aberdeen School Strike, 1913.” Labour/Le Travail 70 (Fall 2012): 61–99.

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  A study of children’s agency, political activism, and ethnic tension in 1913 Montreal. In response to anti-Semitism in the classroom, elementary school children, led by a handful of grade six students, went on strike. The authors show how these Jewish children absorbed and reflected their labor-activist origins.

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• McIntosh, Robert. Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.

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  Neglected or forgotten, pit boys formed a substantial minority of coal miners in British Columbia and Nova Scotia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Bradbury, McIntosh shows how familial need and local conventions produced the boy worker. Pit boys created a rough and resilient subculture that would fade as the state introduced age restrictions on work.

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• Stanley, Timothy J. “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922–23.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 2.2 (Fall 1990): 287–305.

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  Stanley examines the refusal of Chinese students to be segregated from white students in Victoria schools in the early 1920s. He argues that this episode exemplifies attempts to entrench and reproduce white supremacy in the province in an era of immigration and labor unrest.

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Juvenile Justice and Delinquency

This subfield comprises work by historians, criminologists, and sociologists interested in the construction of children as delinquent and dependent in the 19th century, as well as the state’s response to the seeming rise in the need for greater regulation of youth. Following early work by Houston about the waifs and strays of modern Canada (see Parr 1982, cited under Edited Collections), later studies used court records to more deeply examine the legal regulation of childhood (see Chunn’s chapter, “Boys Will Be Men, Girls Will be Mothers: The Legal Regulation of Childhood in Toronto and Vancouver,” in Janovicek and Parr 2003, cited under Edited Collections). Unlike Carrigan 1998, which looks at broad developments and national statistics concerning delinquency, Myers 2006 and Sangster 2002 focus on Quebec and Ontario, respectively, and how juvenile justice regimes unfolded in practice. Much of this work is infused with a Foucauldian framework that explores the emergence of the modern disciplinary society and highlights how resistance is a fundamental part of systems of (in)justice. The strong emphasis in this literature on the nature of reform institutions that varied across the country is exemplified in Bennett 1986 and Ménard 2003.

• Bennett, Paul. “Turning ‘Bad Boys’ into ‘Good Citizens’: The Reforming Impulse in Toronto’s Industrial Schools Movement, 1883 to the 1920s.” Ontario History 78 (1986): 209–232.

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  Bennett traces strategies used by 19th-century reformers in Toronto to remake institutional approaches to boyhood delinquency and crime. He demonstrates how middle-class reformers blamed the inadequacies of the working class for the fate of incarcerated boys, and sought instead to promote “child saving” approaches to their moral salvation.

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• Carrigan, D. Owen. Juvenile Delinquency in Canada: A History. Toronto: Irwin, 1998.

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  A broad overview of youth crime and community and state responses to I, t from New France to the late 20th century. This superficial treatment of juvenile delinquency in Canada is useful for gaining insight into the major contours of deviant behavior and the reaction to it, including laws, institutions, and perceptions of what was wrong with youth.

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• Ménard, Sylvie. Des Enfants sous surveillance: La rééducation des jeunes délinquants au Québec, 1840–1950. Montreal: VLB, 2003.

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  Menard traces the establishment of reform schools for endangered and delinquent boys in Quebec. At the hands of a Catholic order, the reform school reflected Western trends in youth incarceration but also diverged, being placed in an urban setting and emphasizing not industrial training for boys but rather profitability of their labor.

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• Myers, Tamara. Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

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  Examines the making of Quebec’s juvenile justice system through the lens of regulating girls. From the establishment of reform schools for girls run by a Catholic order of nuns to probation officers organized along confessional lines, this book argues that juvenile justice was shaped by broad reform impulses but also a local constellation of ideology, practice, and prejudice. Revealing for its attention to (allegedly delinquent) girls’ lives.

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• Sangster, Joan. Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002.

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  Examines the development of the juvenile justice regime and how “bad girls” were constructed as sex delinquents. Careful attention is paid to law in theory and practice, as well as girls’ explanations for their behavior. Poverty, race, gender, and a system to protect girls conspired to condemn them to astonishing punishment that was met with commensurate resistance.

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Adoption and Fostering

A fairly recent development in the history of children and youth, adoption and fostering studies locates the domestic trends in adoption within larger global trends in the migration of children from their birth families. A particularly important facet in this historiography is its attention to race, especially black children and the 1960s “scoop” of indigenous children, which served to perpetuate colonialism. Strong-Boag 2006 and Strong-Boag 2012 orient readers to the development of adoption and fostering practices in Canada, whereas Balcom 2011 examines the nefarious trade in babies across the Canada-US border, and Dubinsky 2010 tends to the question of race and rescue across the Americas.

• Balcom, Karen A. The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling between the United States and Canada, 1930–1972. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

  DOI: 10.3138/9781442621145Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Examines baby-selling scandals and adoption across the Canada-US border in the 20th century. Convincingly argues for the importance of giving a place in transnational relations to child welfare. A study of border control, immigration, citizenship, and baby markets, the book tends to the individual (the child, parents, child welfare professionals, politicians) and to broader questions of difference.

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• Dubinsky, Karen. Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

  DOI: 10.3138/9781442686120Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A powerful examination of the global circulation of babies and children in the postwar era through the lenses of transnational adoption and the symbolic child. Three case studies examine adoption narratives and the kidnap/rescue dichotomy: the early 1960s mass migration of Cuban children to the United States; the adoption by white families of African Canadian and aboriginal children; and the recent adoption of Guatemalan children by American and Canadian families.

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• Strong-Boag, Veronica. Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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  Charts the evolution of care for those deemed orphaned, from institutions and casual forms of adoption to highly organized and regulated systems with global reach. Shows how gender mattered (girls were often preferred), and also the complexities that religion, race, ethnicity, and poverty introduce to adoption stories. Argues that adoption trends reflect national priorities and changing notions of what it meant to be Canadian.

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• Strong-Boag, Veronica. Fostering Nation? Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

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  A wide-ranging study of Canada’s system of care for neglected, delinquent, and abused children. From institutionalization to foster care, Strong-Boag argues children “rescued” by the state experienced the full range of protection’s limitations and ironies. Especially insightful on First Nations children and includes the voices of those fostered.

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Children and Wartime

The literature on Canadian children and war overwhelmingly focuses on World War I and World War II. During both wars adults acted quickly to safeguard the nation’s children; protection included mobilizing and disciplining them for total war. A major theme is the promotion of patriotism in the schools, which in English Canada meant adherence to British imperialism, as Fisher 2010, Cook 2008, and Glassford 2014 demonstrate. This literature is highly sensitive to gender: Cook 2008 explores the militarization of boys’ culture, as does Moss 2001 (cited under Leisure and Youth Organizations); and girls’ home front volunteer work is emphasized in Alexander 2012 and Lewis 1995. Myers and Poutanen 2005 shows how mobilization involved a heightened level of youth regulation. Methodologically, this genre is expansive, using oral histories, memories, material culture, and letters written by children, allowing for the privileging of children’s voices (Lorenzkowski 2010).

• Alexander, Kristine. “An Honour and a Burden: Canadian Girls and the Great War.” In A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War. Edited by Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw, 173–194. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012.

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  Symbolic and practical roles played by children during World War I are examined. Demonstrates the discursive and central presence of girls in wartime popular culture, the emotional toll on girls as sisters and daughters of soldiers, and their mobilization for home-front work. Focuses on the mobilization of Canadian Girl Guides for the war effort.

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• Cook, Tim. “‘He Was Determined to Go’: Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.” Histoire sociale/Social History 41.81 (May 2008): 42–74.

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  In examining the story of the 20,000 adolescent, and therefore underage, soldiers serving during World War I, Cook provides evidence of the impact of what Mark Moss describes as the inculcation of militarism in boyhood in Victorian and Edwardian Canada (see Moss 2001, cited under Leisure and Youth Organizations). Examines the pressures upon youth to sign up, and their efforts to remain undetected while in service.

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• Fisher, Susan. Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

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  Explores the ways in which World War I was integrated into, and represented in, children’s lives. Using materials produced by children, Fisher shows how children responded to the war; using children’s war fiction, she illustrates how the war was presented as an imperial duty—and for children that meant raising funds and being good.

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• Glassford, Sarah. “Practical Patriotism: How the Canadian Junior Red Cross and Its Child Members Met the Challenge of the Second World War.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7.2 (Spring 2014): 219–242.

  DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2014.0024Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Glassford argues that children were recruited during World War II to make a sacrifice for the armed forces, refugees, and other children in war zones. Under the guise of practical patriotism Canadian children joined the Junior Red Cross and offered their volunteer labor as a humanitarian effort believing that they could make a better world.

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• Lewis, Norah. “‘Isn’t This a Terrible War?’: The Attitudes of Children to Two World Wars.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 7.2 (Fall 1995): 193–215.

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  Investigating children’s letters written to the children’s pages of five agricultural publications, Lewis queries how children responded to the two major world wars, their contributions to the war effort, and whether their attitudes changed over time. She cautions about the use of published letters as a historical source that adequately reflects children’s attitudes.

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• Lorenzkowski, Barbara. “The Children’s War.” In Occupied Saint John’s: A Social History of a City at War. Edited by Steven High, 113–150. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010.

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  Focused on St. John’s, Newfoundland, a war zone during World War II, this article explores the importance of place and time, gender and geography, in the lives of children. Using twenty-five oral histories, Lorenzkowski reveals the richness and quirkiness of adult memory of childhood.

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• Myers, Tamara, and Mary Anne Poutanen. “Cadets, Curfews, and Compulsory Schooling: Mobilizing Anglophone Children in WWII Quebec.” Histoire sociale/Social History 38 (November 2005): 367–398.

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  Myers and Poutanen investigate how mobilization for total war impacted children in Montreal. Protestant (English) schools in Quebec stressed patriotic duty for both girls and boys; children were encouraged to “do their part” voluntarily, and were also subject to wartime disciplinary regimes that circumscribed their behavior.

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Leisure and Youth Organizations

This area of research shows how adult-designed youth organizations and programs, from girl guides to summer camps and church groups, functioned as an important part of Canadian childhood. Often undergirded by religious and moral socialization goals, these organizations and programs helped to promote normative childhood. Wall 2009 reveals that the antimodern orientation of summer camps was a strategy to instill proper child development. A thread running through these works—beyond the ambitions of the adults behind the programs—is how the children themselves internalized the messages and made the experience of joining their own. Gender and class are dominant themes here, since so many organizations were gender and class specific. Marr 1991 shows how effective church-run gendered organizations were in appealing to girls. Achieving manliness, as Moss 2001 demonstrates, involved boys subscribing to a military imperative, whereas Alexander 2017 shows how girls were conscripted to think about international peace. Bienvenue 2003 argues for the powerful role of organizations in shaping the meaning of youth in the 20th century. Mahood 2017 offers a complement to youth organization historiography by focusing on leisure as pursued by 1970s hitchhiking teens who were responsible for a distinct youth subculture related to mobility.

• Alexander, Kristine. Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017.

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  Alexander situates the Girl Guide movement in an imperial and international framework in this comparative study centered on the 1920s and 1930s. Making critical links among Canadian, English, and Indian Guiding efforts to shape a “conservatively modern” ideal girlhood, this study offers depth to a familiar story of girls’ early-20th-century organizing, demonstrating how at times girls challenged this ideal.

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• Bienvenue, Louise. Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: L’Action catholique avant la révolution tranquille. Montreal: Boréal, 2003.

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  Bienvenue investigates the origins and evolution of four youth Catholic Action movements. These nationalist and Catholic social organizations provide the vehicle for an exploration of the changing definitions and meanings of youth in Quebec society. Bienvenue argues that an individualized youth identity—associated with the 1960s—has its origins in these movements.

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• Mahood, Linda. “Hitchin’ a Ride in the 1970s: Canadian Youth Culture and the Romance with Mobility.” In Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Edited by Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, 438–455. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  Mahood illuminates the subculture created by Canadian youth through the hitchhiking craze of the early 1970s. Emphasizing the rituals of tourism subverted by these mostly hippie youth, Mahood has mined the memories of a cohort heavily invested in taking to the road.

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• Marr, M. Lucille. “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations? Tuxis Boys, Trail Rangers, and Canadian Girls in Training, 1919–1939.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 3.2 (Fall 1991): 249–267.

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  Marr investigates how church organizations strategized to attract dwindling numbers of young people into their fold. Such appeals to girls were far more successful than those offered to boys because, Marr argues, organizations like the Canadian Girls in Training were presented as educational, rather than simply competitive, programs.

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• Moss, Mark. Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Boys in Ontario for War. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  DOI: 10.3138/9781442623392Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This book examines the school programs, children’s literature, and dominant ethos in Victorian and Edwardian Canada that instilled in boys the desire to fulfill the era’s masculine imperative by becoming war-ready. Boys were socialized into embracing militarism through sports and muscular Christianity, scouting, and adventure literature.

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• Wall, Sharon. The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–1955. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009.

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  Childhood summers spent in the Canadian wilderness lie at the heart of this analysis of the antimodern impulse in early-20th-century Ontario. Wall pays particular attention to class-based camp experiences and how ideas of proper child development motivated camp design and programming. Particularly important is her treatment of the meanings of “playing Indian” at camp.

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Postwar Children and Youth

World War II marks a major turning point in the history of Canadian young people. In the postwar era, Adams 1997 argues, we see the heteronormative imperative emerge, a concomitant anxiety over youth’s wayward behavior and vulnerability, and, as Marshall 1998 shows, a discourse on children’s rights emerges. Brookfield 2012 illuminates how the Cold War created a universal vulnerable child around which Canadians organized. Greig 2014 offers an analysis of the changing culture of boyhood in postwar Ontario, focusing on themes raised by scholars in works such as Adams 1997. Brookfield 2017 offers a complex reading of the role of the child in postwar foreign relief campaigns.

• Adams, Mary Louise. The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

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  Adams argues that postwar Canada’s twin social anxieties—youth and sexuality—often clearly articulated in moral panics over youth behavior, produced an environment in which experts, lawmakers, schools, psychologists, and the like embarked on a normalization process directed at teenagers. The era’s sexual discourses presented a clear binary of normal (hetero)sexuality and abnormal (homo)sexuality.

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• Brookfield, Tarah. Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global Insecurity. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

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  Demonstrates how the safety of Canadian and global children motivated women’s postwar activism, from civil defense to disarmament. A compelling exploration of how the Cold War refocused Canadian child saving. At home, the threat and fear of nuclear fallout and radiation poisoning produced bomb shelters and their opposite: a peace movement. Abroad, the vulnerability of children in war-torn areas of the globe spurred international foster parent and adoption schemes.

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• Brookfield, Tarah. “Seeds of Destiny: Nation, Race, and Citizenship in Post-war Foreign Relief Programs.” In Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Edited by Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, 377–391. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  Examines youth constructed by, and drawn into, postwar foreign relief efforts as recipients and donors. Relief agencies empowered Canadian children to believe they could reach across borders to help those “in need.” Important attention to indigenous children as both at risk and as donors helps show the varied roles assigned children in foreign relief efforts.

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• Greig, Christopher J. Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945–1960. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.

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  Greig explores the preoccupation with boys and masculinity in the postwar years in the province of Ontario. He argues that experts worked hard to set the agenda for acceptable boyhood in the years after the war as a way to recuperate patriarchal power.

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• Marshall, Dominique. “Canada and Children’s Rights at the United Nations, 1945–1959.” In Canada and the Early Cold War, 1943–1957. Edited by Greg Donaghy, 183–214. Ottawa, ON: Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1998.

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  The author is a pioneer in examining the discourses and policies of children’s rights, both in Canada and beyond. This article interrogates the Canadian contribution to the development of a rights discourse concerning children.

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Sexuality and Bodies

This literature explores the management of sexual knowledge provided to youth and the often-difficult issue of children’s sexuality agency and sexual vulnerability. Informed by queer history, the history of law and delinquency, and the history of education, this aspect of childhood history confirms that sexuality and body issues were a complex but ever-present aspect of growing up. Sethna 1997 and Barman 2004 explore the politics of sexuality in the education system. While Barman examines 19th-century schools and the disciplining of inappropriate bodily behavior, Sethna shows the great challenge of initiating sex education into the public school system in the early 20th century. Also concerned with disciplining “inappropriate” bodies, Myers 2005 sheds light on the widespread regulation of boys’ bodies by the juvenile justice system. Maynard 1997 uses legal records to examine the regulation of the relationships between men and those deemed boys. Desjardins 1995 surveys the changing discourses on sexuality in the mid-20th century. Gleason 2017 returns to the question of children’s vulnerability, exploring how assumptions about children on the part of adults through the 20th century shaped the lived experiences of young people in terms of their sexuality and sexual health. Wall 2014 shows the changing attitudes and treatment of pregnant teens in this article on postwar maternity homes.

• Barman, Jean. “Encounters with Sexuality: The Management of Inappropriate Body Behaviour in Late-Nineteenth-Century B.C. Schools.” Historical Studies in Education 16.1 (Spring 2004): 85–114.

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  Locates and analyzes sexuality and body discipline in the 19th-century classroom. Using thirty allegations of inappropriate body behavior, half directed at students and most infused with a sexual edge, Barman confirms the centrality of the body and sexuality in 19th-century schooling.

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• Desjardins, Gaston. L’amour en patience: La sexualité adolescente au Québec, 1940–1960. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1995.

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  An examination of the discourses of youthful, that is, premarital, sexuality during a period of dramatic change. Focusing on the changing morality of an emergent modern Quebec, the author explores the religious, educational, and parental commentary on youthful sexuality in the decades preceding the sexual revolution.

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• Gleason, Mona. “‘Knowing Something I Was Not Meant to Know’: Exploring Vulnerability, Sexuality, and Childhood.” Canadian Historical Review 98.1 (March 2017): 35–59.

  DOI: 10.3138/chr.3564Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Utilizing age as a category of historical analysis, Gleason demonstrates that attitudes on the part of adults toward children’s vulnerability often left the young more, not less, at risk for harm. The author offers a synthetic analysis of three themes that traded on vulnerability as a normative dimension of sexuality as it impinged on childhood over the first five decades of the 20th century: debates about the propriety of sex education, matters of sexual health and sexual danger more generally, and prescriptions regarding healthy and normal gender socialization.

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• Maynard, Steven. “‘Horrible Temptations’: Sex, Men, and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890–1935.” Canadian Historical Review 78.2 (June 1997): 191–235.

  DOI: 10.3138/CHR.78.2.191Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Using court records to study same-sex sexuality, the author explores the little-known world of working-class boys and their experiences on the streets of Toronto. Maynard explores the variety of relationships, power dynamics, and discourses shaping boys’ experiences.

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• Myers, Tamara. “Embodying Delinquency: Boys’ Bodies, Sexuality, and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth-Century Quebec.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14.4 (2005): 383–414.

  DOI: 10.1353/sex.2006.0043Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Using juvenile court records, Myers brings to light the ways that boys were regulated by the state for inappropriate bodily behavior. Boys’ exhibitionism, sexually predatory behavior, and vulnerability came to light in the courtroom, correcting the myth that only girls were seen as sexual delinquents.

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• Sethna, Christabelle. “The Cold War and the Sexual Chill: Freezing Girls Out of Sex Education.” Canadian Women Studies 17.4 (Winter 1997): 57–61.

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  Following Sethna’s PhD dissertation on sex education in Ontario public schools before 1950, this article demonstrates that early advances in introducing sex instruction were quashed by conservative education bureaucracies as the Cold War set in. Girls looking for sex knowledge found it in some sympathetic teachers, but this casual instruction was frowned upon by school administrations.

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• Wall, Sharon. “Making Room(s) for Teenagers: Space and Place at Early Postwar Maternity Homes in Ontario and British Columbia.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7.3 (Fall 2014): 509–533.

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  Focusing on a transitional era in the regulation of unwed pregnancy, Wall examines the institutionalization of a growing number of teenage girls in church-run homes. She shows that suburban maternity homes reflected the era’s domestic and gendered imperatives but also the emergence of teenage culture, with its insistence on recreational spaces and smoking rooms.

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Bodies, Health, and Safety

Historical literature on the issues of health and sickness in the Canadian context has spawned work that integrates, and takes as its focus, the experiences of young people. Kelm 1998 is an early study that explores the toll that colonization took on aboriginal health over the 19th and 20th centuries, offering a key chapter on how children in residential schools suffered disproportionally from disease, physical mistreatment and abuse, and malnutrition. Subsequent work asked a broader question: How did medical professionals, educators, and children themselves understand and experience embodiment as a historical phenomenon? Gleason 2001 and Myers 2015 argue that the embodied regulation of children during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly through the public school system, was a critical strand in attempts to socialize them into family, community, and, more broadly, national values and beliefs. Class, race, gender, and ability played key roles in determining whether children experienced social inclusion or exclusion. That children and youth are understood to be physically vulnerable, powerless, and in need of surveillance and regulation, Gleason 2013 shows, are critical themes that are explored and, to a certain degree, challenged in this history.

• Gleason, Mona. “Disciplining the Student Body: Schooling and the Construction of Canadian Children’s Bodies, 1930 to 1960.” History of Education Quarterly 41.2 (Spring 2001): 189–215.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2001.tb00084.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Gleason argues that the embodied regulation of children by adults and other children has shaped their history. She utilizes a Foucauldian framework to suggest that discipline was not simply exercised from the top down, but among children of different genders, ages, and races. The focus is on gendered and sexualized regulation.

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• Gleason, Mona. Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

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  The first study of children’s medical treatment in the Canadian context that makes extensive use of oral histories. Gleason develops size and age as categories of historical analysis and focuses on race, class, gender, and able-bodiedness as critical factors shaping both medical professionals’ attitudes toward children and children’s responses to this treatment.

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• Kelm, Mary-Ellen. Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998.

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  Kelm privileges the perspectives of aboriginal peoples and argues that colonial violence happened not only through displacement from the land and cultural genocide, but also on the bodies of aboriginal people. She draws attention to the role that processes of dispossession and cultural erasure had on the health and welfare of aboriginal children and their families.

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• Myers, Tamara. “Didactic Sudden Death: Children, Police, and Teaching Citizenship in the Age of Automobility.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8.3 (Fall 2015): 451–475.

  DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2015.0036Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Deploying the concept of necropedagogy, Myers shows how urban police forces became embedded in childhood through their efforts to reduce traffic accidents in midcentury Canada. Rather than avoid the topic of traffic tragedies, policemen and women used images and conjured scenarios of sudden death to train school children to respect the automobile’s hegemonic place in postwar society.

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Disability and Childhood

A recent development in the historiography of Canadian children and youth is the inclusion of children labeled with physical, emotional, and behavioral disabilities. This scholarship has focused not only on bringing the traditionally marginalized into the historical record, but also on making substantial contributions to critical disability studies that challenge the medical model of disability. Major domains such as medicine and education have been the focus of this work, demonstrating how families and individual children both confronted and complied with broader social attitudes that marginalized those labeled with disabilities. Clarke 2004–2005 breaks new ground in the history of children with intellectual disabilities in British Columbia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Clarke challenges the idea that all children have been conceptualized and treated as “precious.” Thomson 2006 explores the role of the segregated classroom for “subnormal” children in Vancouver in a slightly later period, focusing on how pioneering educators for disabled children advocated for their sterilization. Historians have focused on the social construction of “abnormalcy” and the ways in which children and families responded. Ellis 2018 offers a more broadly conceived history of children consigned to special education classes in Toronto, including not only the perspectives of teacher and administrators, but also those of the children and families involved. The cruel exploitation of physical difference in children, exhibited as amusement for other children in sideshows, was one of the results of constructing normal in 20th-century Canada, according to Nicholas 2017.

• Clarke, Nic. “Sacred Daemons: Exploring British Columbian Society’s Perceptions of ‘Mentally Deficient’ Children, 1870–1930.” BC Studies 144 (Winter 2004–2005): 61–90.

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  Clarke’s study of the treatment of “mentally deficient” children in turn-of-the century British Columbia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries demonstrates that families routinely advocated for their children, often opposing their institutionalization. Medical discourse, and indeed broader social attitudes, cast the mentally deficient child as incapable of growing up, and therefore forever dependent on the family and the state.

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• Ellis, Jason. A Class by Themselves? Children, Youth and Special Education in a North American City—Toronto, 1910–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.

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  One of the first comprehensive studies of early special education programs, focusing on Toronto schools. Integrates students’ experiences of disability and disability education with that of families, teachers, and bureaucrats. Ellis draws on student records to help re-create the experience of young people themselves in special education classes.

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• Nicholas, Jane. “Child Freak Performers in Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada.” In Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Edited by Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, 308–324. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  Nicholas indicts the exhibitions, circuses, and fairs that promoted child performers whose corporeal difference made them valuable side show spectacles. The violence done when “freak” performers were turned into commercial amusement is demonstrated through the story of Ernie Defort, a Winnipeg boy born with an asymmetrical conjoined twin.

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• Thomson, Gerald. “‘Through No Fault of Their Own’: Josephine Dauphinee and the ‘Subnormal’ Pupils of the Vancouver School System, 1911–1941.” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 18.1 (Spring 2006): 51–73.

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  This critical analysis of attitudes toward “feebleminded” children in Vancouver’s first special segregated classes in Vancouver focuses on the role of a eugenics-inspired teacher, Josephine Dauphinee. Dauphinee, Thomson argues, used her role as a teacher of segregated children to promote the eugenics cause, eventually lending her support to the province’s sexual sterilization law.

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Visual Cultures of Childhood

A highly interdisciplinary subfield, the visual cultures of childhood examines adult portrayals of children and childhood in art, photography, film, and other areas. This approach, which emphasizes the representation of children, deepens our understanding of the changing discourses and tropes concerning Canadian childhood. Lerner 2009 is an excellent compendium of, and introduction to, the scholarship on childhood and visual culture in Canada. Low 2002 surveys the extensive didactic and entertaining National Film Board of Canada holdings that pertain to childhood. Myers 2011 argues that the visual depiction of Canadian children was central to transnational understandings in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s.

• Lerner, Loren, ed. Depicting Canada’s Children. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009.

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  This collection on the visual representation of Canadian children from the 17th century to the present explores childhood as ideology and practice. In four sections (Symbol and Reality, Others and Outsiders, Subjects of Care, and Inner Visions), the book presents depictions of children in multiple media, from photography to film. A stunning volume that provides cross-disciplinary discussions of many topics, including children’s health and organizations, residential schooling, child welfare, and leisure.

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• Low, Brian J. NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–89. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002.

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  A guide to approximately three hundred films directed at children and families produced by the venerable National Film Board in its first fifty years. Charts the impact of “progressive education” and the mental hygiene movement on these films. Focusing mainly on nonfiction films, Low conjures a cinematic childhood that was part reflection, part prescription, and wholly Canadian.

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• Myers, Tamara. “Blistered and Bleeding, Tired and Determined: Visual Representations of Children and Youth in the Miles for Millions Walkathon.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 22.1 (2011): 245–275.

  DOI: 10.7202/1008963arSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Myers examines children and childhood in the visual culture produced during the Miles for Millions walkathons in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canadian cities. Images of Canadian children asserted an ideological argument about the nation and international development, positioning the country as helpmate to the Global South.

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