Over the last twenty-five years, women's historians have
striven with the problem of how to uncover women's lives in the
past. The early concern with merely "retrieving" women's life
stories has recently been augmented by a more theoretically-
informed approach which takes into consideration issues of
experience, voice, and representation, and which challenges the
notion of absolute objectivity. This study was designed as a
contribution to the latter type of historical research informed by
the sociological debates on these issues, and was influenced by
feminist materialist approaches that insist on accounting for both
the content of experiences and the various discursive positions
occupied by subjects. Specifically, it examines the bases of identity
construction in the lives of two women teachers (Susan Abercrombie
Holmes and Susan Suckley Flood) in nineteenth-century British
Columbia, a context in which relatively little work on the history of
women has been done.
Identity is not perceived as given or static, but rather as
constructed, changing, and sometimes contradictory. Even those
markers of identity commonly called upon to describe a person-
such as gender, race, class, religion, and nationality-are seen as
problematic, and their ambiguities are discussed in relation to the
life stories of the two women. Subsequently, the effects of these
"markers" are further adumbrated through an examination of some of
the less obvious ways in which the women's identities were
constructed. These are all seen as interrelated, and include the influences of their families of origin on the women's earlier lives,
especially regarding their education and marriage decisions, their
functions as economic agents, their social relationships, and their
self-images or self-representations. To the extent that these were
fashioned by their gender identity, many similarities can be seen in
their lives, but their experiences also diverged (widely or narrowly)
as a result of their differences in other aspects, notably racial
identity. These differences had a profound effect on the type and
degree of material and ideological constraints placed upon them, and
thus on the degree to which they were able to shape the construction
of their own identities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6727 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Bonson, Anita M. J. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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