Archiving feminist histories: Women, the ‘nation’ and metanarratives in Canadian historical writing

SynopsisFeminist historians have increasingly stressed the importance of transnational examinations of women's history, particular the unequal colonial relations of power transversing nation states, though they are also wary of overarching ‘metanarratives’ which obscure the local and particular in women's lives. Does the concept of ‘nation’ still provide a useful lens through which we can view women's lives? Moreover, have we been able to escape the use of metanarratives in our attempts to place ‘gender’ at the center of history? This paper examines the concept of nation within Canadian feminist history, indicating how it has changed over time, and how contentious and complex the category has been. Not only have feminist protested the idea of a homogeneous (masculine) nation, but the concept of one nation has also been problematic for regional, minority, linguistic and colonized groups, some of whom embrace their own national(ist) histories. My aim is to contextualized our debates about archiving women's history by offering both critical and sympathetic views of our use of the category ‘nation’ as it intersects with women's history. Sorting through these complexities might help us rethink how we archive, write, and interpret the past and perhaps how our definitions of feminism should become as inclusive as possible.