topic:"Women" found 2 records - Research Collections - Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

Abstract: In Hard is the Journey, award-winning historian and researcher Lily Chow shares the difficult history of Chinese Canadians in the Kootenay. She unearths the racism of early newspapers that portrayed Chinese immigrants as dirty, sinister, and lethargic people not fit to live in BC and uncovers the history of the Chinese labourers who completed the deadly work of blazing the Dewdney Trail from Hope to Kootenay only to be dismissed, without any compensation, as soon as the project was completed. She also offers an intimate and inspiring look into the many ways Chinese immigrants survived, finding community, building resilience, and preserving their culture. Piecing together interviews with Kootenay residents and descendents of Chinese immigrants, government records and documents, and early newspaper articles, Chow bravely exposes dark parts of BC's history while shedding light on the struggles but also resilience and untold accomplishments of the Chinese immigrants who risked everything and often lost their lives in building the Canada we know today. Hard is the Journey is Chow's fourth book on the history of Chinese Canadians. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents: Introduction -- The Wild Horse Creek gold rush: Fisherville -- The key city: Cranbrook -- Once the Farwell town: Revelstoke -- The queen city: Nelson -- The golden city: Rossland -- Afterword.

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Abstract: As modern versions of the settler nation took root in twentieth-century Canada, beauty became a business. But beauty pageants were more than just frivolous spectacles. Queen of the Maple Leaf deftly uncovers how colonial power operated within the pageant circuit. In this astute critical investigation, Patrizia Gentile examines the interplay between local or community-based pageants and more prestigious provincial or national ones. Contests such as Miss War Worker, Miss Black Ontario, and Miss Civil Service often functioned as stepping stones to competitions such as Miss Canada. At all levels, pageants exemplified codes of femininity, class, sexuality, and race that shaped the narratives of the settler nation. A union-organized pageant such as Queen of the Dressmakers, for example, might uplift working-class women but immigrant women need not apply. Not unlike sports leagues linked from minor to major, pageants from local to national formed a network that entrenched white settler nationalism in the context of the beauty industrial complex. Queen of the Maple Leaf demonstrates that these contests are designed to connect female bodies to white, middle-class, respectable femininity and wholesomeness, and that their longevity lies squarely in their capacity to reassert the white heteropatriarchy at the heart of settler societies. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents: Beauty Queens and (White) Settler Nationalism -- Miss Canada and Gendering Whiteness -- Labour of Beauty -- Contesting Indigenous, Immigrant, and Black Bodies -- Miss Canada, Commercialization, and Settler Anxiety.

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