Franchises lost and gained: post-coloniality and the development of women’s rights in Canada

The Canadian constitution is to some extent characterised by its focus on equality, and in particular gender equality. This development of women’s rights in Canada and the greater engagement of women as political actors is often presented as a steady linear process, moving forwards from post-enlightenment modernity. This article seeks to disturb this ‘discourse of the continuous,’ by using an analysis of the pre-confederation history of suffrage in Canada to both refute a simplistic linear view of women’s rights development and to argue for recognition of the Indigenous contribution to the history of women’s rights in Canada. The gain of franchise and suffrage movements in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are, rightly, the focus of considerable study (Pauker 2015), This article takes an alternative perspective. Instead, it examines the exercise of earlier franchises in pre-confederation Canada. In particular it analyses why franchise was exercised more widely in Lower Canada and relates this to the context of the removal of franchises from women prior to confederation

The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450 1800. By Rosemary O'Day. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Pp. xi, 334. 19.99, paper.

To review a work which cites one s name in both acknowledgments and text is probably imprudent and quite possibly unethical. On the other hand, a rigorous self-denying ordinance would have drastic implications for the viability of academic book reviewing. Further justification for proceeding in the present instance is that Professor O Day s references to my own work are not wholly one-sided, either praise or criticism. The following assessment of her latest book will seek to adopt an equally balanced if not professional approach.

William Blackstone and the English Enlightenment

"Presented by the Friends of the Barr Smith Library, 22 November 2007, Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library, the University of Adelaide." Recorded in the Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library, the University of Adelaide, 22 November 2007.Blackstone is best known today for his Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in four volumes between 1765-69 and continuously in print thereafter. But besides writing the most influential law book in the English language, Blackstone had a remarkably wide range of extra-legal interests and accomplishments: architectural, bibliographical, historical, literary, and political, among others. This talk touches lightly on some aspects of these polymathic activities.Wilfrid Pres

Let's Not Forget Albion. "The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia", by John Gascoigne. [review]

Australian historiography, in the 1970s and 1980s, was dominated by a nativist reaction against Anglocentricity and the dreaded ‘cultural cringe’. Its more extreme manifestations rejected any comparative perspective that might blur an exclusive focus on Australia’s historical distinctiveness. But time, and academic fashion, moved on. Now John Gascoigne directs his formidably learned gaze to the social history of ideas in Australia from 1788 to 1850. The result is an engaging, lucid and wide-ranging overview, which triumphantly re-emphasises the intellectual benefits of integrating the study of Australia’s colonial past more closely with that of imperial Britain