Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700-1975

Those in marginal family formations - spinsters, bachelors, orphans, unmarried mothers, the insane, and the aged - have largely been overlooked by historians. Building on the new theoretical proposition that the family must be seen as a regulatory institution of unequal hierarchies of age, gender, and social status, Mapping the Margins challenges the view that the nuclear family was dominant in Canada and provides significant new evidence to help understand family life historically. In constructing broader arguments about the changing relationship between the family, the individual, and the state, this innovative volume charts a new interpretive framework that sees the family as a central arbiter in constructing identities and politics in the modernizing world.