Women in the Formal and Informal Economies of Late Eighteenth‐Century Quebec, 1763–1830

This article challenges the conventional interpretation of the transition from French to British rule in Quebec, which has emphasised the increasing marginalisation of women in the colonial economy. Using hitherto unexplored criminal and civil court records and newspaper advertisements, reveals that women and in particular married women, both French and English speaking, were active in all facets of business life. Given the importance of imported British luxury items in the colonial economy following the American Revolution, this article argues that women occupied a particularly dynamic segment of business life in Quebec, and were especially prominent in the critical textile and fashion trades. A major theme of this article is to show the significance of informal trade networks in expanding economic development in the late eighteenth century, where women were demonstrably key players. The presence of women in both formal and formal economies goes far to locating Quebec in a burgeoning Atlantic economy, and to explaining the nature of consumer society in this new British colony.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.