The unsettling West: Gender, crime, and culture on the Canadian prairies, 1886--1940.

摘要

With the official closing of the American "frontier" in the late 1890s, Canadian officials and British travel writers promoted the Canadian prairies as the "Last Best West." Life in the region, they promised, would be free from the hierarchies and constraints that typified life in the Old World, and the violence that reigned south of the border. An examination of women and girls' interactions and confrontations with four levels of criminal courts in five select judicial districts, however, belies constructed visions of the "mild West" that depict the prairie environment and the North-West Mounted Police as fostering a peaceful and orderly society built upon the foundations of a pioneering partnership between men and women. Prairie communities and the criminal courts were often sites of violent gender conflicts between Natives and Newcomers, workers and employers, and husbands and wives.; Between 1886 and 1940, the criminal courts provided the West's white, Anglo-Canadian, and middle-class dominant culture with a forum through which its members could impose their cultural mores, values, and visions of the family on subordinate groups. Judges and juries tended to punish harshly male and female offenders who conformed to stereotypes of the "criminal" that were rooted in dominant discourses on race, class, and gender difference: eastern Europeans, the urban working class, agricultural labourers, and the sexually "impure." Conversely, the courts failed to protect female victims of violence who did not meet middle-class and patriarchal ideals of a chaste and submissive womanhood. Although criminal case files contain sub-texts of resistance, as individuals and groups attempted to shape trial outcomes by manipulating stereotypes in favour of the victim or accused, the criminal law served a hegemonic function in western Canadian settlement by obscuring race, class, and gender inequalities and enhancing the population's adherence to the "white life for two." By expanding the definition of "violence" to include the experiences of women, this study highlights how the state's response to the most intimate acts played an integral role in Canada's colonial and nation-building campaigns to bring the behaviour of the West's culturally diverse population into conformity with that of other western industrializing nations.