Documents found
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813.More information
AbstractDuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of journalists, ministers, medical doctors, businessmen, lawyers, labour leaders, politicians, and others called for an assault on poverty, slums, disreputable boarding houses, alcoholism, prostitution, sweatshop conditions, inadequate educational facilities, and other “social evils.” Although they represented an array of political positions and advocated a range of strategies to deal with what they deemed problems, historians have come to term this impulse “urban reform” or the “urban reform movement.” Over the past several decades, there have developed two main approaches to the study of this flurry of activity in Canada. Some historians, mostly writing before the mid-1980s, argued that it was an effort to reconstitute “the nation,” which arose in response to the anonymity and social conflict and ills apparent in modern, urban-industrial society. More recently, scholars have emphasized that in Canada reform often preceded urban-industrial development, and that the institutions that reformers supported, like later state agencies, were focused upon moral regulation and in particular fostering and sustaining a liberal order premised on patriarchal concepts of gender and related notions of race. This article demonstrates that important as urban industrial development and moral regulation were, understanding reform in Canada requires the addition of another layer of complexity to already existing analyses. In particular, it shows that we must conceive of Canadian reformers and their institutions as rooted in and shaped by a broader and longer history of European, and particularly British, imperialism.
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815.More information
AbstractCapacity to act on its life and inflexion of biographical lines: the point of view of homeless women To think of homelessness as a process opens the path to two questions. How can one prevent this disqualification process to arrive at its ultimate end? (the fact of being on the street with an identity of a homeless person)? One then thinks of prevention. How can one (re)store a reversed process allowing to modify the condition of homelessness? The issue of (re)integration or (re)affiliation is then raised. The answer to these questions cannot be limited to the sole reversal of general or particular processes having led to homelessness. In this article, the authors are concerned with the second question: the unfolding of an inflexion process of homelessness. This transformation process is not organized according to a linear and progressive model but is rather developed within the intertwining of personal essays, positive experiences and significant events entailing biographical inflexions in a way reformatting life's history. The material used in the analysis is constituted of homeless women's discourses (31non-directive interviews). The authors present distinctive forms of representations of action within a typology including three figures: 1) fatalism; 2) powerlessness; 3) appropriation.
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816.
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817.