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

Mapping the Margins examines marginal family formations - spinsters, bachelors, orphans, unmarried mothers, the insane, and the aged - that have been largely overlooked by historians. The authors challenge the view that the nuclear family was dominant in Canada, providing significant new evidence through which to understand family life in the past. They build on the new theoretical proposition that the family must be conceived of as a regulatory institution of unequal hierarchies of age, gender, and social status. 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.