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Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The
Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 2001 by Steven Maynard
Arthur Lower, "the most nationalistic of English-Canadian historians" (Berger 112), was among the first to draw our attention to social history and the historical importance of sex. Even though his studies of the forest industry published in the 1930s were firmly planted in the ground of economic history, Lower, in contrast to Innis, "was fascinated by the human side of the timber trade, especially with the social life and the dress, food, and manner of work of the camboose men" (Berger 117). While Lowers primary historical concern was the emergence of a national community (Colony to Nation appeared in 1946), his later teaching and writing took a more deliberate turn towards social history. During the 1950s, in the department of history at Queen's University, Lower instituted a course he called "Canadian Social History." The lectures and subsequent research formed the basis of Canadians in the Making, which appeared in 1958. The book was novel enough in its approach and subject matter that Lower was thankful "I called the book in sub-title A Social History of Canada" otherwise many people "would have been left wondering what I was getting at" (Lower 1967, 362). In it, Lower distinguished between "constitutional, economic, and political" history and "social history." He believed his principal contributions to social history involved the study of "race" (by which he meant English and French), religion and a "third great determinant ... class" (Lower 1958, xv and xxii-xxiii). But Lower might have added a fourth. It may come as something of a surprise to discover in the index an entry for "Sex."
In what Carl Berger described as an "uninhibited" book (205), Lower wrote about Catholicism in New France and its views on "the dangerous qualities of sex," the Protestant concern with "sexual laxity" in early nineteenth-century settlements, the campaigns against "seduction" during the 1880s and an extended section on "the change in sexual morals" in the early to mid twentieth century (Lower 1958, 60, 217, 317, 413-417). Reflecting on his career some years later, Lower wrote of Canadians in the Making: it "comes as close to my instinctive intellectual interests as I am likely to get" (Lower 1967, 360). How do we account for Lowers instinct for sex and social history? Berger's portrait of Lower may provide a few clues. There was, first of all, Lowers class background: "No one in his family had been to university before, and it was there that Lower discovered the costs exacted, at least in cultural terms, of those who move from a relatively humble background across a class line. The transition cut him off from his boyhood friends and widened the 'gulf' between himself and his parents." Coupled with his experience of class alienation was Lowers personal and political critique of the Protestant-Calvinist ethic of material success that propped up English-Canadian capitalism. A "condemnation of the fetish of economic success informed and underlay everything he wrote" (Berger 113 and 122). Stanley Ryerson, after making respectful use of Lowers work on the North American assault on the Canadian forest, pointed out the obvious, that Lowers conception of capitalism remained idealist in nature (426). Lower was no Ryerson. Still, Lowers personal revulsion towards greed, his insights into economic exploitation and his willingness to consider class were closer to a social historical understanding of Canadian history than, say, his colleague Donald Creighton, whose history featured an all-powerful river and one hard-drinking prime minister as the central motors of historical change.
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