Author Archives: Jan Noel

Sisters in Arms: Quebec Covenants at the Crossroads of Empire

In Barton Hacker and Margaret Vining, eds., Companion to Women’s Military History (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 409 – 430. BOOK DESCRIPTION: Military institutions have everywhere and always shaped the course of history, but women’s near universal participation in them has largely gone unnoticed. This volume addresses the changing relationships between women and armed forces from antiquity to… Read More »

New France: Les Femmes Favorisées

ABSTRACT: You constantly behold, with renewed astonishment, women in the very depths of indigence and want, perfectly instructed in their religion, ignorant of nothing that they should know to employ themselves usefully in their families and who, by their manners, their manner of expressing themselves and their politeness, are not inferior to the most carefully… Read More »

Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation

by Jan Noel, University of Toronto Press, 1995 Winner of the Canadian Historical Association’s Macdonald Prize for best monograph in Canadian History Purchase: https://www.amazon.ca/Canada-Dry-Temperance-Crusades-Confederation/dp/0802069762

Along a River: The First French Canadian Women

By Jan Noel University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division © 2013 Purchase: http://www.utppublishing.com/Along-a-River-The-First-French-Canadian-Women.html French-Canadian explorers, traders, and soldiers feature prominently in this country’s storytelling, but little has been written about their female counterparts. In Along a River, award-winning historian Jan Noel shines a light on the lives of remarkable French-Canadian women — immigrant brides, nuns,… Read More »

N’être plus la déléguée de personne : une réévaluation du rôle des femmes dans le commerce en Nouvelle-France

RÉSUMÉ: Les historiens ont eu tendance à réduire les femmes engagées dans le commerce en Nouvelle-France à une poignée de chefs d’entreprise autonomes opérant à grande échelle. La recherche a révélé que ces individus exceptionnels étaient flanqués d’un groupe un peu plus nombreux qui ne jouissait pas de la même indépendance, comptant des femmes déléguées… Read More »

“Fertile with Fine Talk”: Ungoverned Tongues Among Haudenosaunee Women and Their Neighbors

ABSTRACT: This article casts light on the gender of fur traders by tapping into new analysis of Albany and Canadian records from the colonial period. A surprising number of active, sometimes outspoken, female participants emerge. Exploring the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, the article discusses the unusual voice Haudenosaunee women had in governance. It then… Read More »

The Powerful Influence of Iroquois Women

ABSTRACT: One knowledgeable commentator was early 18th-century Jesuit missionary Joseph- François Lafitau, who lived for five years among the Haudenosaunee at the Kahnawahke mission near what is now Montreal. While the group at that time had more than a century of interchanges with Europeans, it still possessed many of its pre-contact attributes. Lafitau’s writing, a foundational… Read More »

Not Confined to the Village Clearings: Indian Women in the Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1695–1732

ABSTRACT: This article presents documentary evidence supporting a fundamental update of the masculine persona the fur trader carries in both the popular and the scholarly imagination. It demonstrates that, certainly in colonial New York, fur transactions were part of the norm for people of both sexes. Much of the ethnohistorical literature on intercultural economic exchanges… Read More »

Clash of the Britons: Was the War of 1812 a Civil War?

Interview of Jan Noel by Scott Anderson.   ABSTRACT: On June 18, 1812, the U.S. formally declared war against Great Britain. It was the first and only time our southern neighbour has taken up arms against Canada (or what would become Canada). Two hundred years later, Scott Anderson spoke to Jan Noel, a history prof… Read More »