Before Official Multiculturalism: Women's Pluralism in Toronto, 1950s-1970s

by Franca Iacovetta

Overview

For almost two decades before Canada officially adopted multiculturalism in 1971, a large network of women and their allies in Toronto were promoting pluralism as a city- and nation-building project. Before Official Multiculturalism assesses women as liberal pluralist advocates and activists, critically examining the key roles they played as community organizers, frontline social workers, and promoters of ethnic festivals.

The book explores women’s community-based activism in support of a liberal pluralist vision of multiculturalism through an analysis of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, a postwar agency that sought to integrate newcomers into the mainstream and promote cultural diversity. Drawing on the rich records of the Institute, as well as the massive International Institutes collection in Minnesota, the book situates Toronto within its Canadian and North American contexts and addresses the flawed mandate to integrate immigrants and refugees into an increasingly diverse city. Before Official Multiculturalism engages with national and international debates to provide a critical analysis of women’s pluralism in Canada.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487545642
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	11/14/2022
Series:	Studies in Gender and History
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Franca Iacovetta is a professor emerita of history at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Part One: Introduction

1. The Case Study
2. The Scholarship

Part Two: Narrative, Subjectivities, and Affect in the Multicultural Social Welfare Encounter

3. Toronto Counsellors and International Institute Social Work Theory and Practice
4. Professionals, Narrative, and Gendered Middle-Class Subjectivities   
5. Marital Conflict, Emotions, and "De-culturalizing" Violence
6. Generational Conflict: Intimacy, Money, and "Mini-Skirt" Feminism

Part Three: Community-Building Experiments, Integration Projects, and Collective Belonging

7. Making Multicultural Community at the Institute
8. Community Projects for Rural Villagers: Health and Occupational Training  
9. Food as Charity, Community-Building, and Cosmopolitanism on a Budget

Part Four: Ethnic Folk Cultures and Modern Multicultural Mandates

10. Immigrant Gifts, Pluralist Spectacles, and Staging the Modern City and Nation
11. Handicrafts, High Art, and Human Rights: Cultural Guardianship and Internationalism

Conclusion
Appendices 
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Laura Madokoro

"This magnificent work makes it clear why Franca Iacovetta is one of the leading scholars of gender, labour and migration history in Canada. In a finely-tuned analysis, Iacovetta explores the double-edged nature of pluralism at the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto from 1956-1974. Before Official Multiculturalism offers critical insights that help us better understand the significance of ongoing contestations over culture, community, and belonging, in the present."

Rhonda L. Hinther

"Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study of Toronto's International Institute offers a much needed and explicitly gendered intervention into our understandings of mid-century migrant settlement efforts. Emphasizing women's engagement at and with the Institute, Iacovetta deftly untangles the potential and paradoxes of white settler-based liberal cultural pluralism and efforts at multiculturalism before it was made 'official' in Canada."

Joe Mihevc

"Iacovetta creatively uncovers the story of one organization led primarily by women, which serves as a prototype for how the era understood and developed the pluralism it was experiencing. The book has a celebratory tone even as it has a critical eye on the form and exclusions that women's pluralism of the period undertook. As such there is much to learn from this history for researchers and advocates working on diversity and inclusion issues in Toronto today."

Donna Gabaccia

"Fresh insights into Canada's fifty-year dialogue about multiculturalism abound in this history of Toronto's International Institute. Iacovetta embeds the Institute's immigrant social services and public celebrations of cultural pluralism in a history that highlights interclass, gender, and race relations within local dynamics that foreshadowed the strengths and weaknesses of federal policy."

Adele Perry

"Combining painstaking archival research with sharp analysis, Franca Iacovetta's Before Official Multiculturalism offers us an important account of English Canada's particular version of multiculturalism. Studying the work of women associated with Toronto's International Institute in the 1950s and 60s, Iacovetta's book offers us new ways of thinking about the possibilities, and perhaps more importantly, the enduring limitations of liberal, plural multiculturalism, both then and now."

Editorial Reviews

"Combining painstaking archival research with sharp analysis, Franca Iacovetta's Before Official Multiculturalism offers us an important account of English Canada's particular version of multiculturalism. Studying the work of women associated with Toronto's International Institute in the 1950s and 60s, Iacovetta's book offers us new ways of thinking about the possibilities, and perhaps more importantly, the enduring limitations of liberal, plural multiculturalism, both then and now."

Adele Perry

"Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study of Toronto's International Institute offers a much needed and explicitly gendered intervention into our understandings of mid-century migrant settlement efforts. Emphasizing women's engagement at and with the Institute, Iacovetta deftly untangles the potential and paradoxes of white settler-based liberal cultural pluralism and efforts at multiculturalism before it was made 'official' in Canada."

Rhonda L. Hinther

"Combining painstaking archival research with sharp analysis, Franca Iacovetta’s Before Official Multiculturalism offers us an important account of English Canada’s particular version of multiculturalism. Studying the work of women associated with Toronto’s International Institute in the 1950s and 60s, Iacovetta’s book offers us new ways of thinking about the possibilities, and perhaps more importantly, the enduring limitations of liberal, plural multiculturalism, both then and now."

—Adele Perry, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba

"Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study of Toronto’s International Institute offers a much needed and explicitly gendered intervention into our understandings of mid-century migrant settlement efforts. Emphasizing women's engagement at and with the Institute, Iacovetta deftly untangles the potential and paradoxes of white settler-based liberal cultural pluralism and efforts at multiculturalism before it was made ‘official’ in Canada."

—Rhonda L. Hinther, Professor of History, Brandon University

"This magnificent work makes it clear why Franca Iacovetta is one of the leading scholars of gender, labour and migration history in Canada. In a finely-tuned analysis, Iacovetta explores the double-edged nature of pluralism at the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto from 1956-1974. Before Official Multiculturalism offers critical insights that help us better understand the significance of ongoing contestations over culture, community, and belonging, in the present."

—Laura Madokoro, Associate Professor of History, Carleton University

"Fresh insights into Canada's fifty-year dialogue about multiculturalism abound in this history of Toronto's International Institute. Iacovetta embeds the Institute’s immigrant social services and public celebrations of cultural pluralism in a history that highlights interclass, gender, and race relations within local dynamics that foreshadowed the strengths and weaknesses of federal policy."

—Donna Gabaccia, Professor Emerita of History, University of Toronto

"Iacovetta creatively uncovers the story of one organization led primarily by women, which serves as a prototype for how the era understood and developed the pluralism it was experiencing. The book has a celebratory tone even as it has a critical eye on the form and exclusions that women’s pluralism of the period undertook. As such there is much to learn from this history for researchers and advocates working on diversity and inclusion issues in Toronto today."

—Joe Mihevc, Adjunct Professor, York University, and former Toronto City Councillor

From the Publisher

"This magnificent work makes it clear why Franca Iacovetta is one of the leading scholars of gender, labour and migration history in Canada. In a finely-tuned analysis, Iacovetta explores the double-edged nature of pluralism at the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto from 1956-1974. Before Official Multiculturalism offers critical insights that help us better understand the significance of ongoing contestations over culture, community, and belonging, in the present."

Laura Madokoro