In the early 1970s, when women’s history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume. Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women’s lives, and men’s.

These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women’s studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women’s history.

Franca Iacovetta is professor emerita of history at the University of Toronto, and a past president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. A historian of women/gender, migration, and transnational radicals, she has published eleven books, including Before Official Multiculturalism: Women’s Pluralism in Toronto, 1950s-1970s. Award-winning books include Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada and the co-edited Beyond Women’s Words. She lives in Toronto.

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MARIANA VALVERDE is a Professor at University of Toronto Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal society of Canada. Her fields of study are the legal regulation of sexuality, sociolegal theory, historical sociology, and urban governance and law. She has written eight books, co-edited four anthologies and over 45 articles. In 2016 she received the Kalven prize of the Law and Society Association, for her longstanding contribution to empirical socio-legal scholarship. In addition to scholarly publishing, Mariana also writes for magazines, newspapers, and online forums, mostly on public-private infrastructure partnerships but occasionally on other topics; she has been published in The Conversation and Spacing Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

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