"The Right Kind of Children": Childhood, Gender and "Race" in Canadian Postwar Political Discourse

Authors

  • Jane Helleiner Brock University

Abstract

Located within newer anthropological writing on the cultural politics of childhood that is in part inspired by feminist work, this paper explores constructions of childhood in the parliamentary discourse of the immediate postwar period in Canada. Political debates from this period are located within a postwar political economy marked by an expanding welfare state, Cold war dynamics, and shifting understandings of both "race" and childhood itself. Federal parliamentary debates provide the material for an examination of how discourses of universalized as well as gendered and racialized childhoods emerged and were deployed in the project of nation-building.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Downloads

Published

2022-06-14

How to Cite

Helleiner, J. (2022). "The Right Kind of Children": Childhood, Gender and "Race" in Canadian Postwar Political Discourse. Anthropologica, 43(2), 143–152. Retrieved from https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/2203

Issue

Vol. 43 No. 2 (2001): Anthropology, Feminism and Childhood Studies

Section

Thematic Section:

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.