Class, Gender, and the Social Standard: The Montreal Junior League, 1912-1939

The author examines how Montreal's Anglophone upper class women constructed, managed and maintained their identity and, by extension, their social position in the early decades of the twentieth century by recasting 'coming out' as a debutante into training in intelligent philanthropy and civic responsibility. Using the Montreal Junior League as a case study the author argues that, though run by and for women, Junior Leagues functioned primarily as a means to confer social status and affirm class privilege. In contrast to their middle-class feminist contemporaries, Junior Leaguers' sense of their own legitimacy as actors on the public stage derived from their social position as elites, not on their maternal authority as women. By focusing on social status as an identity category, the author concludes that historians need to take more care to treat gender as a primary category of analysis, not the primary category of analysis.

The Canadian Historical Review

Vol. 90

no. 4

671-710

December 2009

en