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MENNONITE WOMEN IN CANADA: A HISTORY Marlene Epp Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008
REVIEWEDBY DEBORAH MCPHAIL
Mennonite Women in Canada is an expansive history of Mennonite women, describing their daily lives, struggles, and resistances from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. While Epp's historical text, based largely upon interviews with Mennonite women and their diaries and letters, does much to "burn off the low-lying, lingering fog of historical neglect" of Mennonite women, the book also adds to the fields of gender history and feminist political economy. Through historical example, Mennonite Women in Canada provides a concrete account of how normative gender roles were re-established through discursive and material separations of public and private spheres, and how these constrictive gender roles were also complicated by Mennonite women whose lives, labours, and loves pushed at the boundaries between unpaid and paid, private and public labour.
The women Epp describes in her text are as confined by patriarchal edicts and norms as they are tenaciously working within gendered limitations to carve out their lives and liberties. While Mennonite women may have been fenced in by their religion and culture, or by Canadian patriarchy more generally, they also worked hard to become self-actualized individuals - often, though certainly not always, within their prescribed roles as...