Experience and discover the history of Ottawa during the first half of the 20th century through the scrapbooks of the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa.
Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa, 1950. Source: Historical Society of Ottawa
Between its foundation in 1898 and 1955, the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa regrouped women who dedicated themselves to preserving, producing and sharing historical knowledge about the city and valley of Ottawa. Among their many activities, they produced scrapbooks that preserved, to this day, a wealth of archival documents, primarily newspaper clippings.
To valorize and learn more about these women's work, a partnership between the Historical Society of Ottawa and the Fall 2024 class of the HIS4135 Canadian Digital History course taught by Prof. Sarah Templier at the University of Ottawa was struck.
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The goals of the collaboration between the HSO and the HIS4135 Canadian Digital History Course were to valorize the HSO's archival collection and to contribute to the HSO's mission of producing and sharing knowledge about the history of Ottawa.
To that end, the class first selected five scrapbooks to work with, and five teams of three students then undertook a research project about the history of Ottawa through the lens of these five scrapbooks. In their webpages, you will find a lot of scans of newsclipping and images from these scrapbooks.
How were women of the Historical Society of Ottawa collecting and preserving the history of Canada through their scrapbooking practices? What interested them, and what did they deem worthy of clipping, collecting, collaging and conserving for posterity?
These questions inspired students and initiated their research project using the five scrapbooks from the HSO collection preserved at the City of Ottawa Archives as their core primary sources.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, two out of five projects specifically concentrated on women's history. Turns out, the women of the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa were interested in... women! While one team of students explored the pioneering role of women in sports, another worked on the place and role women occupied in the public sphere, namely in religious, political and educational sectors, as well as the emergence and growth of women's clubs.
Women of society also had a vested interest in documenting the lives of prominent People of Ottawa, and one team focused on this tendency. On the one hand, it reflects a tradition of telling history through great men. On the other hand, it also mirrors their social standing, as these women and their families were part of the Ottawan political, social, economic and cultural elite. Speaking of culture, another student team highlights these women's interest and participation in the Arts & Culture of Ottawa, as their scrapbooks cover extensively the city's cultural life.
Finally, during the years of activities of the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa, Canada and Ottawans lived through two Word Wars. The experience of the wars and its memory thus also transpire through the scrapbook clippings, a thread of Ottawan and Canadian military history that another student team followed through.
Together, these projects aim to provide a sense of the archival practices of the women of the Women's Canadian Historical Society of Ottawa and what they judged essential to clip, collect, collage and conserve.
Please review the References page for all the literature the students used to contextualize their project and their analysis of the scrapbooks.