Theoretical Framework: Intersectional Positionality

Although this study does not attempt to provide a complete representation and analysis of woman’s roles, spheres, or identities in Upper Canadian society, I have employed a theoretical framework that informs my interpretations of women’s lives, actions, and choices. The framework is based on two complementary feminist concepts drawn from women’s and gender studies: positionality and intersectionality. As defined by Linda Alcoff, positionality has two unique characteristics: first, “the concept of woman is a relational term identifiable only within a (constantly moving) context”; and second, “the position that women find themselves in can be actively utilized (rather than transcended) as a location for the construction of meaning […] rather than simply the place where a meaning can be discovered.”³⁵ Mindful of these two characteristics, I analyze women’s actions and responses to events with consideration of how specific contexts reshaped the construct of “woman” and its accompanying roles and positions. I also consider how women perceived the positions in which the war placed them and how they actively constructed their own meanings and positions within those contexts.

Intersectionality is employed in this study by assessing the positionality of women with attention to the “multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.” Kimberlé Crenshaw’s early work on intersectionality explored “the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of color.”³⁶ Crenshaw’s theory has been employed by many scholars studying the intersection of different factors in women’s lives, including Cynthia Levine-Rasky, whose study of whiteness and middle-classness used “intersectionality theory for its expansiveness and potential to accommodate complexity.”³⁷ Women of different communities who lived through the War of 1812 in Upper Canada contended with numerous intersecting forces that shaped their access to economic, legal, and social spaces. The physical landscape of the province was a contested space, formerly possessed and inhabited by native peoples who suffered displacement through violence and exploitation. By the 1810s, native villages were limited in number and native people were quickly becoming outnumbered by white settlers. Although the native inhabitants suffered losses during the war, they were unable to apply for compensation from the British government. Native women’s position within Upper Canada has been actively obscured for centuries, as evident in their absence in the primary sources examined in this study.

Similarly, black women are underrepresented in the records of the BCL in part because the black population of Upper Canada was relatively small in the first decades of the nineteenth century. They are also less visible in the record because the process of making claims was less accessible to inhabitants who occupied marginalized positions within Upper Canadian society. Although they were technically equal subjects of the Crown, black men and women still faced prejudice from the white men who controlled the processes and means to exercise their rights. Module 4 explores the ways in which the claims process was experienced by white and black men and women.

Because white women make up the largest proportion of claimants studied, their position within Upper Canadian society receives the greatest attention in this work. White women did not have to consider or contend with discrimination based on race but were subject to restrictions and limitations resulting from their gender. In particular, the common-law doctrine of coverture often excluded married women from property ownership or legal representation, which means they are underrepresented in the claim records compared to widowed women. Female claimants also experienced the war differently depending on their level of access to resources and social connections. Throughout this study, I approach the evidence of women’s lives and actions with consideration of how their social, economic, and legal positions shaped their identities, provided or limited access to resources, and prescribed or prohibited certain roles. I also consider how women perceived and constructed their own positions in ways that aligned with or challenged definitions of their positions crafted by others.³⁸