The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 - Paperback

by Sarah Carter (Author)

Sarah Carter provides a detailed description of marriage as a diverse social institution in nineteenth-century Western Canada, and the subsequent ascendancy of Christian, lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous marriage as an instrument to implement dominant British-Canadian values. It took work to impose the monogamous model of marriage as the region was home to a varied population of Aboriginal people and newcomers such as the Mormons, each of whom had their own definitions of marriage, including polygamy and flexible attitudes toward divorce. The work concludes with an explanation of the negative social consequences for women, particularly Aboriginal women, that arose as a result of the imposition of monogamous marriage. "Of an immense amount of new and pathbreaking research on Native people over the past 20 years, this work stands out." -Sidney L. Harring, Professor of Law at City University of New York and author of White Man's Law: Native People in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Jurisprudence

Author Biography

Sarah Carter, FRSC, is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics and in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a specialist in the history of Western Canada and is the author of Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Capturing Women, and Lost Harvests. From Saskatoon, she studied Canadian history at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Manitoba. In 2020, she was awarded the Killam Prize in the Humanities.