Dorothy E. Chunn

• Simon Fraser University

Synopsis This article draws on interviews with 29 Canadian women who decided between 1965 and 2010 to parent as sole mothers through adoption or childbirth. The authors examine participants' experience of stigma and social sanctions and explore how perceptions of stigma changed over time. Although the analysis largely reflects the experience of rel...

ChambersLori, Misconceptions: unmarried motherhood and the Ontario Children of Unmarried Parents Act, 1921–1969. (Toronto: The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History/University of Toronto Press, 2007.) Pages xi+258. £35.00. - Volume 23 Issue 2 - DOROTHY E. CHUNN

The image of “backlash” is pervasive in contemporary debates about the impact of second-wave feminism on law and policy. But does it really explain the resistance to feminist initiatives for social change in contemporary culture? In this timely volume, contributors from various disciplines analyze reaction and resistance to feminism in several area...

This commentary reflects back on an article that we published in the 1999 volume of this journal, which offered a number of observations about the condition of Canadian academic criminology at the turn of the new century. In this brief update, we consider some of the trends that have unfolded over the intervening six years, which have contributed t...

... Feminists have examined these issues in relation to the adjudication of criminal cases involving women accused (bat-tered woman syndrome - BWS; pre-menstrual syndrome - PMS) and women complainants/victims (rape trauma syn-drome - RTS) as well as cases in other areas of law such as sex discrimination and sexual harassment. ... However, the almos...

The dismantling and restructuring of Keynesian social security programmes have impacted disproportionately on women, especially lone parent mothers, and shifted public discourse and social images from welfare fraud to welfare as fraud, thereby linking poverty, welfare and crime. This article analyzes the current, inordinate focus on 'welfare cheats...

This paper examines how forensic clinicians, particularly psychiatrists, help maintain the “constructed normality” of capitalist, patriarchal relations in contemporary liberal democratic states. The specific focus is a comparison of decision-making about accused women and men at a Canadian pre-trial clinic. Using quantitative and qualitative data,...

In this paper we have undertaken what we regard as a preliminary critique of the concept of social control and its utility for a critical criminology in Canada. In tracing its emergence and historical development as a key concept in American sociology, we have illustrated that its ascendancy represented a victory for liberal sociology. The recent a...

In this paper we examine changes in the form and content of Canadian welfare law through a historical, feminist lens using the exemplar of mother-headed families. Our analysis of how the state dealt with sole support mothers in several provinces throughout the twentieth century reveals important continuities, as well as discontinuities, between the...