For home and country? Engendering nationalism in the workplace

Abstract

Though geographers have taken seriously the ways in which representations of place, race, sexuality and gender are woven into narratives of nationalism through experiences of conflict, spaces of memorialization and the practice of ‘heritage’, less attention has been paid to the ways nationalism is constituted in and through day-to-day space and spatial practice in times of peace. This paper examines how nationalism is produced in and through the workplace. In particular, I focus on how narratives of nationalism were constituted within the early twentieth-century Canadian financial services sector. Through an analysis of archival materials from six Canadian financial institutions, I compare how narratives of nationalism were employed strategically by women and men in efforts to win employment in this sector after the First World War. I argue that the workplace constitutes and important site for the production and deployment of nationalist feeling, and suggest that nationalism has long been used strategically to reach multiple, sometimes competing, goals.

Keywords:

• gender
• nationalism
• identity in the workplace
• feminist geography
• Canada

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gill Valentine and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 Anonymous (1929) Bank of Montreal Staff Magazine 1(5): 6, Bank of Montreal Archives.

2 For more on nationalism and the fetishization of objects such as the flag, see McClintock (1995: 373–375) and Sharp (1996: 98).

3 For more on this see Domosh (1996: 53).

4 Symbolic references to conquest and domination, represented here through a narrative of colonialization, persist in the sexualized language of domination and penetration within contemporary financial workspaces. See McDowell (1997).

5 For more on this subject, see Johnson (1994) and Osborne (2001).

6 Personnel Files 1–3, Bank of Nova Scotia Archives. According to Company records, Backlet died 27 September 1918.

7 French Canadians constituted 28 per cent of the Canadian population at this time. (Bumsted 1993: 170). This seems to have differed from the case in Ireland described by Johnson (2003), in which special recruitment efforts were made to appeal to Irish myth and constructions of Irish identity in the First World War recruiting posters.

8 La Minerve: revue périodique de politique, histoire et littérature Canadienne, June 1918, No. 1.

9 Linteau (1992) notes that this was the case across all sectors of the Montreal economy.

10 For a first-hand account of war-time work in the financial services sector see Simons, W.K. (1961) I was a Sun Lifer fifty years ago, Sun Life Review, Apr.: 10, Sun Life Archives.

11 Staff Lists, Bank of Montreal Archives, Bank of Nova Scotia Archives.

12 Sun Life Archives, Item No. 2, Box 408.

13 Anonymous (1921) The Caduceus 2(9): 18–21, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Archives. Note: the Canadian Bank of Commerce was absorbed by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

14 Anonymous (1921) The Caduceus 2(9): 18. For a classic treatment of the romanticization of wilderness and anti-modernism in the turn of the century, see Lears (1981).

15 Anonymous (1921) The Caduceus 2(9): 19.

16 Anonymous (1921) The Caduceus 2(9): 21.

17 Duncan McDowall, for example, asserts in Quick to the Frontier (1993: 122) that women employees at the Royal Bank of Canada readily ‘abandon[ed] the banks for the altar’ after the war.

18 Personnel File #1–20, Bank of Nova Scotia Archives.