Lara Wellman
Women’s historical experiences with the law, sexual harassment of working women, racial discrimination in Canadian legal history — these are all topics that have helped make Constance Backhouse, Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair in the Faculty of Law, an internationally recognized voice in the areas of feminist research, sexual discrimination, and the legal history of gender and race in Canada.
Backhouse’s research has also won her numerous awards and prizes over the years, with this past year being no exception. She is the recipient of the 2005-2006 Jules and Gabrielle Léger Fellowship, an award that promotes research and writing on the role, function and historical contributions of the Crown and its representatives in Canada. In May, she was awarded a $225,000 Trudeau Foundation Fellow prize for her outstanding contributions to the social sciences and humanities in Canada and around the world. As well, she is the 2006 Researcher of the Year at the University of Ottawa.
With the recognition from these awards and for her research, Backhouse feels hopeful that other researchers will increasingly turn their energies to these fields. “In my earlier years, research on gender and race discrimination was viewed as ‘fringe’ research, and slightly dubious research at that,” says Backhouse. “Feminist and anti-racist research is no longer marked ‘marginal’ and that makes me very excited and proud.”
Backhouse began her career in the late 1970s when Canadian legal history was still in its infancy. She was the first scholar to specialize in Canadian women’s legal history and wrote the first Canadian book to give a comprehensive description of women’s historical experience in law (Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada). She also wrote
Secret Oppression: Sexual Harassment of Working Women, the first book in Canada about sexual harassment.
Backhouse has spent the last thirty years involved in efforts to improve the law against sexual assault — to try and make the law more sensitive to the realities of women and children who have experienced sexual abuse.
With a certainty that more changes remain to be made, Backhouse is currently in France on a research leave finishing a book on sexual assault trials in Canada between 1900 and 1975. She is profiling a series of trials across the country that illustrates the unfairness of the legal response, and the biases against women, communities divided by race, persons with disabilities and the working classes.
“The trials I am writing about are fascinating,” says Backhouse. “The women were incredibly brave to face such unsympathetic courtrooms, and I find myself continually inspired by their courage.”
As this year’s researcher of the year recipient, Constance Backhouse will deliver a special lecture on October 5, 2006.
