Sharon Anne Cook – författare

Using an extensive array of primary sources, including local WCTU minute books and correspondence, Cook describes the origins, structures, strategies, and achievements of the Ontario WCTU in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She discusses the importance of its positions on such issues as Social Purity, women''s franchise, the appropriate role of single women, working women''s rights, the treatment of female offenders, and the effect of the WCTU''s youth work. Cook traces the empowerment of women in the WCTU to the union''s evangelical roots, arguing that the views of the Ontario WCTU were grounded in a vision of society that based the development of a moral society on the family unit and its moral centre, the mother.

With introductory essays by historians, Framing Our Past emphasizes the lived experiences of women: their participation in many areas of social life, such as social rituals with other women; organized sporting clubs; philanthropic, spiritual and aesthetic activities; study and reading groups. The authors then focus on women''s roles as nurturers and keepers of the hearth B their experiences with family management, child care, and health concerns. They consider women''s varied contributions within formal and informal educational systems as well as their instrumental political role in consumer activism, social work, peace movements, and royal commissions. Canadian women''s shaping of health care and science through nursing, physiotherapy and research are discussed, as is women''s work, from domestic labour to dressmaking to broadcasting to banking. Using diary accounts, oral history, letters, organizational records, paintings, quilts, dressmaking patterns, milliners'' records, posters, Framing our Past offers a unique opportunity to share what is rarely if ever seen, offering insights into the preservation and interpretation of historical sources.

Despite well documented health risks, young women are still drawn to the act of smoking and continue to smoke at an alarming rate. A century ago, women were vocal leaders of campaigns against tobacco across North America. In Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes, Sharon Anne Cook explores the history of the paradoxical relationship between women and the cigarette, in a sensitive and lively description of the many different meanings that smoking has held for women. Focusing on the social context of smoking, Cook explores its allure for elite, middle-class, working, and marginalized women from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. She argues that smoking''s attraction is rooted in women''s changing identity formation and in strategies for empowerment, an idea enriched through extensive analysis of visual culture. It is in these images (yearbooks, posters, photographic collages, print advertisements, billboards, movies) but also in the act of smoking itself, that women harnessed the power of the visual. Smoking remains a powerful way for women to express themselves and is closely connected to the processes of modernity, sexualization, and commodification of desire. Textual documents (newspapers, magazine features, textbooks, teachers'' guides) and oral testimony are also explored to show how dominant discourses of smoking, sexuality, and health have shaped women''s experiences and how women have moulded these discourses themselves. The first comprehensive study of women and smoking in Canada, Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes creates a rich portrait of the cultural factors that have resulted in over a century of women smokers.

A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BEST BOOKS OF 2022A former United Church minister massacres his family. What led to this act of femicide, and why were his victims forgotten?On May 2, 1963, Robert Killins, a former United Church minister, slaughtered every woman in his family but one. She (and her brother) lived to tell the story of what motivated a talented man who had been widely admired, a scholar and graduate from Queen’s University, to stalk and terrorize the women in his family for almost twenty years and then murder them.Through extensive oral histories, Cook and Carson painstakingly trace the causes of a femicide in which four women and two unborn babies were murdered over the course of one bloody evening. While they situate this murderous rampage in the literature on domestic abuse and mass murders, they also explore how the two traumatized child survivors found their way back to health and happiness. Told through vivid first-person accounts, this family memoir explores how a murderer was created.