“That space is still very special to me”: Religion, space, and embodiment in Canadian Protestant girls’ groups, 1950 to 1989

Abstract

This dissertation explores the lived experience of Canadian women within four Protestant girls’ groups from the 1950s to the 1980s. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, four organisations—Canadian Girls in Training (CGIT), Girls’ Auxiliary, Calvinettes and Pioneer Girls—ran weekly after-school clubs for girls, teaching not only religion, but also cultural and social gendered expectations. While these organisations promoted official church-sanctioned goals, what girls experienced depended largely on the individual women who volunteered as leaders in their local clubs. Based on the oral history testimony of forty women as well as extensive personal and public archives, this dissertation explores the experiences of mainly rural girls and women who actively participated in their religious communities despite rising secularisation.

Using space, embodiment and the history of emotions as my theoretical framework, I argue that these girls’ groups were prominent, religious, gendered, vulnerable and relational spaces. Girls and women did not just experience these varying and often overlapping spaces, they actively participated in shaping and reshaping them to fit their individual and collective needs. Hundreds of thousands of Canadian girls and women embodied these spaces, creating an influence that radiated beyond their immediate selves and into twentieth century Canadian girlhood.