Now, she notes, the project has widened in scope to include the tensions men faced while resisting the draft in the US. These men, she says, faced criticism on a number of fronts, “both by the conservative right who saw draft resistance as unpatriotic and cowardly even treasonous. But also from the left, because the many activists on the left felt that draft resistance in the form of moving to Canada was also cowardly—that the most courageous, radical, brave thing you could do was to stay in the United States and fight and go to jail if need be: ‘risk everything for your beliefs.’” This was a criticism targeted particularly at men’s masculinity, calling into question, men’s “courage, their manliness, their cowardice.”

In assessing how men negotiated that criticism, Campbell notes that while existing histories state that men felt supported and accepted by Canadian society in the late 60s, there is evidence to suggest Canadians were also somewhat “ambivalent” about the Vietnam War: “They don’t necessarily support the Vietnam War but they’re reluctant to support wholesale immigration of draft dodgers to Canada.” Added to these tensions are media representations on both the Canadian right and left: on the one side, a right-wing concern that Canadians shouldn’t accept draft dodgers because they are “unpatriotic,” and “Canada shouldn’t take [them] in because serving your country in a time of war, for a man, is the best way to show your commitment to the country.” And on the other hand, in the 70s, Campbell has found there is also evidence of a Canadian nationalism from the left, characterized by anti-American sentiment and anxiety over American influence.

Also out this year is Gender History: Canadian Perspectives, a comprehensive textbook Campbell has co-authored with Dr. Willeen Keough, SFU’s Chair of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. After an editor at Oxford University Press approached Keough about creating a textbook which focuses wholly on gender history in a Canadian context from the 1500s up to present day, she asked Campbell to co-author, in light of the project’s massive scope. Campbell explains that they wanted the book to be comprehensive chronologically but also to cover much thematic ground: “We made the first half chronological and the second half thematic so that you can see in the chronological sections, with the change of gender norms and ideas over time very clearly. But then the second section pulls out themes that we’ve found students to be quite interested in—like sexuality or the body and then explore that one theme over the course of several centuries, so you have almost six case studies of a particular theme.”

Gender History takes on perspectives not only in women’s history, but also the history of how masculinity has been defined in Canada over time. Campbell explains that she and Keough wanted to historicize “current debates over challenging the gender binary,” and also “look at the ways gender intersects with race, class, religion and those things.” Thus the book “puts gender as a concept at the centre,” but positions gender as unstable through time, articulating “throughout the book that there isn’t one story about gender throughout Canadian history, the definitions change.”