This book is the winner of the 2002 Canadian Association of Foundations in Education Book Award. "Framing Our Past" is about women's lived experience. Drawing from diaries, oral history, letters, organizational records, paintings, quilts, dressmaking patterns, milliners' records, and posters, the contributors offer fresh interpretations of this historical material and unique insights into the lives of individual Canadian women who expanded the boundaries of traditional roles. Lavishly illustrated, "Framing Our Past" looks at women and their social rituals with other women, organized sporting clubs, philanthropic, spiritual and aesthetic activities, study and reading groups. The authors explore women's roles as nurturers and keepers of the hearth and in family management, child care, and health care. They highlight women's work in areas as diverse as domestic labour, nursing, dressmaking, broadcasting, and banking as well as women's contributions to education and their instrumental political role in consumer activism, social work, and peace movements.