Before Official Multiculturalism

Renowned author Franca Iacovetta provides a new perspective on multiculturalism by examining the hopes and challenges of women activists associated with the Toronto International Institute.

Franca Iacovetta is a professor emerita of history at the University of Toronto.

"Iacovetta creatively uncovers the story of one organization led primarily by women, which serves as a prototype for how the era understood and developed the pluralism it was experiencing. The book has a celebratory tone even as it has a critical eye on the form and exclusions that women’s pluralism of the period undertook. As such there is much to learn from this history for researchers and advocates working on diversity and inclusion issues in Toronto today."

Donna Gabaccia, Professor Emerita of History, University of Toronto:

"Fresh insights into Canada's fifty-year dialogue about multiculturalism abound in this history of Toronto's International Institute. Iacovetta embeds the Institute’s immigrant social services and public celebrations of cultural pluralism in a history that highlights interclass, gender, and race relations within local dynamics that foreshadowed the strengths and weaknesses of federal policy."

Laura Madokoro, Associate Professor of History, Carleton University:

"This magnificent work makes it clear why Franca Iacovetta is one of the leading scholars of gender, labour and migration history in Canada. In a finely-tuned analysis, Iacovetta explores the double-edged nature of pluralism at the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto from 1956-1974. Before Official Multiculturalism offers critical insights that help us better understand the significance of ongoing contestations over culture, community, and belonging, in the present."

Rhonda L. Hinther, Professor of History, Brandon University:

"Meticulously researched and accessibly written, this study of Toronto’s International Institute offers a much needed and explicitly gendered intervention into our understandings of mid-century migrant settlement efforts. Emphasizing women's engagement at and with the Institute, Iacovetta deftly untangles the potential and paradoxes of white settler-based liberal cultural pluralism and efforts at multiculturalism before it was made ‘official’ in Canada."

Adele Perry, Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies and Director of the Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba:

"Combining painstaking archival research with sharp analysis, Franca Iacovetta’s Before Official Multiculturalism offers us an important account of English Canada’s particular version of multiculturalism. Studying the work of women associated with Toronto’s International Institute in the 1950s and 60s, Iacovetta’s book offers us new ways of thinking about the possibilities, and perhaps more importantly, the enduring limitations of liberal, plural multiculturalism, both then and now."