John Lorinc

Stephanie Chambers

Ed Jackson

Tim McCaskell

Tatum Taylor

Maureen Fitzgerald

Rebecca Sheffield

Jane Farrow

Rahim Thawer

Toronto is home to multiple and thriving queer communities that reflect the intense diversity of the city itself, and Any Other Way is an eclectic history of how these groups have transformed Toronto since the 1960s. From pioneering activists to show-stopping parades, Any Other Way looks at how queer communities have gone from existing in the shadows to shaping our streets.

How Toronto Got Queer

Any Other Way

The Irish-Catholic Sisters accomplished tremendously successful work in founding charitable organizations in New York City from the Irish famine through the early twentieth century. Maureen Fitzgerald argues that their championing of the rights of the poor--especially poor women--resulted in an explosion of state-supported services and programs. Parting from Protestant belief in meager and means-tested aid, Irish Catholic nuns argued for an approach based on compassion for the poor. Fitzgerald positions the nuns' activism as resistance to Protestantism's cultural hegemony. As she shows, Roman Catholic nuns offered strong and unequivocal moral leadership in condemning those who punished the poor for their poverty and unmarried women for sexual transgression. Fitzgerald also delves into the nuns' own communities, from the class-based hierarchies within the convents to the political power they wielded within the city. That power, amplified by an alliance with the local Irish Catholic political machine, allowed the women to expand public charities in the city on an unprecedented scale.

Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York's Welfare System, 1830-1920

Habits of Compassion

Maureen Fitzgerald

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