Gender, Ethnicity, and Class

Equality — racial, sexual, religious, and social — is a fairly recent ideal in the western world, and is still far from being worldwide. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada and the United States are both multicultural societies with laws against gender and ethnic discrimination. This chapter shows the types of discrimination tend to overlap. The Loyalists expressed no noble sentiments about equality and openly tried to duplicate British class society. This attitude was sustained by impoverished upper-class British, who emigrated after the Napoleonic Wars, preferring to relocate in the Empire rather than move to the United States. Individual attitudes toward gender, ethnicity, or class differences tend to merge. In spite of several reform movements shared by the United States and Canada with Western Europe, there were distinct differences between the two nations in attitudes toward gender, ethnicity and class.