Some of the first doubts I began to have about my graduate-school training began to creep in at this point. How long could the profession keep expanding by simply adding more and more kinds of oppression? Surely, at some point, history would actually be fully inclusive. In fact, I was pretty sure that was already the case. By 2009, I published a book with an essay entitled After Inclusiveness, making this point. Fortunately, I had a tenure-track job by the time the book came out. Many in the profession privately admitted I was right, but almost no one would say so in print.

I do remember one conversation with a genial older historian who graciously offered to read my article on men and barbecuing. I was a young PhD student and doing work entirely different from his. I don’t know why he offered, but his comments are telling. He politely told me that the middle bits were good but he could “take or leave” the parts at either end. That is, he liked the actual research in the paper, where I reconstructed how people talked about men and cooking in postwar Canada. But the part where I wrapped it all up in the ideology expressed by the recent books I’d read, not so much.

At the time, I didn’t make any changes. How could I? That was the paradigm I was committed to. It was in the introduction and conclusion that I was really hitting the points I wanted to make—that gender was a social construction, that postwar Canadians were anxious about men living domesticated lives in suburbs and being involved as hands-on fathers, and so they used this silly example of men and barbecuing as a way of saying that men weren’t really going to be too involved in cooking, and that when they did so it would be funny, and that of course they were bad at it, and only did it because it was dangerous and reminded them of cavemen days. Here was power at work—admittedly, in a sort of funny way—shoring up differences between men and women.

To reiterate: The problem was, and is, that I was making it all up.