-Written by a renowned and award-winning scholar of Canadian women’s history
-Explores the hierarchies of gender, race, and class relations that shaped life at the Toronto International Institute and its community projects and cultural programs
-Draws on institutional records to explore themes related to women and multiculturalism
-Probes the fundamental tensions within liberalism between democratic ideals of influence and power

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

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"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."

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

"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."

- Rhonda L. Hinther, Professor of History, Brandon 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."

- Laura Madokoro, Associate Professor of History, Carleton University

"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."

- Donna Gabaccia, Professor Emerita of History, 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."

- Joe Mihevc, Adjunct Professor, York University, and former Toronto City Councillor