Your search

The article reviews the book, "Rebellious Families: Household Strategies and Collective Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," edited by Jan Kok.

The article reviews the book, "Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada," by Peter Baskerville and Eric W. Sager.

The article reviews the book, "How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working Class Meals at the Turn of the Century," by Katherine Leonard Turner.

To understand the family economy of the working class in the period of early industrial capitalism it is necessary to go beyond a simple consideration of the sufficiency of wages, to put aside the equation of work with wage labour and to examine other ways in which survival could be enhanced. This paper begins an examination of non-wage-based survival strategies. It focuses on animal raising, gardening, the taking in of boarders and house sharing in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Montreal. These particular survival strategies can be ascertained to some extent from people's responses to the census taker. Analysis of their responses as found in the manuscript schedules of 1861 and 1871 constitutes the core of the paper. Professionals and proprietors were most likely to keep cows, the semi- and unskilled pigs. Pigs were outlawed in this period, while cows remained legal. Gardening, too, was largely eliminated on the narrow, densely built lots of the working class. The outlawing of pigs represents one of a complex of changes that, over the length of a generation, severely curtailed the proletariat's access to means of supplementing their wages and altered the contributions a wife and children could make to the family economy.

This article reviews the book, "Never Done: A History of American Housework," by Susan Strasser.

Working Families takes the reader onto the streets of Montreal and into the homes of its working-class families during the years that it became a major, industrial city. Between the 1860s and 1890s the expansion of wage labour changed the bases of family survival. It offered new possibilities and created new points of tension within the families of the emerging working class. Here we meet the men, youth, and children who worked for wages. We see the women who stayed home with their young, cooked and sewed, planted gardens and tended animals, stretching their often meagre family wages into goods and services for survival. We also see the ingenuity and agony of women whose husbands lost their jobs, fell ill, drank up their wages, deserted their families, or died. Working Families explores the complex variety of responses of working-class families to their new lives within industrial capitalist society, and offers new ways of looking at the industrial revolution in Canada. --Publisher's description

The poor and destitute have traditionally been ther esponsibility of municipalities in Canada.This responsibility became ananachronism with the mass industrial unemployment of the 1930's. Lacking the resources to provide relief alone, municipalities became dependent on help from the senior governments. Annual Relief Acts of the dominion government gave assistance, but stressed always municipal and provincial responsibility for relief. For the municipalities each new Act demanded both administrative and financial changes which had to be complied with in order to receive the badly needed help. Of all the three levels of government the municipalities bore the brunt of the unemployment problem of the 1930's. Local councils were in daily contact with the unemployed and their plight. Responsibility rested with them. Yet their inflexible and diminishing revenues did not allow them to take the initiative in solving the problem of unemployment. In British Columbia the problems of transients and of Vancouver City have absorbed most attention. Unknown or ignored is the impact of the depression years on the surrounding suburbs. In 1930 Vancouver's bedroom suburbs were Burnaby, North Vancouver City, North Vancouver District and West Vancouver. In the winter of 1932 to 1933, in the depth of the depression, the first three defaulted on bond payments and were taken over by a provincially appointed commissioner. West Vancouver in contrast retained solvency and hence local responsibility and control. The Dominion Acts were not designed to counteract the disparities between provinces and municipalities either in the incidence of unemployment or in their ability to cope with it. Burnaby, North Vancouver City and North Vancouver District were predominantly working class suburbs, many of whose residents and taxpayers lost their jobs. West Vancouver, by contrast, was a consciously middle class, residential suburb whose residents were much less susceptible to unemployment. As suburbs, unlike a city, have no major industries to compensate for non-payment of taxes by their residents, this basic occupational difference led to bankruptcy in Burnaby and North Vancouver City and District. The history of the attempts of these suburban councils to provide relief for the growing numbers of unemployed between 1929 and 1933 not only contrasts the difficulties of providing relief in working class and middle class suburbs, but also illustrates the problems that arose from insistence on municipal responsibility for relief. Daily contact with the growing numbers of unemployed and the obvious inadequacy of municipal and even provincial revenues convinced municipal officials in British Columbia that the dominion government should take control and assume responsibility for unemployment relief.They were not merely 'passing the buck'. The worldwide nature of the depression supported their contention that unemployment was not a local problem with a local solution. Neither the provincial nor dominion governments would accept primary responsibility for relief. Only in the municipalities which wentbankrupt was a senior government forced to assume responsibility and take control.

The article reviews the book, "L'histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles," by Le Collectif Cleo.

The article reviews the book, "Urban Domestic Servants in 19th-Century Canada/Les Domestiques En Milieu Urbain Canadien au XIXe Siècle," by Claudette Lacelle.

This paper seeks to examine the extent to which the writing of the history of both women and of the Canadian working class has converged over the last ten years, to suggest other ways in which integration of the two could be sought, and also to suggest some basic conflicts between the paradigms of each which point to areas where integration seems unlikely. It argues that if the goal of writing a history of the totality of the working class is a shared one, areas of intersection between the two fields must be consciously sought out. New ways of integrating the history of women and of the working class must be sought. For a start, this requires a reconceptualization of the way we define the working class and work, examination of the processes of class reproduction, and acknowledgement of the importance of examining how gender definitions are transmitted, shaped and reshaped.

This article reviews the book, "Women, Work and Family," by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott.

The article reviews the book, "Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940," edited by Jane Lewis.

The family economy of the working class in the period of early industrial capitalism is examined in this thesis. Changes in the involvement of family members in wage labour, in education, in non-wage and domestic labour at home as well as in patterns of marriage, childbearing and residential arrangements are assessed. Analysis is based on data collected from the manuscript censuses for two working class Montreal wards, Ste. Anne and St. Jacques between 1861 and 1881. This is complemented by information from other contemporary quantitative and descriptive sources. The roles of fathers, children and mothers are examined in separate chapters for age and gender combined with class position to determine people's roles in the family and in the wider economy. Within the working class, the level and regularity of men's wages set the contours of the family economy conditioning the need for and the nature of other survival strategies. Differences of around 25 cents a day translated over a year into the possibility of divergent standards of living, roughly dividing the working class into separate, identifiable fractions. Each favoured particular survival strategies and exhibited different patterns of family labour commitment, marriage, reproduction and residence. Over this period the contours of working class youth were reshaped. Growing numbers of children aged six to twelve attended school. An increasing proportion of older children were drawn into wage labour. Boys were more likely to work for wages than girls. Girls worked in a narrower range of jobs and for a shorter span of their lives. On marriage most ceased wage earning. With whatever money others earned, they tried to ensure that the family's wage labourers faced each day sufficiently fed, clothed and rested to work. And, in abysmal living conditions they produced and socialized the next generation of workers. Occasionally seeking wage labour themselves, raising animals or gardens, or sharing their homes helped some women to come closer to balancing family budgets. Working class women remained, however, both economically and legally dependent on their husbands. This dependence was highlighted in the problems that widows faced when they tried to raise and feed a fatherless family.

Distinctions of gender and age were reinforced in the period of early industrial capitalism in Montreal as more and more children were drawn into wage labour. Working-class males sought work for wages for most of their lives. For women such work was transitory, undertaken as girls, seldom as wives, but required if their husband died or deserted them. Domestic labour was the usual task of both girls and women within the family economy. Gender-based wage differentials made it practical for families to send sons rather than daughters into the workforce, hardening the identification of the home as women's place. The female's economic dependence on a male and his wages was highlighted in the plight of the widow.

Pays tribute to the life and work of social historian Marta Danylewycz (reprint of the letter published in La Presse, Friday, March 29, 1985, that was signed by Denyse Baillargeon, Bettina Bradbury, Joanne Burgess, and eight others); industrial relations' professor Léo Roback, by Bernard Brody; and US labour historian Herbert G. Gutman, by John T. O'Brien (1st article), and Leon Fink and Susan Levine (2nd article). Also includes a list of Gutman's major publications. A photo accompanies each obituary.

The experiences of working women are explored in Women, Work, and Place. Tied together by the conceptual theme "place matters," the essays emphasize the social, cultural, economic, historical, and geographical contexts in which women work, and the effect of specific conditions on women's experiences. Topics include the transformation of the work force in nineteenth-century Montreal (Bettina Bradbury), feminization of skill in the British garment industry (Allison Kaye), the relationship between work and family for Japanese immigrant women in Canada (Audrey Kobayashi), experiences of women during a labour dispute in Ontario (Joy Parr), contemporary restructuring of the labour force in the United States (Susan Christopherson) and in an urban context in Montreal (Damaris Rose and Paul Villeneuve), the effect of gentrification on women's work roles (Liz Bondi), inequality in the work force (Sylvia Gold), and theoretical issues involved in understanding women in the contemporary city (Linda Peake). An introductory essay provides a review of current issues. --Publisher's description