Labour, Demography, Economy, and the like

This one is reasonably coherent, I hope. Next week will be particularly interesting: I'm down to the last few books for this particular field, so my paper will somehow draw together the War of 1812, the memorialization of the First World War, Chinese-Canadian education, counterculture, and donuts. 

I had best get to bed before the cat wakes up.

Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners

Baillargeon, Making Do

Olson and Thornton, Peopling the North American City

This week’s three studies present approaches to demographic and economic history that are innovative, or were at the time of original publication. Joy Parr’s study considers the gendered dimensions of labour in two Ontario towns in the early twentieth century; Denyse Baillageon analyzes Montreal women’s labour inside and outside the home during the Great Depression; and Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton offer a comprehensive analysis of Montreal’s demographic transition in the mid to late nineteenth century. All three studies show the complex interactions of culture, demography, and economics, and illustrate how these factors are linked to issues of class, religion, language, and gender.

In The Gender of Breadwinners, Parr analyzes the social and economic changes that occurred alongside industrialization through two parallel local histories. Paris, Ontario, was dominated by a knitting mill with a largely female workforce. Hanover, Ontario, had a more typically male workforce in its furniture industry. Using perspectives from feminist and poststructuralist theory, Parr sets out to go beyond Marxian analyses and show the dual interactions of patriarchy and capitalism (7). While she offers only limited discussion of these theories through the body of her analysis, Parr handily demonstrates that pairings such as class/gender and public/private are “multiple and mutable,” showing a need to question such categories and consider how they construct meaning (9); this sort of deconstruction was uncommon among feminist historians in 1990, when her work was released. Parr’s work consists of two parts, analyzing Paris, then Hanover. Offering up the more atypical discussion of the “women’s town” first, followed by the more traditional workforce in Hanover, is an unusual decision; the exceptionality of Paris meant that many of Parr’s most intriguing points become clear in the first half of her work. Integrating the two analyses, or building a narrative by discussing Hanover first, may add to the appeal of her work.

In each section, Parr considers labour recruitment; the role of gender in the management strategies in each town; the sexual division of labour; the relationships between wage work, domestic labour, and family and community values; and the impact of labour organization and disputes. Of interest in each town is the largely migrant workforce recruited by mills and factories that held a near monopoly on the industry in each town: in Paris, Penman’s hosiery mill sought skilled women from the East Midlands, and in Hanover, Knechtel’s furniture plant recruited immigrants of German origin who had a long-standing tradition of woodwork and craftsmanship. The demographics of each town built divergent gendered relationships to wage work. While Hanover saw a need to protect women by providing safe and respectable employment until marriage (185), Paris had unmarried women who owned their own homes; there, independence and factory work could be respectable for women (82), and men were often unemployed. Parr also shows the processes by which work became gendered in each industry, and the interactions of gender with class in creating such distinctions. Knitting is a particularly intriguing example, where unions worked to define mechanized work as male, but companies sought to diversify tasks to build a more stable workforce (70-73).

Parr’s work was unusual for 1990 in its consideration of masculinity, arguing masculinity to be diverse rather than unified, and subject to class divisions (240). In Hanover, for example, she considers how masculinity shifted from a basis in the physicality of manual work to a focus on men’s roles as breadwinners (164). Unfortunately, by not significantly integrating her analyses of Paris and Hanover, Parr does not really question how masculinity played out in Paris, where women had authority as breadwinners. This study is also before its time in its emphasis on intersectionality; while Parr does not use this particular term, it is a clear goal of her call to integrate analyses of gender and class.

Denyse Baillargeon’s Making Do: Women, Family, and Home in Montreal During the Great Depression presents research that she undertook in the late 1980s, interviewing French-Canadian women who started families in Montreal during the Great Depression. While her monograph now seems quite routine, it was much less so when she researched and published it. Baillargeon analyzes the survival of working-class families during the Great Depression by considering women’s work, paid or at home, and how this contributed to family economies. Overall, she shows that women had an indispensable role in overcoming and managing their family’s poverty (4). Montreal’s working-class women had become accustomed to poverty and developed strategies for survival during their childhoods and adolescences; this helped to prepare them for the duration of economic upheaval that they experienced during the Depression (45, 7). Baillargeon gives some insight as to the methodology behind her oral history approach in her first appendix. This lists the questions that were asked of each respondent. It becomes clear that much of the information sought was quantitative. Several questions inquire about descriptions of women’s experiences, but women’s feelings or conclusions about their own experiences seem to be an afterthought.

Motherhood, and the domestic labour that surrounded it, was central to the lives of these women. The Quebec context of these women’s experiences is particularly salient when examining their recollections of motherhood and sexuality; while women of British origin had some grasp of their anatomy and had some extent of knowledge of contraception, Baillargeon indicates that Montreal’s working-class women wanted more control over their reproduction but were seriously ignorant of their sexuality (69). These women relied on men for information about sexuality and reproduction, and their awareness of and access to contraception was limited by the Church (73). Many women feared pregnancy, despite their fondness for their children (78).

While the women Baillargeon interviewed worked, sometimes outside the home, a division of labour was entrenched in their community. Baillargeon is quick to point out, however, that women’s work did not differentiate between the public and private spheres, as women worked for pay even within their homes, and their roles as housewives were increasingly important in the Depression’s tight economy (111). The women’s work made working-class families sites of production rather than consumption, as limited incomes necessitated that most goods be homemade (114). Baillargeon concludes by noting that her oral narratives confirm the hypotheses of other researchers (167), and reiterates that women’s paid and domestic labour, and management of household finances, was critical to economic mobility for working-class families (168).  

Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton’s work is the most recent, and the most substantial, of this week’s studies. This team of geographers present the results of thirty years of quantitative and qualitative demographic research on Montreal. Their methodology, at first glance, appears simple: they tracked the births, marriages, deaths, and movements of individuals with twelve surnames over a period of sixty years. Their analysis of the interaction between demography and culture makes this study far more complex, however, as they exhaustively considered everything from how to select easily-spelled surnames to the potential impact of contagion and genetics within particular families (38, 348). Their use of surnames enabled them to construct a “miniaturized city” and consider demographic differences between three dominant cultural groups – the sample was divided into three equal parts of Irish Catholics, French-Canadian Catholics, and English-Canadian Protestants. Surprisingly, they learned that natural increase was highest in Protestant rather than Catholic families (61).

This study showcases a potential methodology for demographic history, as well as highlighting the significance of movement and migration for culture and demography. Montreal, they argue, served as a “centre de triage,” attracting, sorting, and distributing new immigrants (54), and moving was central to family narratives and the formation of social status (356-360). The methodology of their study is comprehensive, probing nearly every conceivable written source and image for information about these twelve extended families to analyze their migrations, marriages, housing, and social and kinship networks. However, Olson and Thornton are also self-conscious about the limitations of their work, considering the drawbacks of a patronymic organization (39) and criticizing their own blurring of diversity, particularly among Protestants (347). Ultimately, they present a convincing argument for the integration of the social sciences to better understand the cultural context of demographic regimes and changes, and the multidimensional intersections of identity (360, 363).

This heron told me to leave the park and go home; it was getting late.