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Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal
"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.
"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.
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2012
One of the recurring and most interesting strands in working class histories in the last 30 years or so has been explorations of the working class family economy that draw on aspects of class and gender history – with studies of note including Christine Stansell’s work on New York and Ellen Ross’s work on the East End of London as well as Jerry White’s excellent 1980 book Rothschild Buildings also dealing with London’s East End. This book is an important part of that body of work, that is all the more important because it considers the mutual interaction of the waged and domestic economies, and demands that we step beyond the rigid gendering of those as a masculine productive economy and a feminine reproductive economy.
Although there are large sections of the analysis that are specific to Montréal with its distinctive economic and social profiles, there are also important points of engagement that challenge and extend the analyses of working class life; Bradbury’s principle reference points include some of Stansell’s work (to which she is quite sympathetic) and studies of Hamilton Ontario (where she is more critical). Her focus on two wards in Montréal suggests some significant differences in working class life that gives her general conclusions more power.
There are eight broader points that she draws out for the analysis;
1. to understand working class life analysts must be carefully attuned to differential earning power that produced distinctive (but not rigidly separated) class fractions, in this case based around families incorporating men in skilled trades, those where the trades were rapidly transforming and those in unskilled work;
2. families could not rely solely on the income of the male ‘family head’, and survival depended on other income as well as the ability of women to extend/stretch the total family income, so not only were wages necessary but not sufficient, but careful and sophisticated domestic management was essential;
3. family membership and roles, including marital status, age and sex were crucial determinants of daily life as well as life courses and individuals relations to the wider economy, where it is vital to see that the development of industrial capitalism (as occurred in Montréal during this period) did not replace previous domestic economic relations but was built on them;
4. over the period studied (1860s to 1890s) families became increasingly dependent on the income of sons and daughters, and that during the first half of the period offspring were more inclined to stay living in the family home but by the 1890s sons were beginning to move out more often suggesting the beginning of changes in the family economy and less dependence on the incomes of children;
5. although married women did not work outside the home for long periods or for most of the day if they did, working class life depended on the work of married women outside the ‘formal’ economy, some of which was likely to be income generating or substituting, such as keeping livestock or the ‘reproductive’ work of transforming wages into sustenance;
6. despite the technological changes associated with middle class domestic life in the later half of the 19th century, there were only minor modifications to the domestic work and lives of working class women in Montréal during that period;
7. the complementary relations between husbands and wives, sons and daughters did not mean that their relations were equal – family life and relations were culturally and formally (that is, legally) unequal and hierarchical with women locked into relations of formal/legal dependency, and social ideals of masculinity reinforcing women’s dependency on men; and
8. women’s dependence and inequality was exposed when men deserted them or died, as was men’s dependency on domestic labour, so life without a spouse became close to unsustainable.
Bradbury’s argument in favour of a close consideration of the domestic economy within wider capitalist relations is a significant contribution to the field and demands that we look in a much more sophisticated way at the realities and material conditions of working class life. The research is compelling, the data rich and revealing, and she has marshalled it present a powerful argument revealing the importance of interlocking class and feminist analyses. It has stood the test of time, and reminds me of the importance of more nuanced analyses that get beyond the simplicities of gendered economies of ‘separate spheres’ and the mutual dependence of productive and reproductive labour. Although the detail paints a rich picture of Montréal working class life in the late 19th century, the study has much wider implications that historians must attend to.
The historical sociologist Wally Seecombe once argued that the wage was both a ‘compensation’ for productive labour and a tool to purchase ‘reproductive’ labour – this book is compelling demonstration of his case for the mutual dependence of productive and reproductive economies. A fabulous research monograph.
Although there are large sections of the analysis that are specific to Montréal with its distinctive economic and social profiles, there are also important points of engagement that challenge and extend the analyses of working class life; Bradbury’s principle reference points include some of Stansell’s work (to which she is quite sympathetic) and studies of Hamilton Ontario (where she is more critical). Her focus on two wards in Montréal suggests some significant differences in working class life that gives her general conclusions more power.
There are eight broader points that she draws out for the analysis;
1. to understand working class life analysts must be carefully attuned to differential earning power that produced distinctive (but not rigidly separated) class fractions, in this case based around families incorporating men in skilled trades, those where the trades were rapidly transforming and those in unskilled work;
2. families could not rely solely on the income of the male ‘family head’, and survival depended on other income as well as the ability of women to extend/stretch the total family income, so not only were wages necessary but not sufficient, but careful and sophisticated domestic management was essential;
3. family membership and roles, including marital status, age and sex were crucial determinants of daily life as well as life courses and individuals relations to the wider economy, where it is vital to see that the development of industrial capitalism (as occurred in Montréal during this period) did not replace previous domestic economic relations but was built on them;
4. over the period studied (1860s to 1890s) families became increasingly dependent on the income of sons and daughters, and that during the first half of the period offspring were more inclined to stay living in the family home but by the 1890s sons were beginning to move out more often suggesting the beginning of changes in the family economy and less dependence on the incomes of children;
5. although married women did not work outside the home for long periods or for most of the day if they did, working class life depended on the work of married women outside the ‘formal’ economy, some of which was likely to be income generating or substituting, such as keeping livestock or the ‘reproductive’ work of transforming wages into sustenance;
6. despite the technological changes associated with middle class domestic life in the later half of the 19th century, there were only minor modifications to the domestic work and lives of working class women in Montréal during that period;
7. the complementary relations between husbands and wives, sons and daughters did not mean that their relations were equal – family life and relations were culturally and formally (that is, legally) unequal and hierarchical with women locked into relations of formal/legal dependency, and social ideals of masculinity reinforcing women’s dependency on men; and
8. women’s dependence and inequality was exposed when men deserted them or died, as was men’s dependency on domestic labour, so life without a spouse became close to unsustainable.
Bradbury’s argument in favour of a close consideration of the domestic economy within wider capitalist relations is a significant contribution to the field and demands that we look in a much more sophisticated way at the realities and material conditions of working class life. The research is compelling, the data rich and revealing, and she has marshalled it present a powerful argument revealing the importance of interlocking class and feminist analyses. It has stood the test of time, and reminds me of the importance of more nuanced analyses that get beyond the simplicities of gendered economies of ‘separate spheres’ and the mutual dependence of productive and reproductive labour. Although the detail paints a rich picture of Montréal working class life in the late 19th century, the study has much wider implications that historians must attend to.
The historical sociologist Wally Seecombe once argued that the wage was both a ‘compensation’ for productive labour and a tool to purchase ‘reproductive’ labour – this book is compelling demonstration of his case for the mutual dependence of productive and reproductive economies. A fabulous research monograph.
July 2, 2024
This book is specific to Montreal and the surrounding areas to focus on the families, men and women, children, and industrialization affects on the community. I enjoyed this book in the sense that it's specific to one area so it provides a lot of factual evidence with statistics to back up the findings. I also enjoyed that this book talked about some of the illegal ways people tried to make ends meet as well as the various ways incomes were stretched or supplemented. It was also refreshing to read about the negative effects that men experienced during industrialization, and ultimately how that came home and how their choices affected their wives, children and finances. My only complaint is that this book felt very repetitive and kind of all over the place. I found that the topics within the last two chapters were already previously discussed earlier and it made reading this feel like a chore. However, this is a very interesting read when you compare this area of focus to our current lives and urban centers. Has much truly changed?
June 22, 2016
Study of the usually ignored group, working families (lower and lower-middle classes) especially women in these families in 19 century Montreal. Very informative. A lot of graphs and tables.
January 6, 2019
A clear and concise account of the topic. Bravo!
May 31, 2008
I can't criticize anyone but myself for not loving this book. It is a dense reconstruction of working class families from census materials. I used it to assess the living and family situations of the elderly in Montreal in the 19th Century. After spending so much time slamming the idea of a grand narrative of history I should know better than to think I'll get some good personal histories from a book like this. Anyway, it's well done for the purpose of study.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews