- Email: [email protected]
Research note: The Canadian families project
RESEARCH NOTE: The Canadian Families Project
ERIC W. SAGER
ABSTRACT: The note describes the structure of the Canadian Families Project, its goals, the Canadian census sources the Project is incorporating into its data base, and the goals of the Project in light of previous work on the history of the family in Canada and internationally. The Project is collaborative, but it is also intended to be relational. in the sense that each subtheme researchers are exploring-space, class, gender, discourse, and others -feeds back into all others.
The Canadian Families Project is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). The Project is also supported by its host institution, the University of Victoria, and by four other participating universities. The research team includes eleven scholars from the disciplines of history, sociology, geography, and historical demography. ’ The advantages of collaborative and interdisciplinary research are perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the field of family history. Family history is about “the reconstruction of a multi-tiered reality,” as Tamara Hareven has suggested (Hat-even 1991). The challenge is to understand the overlapping interactions between family and major social, economic, and political forces. The subject is complicated by the increasing attention of historians to the internal dynamics of families. Families are fluid and flexible associations, in which internal age and gender configurations change over space and time. While placing a premium upon the historian’s sensitivity to the multiple conditions of change, the subject demands and rewards methodological breadth, and, in particular, the simultaneous application of the methods of historians and social scientists.
Eric W. Sager is Professor in the Department of History, University Canada, V8W 3P4, and Director of the Canadian Families Project.
of Victoria,
PO Box 3045, Victoria,
THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY An International Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 1, pages 117-123 Copyright 0 1998 JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1081-602X
BC.
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We could all cite many instances of successful team research, and Canada has seen a number of innovative collaborations (the best known in recent years is the editorial and research project that produced the three volumes of The Historical Atlas ofCunadu>. In the field of Canadian family history, however, major collaborative projects have not appeared outside the province of Quebec, where there is a long tradition of collaborative research in the study of population and family.2 The Canadian Families Project (CFP) is the first collaborative research project that focuses on the history of families in Canada as a whole. We propose to revisit family, not as a singular or unchanging social unit but as a dynamic set of associations varying with time, region, class, gender, and other historical conditions of Canadian experience. We hope to set our findings in the context of the wider intemational literature, and it follows that we are interested in the relationship between family and the sweeping changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. Given our sensitivity to the plurality of family and household, and given the heterogeneity of the Canadian “cultural mosaic,” it is unlikely we shall find a specifically Canadian type of family or household, at any time in our past. For historians as much as for the makers of constitutions, the Canadian geopolitical entity remains a problematic and fragile analytical unit. We wish to move beyond the microhistorical and regional focus of Canadian family history, to seek commonalities and patterns of family reproduction that may transcend the boundaries of both region and nation-state. In Canada, however, we can never escape the preoccupation with local and regional contexts, and the sensitivity of Canadian scholarship to place and region may be one of its conspicuous strengths. The results may allow us, and those who follow us, to reconnect the local and the regional to new trans-national models, in ways such as those suggested by Gerard Bouchard (Bouchard 1993, 1994, 1996). The social geography of families, therefore, is basic to our collaboration: what difference did location make to the relationships between family, household, ethnicity, and the other target variables of our Project? A key obstacle to creative synthesis is the absence of source materials capable of supporting transregional conclusions. There exists only one national sample of a historic census (the census of 187 1, when Canada had only four provinces). The nominal information from decennial censuses of 1911 and after is closed, and the public use samples created by Statistics Canada from national censuses begin only in 197 1. Comparisons with U.S. census data, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, will necessarily be limited to specific years. The CFP team has started by taking a five-percent national sample of the 1901 census of Canada, a census that groups individuals by dwelling place and also by a specific family/household definition (the key term in the definition is “housekeeping community”). Our sample includes all individual-level information from Schedule 1 (the nominal returns) and information from Schedule 2, which reports information on property owned or leased by the individuals in Schedule 1, as well as their street addresses, a variable missing from previous Canadian censuses.3 The census is particularly rich in employment information: in addition to reporting occupations, it includes answers to questions about duration of employment over the census year, annual earnings, and location of employment (factory, home or other)(Baskerville and Sager 1989, 1995). The census also reports the religion and “mother tongue” of individuals, and these fields are key to specific Project sub-topics. The 1901 sample will allow national benchmarks which may inform all subsequent local studies; the sample is also the starting point for longitudinal studies. Gordon Darroch, a co-
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creator of the 187 1 national sample, is a member of the CFP team: he will use the 187 1 and 1901 national samples to examine changes in household structures, the separation of home and work, co-residence patterns of children and parents, and the relationship between household structure and ethnicity. Darroch is also a pioneer in the analysis of social stratification, ethnicity, and rural class formation in Ontario. Many of the hypotheses to be tested by the CFP emerge from his work (Darroch 1988; Darroch and Omstein 1984; Darroch and Soltow 1994). Basic to the changing structure and composition of Canadian families has been the secular decline in fertility. When they joined the CFP, Danielle Gauvreau and Peter Gossage were already working collaboratively on fertility decline in Quebec, in association with the Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur les populations (IREP), based in Chicoutimi. Quebec (Gauvreau 1991; Gossage 1991; Gauvreau and Gossage 1997). Gauvreau and Gossage are using both aggregate census data and nominal information from the 1901 census to study the relationship between fertility and a range of factors. They are also examining the literature-religious, nationalist, medical-that dealt with issues of family size and fertility. The Canadian fertility decline will likely be of interest to scholars elsewhere, not least because the Canadian context offers an excellent opportunity to observe ethnic and religious differences while controlling for other variables. While the fertility decline began later in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, nevertheless by world standards the onset of deliberate family limitations began quite early in anglophone Canada, and striking declines occurred in rural areas, including newly settled ones (McInnis 1991). Felicitous linkages among Project sub-themes abound: Chad Gaffield has already suggested that fertility decline and rural schooling were related aspects of strategies of inheritance and family reproduction (Gaffield 1987, 1991). In the context of the CFP, Gaffield studies language-always at the heart of Canadian experience-and its connections to family and household. The 1901 census gave us our first nation-wide data on languages: not only the mother tongue of individuals, but whether or not they could speak English or French. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to observe language patterns within families and households, and to display connections among language, schooling, occupation, family size, and other variables. Religious affiliation, like linguistic diversity within families and households, raises interesting questions about inter-generational transfers and domestic cohesion. Family church attendance was supposed to extend the domestic togetherness of the ideal Victorian family into a public yet sacred space. How far did reality coincide with the ideal? Lynne Marks has already found that church attendance patterns varied by social class and gender, and that members of working-class families were much more likely than those of other classes to marry outside their own church (Marks 1995, 1996). We need to know much more about the relationship between religion and family structures, family sizes, ideals of family and domesticity, and the labor force participation of family members. Religion feeds back into many other sub-themes, including those relating to standards of living and fragmented or broken families. Churches informed all discussions of family poverty, and they selected for intensive scrutiny and assistance those who appeared to lack ongoing familial support, such as widows and deserted wives. Bettina Bradbury, author of a prize-winning study of working-class families in Montreal, has pioneered the multidimensional study of family and household in Canada. Into her complex historical tapestry she weaves church and charity, marriage contracts. property law, gender and family deci-
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sion-making, patterns of labor within and beyond the home, and much else (Bradbury 1992, 1993, 1995). She rejects typologies of household structure that hide single-parent families within the category of nuclear or simple household. Transcending ahistorical assumptions about “traditional” family demands that we bring to the fore the multitude of life courses in which marriage ended with death, desertion, separation, or divorce, followed by institutional support and even residence with non-kin. The single parents of the 1990s so often women, have a history that must include the female-headed households of a century ago. In the 1990s when an idealized “traditional family” haunts the political exchanges of North America, all such research is charged with present point and meaning. Even before the Project published any results we had attracted media attentionP Bradbury’s research has obvious resonance in the present, and so too does the research of Sager and Peter Baskerviile on the living standards of Canadian families, research that may revive old debates in new contexts (Baskerville and Sager 1998; Sager and Baskerville 1997). At the end of the twentieth century, when state welfare systems and collective funding of health care and education are under severe stress, it is imperative to study families as a locus of economic support. How did family economies function before the emergence of the welfare state? Already our finding that between fifteen and nineteen percent of urban workingclass families in 1901 could not survive on the wage earnings of their members has prompted skepticism, and in one instance, intemperate ideologically-charged denunciation.5 The subject of living standards raises questions about household space, overcrowding, and property-holding, and Baskerville has a separate but related project on women property-holders in urban Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baskerville 1993). Fertility decline, language, religion, and living standards all feed back into the great Canadian preoccupation with place and region. All of the key constituents of family experience have a social geography. Was there a specific rural pattern of family structure and family reproduction? Ian MacPherson, rural historian and historian of the co-operative movement, is the CFP researcher who focuses most directly on rural families, especially in the prairie provinces (MacPherson 1979).” Larry McCann directs the CFP work on GIS mapping of census districts, and looks particularly at the family economy in the emerging urban landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting old questions about ethnic and class segregation is only part of his work. Housing needs, residential location strategies, work-residence patterns, and suburbanization fall within McCann’s search for a new urban geography of Canadian family and household (McCann 1987a, 1987b). Another map will be drawn, within a different gaze: that of the student of discourse. While we pretend to nothing so grand as the dismantling of epistemological walls dividing social science history from post-structuralism and linguistic turns, we must attend to the discourse surrounding family. For Annalee Golz, historian of family violence and student of Bryan Palmer, there remains a distinction between the discursive and the material, but “family” was embedded in culture as much as in changing socio-economic conditions (Golz 1993, 1995). Golz’s research on the discourse of family feeds into the research of all other Project members, because we all need to see more clearly the cultural context and provenance of state-generated sources on family and household, including particularly the census. Every source used by team members, from censuses to court records, was a text
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constructed around discourses of gender and family. Every source may reflect the presence of normative familial ideals widely shared in Anglo-Protestant culture and perhaps also in French-speaking Catholic Quebec. Our quantitative analysis of census data does not occur before, or apart from, Golz’s study of the discourse of familialism; these are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing parts of a single research design. The Project is more than simply collaborative; it is intended to be relational, in the sense that each subtheme feeds back into all others. As graduate students and post-doctoral fellows join us, creative interactions (and perhaps frictions too) will multiply, and the multidimensional horizons will expand in ways that we cannot now foresee. We may not discover new historical foundations for the Canadian nation-state or for Canadian “public self-understanding,” but we hope to transcend the older “limited identities” associated with region and ethnicity (Bliss 1991-2). We do not propose a new, specifically Canadian, analytical trinity-space, class and gender-but we do hope to situate Canadian patterns within the broader international contexts to which they were so deeply connected. We may not succeed in reconstructing the historical foundations of contemporary debates over family in Canada, but we may help to dissolve parts of the “multifaceted myth” that lie beneath current “family crisis” debates (Comacchio 1994). By ourselves we can do little to stem the neo-conservative tidal wave that widens the chasms of inequity among families, social classes, regions, and nations. There is no escaping the present implications of historical research on family, however; and a modest success may consist of no more than the offer of lessons from past experience about the massive social costs of removing the collective social supports that families require for health, stability and survival.
NOTES 1. The SSHRCC grant is part of that agency’s Major Collaborative Initiative program. Total project funding is approximately $1 million Canadian over five years (1996-2000). of which SSHRCC contributes $672,000. The four other universities are the University of Ottawa, York University, Concordia University and the University of Sherbrooke. The eleven researchers are Eric W. Sager (Project Director), Peter Baskerville, Annalee Golz, Lynne Marks, Larry McCann, and Ian MacPherson (all at the University of Victoria); Chad Gaffield (University of Ottawa); Bettina Bradbury and Gordon Darroch (York University); Danielle Gauvreau (Concordia University); and Peter Gossage (University of Sherbrooke). Lisa Dillon joins the Project as a post-doctoral fellow in 1998.The members of the Project’s Advisory Board are GCrard Bouchard (Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur les populations, Chicoutimi); Tamara Hareven (University of Delaware); Robert Glossop (Vanier Institute of the Family, Ottawa); and Rosemary Ommer (Memorial University of Newfoundland). The Project Manager is Douglas Thompson; the Computer Assistant is Marc Trottier. The CFP home page is at http:Nweb.uvic.ca/hrd/cfp/. 2. The Hamilton Social History Project certainly contributed to our understanding of families in one part of Canada in the third quarter of the nineteenth century; but family was not its primary focus. Within Quebec there are many instances, most notably the Saguenay Project and the on-going work of GCrard Bouchard and his associates at the Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur le.7pnpulations. For a review of recent literature see Comacchio 1994. 3. The CFP census database becomes a “public use” sample, open to any scholar wishing to use it, after the conclusion of the CFP research project. The database was nearing completion in the autumn of 1997, but preliminary results had already appeared in a few conference papers.
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The announcement of the SSHRCC grant prompted a number of letters in the Victoria Times14 and 24 November, 1995; see also Vivian Smith, “Family Matters,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 5 October 1996 and the letters to the editor in that newspaper on 9 October 1996. 5. I refer to an anonymous assessment of our book, then at the manuscript stage, entitled Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (1998). Standards of living results also appear in Sager and Baskerville 1996. 6. MacPherson was founding President of the Canadian Co-operative Association; he recently revised the International Co-operative Principles and wrote a Declaration for the Twenty-First Century for the international co-operative movement. 4.
Colonist,
REFERENCES Baskerville, Peter. 1993. “‘She Has Already Hinted At Board’: Enterprising Urban Women in British Columbia, 1863-1896.” Histoire sociale/Social History 26: 205-228. Baskerville, Peter, and Eric W. Sager. 1989. “The First National Unemployment Survey: Unemployment and the Canadian Census of 1891.” Labour/Le Travail 23: 171-8. 1995. “Finding the Work Force in the 1901 Census of Canada.” Histoire sociale/Social His-. tory 56: 521-539. 1998. Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and their Families in Late Victorian Can-. ada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bliss Michael. 1991-2. “Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies 26: 5-17. Bouchard, Gerard. 1993. “La reproduction familiale en terroirs neufs: Comparaison sur les donnees quebtcoises et fran9aises.” Annales Economies, Societes, Civilisations 2: 42145 1. 1994. “Family Reproduction in New Rural Areas: Outline of a North American Model.” -. Canadian -.
Historical
1996. Quelques 1971. Montreal:
Review 75: 475-510. Arpents
d’Ame’rique:
Population,
economic,
famille
au Saguenay
1838-
Boreal. Bradbury, Bettina. 1992. Canadian Family History. Selected Readings. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. 1993. Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Tor-. onto: McClelland and Stewart. 1995. “The Home as a Workplace.” Pp. 4 12478 in Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in -. Nineteenth-Century Ontario, edited by Paul Craven. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Comacchio, Cynthia R. 1994. “Beneath the Sentimental Veil’: Families and Family History in Canada.” Labour/Le Travail 33: 279-302. Darroch, Gordon. 1988. “Class in Nineteenth Century Ontario: A Reassessment of the Crisis and Demise of Small Producers During Early Industrialization, 1861-1871.” Pp. 49-71 in Class, Gender and Region: Essays in Canadian Historical Sociology, edited by Gregory S. Kealey. St.John’s: Canadian Committee on Labour History. and Michael Ornstein. 1984. “Family and Household in Nineteenth-Century Canada: Regional Patterns and Regional Economies.” Journal of Family History 9: 155-177. and Lee Soltow. 1994. Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns -> and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gaffield, Chad. 1987. Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict: The Origins of the French Language Controversy in Ontario. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1991. “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” -. Canadian Historical Review 72: 157-91 Gauvreau, Danielle. 1991. Quebec. Une ville et sa population au temps de la Nouvelle France. Quebec: Presses de l’universite du Quebec.
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and Peter Gossage. 1997. “EmpechCr la famille: Fecondite et contraception au Quebec, 192&1960.” Canadian Historical Review 78: 478-5 10. Golz, Annalee. 1993. “Family Matters: The Canadian Family and the State in the Postwar Period.” lefthistory 1: 9-50. 1995. “‘If a man’s wife does not obey him what can he do?‘: Marital Breakdown and Wife -. Abuse in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Pp. 323-350 in Law, State and Society: Essays in Modern Legal History, edited by Susan Binnie and Louis Knafla. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gossage, Peter. 1991. “Family Formation and Age at Marriage at Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1854189 1.” Histoire sociale/Social History 24: 61-84. Hareven, Tamara K. 1991. “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change.“ American Historical Review 96: 95-l 24. Marks, Lynne. 1995. “Religion, Leisure and Working-Class Identity.” Pp.278-334 in Lahouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth Century Ontario, edited by Paul Craven. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1996. Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure and Identity in Small Town Ontario. -. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McCann, Larry. 1987a. Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography ofCanada. Toronto: Prentice-Hall. 1987b. People and Place: Studies of Small Town Lifr in the Maritimes. Fredericton: Acadi-. ensis Press. MacPherson, Ian. 1979. Each Far All: A History of the Co-operative Movement in English Canada, 1900-I 945. Toronto: Macmillan. Mclnnis, Marvin. 1991. “Women, Work and Childbearing: Ontario in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Histoire sociale/Social History 48: 237-262. Sager, Eric W., and Peter Baskerville. 1997. “Unemployment, Living Standards and the WorkingClass Family in Urban Canada in 1901.” The History of the Family: An International Quarterl? 2: 229-254.
->
ERIC W. SAGER
ABSTRACT: The note describes the structure of the Canadian Families Project, its goals, the Canadian census sources the Project is incorporating into its data base, and the goals of the Project in light of previous work on the history of the family in Canada and internationally. The Project is collaborative, but it is also intended to be relational. in the sense that each subtheme researchers are exploring-space, class, gender, discourse, and others -feeds back into all others.
The Canadian Families Project is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). The Project is also supported by its host institution, the University of Victoria, and by four other participating universities. The research team includes eleven scholars from the disciplines of history, sociology, geography, and historical demography. ’ The advantages of collaborative and interdisciplinary research are perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the field of family history. Family history is about “the reconstruction of a multi-tiered reality,” as Tamara Hareven has suggested (Hat-even 1991). The challenge is to understand the overlapping interactions between family and major social, economic, and political forces. The subject is complicated by the increasing attention of historians to the internal dynamics of families. Families are fluid and flexible associations, in which internal age and gender configurations change over space and time. While placing a premium upon the historian’s sensitivity to the multiple conditions of change, the subject demands and rewards methodological breadth, and, in particular, the simultaneous application of the methods of historians and social scientists.
Eric W. Sager is Professor in the Department of History, University Canada, V8W 3P4, and Director of the Canadian Families Project.
of Victoria,
PO Box 3045, Victoria,
THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY An International Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 1, pages 117-123 Copyright 0 1998 JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1081-602X
BC.
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We could all cite many instances of successful team research, and Canada has seen a number of innovative collaborations (the best known in recent years is the editorial and research project that produced the three volumes of The Historical Atlas ofCunadu>. In the field of Canadian family history, however, major collaborative projects have not appeared outside the province of Quebec, where there is a long tradition of collaborative research in the study of population and family.2 The Canadian Families Project (CFP) is the first collaborative research project that focuses on the history of families in Canada as a whole. We propose to revisit family, not as a singular or unchanging social unit but as a dynamic set of associations varying with time, region, class, gender, and other historical conditions of Canadian experience. We hope to set our findings in the context of the wider intemational literature, and it follows that we are interested in the relationship between family and the sweeping changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. Given our sensitivity to the plurality of family and household, and given the heterogeneity of the Canadian “cultural mosaic,” it is unlikely we shall find a specifically Canadian type of family or household, at any time in our past. For historians as much as for the makers of constitutions, the Canadian geopolitical entity remains a problematic and fragile analytical unit. We wish to move beyond the microhistorical and regional focus of Canadian family history, to seek commonalities and patterns of family reproduction that may transcend the boundaries of both region and nation-state. In Canada, however, we can never escape the preoccupation with local and regional contexts, and the sensitivity of Canadian scholarship to place and region may be one of its conspicuous strengths. The results may allow us, and those who follow us, to reconnect the local and the regional to new trans-national models, in ways such as those suggested by Gerard Bouchard (Bouchard 1993, 1994, 1996). The social geography of families, therefore, is basic to our collaboration: what difference did location make to the relationships between family, household, ethnicity, and the other target variables of our Project? A key obstacle to creative synthesis is the absence of source materials capable of supporting transregional conclusions. There exists only one national sample of a historic census (the census of 187 1, when Canada had only four provinces). The nominal information from decennial censuses of 1911 and after is closed, and the public use samples created by Statistics Canada from national censuses begin only in 197 1. Comparisons with U.S. census data, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, will necessarily be limited to specific years. The CFP team has started by taking a five-percent national sample of the 1901 census of Canada, a census that groups individuals by dwelling place and also by a specific family/household definition (the key term in the definition is “housekeeping community”). Our sample includes all individual-level information from Schedule 1 (the nominal returns) and information from Schedule 2, which reports information on property owned or leased by the individuals in Schedule 1, as well as their street addresses, a variable missing from previous Canadian censuses.3 The census is particularly rich in employment information: in addition to reporting occupations, it includes answers to questions about duration of employment over the census year, annual earnings, and location of employment (factory, home or other)(Baskerville and Sager 1989, 1995). The census also reports the religion and “mother tongue” of individuals, and these fields are key to specific Project sub-topics. The 1901 sample will allow national benchmarks which may inform all subsequent local studies; the sample is also the starting point for longitudinal studies. Gordon Darroch, a co-
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119
creator of the 187 1 national sample, is a member of the CFP team: he will use the 187 1 and 1901 national samples to examine changes in household structures, the separation of home and work, co-residence patterns of children and parents, and the relationship between household structure and ethnicity. Darroch is also a pioneer in the analysis of social stratification, ethnicity, and rural class formation in Ontario. Many of the hypotheses to be tested by the CFP emerge from his work (Darroch 1988; Darroch and Omstein 1984; Darroch and Soltow 1994). Basic to the changing structure and composition of Canadian families has been the secular decline in fertility. When they joined the CFP, Danielle Gauvreau and Peter Gossage were already working collaboratively on fertility decline in Quebec, in association with the Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur les populations (IREP), based in Chicoutimi. Quebec (Gauvreau 1991; Gossage 1991; Gauvreau and Gossage 1997). Gauvreau and Gossage are using both aggregate census data and nominal information from the 1901 census to study the relationship between fertility and a range of factors. They are also examining the literature-religious, nationalist, medical-that dealt with issues of family size and fertility. The Canadian fertility decline will likely be of interest to scholars elsewhere, not least because the Canadian context offers an excellent opportunity to observe ethnic and religious differences while controlling for other variables. While the fertility decline began later in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, nevertheless by world standards the onset of deliberate family limitations began quite early in anglophone Canada, and striking declines occurred in rural areas, including newly settled ones (McInnis 1991). Felicitous linkages among Project sub-themes abound: Chad Gaffield has already suggested that fertility decline and rural schooling were related aspects of strategies of inheritance and family reproduction (Gaffield 1987, 1991). In the context of the CFP, Gaffield studies language-always at the heart of Canadian experience-and its connections to family and household. The 1901 census gave us our first nation-wide data on languages: not only the mother tongue of individuals, but whether or not they could speak English or French. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to observe language patterns within families and households, and to display connections among language, schooling, occupation, family size, and other variables. Religious affiliation, like linguistic diversity within families and households, raises interesting questions about inter-generational transfers and domestic cohesion. Family church attendance was supposed to extend the domestic togetherness of the ideal Victorian family into a public yet sacred space. How far did reality coincide with the ideal? Lynne Marks has already found that church attendance patterns varied by social class and gender, and that members of working-class families were much more likely than those of other classes to marry outside their own church (Marks 1995, 1996). We need to know much more about the relationship between religion and family structures, family sizes, ideals of family and domesticity, and the labor force participation of family members. Religion feeds back into many other sub-themes, including those relating to standards of living and fragmented or broken families. Churches informed all discussions of family poverty, and they selected for intensive scrutiny and assistance those who appeared to lack ongoing familial support, such as widows and deserted wives. Bettina Bradbury, author of a prize-winning study of working-class families in Montreal, has pioneered the multidimensional study of family and household in Canada. Into her complex historical tapestry she weaves church and charity, marriage contracts. property law, gender and family deci-
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sion-making, patterns of labor within and beyond the home, and much else (Bradbury 1992, 1993, 1995). She rejects typologies of household structure that hide single-parent families within the category of nuclear or simple household. Transcending ahistorical assumptions about “traditional” family demands that we bring to the fore the multitude of life courses in which marriage ended with death, desertion, separation, or divorce, followed by institutional support and even residence with non-kin. The single parents of the 1990s so often women, have a history that must include the female-headed households of a century ago. In the 1990s when an idealized “traditional family” haunts the political exchanges of North America, all such research is charged with present point and meaning. Even before the Project published any results we had attracted media attentionP Bradbury’s research has obvious resonance in the present, and so too does the research of Sager and Peter Baskerviile on the living standards of Canadian families, research that may revive old debates in new contexts (Baskerville and Sager 1998; Sager and Baskerville 1997). At the end of the twentieth century, when state welfare systems and collective funding of health care and education are under severe stress, it is imperative to study families as a locus of economic support. How did family economies function before the emergence of the welfare state? Already our finding that between fifteen and nineteen percent of urban workingclass families in 1901 could not survive on the wage earnings of their members has prompted skepticism, and in one instance, intemperate ideologically-charged denunciation.5 The subject of living standards raises questions about household space, overcrowding, and property-holding, and Baskerville has a separate but related project on women property-holders in urban Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baskerville 1993). Fertility decline, language, religion, and living standards all feed back into the great Canadian preoccupation with place and region. All of the key constituents of family experience have a social geography. Was there a specific rural pattern of family structure and family reproduction? Ian MacPherson, rural historian and historian of the co-operative movement, is the CFP researcher who focuses most directly on rural families, especially in the prairie provinces (MacPherson 1979).” Larry McCann directs the CFP work on GIS mapping of census districts, and looks particularly at the family economy in the emerging urban landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Revisiting old questions about ethnic and class segregation is only part of his work. Housing needs, residential location strategies, work-residence patterns, and suburbanization fall within McCann’s search for a new urban geography of Canadian family and household (McCann 1987a, 1987b). Another map will be drawn, within a different gaze: that of the student of discourse. While we pretend to nothing so grand as the dismantling of epistemological walls dividing social science history from post-structuralism and linguistic turns, we must attend to the discourse surrounding family. For Annalee Golz, historian of family violence and student of Bryan Palmer, there remains a distinction between the discursive and the material, but “family” was embedded in culture as much as in changing socio-economic conditions (Golz 1993, 1995). Golz’s research on the discourse of family feeds into the research of all other Project members, because we all need to see more clearly the cultural context and provenance of state-generated sources on family and household, including particularly the census. Every source used by team members, from censuses to court records, was a text
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constructed around discourses of gender and family. Every source may reflect the presence of normative familial ideals widely shared in Anglo-Protestant culture and perhaps also in French-speaking Catholic Quebec. Our quantitative analysis of census data does not occur before, or apart from, Golz’s study of the discourse of familialism; these are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing parts of a single research design. The Project is more than simply collaborative; it is intended to be relational, in the sense that each subtheme feeds back into all others. As graduate students and post-doctoral fellows join us, creative interactions (and perhaps frictions too) will multiply, and the multidimensional horizons will expand in ways that we cannot now foresee. We may not discover new historical foundations for the Canadian nation-state or for Canadian “public self-understanding,” but we hope to transcend the older “limited identities” associated with region and ethnicity (Bliss 1991-2). We do not propose a new, specifically Canadian, analytical trinity-space, class and gender-but we do hope to situate Canadian patterns within the broader international contexts to which they were so deeply connected. We may not succeed in reconstructing the historical foundations of contemporary debates over family in Canada, but we may help to dissolve parts of the “multifaceted myth” that lie beneath current “family crisis” debates (Comacchio 1994). By ourselves we can do little to stem the neo-conservative tidal wave that widens the chasms of inequity among families, social classes, regions, and nations. There is no escaping the present implications of historical research on family, however; and a modest success may consist of no more than the offer of lessons from past experience about the massive social costs of removing the collective social supports that families require for health, stability and survival.
NOTES 1. The SSHRCC grant is part of that agency’s Major Collaborative Initiative program. Total project funding is approximately $1 million Canadian over five years (1996-2000). of which SSHRCC contributes $672,000. The four other universities are the University of Ottawa, York University, Concordia University and the University of Sherbrooke. The eleven researchers are Eric W. Sager (Project Director), Peter Baskerville, Annalee Golz, Lynne Marks, Larry McCann, and Ian MacPherson (all at the University of Victoria); Chad Gaffield (University of Ottawa); Bettina Bradbury and Gordon Darroch (York University); Danielle Gauvreau (Concordia University); and Peter Gossage (University of Sherbrooke). Lisa Dillon joins the Project as a post-doctoral fellow in 1998.The members of the Project’s Advisory Board are GCrard Bouchard (Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur les populations, Chicoutimi); Tamara Hareven (University of Delaware); Robert Glossop (Vanier Institute of the Family, Ottawa); and Rosemary Ommer (Memorial University of Newfoundland). The Project Manager is Douglas Thompson; the Computer Assistant is Marc Trottier. The CFP home page is at http:Nweb.uvic.ca/hrd/cfp/. 2. The Hamilton Social History Project certainly contributed to our understanding of families in one part of Canada in the third quarter of the nineteenth century; but family was not its primary focus. Within Quebec there are many instances, most notably the Saguenay Project and the on-going work of GCrard Bouchard and his associates at the Institut interuniversitaire de recherches sur le.7pnpulations. For a review of recent literature see Comacchio 1994. 3. The CFP census database becomes a “public use” sample, open to any scholar wishing to use it, after the conclusion of the CFP research project. The database was nearing completion in the autumn of 1997, but preliminary results had already appeared in a few conference papers.
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The announcement of the SSHRCC grant prompted a number of letters in the Victoria Times14 and 24 November, 1995; see also Vivian Smith, “Family Matters,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 5 October 1996 and the letters to the editor in that newspaper on 9 October 1996. 5. I refer to an anonymous assessment of our book, then at the manuscript stage, entitled Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (1998). Standards of living results also appear in Sager and Baskerville 1996. 6. MacPherson was founding President of the Canadian Co-operative Association; he recently revised the International Co-operative Principles and wrote a Declaration for the Twenty-First Century for the international co-operative movement. 4.
Colonist,
REFERENCES Baskerville, Peter. 1993. “‘She Has Already Hinted At Board’: Enterprising Urban Women in British Columbia, 1863-1896.” Histoire sociale/Social History 26: 205-228. Baskerville, Peter, and Eric W. Sager. 1989. “The First National Unemployment Survey: Unemployment and the Canadian Census of 1891.” Labour/Le Travail 23: 171-8. 1995. “Finding the Work Force in the 1901 Census of Canada.” Histoire sociale/Social His-. tory 56: 521-539. 1998. Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and their Families in Late Victorian Can-. ada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bliss Michael. 1991-2. “Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies 26: 5-17. Bouchard, Gerard. 1993. “La reproduction familiale en terroirs neufs: Comparaison sur les donnees quebtcoises et fran9aises.” Annales Economies, Societes, Civilisations 2: 42145 1. 1994. “Family Reproduction in New Rural Areas: Outline of a North American Model.” -. Canadian -.
Historical
1996. Quelques 1971. Montreal:
Review 75: 475-510. Arpents
d’Ame’rique:
Population,
economic,
famille
au Saguenay
1838-
Boreal. Bradbury, Bettina. 1992. Canadian Family History. Selected Readings. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman. 1993. Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Tor-. onto: McClelland and Stewart. 1995. “The Home as a Workplace.” Pp. 4 12478 in Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in -. Nineteenth-Century Ontario, edited by Paul Craven. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Comacchio, Cynthia R. 1994. “Beneath the Sentimental Veil’: Families and Family History in Canada.” Labour/Le Travail 33: 279-302. Darroch, Gordon. 1988. “Class in Nineteenth Century Ontario: A Reassessment of the Crisis and Demise of Small Producers During Early Industrialization, 1861-1871.” Pp. 49-71 in Class, Gender and Region: Essays in Canadian Historical Sociology, edited by Gregory S. Kealey. St.John’s: Canadian Committee on Labour History. and Michael Ornstein. 1984. “Family and Household in Nineteenth-Century Canada: Regional Patterns and Regional Economies.” Journal of Family History 9: 155-177. and Lee Soltow. 1994. Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns -> and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gaffield, Chad. 1987. Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict: The Origins of the French Language Controversy in Ontario. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 1991. “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” -. Canadian Historical Review 72: 157-91 Gauvreau, Danielle. 1991. Quebec. Une ville et sa population au temps de la Nouvelle France. Quebec: Presses de l’universite du Quebec.
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and Peter Gossage. 1997. “EmpechCr la famille: Fecondite et contraception au Quebec, 192&1960.” Canadian Historical Review 78: 478-5 10. Golz, Annalee. 1993. “Family Matters: The Canadian Family and the State in the Postwar Period.” lefthistory 1: 9-50. 1995. “‘If a man’s wife does not obey him what can he do?‘: Marital Breakdown and Wife -. Abuse in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Pp. 323-350 in Law, State and Society: Essays in Modern Legal History, edited by Susan Binnie and Louis Knafla. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gossage, Peter. 1991. “Family Formation and Age at Marriage at Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, 1854189 1.” Histoire sociale/Social History 24: 61-84. Hareven, Tamara K. 1991. “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change.“ American Historical Review 96: 95-l 24. Marks, Lynne. 1995. “Religion, Leisure and Working-Class Identity.” Pp.278-334 in Lahouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth Century Ontario, edited by Paul Craven. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1996. Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure and Identity in Small Town Ontario. -. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McCann, Larry. 1987a. Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography ofCanada. Toronto: Prentice-Hall. 1987b. People and Place: Studies of Small Town Lifr in the Maritimes. Fredericton: Acadi-. ensis Press. MacPherson, Ian. 1979. Each Far All: A History of the Co-operative Movement in English Canada, 1900-I 945. Toronto: Macmillan. Mclnnis, Marvin. 1991. “Women, Work and Childbearing: Ontario in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Histoire sociale/Social History 48: 237-262. Sager, Eric W., and Peter Baskerville. 1997. “Unemployment, Living Standards and the WorkingClass Family in Urban Canada in 1901.” The History of the Family: An International Quarterl? 2: 229-254.
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