Book Review

This carefully researched account of Maritime single women who moved to Boston in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tells a larger story about family strategies to adapt to global capitalism's disruptions of local social and economic structures. By the 1880s, the rural, coastal economies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island declined as central Canada and the United States embraced integration, tariffs, and industrialization. In many places in the world adapting to economic change, men left in search of work while women cared for home enterprises and families; Betsy Beattie explores why more young Maritime women than men immigrated to the urban United States and why, once there, they chose domestic work over other wage options.

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In her gender analysis of outmigration, Beattie finds that young men and young women had different motivations for leaving the Maritime Provinces, and they headed in different directions. The title Obligation and Opportunity indicates that single women had dual purposes in moving to Boston. Late-nineteenth-century Maritime daughters left home out of filial responsibility, to contribute wages to the family economy; by the twentieth century, however, their motivations had become more personal. This regional study across six decades provides a more complex interpretation of the nature of women's migration.

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