| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christina Burr. Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform in Late-Nineteenth-Century Toronto. (Studies in Gender and History Series.) Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1999. Pp. x, 254. Cloth $50.00, paper $18.95.

When E. P. Thompson charged historians with the task of considering the "totality" of working-class experience, including private and public social life, institutional groupings, and economic behaviors, he would have applauded studies such as this one. Christina Burr sets out to investigate Toronto's working classes during an "important formative moment" in the last third of the nineteenth century, when local reformers and workers "struggled to interpret and transform the conditions of workers in industrializing society" (p. 4). Her examination is buttressed with Foucauldian analysis and by work over the past decade in women's history that, among other important strands, has traced the connections between work and family. The model Burr most closely emulates to compare male and female-dominated workplaces is Joy Parr's groundbreaking study The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (1990). Three chapters devoted to a close examination of male and female-dominated industries constitute the core and most valuable section of the book. The process through which women were relegated to low-paying, low-status, and unstable employment in the unionized printing trades in Toronto is clear evidence of institutionalized marginalization. A discourse of domesticity in this period reinforced notions of masculinity, further confirming male privilege. Also still much in evidence in the early twentieth century were the immigrant female and sweated labor underpinning the garment industry, the roots of which are well investigated by Burr. This case study also allows for a view of how older, family-based modes of production intersected with and supported new factory-based methods. . . .

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