| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2004)

IN ADDITION to their important monographic studies that began in the early 1990s, this is the third collection edited by one or both of Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau since 2002. With such a concentration of productivity, the anthology under review here should be approached as part of their ongoing effort to promote fresh research on diverse topics. Their editorial work has elucidated emerging social and cultural themes. It is also highly cognizant of the international literature. While a broad period frame is embraced, from the beginning of the 18th century to the mid-1970s, Christie and Gauvreau have a good grasp on period shifts in politics, the economy, and cultures that impinge on generations of social change. In another collection, for instance, they highlighted a single decade of intense realignments, the postwar reconstruction period from 1945 to 1955. Thanks to their publishing program to date, new work on family, gender, community formation, citizenship, religion, and social discipline is now available to wide reading audiences, from researchers and graduate students to undergraduate instructors choosing reading materials for their students. So too with this book.

Thematically, Mapping the Margins offers twelve essays that consider the normative, conjugal family (of homemakers and wives and breadwinners and husbands, along with their dependant children), as a marginalizing force, a powerful model that often served to define those living outside of it. It served, in short, as a centrifugal ideal — one that spinsters, widows, unmarried mothers, orphans, the insane, the elderly, and reconstituted families constructed their own lives, both against and with. Throughout, this collection underscores the complexities of this model/reality relationship under the broad Foucauldian label of "social discipline." It considers the varied ways that historical subjects actively mapped out their lives in counter-distinction to those supposedly 'enduring' nuclear kinship ties, the kinds of mother/father/children roles some historians have mistaken as 'traditional'. As the editors state, they set out, first, "to examine the ways in which the family defined membership, dependency, and exclusion," and to consider how the family itself became an "agent in articulating institutional and state constructions of marginality"; and, secondly, to assess "those who fell outside the demographic measure of the conjugal household, to test the prevailing historiographical assumption that the nuclear family was irrevocably normative in Western society." (4)

The book is nicely framed. Both the co-written introduction and Micheal Gauvreau's useful commentary at the end work very well, the latter bringing into focus both social scientific and historical constructions of the nuclear family through the 1945–1975 period. Each of the contributors uses their subject areas to map either case study or state jurisdiction histories of subjects living outside strictly nuclear family roles in eastern Canada since colonization. The intersecting variables of class, gender, ethnicity, and age, with a marked emphasis on histories in Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritimes, are addressed throughout. My only criticism of the volume concerns what it does not attempt — selections did not include western Canada. But it does, nonetheless, raise the issue of the marginalizing force of the conjugal family ideal, a concept that applies to work other historians are now pursuing on polygamy on the Prairies in the late 19th century, gay life in the same region in the 20th century, and the lives of Vancouver's single, male hoboes during the years of the Great Depression. Both the conclusion and fulsome introduction to what the book does consider offer family history specialists an important conceptual statement concerning the conjugal model's current status in studies of social control and discipline. Christie also introduces each of the book's three sections through brief discussions that push readers to consider, thematically, what follows.

In the process, the editors consider how a surprisingly enduring myopia among historians has cropped up alongside the grand narratives of change in family structure over time: how, for instance, the displacement of the patriarchal family with the contractual family, or the rise of the 'modern' family of separate spheres in shifting contexts of settlement, commerce, and industrialization have led us to forget something important. Those who did not fit the traditional family mould were in fact defined, or defined themselves, in relation to it — as widows and widowers, orphans, unmarried mothers, the homeless, or the institutionalized — roles and identities were forged by the absence of an ideal kinship arrangement. The foundational touchstones today for students just beginning to consider the extent to which families in Western cultures have become modern, new, traditional, reconfigured, or reconstituted — Peter Laslett, Lawrence Stone, and Phillippe Ariès — are critically assessed in this introduction in light of work that includes Mary Beth Norton, Joanna Bourke, Lenore Davidoff, and Catherine Hall. With this new generation, family history beyond the conjugal unit has broadened considerably. The defectives, the indigent, the single men or women, or the "ambiguous" families (from Peter Laslett) are increasingly being seen as part of rather than separate from the intersecting force of family ties. By mapping the evolving margins, of "broken" families, of "bachelors and spinsters," and of "institutions and marginality" (the book's three themes), both the editors and each contributor remind us of the cultural power of the evolving image of the stable and economically secured family household unit through the longue durée of nearly three centuries of family life in Canada. While the "nuclearity thesis," (6) (an awkward but, in the context of this book, understandable term) must be critically re-examined, both editors and authors are sensitive to its shifting significance across Canada's changing social landscapes.

Under the "Broken Families" rubric, Josette Brun begins with the impacts of death in New France, offering a quantitatively precise study of the kinship strategies of widows, widowers, and orphans reaching maturity, strategies that changed with the life cycle to accommodate changing power relationships defined by wealth and patriarchy. Christie herself contributes perceptive interpretations of women in need, most from Upper Canada, beseeching material support through letters that spoke to what was owed through kinship ties, with, again, "the obligations of patriarchal governance" (92) always present.

From a close look at the "itineraries" of wives who became widows in 19th-century Montreal, Bettina Bradbury focuses on the impact of marital civil law, according to the Custom of Paris, on three cases — that of a poor widow, a richer one, and one who negotiated her economic rights at marriage, a legal loophole available within the marriage law. The contrasting outcomes are, especially in relation to each other, illuminating. Bradbury's article is part of a larger work in progress, and clearly an important one. Again, the power of a patriarchal family model, and the legal structures that secured them, are considered.

Finally in this section, Peter Gossage asks the question: were Quebec's stepchildren marginal by definition? Here, we find a revealing sampling of popular literature, oral histories, life writing, and legal records that extends a discussion that opens with two of Quebec's most famous orphans, Sir Wifrid Laurier and Abbé Lionel Groulx, neither of whom became famous because of their upbringings — or did they? Gossage considers the competing forces that, on the one hand, brought the place of stepchildren into a secured fold as members of reconstituted families, and, on the other, left them in varying degrees unable to share fully the same identities, roles, and privileges of their step-siblings. Again, the presence of patriarchal power was important, but in a different way. Fathers, more than mothers, sought to secure the presence of stepchildren within the family circle.

Under the "Bachelors and Spinsters" theme, Ollivier Hubert's study of boundaries separating respectable fatherhood from disreputable bachelorhood in rural Quebec takes seriously the source categories of reconstituted gossip and a critical reading of fictional representations: "instances of deviance," he argues in a critique of the signs of rural mentalities, "are indications of micro-societies that leave no room for deviance." (191) Hubert's readings of the discourse of a parish priest and the novel Jean Rivard, penned by the Quebec writer Antione Gérin-Lajoie a few years before Confederation, are particularly sophisticated, reflecting a distinct style of historiographical discourse that does not shy away from subjective interpretation. Here again, Hubert, through his exegesis of this novel, recognizes the importance of fatherhood as a marker of respectable manhood, of manhood defined ultimately by patriarchal status.

I have not read anyone more versed in patterns of rural life in Quebec's Eastern Townships than J.I. Little, who combines that wisdom with his gifts as a storyteller. Little examines the tale of a revivalist, Ralph Merry, son of the first settler at the Outlet of Lake Memphremagog, later the town of Magog. Merry's life is retraced through his lengthy and detailed journal, kept from 1809 to 1863. Several times Merry tried, unsuccessfully, to publish his story as a man of God, as a throwback to the circuit riders of the northeastern States. But as a family man, Merry was marginal. Uniquely so in fact: because he suffered from ill health, because he never secured a steady means of providing for a family, and because he married late, at age 42. His life, through his telling record of it, Little concludes, shows how the radical revivalism that swept through this region tended both to challenge the patriarchal power of fathers and fatherhood and forestalled the trend toward domesticity that modern changes would eventually bring, even to places like Lake Memphremagog.

Finally, for this section, I felt a researcher's connection to Gwendolyn Davies' and Michele Stairs' approaches to spinsterhood and bachelorhood. "How does one reconstruct this year," Davies asks at one point, "the life of an eighteenth century spinster in between the silences, the illnesses, and the ellipses in her diary?" Taking the 'life-writing' task on, of course, can entail a sort of 'method' reading of people's private confessions, of trying to recreate (akin to 'method' acting) a deep sense of experience by becoming as immersed as possible in the feelings and experiences of a person, place, and era. This is what Davies offers. The lives of four spinsters are revealed through interpretations that speak to these single women's strident efforts to remain connected to their social worlds, worlds in which family identity still played a part. In the next article, Michele Stairs extends the attention we can lend to subjective realms of living as a spinster or a bachelor. Stairs considers the typecasting connections one might draw between Lucy Maud Montgomery's classical portraits of the spinster Marilla Cuthbert, her bachelor brother, Mathew, and the statistical and qualitative experiences of these familial categories on Prince Edward Island. She concludes, with convincing evidence that might deflate more daring notions, that popularized image and lived realities were often not all that different.

For those removed from the family circle by the rise of the Victorian-era institutions for the insane, the elderly, the orphaned, and the single mother, we start in the third and final section with a joint effort by James Moran, David Wright, and Mat Savelli. They follow a useful literature review of the family's reliance on institutions for the insane in America, England, and Canada in the period with new data from the Hamilton Lynatic Asylum to test the 'social control' theses so popular in work done in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Eschewing a crude, Foucauldian approach, linking the 'modern' institution to madness, the authors consider, and quantify in useful ways, cases of mutual dependency that developed between the Hamilton asylum's patients and their families.

In a comparable vein, Denyse Baillargeon stands on its head the notion (fueled by revelations of the 'Duplessis orphans' of the 1950s) of the Quebec orphanage as something far from a haven in a heartless world. She addresses the degree to which the Catholic church strove to nurture settings for "the best family that could exist," (319) one close to God and His children. The gaze of the clerical elite that Baillargeon considers, in fact, looked down upon families, poorer families in particular. They were seen as the least able to provide the best settings for the best family values — Catholic, Christian, and morally communal, despite what Father R.P. Plomondon recognized in the mid-1920s as the 'artificial', boarding school setting provided for the children who grew up in them. (317)

Morality politics takes a different turn with Suzanne Morton's overview of the history of unmarried mothers in Nova Scotia. Though her title and main focus delineates the 1945–1975 period, her contribution goes further back to include thoughtful references to rather common Maritime portraits in the novels of Frank Parker Day, Hugh MacLennan, and others: depictions of unwed mothers. Morton's central points are that Nova Scotia is somewhat unique in having a history in the modern era of proportionally more unwed mothers; at the same time, the province's public policy serves as a strong negative example of histories in North American jurisdictions and elsewhere of women being "made vulnerable and marginalized" by the politics of exclusion. Even after Canada's centennial year, the province offered assistance that was "both inadequate and humiliating." (343)

In the immediate postwar to centennial year period, James Struthers considers the single elderly, typecast as Canada's "grizzled old men and lonely widows," partly as a construct of public policy. The nation's single elderly, especially women, were often the poorest of Canadians, shut out of the rising expectations of the Fifties by virtue of their seniority. The generation that survived two world wars and the Great Depression often faced more coping than comfort with the newly created 1951 universal "citizen's wage" for seniors. At $40 per month, it was at first glance a breakthrough — a universal Old Age Security payment to all over age 70. But what did it really mean? asks Struthers. Like Suzanne Morton's take on shoddy support for Nova Scotia's single mothers, he suggests, it was far less than Health and Welfare minister Paul Martin's claim of unparalleled state "generosity." (354) "[L]iving at the margins of the family," Struthers concludes, dark images of the "tea and toast" or "rooming house" elderly subsisting without the aid of kin called into question the whole notion of a "citizen's wage." (372) Old Age Security became a kind of oxymoron.

Implicit in virtually every article in this collection is the positive force of the family's ability to provide support, both psychologically and materially, weighed against the negative forces faced by those who cannot, will not, or simply do not fit into its many moulds across time. We should note that crossing the thresholds betwixt and between public and private existence, into the vortex of family relations as actually lived, can be a frustrating exercise, fraught with contradictions. In both private lives and the researcher's attempt to reconstruct them, families can appear in all places and eras as oppressive, violent, and variously dysfunctional units that provide love, support, and sustenance. They can become a kind of illusionary, deadly flame, consuming members, young and old, living either too close to dangers within them, or too far from their embrace. In one era, religious fanaticism might flare; in another, pseudo-scientific condemnations of deviancy abound. Historians, too, should be cautioned against being quickly subsumed in their study. "If the family," Gauvreau concludes, "was inhabited by these twin historical archetypes of the addictive personality and the politico-religious fanatic, was it indeed any surprise that the study of this entity would, until very recently, be regarded as somewhat of a distasteful human quagmire, that would swallow alive any historian so unfortunate as to venture there?" (400) Fortunately, with this collection, no such appetites are satisfied, nor pitfalls encountered of inadequate methods or faulty approaches. Specialists will find its conceptual underpinning stimulating. Readers new to family history will find it an insightful companion to other work that focuses on nuclear family roles per se. Further attention by all should be given to this important approach to life on the margins of the ever-changing Canadian family.


Robert Rutherdale Algoma University College

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.