Making Do:
Women, Family, and Home
in Montreal during the
Great Depression
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Making Do:
Women, Family, and Home
in Montreal during the
Great Depression
Denyse Baillargeon
translated by
Yvonne Klein
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
w
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our pub-
lishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our
publishing activities.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Baillargeon, Denyse
Making do: women, family, and home in Montreal during the Great
Depression
(Studies in childhood and family in Canada)
Translation of: Ménagères au temps de la crise.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88920-326-1
1. Housewives − Quebec (Province) − History. 2. Housewives − Quebec
(Province) − Montreal − History. 3. Depressions − 1929 − Quebec
(Province). 4.Women − Quebec (Province) − Social conditions. 5. Women −
Quebec (Province) − Economic conditions. I. Klein, Yvonne M. II. Title.
III. Series.
HQ1459.Q8B3412 1999 305.43′649′09714 C99-930689-8
© 1999
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5
Cover design by Leslie Macredie
Cover illustration: view-23308 New triplex development,
Montreal, QC, 1925. Notman Photographic Archives,
McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal
∞
Printed in Canada
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In memory of Alma and Marie-Rose
T able of Contents
List of Tables....................................................................................................... ix
Acknowledgments............................................................................................. xi
Introduction....................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis..................................... 5
Housework Is Also Work ............................................................................. 9
The Evolution of Domestic Labour before the Depression ...................... 11
Oral Sources .................................................................................................. 14
Chapter 2 From Birth to Marriage............................................................... 23
Birth Families ................................................................................................ 23
Place of Birth and Residence ................................................................... 24
Father ’s Occupation and Standard of Living ......................................... 25
Number of Children and Place in Family .............................................. 28
School ............................................................................................................. 32
Working Experience ...................................................................................... 34
Domestic, Factory Hand or Salesgirl? .................................................... 34
Learning Domestic Work ........................................................................ 41
Chapter 3 Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage............................. 47
Courtship ....................................................................................................... 48
Finding a ‘‘Good Husband’’ .................................................................... 54
The Wedding Day .................................................................................... 58
Setting Up Housekeeping ............................................................................ 59
The Trousseau .......................................................................................... 60
Savings and Personal Property ................................................................ 61
The First Home ........................................................................................ 63
Chapter 4 Motherhood.................................................................................. 67
Sexuality and Contraception ........................................................................ 68
Motherhood ................................................................................................... 75
Expecting .................................................................................................. 77
Preparing for the Birth ............................................................................ 78
Giving Birth .............................................................................................. 79
vii
The Confinement ..................................................................................... 83
The Care and Discipline of Children ........................................................... 85
Infertility and Mothering .............................................................................. 87
Chapter 5 Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances...... 91
A Living Wage ................................................................................................ 92
Income to Balance the Budget ...................................................................... 95
Odd Jobs ................................................................................................... 95
Working in Y our ‘‘Spare Time’’ ............................................................... 96
Managing the Budget and Women’s Economic Power ............................... 102
Making Ends Meet ........................................................................................ 107
Chapter 6 Housework.................................................................................... 113
Women’s Space and Workplace .................................................................... 114
The Neighbourhood ................................................................................ 115
Housing .................................................................................................... 116
Implements of Work ..................................................................................... 121
Organizing Household Tasks ....................................................................... 125
The Cycle of Household Chores ................................................................. 128
Cutting Back on Necessities ........................................................................ 135
Chapter 7 State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit...................................... 141
Government Assistance ................................................................................ 141
Unemployment and Husband-Wife Relations ............................................ 150
The Family ..................................................................................................... 153
The Neighbours ............................................................................................ 160
Debt ................................................................................................................ 163
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 167
Appendices ......................................................................................................... 171
Appendix A: Interview Guide ...................................................................... 171
Appendix B: Thumbnail Biographies of the Women Interviewed ............. 177
Appendix C: Scale of Winter and Summer Rations Approved by
the City of Montreal (c. 1935) ............................................................. 184
Appendix D: Furnishings Bought by an Informant upon Her Marriage
in 1932 .................................................................................................... 185
Appendix E: Floor Plans of Working-Class Flats ....................................... 186
Appendix F: Percentage of Montreal Households Owning Various
Equipment 1931-1958 ........................................................................... 187
Appendix G: Household Appliances and Other Articles Used by
Housewives ............................................................................................ 188
Notes ................................................................................................................... 193
Bibliography....................................................................................................... 213
Index ................................................................................................................... 229
viii Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
List of T ables
Table
1 Birthplace and Place of Residence at Marriage ........................................ 24
2 F ather ’s Occupation .................................................................................. 26
3 Number of Children Per Family Per Place of Residence ........................ 28
4 Average Number of Children and Pregnancies by Area of
Residence ............................................................................................ 29
5 Occupations of Informants ...................................................................... 36
6 Learning Domestic Work .......................................................................... 44
7 Average Number of Pregnancies and Children and the Y ears
between the First and Last Child According to Use of
Contraception ................................................................................... 75
8 Husbands’ Occupations in 1929 or at Marriage ...................................... 92
ix
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Acknowledgments
I
would like first of all to thank the thirty respondents whose precious
accounts permitted me to enter into the very heart of the domestic
sphere; without their contribution, this study would quite simply never
have taken shape. I would also like to express my gratitude to the repre-
sentatives of the various organizations and institutions that I approached.
Their support and cooperation proved indispensable not only in tracking
down these women but also in establishing with them the atmosphere of
confidence necessary to eliciting a good interview. Lauréanne Collin,
information technician at the Council of Health and Social Services of the
Metropolitan Region of Montreal (CSSSRMM), provided me with a list
of nursing homes, Centres locaux de services communautaires (CLSCs),
and people to contact, which facilitated my research a great deal and for
which I should like to thank her.
Many persons read the manuscript and their comments allowed me to
improve its contents. I should particularly like to thank Jacques Rouillard,
professor in the Department of History at the University of Montreal,
who directed my doctoral thesis which was the origin of this work; his
unfailing availability and his repeated encouragement were largely respon-
sible for my bringing this study to its conclusion. My thanks also go to
Bettina Bradbury, Lorraine Gadoury, and Dominique Jean, whose con-
structive criticisms provided food for thought. Daniel Bédard provided a
first review of the manuscript which permitted me to improve its form,
and for which I am very grateful. Finally, I should like sincerely to thank
my partner, Guy Marleau, for his technical advice (as a newcomer to com-
puters, my appeals for his help were frequent!) and especially for his
moral and emotional support throughout the five years that I devoted to
the research and editing of my thesis and the book.
xi
I am also indebted to the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et
l’Aide à la Recherche (FCAR) of the government of Quebec for its finan-
cial support.
xii Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Introduction
T
he Great Depression of the 1930s has entered our collective imagi-
nation as a period synonymous with unemployment, as a kind of
yardstick to which we inevitably refer when trying to assess the strength
of a new recession. Y et again, even at the beginning of the 1980s, newspa-
pers were making the point that the number of unemployed in Canada
was as great as at the beginning of the Depression, as if that event pro-
vided an absolute reference to convey the gravity of the problems which
were besetting the country.
1
Our comprehension of the Depression, however, remains fragmentary.
The political history of the period primarily recounts the constitutional
debates which led to the establishment of the Canadian welfare state and
the emergence of third parties on the left and the right, whereas other
studies pay close attention to organizations and to demonstrations of the
unemployed and to the measures put in place by various governments to
counter unemployment—in short to the consequences of the Depression
that are the most evident and most easy to document.
2
The soup kitchens,
the lines waiting at the doors of the Meurling Refuge, public works sites
where men worked with picks and shovels rather than machines in order
to increase the number of jobs, the drought and the plague of grasshop-
pers which descended on Saskatchewan, the single men who rode the
Canadian rails in search of work, all are shocking images popularized in
the press of the day and more recently in the film La Turlutte des années
dures.
3
The anecdotal thread of various oral histories, like those collected
by journalist Barry Broadfoot, in Ten Lost Years,
4
reminds us of what the
Depression might have meant to those who lived through it. But outside
Notes to the Introduction are on p. 193.
1
of a few distinctive strategies that catch the imagination, like jumping the
electric meter, doing a midnight move, or swiping coal from the railroad
tracks for the stove—we know next to nothing about daily life in the days
when La Bolduc was a star.
The constitutional conflicts, the deeds and posturings of political men
and the brilliant feats recorded in the press certainly did not constitute the
ordinary texture of life during the Depression. For the thousands of
working-class families that were stricken with unemployment, it was
more a matter of hanging on at all costs until the next job or until the eco-
nomic recovery that would finally occur at the beginning of the Second
World War. Most studies of this period, while recognizing that the aid
extended to the unemployed was insufficient to their needs, have nothing
to say about the means these families used to assure their survival. Some
deplore the absence of information in this regard, but despite a constantly
growing number of studies and a broadening of the range of themes that
they address, studies of the Depression continue to pay little attention to
everyday life.
For some years, however, women’s history and the history of the fam-
ily have underscored the importance of the domestic sphere and of the
work which women do in it in order to understand the totality of histori-
cal reality. The work undertaken in these fields has provided evidence of
the connections which exist between the family and the world of work
and of the central role played in this dynamic by women. Whereas stu-
dents of women’s history place at the centre of their analysis the interde-
pendence between the subordinate position of women in the labour
market and their assignment to the function of reproduction and to the
responsibility for life within the domestic sphere, those studying the his-
tory of the family pay close attention to all the possible strategies under-
taken by families to adapt to the industrial context.
5
Women, who
organize and manage daily life and who are responsible for the well-being
of the family, emerge as the principal architects of these strategies. At
present, their domestic labour is seen as an important contribution to the
family economy, that is, to the range of resources contributed collectively
by all the members of the family—women, men, and children—to ensure
their survival.
These two fields of research have opened up new and particularly rich
pathways of investigation into the 1930s. If we are to understand how
working-class families managed to survive this era of profound economic
and social upheaval, we must obviously scrutinize the private sphere and
2 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
ask about the functioning of the family economy and the role played by
women’s work within the home. What indeed was the domestic labour of
working-class housewives at the beginning of the Depression? How and
to what degree did these women increase or modify their labour in order
to ensure the economic survival of their families through the period of
unemployment and underemployment? What consequences did the
Depression have on the various elements of their work at home? These
are the principal questions this study hopes to answer.
An investigation of the private sphere can turn out to be a disappoint-
ing exercise if one tackles it solely by means of conventional sources. In
fact, these contain very little information about daily life and domestic
labour. Admittedly, students of women’s history have developed a certain
expertise in the rereading and reinterpretation of archival documents,
newspapers, reports of commissions of inquiry, and other governmental
publications familiar to historians. Especially in regard to the history of
domestic labour, they have learned to use profitably new and less conven-
tional sources like illustrations, studies of material culture, and even cook-
books and department store catalogues. Although these documents have
not been ignored, it became quickly apparent that, to gain access to daily
life during the Depression years, it would be necessary to turn to the first-
person accounts of those who had lived through it.
The main source on which this study rests is a set of thirty interviews
undertaken in 1986 and 1987 with women who were already married at
the beginning of the 1930s and who agreed to relate their experiences of
the Depression. By the time this study took shape, this period represented
the earliest decade for which it was still possible to find women who had
lived through it as wives and mothers. Their recollections made it possible
to shed light not only on the impact of the economic crisis on their
domestic labour, but also on their entire development from childhood to
the Second World War, and on the living conditions of the working class
from which most of them came. This material is all the more valuable
because it proceeds from a generation of women that will soon disappear
and that has left very little in the way of written evidence behind.
The first chapter of this study, which includes a brief description of
working-class living conditions in Montreal at the beginning of the
Depression and an account of the evolution of domestic labour from the
dawn of industrialization until the 1930s, also devotes space to a consider-
ation of the methodology of oral history on which this work is based. The
chapters following contain analyses of the interviews. Chapter 2, devoted
Introduction 3
to the childhood and youth of the women interviewed, allows us to
develop a profile of the sample while at the same time gives information
about their school attendance and the work experience, both waged and in
the home, that they acquired before they married. Chapter 3 talks about
dating and marriage and describes the couples’ possessions at the begin-
ning of their life together (property, furniture, wedding presents, bride’s
trousseau) while the fourth chapter examines motherhood, sexuality, and
contraception.
Chapter 5 analyzes the contribution made by salaried and paid work, of
men as well as of women, and the management of the family budget and
patterns of consumption. In chapter 6, the subject is housework and a
review of its various aspects: where it was performed, how it was orga-
nized, what tasks were involved, and what implements were available to
women to do it. Finally, chapter 7 considers the contribution of govern-
ment, strategies of mutual aid, such as the help of relatives and neigh-
bours, and the use of credit. The final chapters then examine more
specifically the impact of the Depression on various aspects of women’s
domestic labour and on the family economy. Considering the Depression
from the point of view of those who had to deal with it, this study will
make evident the indispensable role played by women as they did their
best to overcome the poverty in which they found themselves.
4 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Chapter 1
Domestic Labour and
Economic Crisis
T
he New York stock market crash of 1929 is generally considered
the beginning of an unprecedented economic crisis that would
spread to every capitalistic country before it finally ground to a halt
shortly before the start of the Second World War. A decade of destitution,
unemployment and poverty separates these two events. The language
which historians have chosen to describe that period—The Great Depres-
sion, T en Lost Years, La Décennie des naufragés (Decade of Castaways), The
Winter Years, The Dirty Thirties, to mention the titles of only the best
known works—is meant to reflect the scale of the socio-economic upheav-
als the crisis produced and the trauma borne by those who lived through it.
An examination of the principal economic indicators confirms this
rather catastrophic perception of the period. With an economy largely
dependent on exports and with the United States as its primary market,
Canada indeed ranks second among the countries most affected by the
Depression. Thus, between 1929 and 1933, Canadian manufacturing pro-
duction was reduced by more than a third, the consumer price index is
estimated to have dropped 25 to 30 percent, while salaries in non-export
industries fell 37 percent. Meanwhile, the numbers of unemployed rock-
eted in the other direction. According to even conservative estimates,
between 27 and 33 percent of the workforce was looking for work in the
winter of 1933, which meant that 1.5 million Canadians, 15 percent of the
entire population of the country, had to live on public assistance.
1
Quebec, despite its industrial structure centred on light industry and
the production of primary consumer goods, was one of the provinces
most affected by unemployment. The city of Montreal, which was at that
Notes to Chapter 1 are on pp. 193-97.
5
time at the centre of industrial activity, recorded the worst performances.
With a population of 800,000, the city represented 28 percent of the pop-
ulation of Quebec, but 60 percent of those on relief in the province. In
February 1934, at the height of the Depression, more than 240,000 per-
sons, that is 28 percent of the population of Montreal, were living on pub-
lic assistance; among Francophones, the proportion increased to 38
percent.
2
These statistics, though impressive enough, probably do not
convey the entire reality of unemployment as they do not take into
account those without work who did not ask the municipality for assis-
tance nor do they include those who saw their workweek lopped to one or
two days or who were subjected to wage cuts. Despite their deficiencies,
however, the figures clearly show that, out of all occupational categories,
it was the workers who were the most affected by unemployment. In
Montreal, for example, although they represented about two-thirds of all
paid labour, they made up 87 percent of the family wage earners on relief,
with unskilled labourers alone representing 54.9 percent of the total.
3
The data we have on wages and relief payments demonstrate that this
period was especially difficult for the working class. In 1931, for example,
although the Canadian Welfare Council fixed the figure of $1040 as the
absolute annual minimum required to support an average family of five
and $1500 as the amount required to attain a certain level of comfort, that
body remarked that almost half of the heads of Montreal families earned
less than $1000 a year. Four years later, although the subsistence level was
pegged at $1200 a year, an inquiry undertaken by the Montreal Board of
Trade revealed that 68 percent of the 180,000 employed heads of families
in the city were earning less than $1000 a year—and more than 50 percent
of them were making less than $850—leaving aside the 40,000 families
who were dependent on public assistance.
4
The latter group did not
receive even half the amount required to assure their subsistence. The
scale of grants established by the city of Montreal fixed the sums of
$36.88 a month in summer and $39.48 in winter as the amounts allowed to
cover costs of food, heating, rent, and clothing for a family of five.
5
Very clearly, it was impossible to live decently on such meagre
resources. Morover, the low wages condemned a significant proportion of
these families to rent unhealthy lodgings. The report of a municipal
inquiry carried out in 1936-37 in seven working-class districts of the city
in fact deemed that the general condition of 54 percent of some 5000
lodgings visited ranged from only fair to outright bad. Some were infested
with vermin, a number were situated in basements, attics, back alleys, or
6 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
even old stables and the majority were badly lit, badly ventilated and
lacked a bath and hot running water. In 73 percent of these cases, the
housing rented for less than $16 a month, but for the majority of families
living there, this sum represented more than 30 percent of their monthly
budget. Crowding constituted another problem, since 25 percent of
Montreal households had to be satisfied with fewer than one room for
each person.
6
Low wages and bad housing conditions evidently went hand in hand
with poor health. Even though infant mortality was decreasing through-
out the Depression, going from 132.3 per thousand in 1929 to 59.3 per
thousand in 1940, the rate remained higher in the working-class districts
than elsewhere. It was much the same story for infectious diseases like
tuberculosis which continued to wreak havoc.
7
An investigation under-
taken in 1933 into people living on home relief in Montreal likewise con-
cluded that these were more likely to exhibit respiratory troubles as well
as problems with their teeth, eyesight, hearing, and even mental illness.
The problem of malnutrition appeared particularly acute: in 1933, for
example, it was observed that only 55 percent of adults and 47 percent of
youths living on public assistance were adequately nourished. After five
years on relief, the percentage of individuals exhibiting dietary deficiencies
rose to 49 percent. To be precise, the amount allocated by the Unemploy-
ment Relief Commission in Montreal for the feeding of a family of five
totalled $21.88 a month while a balanced diet would have required $35.17
and even the ‘‘restricted diet for emergency use’’ would have cost $25.90.
8
These data, though extremely useful in giving a sense of urban misery
during the Depression, have still to be seen in perspective. It must be
admitted indeed that the inadequate income and problems of housing and
health linked to the poverty and unemployment that affected the work-
ing-class population during the 1930s already represented the daily lot of
many during even the ‘‘prosperous’’ 1920s. The number of families
assisted by the Saint Vincent de Paul Society between 1920 and 1929,
which amounted to three or four thousand each year, represents a good
indication of the economic difficulties experienced in the course of the
decade preceding the Depression.
9
In fact, from the beginning of the process of industrialization and
urbanization in the nineteenth century, workers’ families had to learn how
to cope with low wages, seasonal unemployment, and periodic slowdowns
of industrial activity. If there is no doubt that the Great Depression dis-
tinguished itself from its predecessors in terms of its sheer duration and
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 7
by the fact that it occurred in a society that was more industrialized than
it had ever been before, it is no less true that for large sections of the
working class, particularly for the families of unskilled workers, precari-
ous living conditions were part and parcel of their daily life and they had
already developed various strategies to deal with them. Child labour,
which was widespread as witnessed by the statistics for school attendance
during the period preceding the Second World War, represented one of the
means most commonly employed by these families to increase their
income and counteract the effects of underemployment. But these fami-
lies counted just as much on other kinds of work and other strategies
which depended to a large degree on mothers at home. The entire range of
responsibilities assumed by women at home, the income they brought in,
the savings they effected, though long overlooked by historians, now
appear very much one of the elements to which attention must be paid if
we wish to achieve a better appraisal of the standard of living of working-
class families and appreciate their capacity to survive.
The nature and importance of these responsibilities have varied accord-
ing to era and economic circumstances. Thus in the course of the period
marked by the beginning of industrialization in Montreal, the different
kinds of contribution women made to the family income, as identified by
Bettina Bradbury, cover a broad range of activities which permitted their
families to escape an absolute dependence on paid work and thus improve
their standard of living. Raising livestock, cultivating a patch of land, mak-
ing cloth, clothing, and foodstuffs for family use or to exchange for the
money necessary for household upkeep, taking in boarders or sharing the
house with another family represented the kind of strategies to which
they had always turned.
10
By the time the Great Depression broke out, industrialization and
urbanization had already eliminated a number of these practices. In partic-
ular, keeping livestock within the city limits had been prohibited for some
time, while the population density of the working-class districts had seri-
ously reduced the possibilities of tending a garden. At the same time,
domestic production of many basic items, like bread, cloth, and soap, to
name only a few, had clearly diminished. But despite a greater dependence
on the part of workers’ families on wages and on the consumer goods
market, the labour of women in the home still comprised a whole host of
tasks altogether necessary to support the family. It fell to women to man-
age the available money so as to get the most out of every cent; they were
likewise responsible for the feeding, clothing, and upkeep of the family,
8 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
and for doing it as cheaply as possible. Finally, they had both to find
sources of supplementary income to balance the budget and to maintain
the informal networks of mutual aid and exchange with relatives that
would allow them to achieve precious economies. All of these responsi-
bilities—as well as pregnancy, the care and raising of children, not to
speak of the management of family conflicts, and the emotional support
of its members, especially the partner,
11
are now included in the term
‘‘domestic labour.’’ The study of this particular kind of work turns out to
be indispensable if we are to go beyond the statistical, and frequently
reductive, portrait of working-class living conditions during the Great
Depression.
Housework Is Also Work
Not so long ago, the aggregation of tasks carried out by women in the
home was seen as nothing more than a collection of trivial occupations,
passed on to them by reason of their biological capacity to bear children
and completely disconnected from the great events that form the histori-
cal framework of a nation. In our industrial societies where ‘‘work’’ has
become synonymous with employment and with wages, it was that much
easier to deny the economic and social importance of women’s work in
the home since it was unpaid and because the domestic sphere, where this
sort of work was done, appeared a place isolated from the rest of the
social organization.
Feminist analysis over the last twenty years has overturned all of these
notions. In particular, the debates surrounding the conceptualization of
domestic work have made it possible to demonstrate that it is indeed
labour in the sense that it is as essential to the maintenance and reproduc-
tion of the economic and social organization as is the production of goods
and services.
12
Indeed, in addition to assuring, without pay, the physical
maintenance and the biological and social reproduction of the labour
force, domestic labour ensures the transformation and circulation of mar-
ket-produced commodities and takes over the multiple services that nei-
ther industry nor the state can provide but which are nonetheless essential
to the survival of both, as well as to that of the familial group and the wel-
fare of the individuals which it comprises.
13
Most feminist theorists also take the view that, from the dawn of
industrial capitalism, this form of labour allowed men to reinforce their
position of domination. Work at home had been assigned to women by
virtue of a sexual division of labour that well predated industrialization
and in which women had already been subordinated. Work carried out
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 9
inside the home in fact relieved men of responsibilities related to their
own care and the care of their children and allowed them to enter the
labour market and, more generally, to devote themselves to activities in
the public sphere that in turn became new bases for their power over
women.
14
This is not to maintain that women were altogether excluded
from paid employment, but the wage discrimination to which they were
(and still are) subjected meant that they had no other choice than to make
themselves economically dependent on a man, even though this depen-
dence—and the familial and domestic constraints which ensued from it—
became the pretext for the low wages which they were (and still are) paid.
Thus, the domestic labour of women both serves the needs of capitalism
and patriarchy, which derive genuine material benefit from it, and permits
us to understand the subordinate position of women in the labour market.
Domestic labour is indeed at the heart of the very functioning of society
itself and of gender relations and thus can in no way be considered an
epiphenomenon. Quite the contrary, it constitutes ‘‘the basis and comple-
ment of this society that can neither do without it nor reduce it to a sim-
ple commercial transaction.’’
15
The assignment of women to household tasks and the care of children
does not begin with industrial capitalism, but this new mode of produc-
tion produced profound upheavals in the organization of the family and
considerably modified the role of women within it. In pre-industrial soci-
eties, where the workplace and the home characteristically coincided, the
family constituted a unit of production in which women’s work included
numerous tasks related to the production of goods consumed by the fam-
ily or sold on the market. In addition to preparing the daily meals, doing
the laundry, cleaning house, and caring for the children, women in rural
areas also were responsible for the farmyard animals, as well as the dairy
and pigpens, the garden, the weaving of cloth, the making of clothes and
household linens, and so on. In town, artisans’ wives helped their hus-
bands conduct business, if they were not directly involved in the produc-
tion itself. The presence in the household of various relatives, apprentices,
and domestic servants also meant that the responsibility for the socializa-
tion of children did not fall exclusively on their mothers; the children
were, moreover, quickly integrated into adult life following a period of
apprenticeship that was often served outside the family.
An effect of the shift of production to the workshop and then to the
factory was to institute a new spatio-sexual division of labour: relying on
their old form of domination, men were integrated en masse into market
10 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
production, a new source of power in industrialized societies, while
women, especially married women, were relegated to the home, bringing
into being the housewife, in the modern sense of the term.
16
Technologi-
cal developments and the industrial production of many common con-
sumer goods little by little led housewives to abandon their domestic
production and to use new and improved tools and appliances, which
accordingly lightened their toil. At the same time, the role of wife and
mother took on a whole new dimension and became narrowly associated
with ‘‘feminine nature,’’ to such a degree that tasks performed by women
within the home disappeared under the cover of maternal and conjugal
love. This is the reason why the fact that domestic labour plays a key role
in the functioning of our societies has long been obscured.
The Evolution of Domestic Labour before the Depression
Between the appearance of factory work in the nineteenth century and the
Great Depression, every element comprising women’s domestic labour
underwent numerous transformations. Present research does not always
permit us to focus squarely on the consequences of these changes for
housewives of the poorest classes, but it is evident that these women,
despite their meagre incomes, did not remain completely untouched by
the numerous developments that we observe over the course of this
period. Household chores, for example, were certainly facilitated by the
introduction of electricity and cold running water in the working-class
districts of Montreal during the first two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. Likewise, we may suppose that the majority of these housewives
developed the habit of buying various products available on the market,
like bread, cloth, and soap, and acquired certain household appliances that
appeared in the course of this period, like manual washing machines. It
must be pointed out, however, that electric appliances like irons, washers,
stoves, and refrigerators were not offered in the department store cata-
logues before the 1920s and that, despite often flashy advertising cam-
paigns touting their time and labour-saving advantages, they were slow to
make their appearance in the home on account of their rather high cost.
17
Thus, according to the study undertaken by the Metropolitan Commis-
sion in certain working-class districts of the city in 1937, the majority of
housewives in these areas possessed only a wood or coal stove that was
also used for heating and only 67 percent of them had an icebox. As well,
the investigators noted that 91 percent of these homes had softwood
floors which were difficult to take care of, and that less than half the fami-
lies used one of their rooms as a parlour.
18
Indeed, the data available
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 11
regarding wages, housing conditions, and the spread of domestic technol-
ogy lead us to the conclusion that, for poorer urban housewives, the fam-
ily remained a site of production well after industrialization, while
household chores were always performed by hand and represented a heavy
burden at least until the Second World War.
At the turn of the century, the performance of housework also became
the object of numerous recommendations which went hand in hand with
the new industrialized context and the domestic technology it had given
rise to. In order to care for their families better, urban housewives were
urged to plan their work and to familiarize themselves with the new sci-
ences, like food chemistry and nutrition. The movement for the scientific
management of housework reached its peak at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, when, under the influence of Taylorism, there was an
attempt to convince women to reduce their motions and time their jobs.
19
According to historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the First World War
marked a turning point in regard to this attitude. Housework, until
recently considered a science, became an art, the expression of the house-
wife’s love for her family.
20
One must always wonder to what degree
housewives of the poorest classes were able to conform to these new stan-
dards, considering their limited access to domestic technology and to
decent housing.
Motherhood as well underwent numerous transformations in the
course of this period. On the one hand, women were having fewer chil-
dren. Whereas French-speaking Quebec women born in 1867 gave birth
on average to 6.4 children, their granddaughters, born at the beginning of
the century, on average had two fewer children.
21
This reduction in the
birth rate was accompanied by a trend toward the nuclearization of the
home, which meant that women found themselves more isolated than
they previously had been and henceforth would be on their own in shoul-
dering the responsibility for childcare. Furthermore, toward the end of
the nineteenth century, we witness a virtual exaltation of the maternal role
which comes to epitomize female destiny. In this new context, infant
mortality became unacceptable and of greater and greater concern to
social reformers. Fostered by new medical developments, the discourse on
hygienics which was taking shape in this period served to justify the
increasing intervention of doctors in women’s lives, especially during
pregnancy and childbirth. Various organizations (Goutte de Lait, L ’Assis-
tance maternelle, and the visiting nurse service of the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company) were thus created to give free aid and advice to
12 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
women about the best methods of caring for their children.
22
Of course,
the first priority of these services was to educate women of the poorest
classes, who were seen to be most at risk and at the same time the least
likely to consult a doctor, due to lack of money. To the volunteers, doc-
tors and nurses associated with these organizations, the medical supervi-
sion of mothers and their newborn babies, as well as breast-feeding,
became virtually their theme song. The repetition of the same recommen-
dations throughout the course of the opening decades of the twentieth
century is a clear indication that working-class women either could not
conform to them or were reluctant to.
23
Indeed, the reduction in the rates
of infant mortality registered in these years must be largely attributed to
the improvement in sanitary facilities and to the pasteurization of milk
that was made obligatory in 1926.
24
These statistics ought not obscure the
fact that women of the poorest classes well up until the Second World War
very commonly experienced the loss of one or more young children and
frequently miscarried as a result of malnutrition.
At the same time, this period saw the development of the bourgeois
model of the woman economically dependent on her husband/-
breadwinner;
25
from now on the family was expected to offer a peaceful
haven to the husband/breadwinner, a refuge against the harshness of the
outside world, while the woman was to become more and more focussed
on supporting her husband emotionally, caring for her children, and keep-
ing the house. For working-class women, however, the line between the
public and private spheres was not so clearly drawn.
26
Although very few
of them were actually working for wages during this time, more and more
indications suggest that women were contributing financially to the
household economy by performing one or several paid occupations at
home. The links between the market and the family were all the more evi-
dent for these women in that they were the ones who administered the
family budget and it fell to them to make up, one way or another, the
shortages produced by insufficient wages. It is extremely difficult, how-
ever, to define the evolution of those activities which took place in the
secrecy of the private sphere. We know, for example, that the clothing
trade in Montreal, at least up until the Depression, depended on a signifi-
cant workforce in the home, but it is almost impossible to quantify a phe-
nomenon like this.
27
Keeping boarders, making various products for sale,
or making money from their services (like doing laundry) represent many
of the means to which women resorted in order to balance the budget,
though we cannot determine to what extent. Likewise, it is difficult to
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 13
assess women’s participation in networks of family support, though we do
know that industrialization did not eliminate these.
28
It is quite evident,
however, that the wife-mother-housewife model offered to women did
not yet correspond to the experience of life among housewives of the
poorest classes at the time of the Great Depression. The analysis of the
interviews will reveal particulars about each element of their domestic
labour and highlight the impact of the Depression on each of them.
Oral Sources
In the last fifteen years, studies grounded in whole or in part on oral
sources have become increasingly numerous. This new approach, fostered
by the concerns of social history and histoires des mentalités intends to
take into account the experience of groups which are absent from the
public sphere and from the written record; thus it is a highly desirable, if
not indispensable, tool to bring women back into history. Oral narratives
are also central to the creation of women’s history in that they give voice
to those who have been suppressed, constituting them as historical sub-
jects, and making it possible to go beyond the usual discourse of the elites
who have been especially prolific in regard to women.
29
Finally, these oral
testimonies also help us better to apprehend certain particularly complex
realities, such as the family, and to disclose the often unsuspected interac-
tion between the public and the private spheres by revealing the ubiquity
of ordinary daily experience at the heart of what official history calls ‘‘the
great events,’’ like wars and economic crises.
30
Therefore, to interview
women in itself makes them actors and restores them to history; it also
provides the sole means of access to a vast range of information about the
family that often only women keep and chronicle.
Whatever the object of the research, the complex nature of oral sources
must be kept in mind. They are in fact constructed within the framework
of an interpersonal relationship, thanks to the workings of memory. The
information collected thus depends on the quality of the questions, the
contact established between the interviewer and the interviewee, and on
the functioning of the subject’s memory. These various constituent ele-
ments of oral history require that we bring as critical an eye to bear on the
preliminary steps of formulating the problem and the questionnaire as to
the conditions under which these narratives were elicited.
As for memory, it is certainly important to point out that the memories
of old people, as long as they are in good health, are no less reliable than
those of young adults and that the loss of memory associated with old age
primarily affects recent memory, leaving intact those recollections of
14 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
childhood and youth which are of particular interest to the historian.
31
On the other hand, it is clear that memory works selectively and is condi-
tioned by the present. That is, memories are rekindled only to the degree
that they represent a particular significance to respondents while being
questioned and that their perceptions are modified as much by their sub-
sequent experience as by the changes at work in society.
32
Thus, the
effects of the Great Depression on family life and domestic labour remain
vivid for the women interviewed not only because of the inconveniences
and deprivations which they suffered but also because those years fre-
quently offered a striking contrast to their present living conditions,
which acted as a marker to which they could compare the situation of the
past. Likewise, the resurgence of the feminist movement at the end of the
1960s and the development of new styles of life centred on consumption
impacted more particularly on their conception of their lives. The num-
ber of pregnancies, male-female relations, the sharing of domestic tasks,
the grip exercised by the Catholic Church on society in those days, or the
lack of material comfort they experienced when young, all are themes
which aroused many comments and criticisms. The accounts collected,
however, record a clear distinction between present and past judgements.
This ability to distinguish between what was thought then and what now
is absolutely necessary to a good interview and constitutes an excellent
indicator by which to evaluate the credibility of the subjects questioned
and the information obtained.
33
If memory is not, strictly speaking, sexually determined, the way it is
structured depends on individual experience, which is itself determined by
gender. Thus, the place occupied in social relationships and the sexual
division of labour gives rise to a time-specific relation and fosters the rec-
ollection of certain kinds of experiences.
34
An existence passed almost
entirely within the confines of the domestic sphere, as was the case for the
majority of the women interviewed, favours the recollection of events and
deeds associated with that area of activity. So it is not surprising that they
supplied often very precise details about daily life, more than their hus-
bands would have been able to do, right down to the price of groceries
and their husbands’ wages during the early years of their marriage.
35
This
‘‘family memory’’ does not, however, operate according to the same dates
or points of reference as does official history. On many occasions during
the course of the interviews, the framework of events was reconstructed
around the years when children were born, a close relative died or a move
took place.
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 15
At the beginning, the interview guide included certain questions rele-
vant to the social and political context, what the respondents thought at
the time about the measures taken by the government to deal with the cri-
sis, or the position of the Church regarding unemployment, etc. It
became evident very quickly, however, that women of this generation had
not been especially interested in what was happening outside the domestic
sphere; only those who had been closely involved in certain ‘‘public’’
events had retained memories of them. Thus, one of the women recalled a
women’s demonstration outside the Montreal city hall, organized by the
Ligue de solidarité féminine,
36
because one of her neighbours had taken
part in it and had told her all about it. Nevertheless, she did not know
who had organized the event. Another woman remembered demonstra-
tions by the unemployed because her husband had been involved, but no
more than that, while a third recalled very clearly that the Taschereau gov-
ernment had promised a cash payment to those who would move back to
the country to so-called ‘‘regions of colonization’’ because, in her case,
the promised sum was never paid! For the majority, however, the events
which unfolded in the public sphere passed almost unnoticed, leaving
hardly a trace; questions relating to them raised only faint echoes, con-
firming the relationship between involvement in an area of activity and
the subject of memory.
Because of the peculiar way that memory works and the limitations
which follow from it, oral sources cannot be substituted for written ones
for certain kinds of information. Written sources thus turned out to be
indispensable in developing a relevant questionnaire and played an essen-
tial role in the chronological reconstruction of the period used as a frame-
work for the interviews. As well, for each theme taken up, the accounts
collected were analyzed in the light of sources, studies, and monographs
of various origins. Documents drawn from the archives of the Metropoli-
tan Insurance Company, certain newspapers and periodicals, Eaton’s cata-
logues, a number of governmental publications (census figures, statistical
yearbooks, publications of various government departments, memoranda
and reports of commissions of inquiry, and the like), as well as studies of
the Great Depression, women, and the family carried out in Quebec, in
English Canada, the United States and England made it possible to quan-
tify certain phenomena and to situate the experience lived by the infor-
mants within a broader perspective. Comparing one interview with others
and the different parts of the response of a single witness allowed us to
validate certain information when the written sources could not do so.
16 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The women were questioned more about how they had lived rather
than what they had witnessed of the events which took place around
them, an approach which, in theory, minimizes the risk of mistakes or
oversights. We ought not, however, overlook the fact that respondents
generally attempt to preserve the image they have of themselves or of the
group to which they belong. This image refers to a socially and sexually
oriented construction, but one whose elements may change according to
the historical period. Even if these variations alter what was taboo into
what is now acceptable, behaviours that were deemed deviant in previous
years—premarital pregnancy, for example—can be more difficult to ascer-
tain. Despite present-day tolerance of behaviour of this kind, the person
being questioned knows that she transgressed the norm that was in force
at the time and may still feel so embarrassed that she seeks to disguise the
fact, even if it means lying about the date of her marriage or the year her
first child was born. Rather than a deliberate and conscious lie, experience
reveals that omissions and evasive responses are the means used to avoid
an embarrassing question that has revived painful memories. Whether
conscious or not, these ‘‘oversights’’ and ‘‘mistakes’’ are as significant as
the memory of an event and ought to be submitted to analysis when they
can be identified.
The relationship between the interviewer and the subject remains the
great unknown in this process. It is difficult to determine precisely what
are the exact consequences but even if the interviewer intervenes as little
as possible, her very presence influences the content of the material,
which will more or less conform to the ‘‘norm,’’ depending on how she is
seen. The sex, age, race, and social class of two persons facing one
another are further factors that enter into the equation. Thus, it has been
fairly easy for me, as a woman, to ask participants about their sexuality,
their childbirths, and to approach subjects like contraception, but the
mere fact of being a woman offers no absolute guarantees as differences in
generation and social class may erect formidable obstacles. The fact that
the interviewer was a stranger probably encouraged a subject to confide
what she might feel too ashamed to share with those closer to her, like her
children. The same is true for certain astonishingly virulent comments
about relations between men and women or parents and children, which
can be attributed to a propensity on the part of some older people to a
wounding mode of speech that they display as though it were a privilege
of old age.
37
Nevertheless, my being a young woman and a stranger may
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 17
have hindered me from obtaining other kinds of information, although it
is clearly difficult to determine what sorts.
A minimum level of trust must be established and the two participants
must discover a pleasure in talking to one another and listening to one
another in order to assure the success of each interview: ‘‘a good interview
is one where both take mutual pleasure in the conversation.’’
38
This rela-
tionship of trust ought not, however, permit us to forget that the princi-
pal danger of this approach is to lead the subject into saying what the
interviewer wants to hear. Particular attention must therefore be given to
the composition of the interview guide and the formulation of the ques-
tions.
The interview guide comprised a hundred points divided into three sec-
tions which corresponded to the different stages of the respondents’ lives
from their birth to the end of the 1930s.
39
Beyond the questions about
family origin, the first section of the interview asked about schooling and
paid and domestic work experience prior to marriage. Collecting this kind
of information was intended both to determine the profile of the sample
and to put the later experience of the respondent into perspective. The
second part asked questions about courtship, marriage, and motherhood.
These stages do not simply represent important transitions in the
women’s lives, which in themselves demand our attention, but the ques-
tions relating to them allow us to understand the familial framework (hus-
band’s occupation, number of children, place of residence, etc.) within
which they experienced the Depression. Finally, the last section of the
questionnaire involved questions about the contributions to the family
economy made by different forms of work (paid and domestic), institu-
tions like the government and the family, and other strategies of survival
during the 1930s. A combination of specific questions in order to elicit
factual information and broader, more open questions in order to sketch
in motivations, values, attitudes, and behaviours seemed to me most likely
to stimulate the subjects’ memories without inducing answers while
procuring the desired information.
The choice and number of subjects likewise determines the value of the
information collected and the analysis that can be made of it. In this
regard, we must emphasize that historians, unlike sociologists, have to
take into account that death has already struck down a group of potential
contributors.
40
Additionally, the very nature and the scope of the data that
the qualitative interview produces makes it difficult to analyze too large a
number of interviews. It was a question, therefore, of being sure of a qual-
18 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
itative representation, of knowing that the testimonies collected present a
sufficient number of points in common to permit a certain degree of gen-
eralization. To put it another way, it was necessary to reach and then go
beyond the ‘‘saturation point.’’ This concept, borrowed from Daniel Bar-
taux, starts from the point of view that ‘‘beyond a certain number of
interviews (biographical or not), the researcher or the team gets the
impression that nothing new is being learned, at least insofar as the socio-
logical object of the research is concerned.’’
41
The interviews have been
pursued to the point where it became evident that further interviews
would yield little in the way of new information regarding practices
already identified, the recurrence of which was no longer in doubt. Thirty
interviews were completed. According to a number of writers, this figure
marks a significant stage: ‘‘it is unusual to learn new information after the
twentieth or thirtieth interview.’’
42
A homogenous sample constitutes a prior condition to any meaningful
analysis of the data collected in this way. The informants thus had to fit
certain criteria. The area of investigation, centred on domestic labour in
the context of the depression of the 1930s, involved a sample of women
who were already married at the beginning of that decade. The most catas-
trophic year according to the economic indicators, 1933, was used as a ref-
erence point. The probability that women who married much after this
date would have felt the effects of the Depression on their domestic
labour was indeed less great. Nevertheless, in order to be able to establish
comparisons, it was necessary to find women who had spent the early
years of their marriages before the Depression (this is clearly the case for
eighteen of the respondents married in 1929 or before) or whose hus-
bands had been working during the first months of the marriage (which is
the case for all but one of the respondents).
The influence of the Depression and of unemployment was felt largely
in urban areas and it was the men of the working class, especially unskilled
labourers, and tradesmen who were primarily affected. These factors thus
determined the selection of respondents who had to have lived in a work-
ing-class district of Montreal in the years between 1929 and 1939. The res-
idence qualification, while it may seem rather vague, permitted us to enlist
women who, because of their partners’ occupations, had shared the living
conditions of the working class without necessarily presuming their own
class affiliations.
43
In order to maximize the chance of finding informants
from this era, no particular district was selected.
44
Finally the respondents
had to be French Canadian in origin (and therefore Catholic), their ethnic
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 19
and religious uniformity determining the community of culture essential
to a comparison and analysis of the material elicited. In the end, the sam-
ple consisted of the thirty women born between 1897 and 1916 and mar-
ried between 1919 and 1934.
The interviews, which lasted on average for three hours, were all con-
ducted in the respondents’ homes, for the most part in the absence of wit-
nesses. Twenty-six of the women were widowed and lived by themselves,
while one lived with her daughter, who was present for a good part of the
interview. Four women lived with their husbands; of these men, two were
present off and on during the interview and intervened at greater or lesser
length, particularly when unemployment or their occupations were under
discussion. Their presence did not turn out to be so intrusive, however,
that the interviews completed under these circumstances had to be
rejected. On the contrary, it permitted us to deal with certain subjects
from their point of view (for example, women working for wages after
marriage, childbirth, the sharing of household chores and the like) and to
obtain information unknown to their wives (about their occupations,
their youth before they married, their feelings regarding unemployment
and the Depression, and so on). Moreover, it was not always possible to
avoid the unexpected visit of a daughter, a son, or a sister, but these peo-
ple were present for part of the interview in only three cases.
Before the meeting, the subjects had been informed about the general
aim of the study and the principal points which would be touched upon.
The open-ended questions extended considerable latitude to the intervie-
wee, who often recalled various stages of her life according to the reminis-
cences and stories which came to mind. In general, a good proportion of
the interviews unfolded in this manner, without the intervention of ques-
tions. This mode of procedure requires considerable skill in guiding an
interview so as to follow the rhythm and structure of the informant’s nar-
rative without losing track of the point which she has or has not dealt
with. But it yields the greatest amount of information, even if digressions
can be rather frequent. Ultimately, it might be said that an essential condi-
tion to a good interview is that the subject takes charge of it. ‘‘A life-nar-
rative does not exist until questions are no longer being answered and the
pleasure of telling one’s story, of transmitting one’s experience to another,
takes over.’’
45
Appendix B presents thumbnail biographies of the informants which,
while respecting their anonymity, permit the extracts drawn from the
interviews to be repositioned in the larger life course of each individual. In
20 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
the chapters which follow, each of these extracts will be identified by a
capital letter E followed by the number of the interview to which it corre-
sponds. Finally, it should be noted that the order of the chapters in this
study follow the order of the questions in the interview guide, which is
reproduced in Appendix A. The analysis of the responses begins with two
chapters on the childhood and youth of the informants up until their mar-
riage, followed by close attention to the details of the life of the couple
until the end of the thirties, especially in regard to the responsibilities that
these women assumed within the family and to the impact of the Depres-
sion on different aspects of their domestic labour.
Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis 21
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Chapter 2
From Birth to Marriage
‘‘I certainly know that you get used to the role you
take on.’’ (E3)
W
hen the stock market crashed in 1929, the majority of the
women interviewed for this study were at least twenty years old.
Eighteen of them were already married or would get married that year; the
rest married their husbands in the next few years. The decade of eco-
nomic crisis that affected the Western world thus coincided with that
stage in their lives when they began to assume their role as wife and
mother. Before analyzing the impact of an economic crisis of this size on
the assortment of tasks that they were called upon to shoulder within the
family, a study of their previous history will permit us better to draw their
profiles and take a look at the formative years that prepared them to take
on their adult female roles.
Birth Families
It is during childhood and youth that we learn what we need to know,
internalize behavioural norms, and adopt the role models and social values
specific to our gender. For women born at the beginning of this century,
this period of training and preparation for adult life was marked by the
intensification of various winds of change that had been blowing through
Quebec society for some decades. While imposing a new sexual division
of labour based on the couple as provider/homemaker, the developing
industrialization and urbanization that was becoming more pronounced
during this period significantly modify traditional female life-courses and
Notes to Chapter 2 are on pp. 197-98.
23
apprenticeships. Of course, the socialization of girls remains a function of
their attributes as mother and wife, but the apprenticeship into these
social roles does not cover the same realities as previously. In urban work-
ing-class families, at the very least, the market economy fosters the aban-
donment of the production of certain goods in the home and imposes
new practices, while strategies of survival encourage more and more fre-
quent integration of young women into the labour market. The typical life
path of women of this generation follows the course of early socialization
at home, then at school, followed by several years of waged work preced-
ing marriage. Place of birth and early residence and the composition and
stability of the birth-family are as important as how social roles are
learned. This is why these elements deserve to be the object of detailed
scrutiny.
Place of Birth and Residence
Twenty-six of the women interviewed were born in Quebec, two in the
United States, and two in Ontario. Sixteen were born in urban areas,
eleven of them in Montreal, and fourteen in rural areas. Of these, six were
born on farms. A description which limited itself to these facts would,
however, be misleading. Actually, the pulse of urbanization, which was
accelerating at the beginning of the century, meant that a number of these
women, though born in the countryside or outside of Quebec, came to
Montreal during their childhood or adolescence and thus grew up, to a
greater or lesser extent, in an urban context; a few of them, born in the
city, travelled in the opposite direction.
These moves must be taken into account in order to understand the
progress of the informants, since school attendance, training in household
work, and the possibility of waged work vary according to social circum-
stances. The following table compares the birthplace of the informants
with their place of residence upon marriage.
Table 1
Birthplace and Place of Residence at Marriage
Urban Rural
Montreal Other Total Farm Non-farm Total
Place of birth 11 5 16 6 8 14
Res. at marriage 18 2 20 4 6 10
24 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
When taking the geographical mobility of the informants into account,
we notice that two-thirds of them were already living in an urban setting
(in Montreal or Verdun) by the time they were married. Leaving aside
those whose families had left Ontario and the United States to move to
the city when they were still children, four of them who were born in a
rural area came to Montreal between the ages of thirteen and fifteen years.
More often than not, the motive for these moves was economic and
actually aided the integration both of themselves and of other members of
their families into the labour market. But these migrations also repre-
sented an uprooting and a radical change in lifestyle to which it was often
difficult to adapt. ‘‘I was bored stiff. I didn’t like the city at all. Every-
thing was different—when you’re fifteen, you have lots of friends in the
villages, you know everybody’’ (E11). Some went back and forth between
city and country several times. This is particularly true of one informant
who was born in the United States and who lived in Montreal until the
age of three, after which she migrated to a region of colonization before
returning to Montreal ten years later. Another, born in Montreal, lived for
several years in Ontario, then in a small town in the Montérégie, on the
south shore off the island of Montreal, before marrying a man from the
city. A Montreal family went to live at Pont Viau, north of the city, for
several years in order to hide their sons and protect them from the Con-
scription Act of 1917. These frequent moves, important in regard to the
socialization of the informants, seem also to indicate that urbanization,
far from being a linear phenomenon, was instead accompanied by very
various patterns of movement that were a function of the families’ needs
or particular circumstances.
1
Father ’s Occupation and Standard of Living
The following table indicates the principal occupation of the informants’
fathers (the occupation that they followed for the longest period while
they were head of the household), listing whether they owned their own
businesses, the nature of the work (manual or not) and the qualifications
attained.
It is important to point out that this table provides a rather simplified
view of the facts, since half of these men had more than one job, some-
times at the same time. Moreover, the job category of the father does not
necessarily reveal the family’s standard of living. Earnings provided by a
particular job (which the informants did not always know), number of
dependent or working children, and the seasonal nature of certain jobs are
all factors which must be considered in evaluating the family’s financial
From Birth to Marriage 25
situation. In general, the families of unskilled workmen, casual labourers,
and farmhands, despite the contribution of working children and even at
times of working wives, achieved a very low standard of living:
In those days, you know, as long as you had a kitchen, a table and chairs,
and beds and chests of drawers.... W e only had what was absolutely neces-
sary, no luxuries. No living-room suites. Living-room suites and pianos
were for the rich.... What I had was my little room. I had my little bed and
my stepfather made me a little dresser out of orange crates. (E16)
Table 2
F ather ’s Occupation
Occupation Number
Farmer 6
Small business/self-employed tradesman 4
Office work/white collar 2
Skilled workman 12
Semi-skilled, unskilled, labourer 6
Total 30
Skilled workers were not, however, necessarily much better off in
terms of an income sufficient to support a large family. In one weaver’s
case, for example, his family of seven children was crammed into a four-
room flat. His daughter’s recollections shed light not only on the poverty
in which she grew up, but also on her mother’s contribution to the fam-
ily ’s survival:
We didn’t have electricity until I was twelve years old. We used lamps. We
had a toilet in the house but no bathtub. We took baths in the laundry-tub.
We had four rooms but there were seven of us children and that made nine
with my father and mother. There was a large room in the back. There were
two double beds in it—three of the girls slept in one and two in the
other . . . the washing machine was behind the door to the room and then
there was a bureau between the two beds.... I don’t know how my mother
could get through. We really had to make miracles when there wasn’t any
money coming in. My father didn’t care. It was my mother who had to see
about getting coal, wood, food for the table. She sewed hand-me-downs so
that we had dresses to wear. It was amazing what my third sister could get
out of old clothes.... But we weren’t unhappy—we didn’t know anything
better .... W e always had clothing, we were never cold, we were never hun-
gry, and we were always decently dressed. (E6)
26 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The father of another woman, who, as a furrier, enjoyed quite a good
salary as well as a certain prestige, nevertheless was unemployed for
almost half the year. The relative comfort in which this family lived was
the result of the financial contribution made by the older children and by
two maternal aunts who lived with them:
That meant that my father had to stop working in November and did not
go back until after the fur market in New York was held in April. Then I
had my sister and brother who were working regularly and who brought
home what we needed.... W e were fortunate to have my mother’s two
unmarried sisters living with us. One of them was a forewoman... in a gar -
ment factory, the other was a lead milliner .... W e had the advantage of hav-
ing these two aunts dressing the two of us girls. We were always turned out
looking much better off than we really were. (E15)
Having a skilled trade was thus far from being synonymous with hav-
ing a sufficient or comfortable income, even when the father was working
regularly, as the daughter of a painter employed by a railway company
explained:
We weren’t rich, not even comfortable. It took everything we had to get by.
In those days, my father... the wages weren’t very high. We came through
all right. We never lacked anything, but you couldn’t say we were comfort-
able. . . . In those days, nobody was rich. We went to work early. I think my
oldest sister was twelve when she went to work. (E29)
According to certain of the respondents, rural families generally had
larger living quarters and conditions which were less precarious because
the farm produce assured they had something to eat. But the standard of
life, on subsistence farms, was no higher for all that. In summer, the fam-
ily often had to be content with a monotonous diet based on salt pork
while the lack of cash reduced the purchase of manufactured goods to a
bare minimum and eliminated any possibility of material comfort.
Whether they were born in the country or in town, the majority of the
informants grew up in decidedly modest circumstances, that is, in families
where the contribution made by children working either on the farm or in
the factory was deemed essential to family survival. Lacking any other eas-
ily applicable standard, this indication indeed appears as one of the most
relevant in determining the living standard of their families. If we add to it
the information collected from these women regarding years of schooling,
the age at which they first went to work, and their descriptions of their
living quarters, we are able to conclude that only four had the benefit of a
youth spent in comfortable circumstances. To the contrary, some experi-
From Birth to Marriage 27
enced extreme poverty, often because of the death, illness, or alcoholism
of their father. ‘‘Mama didn’t bother to unpack because we knew that
we’d have to move from one month to the next because if Papa didn’t pay
the rent, they would put us in the street’’ (E18). Not all of them experi-
enced such extreme situations, but five of the families had to depend on
charitable organizations like the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and on the
mothers working for wages for a greater or lesser period of time. With the
exception of one mother, who took in boarders to improve the family’s
lot, the paid work of the women always coincided with the father’s
absence or his inability to fulfil his role as provider. Only when pressed by
direst necessity did mothers take jobs in factories or as domestics.
2
In
general, however, when it came to supplementing the paternal income, the
preference was to count on the waged work of the children, a subject that
we will return to later.
Number of Children and Place in Family
The women interviewed came from families in which the number of chil-
dren varied from one to fifteen, with an average of 7.2 children per family.
We must note, however, that this average is based on the number of
brothers and sisters with whom the informant grew up. Some could not in
fact recall precisely how many children were born alive, how many were
stillborn, and how many miscarriages their mother had had, which seems
to have been a fairly common event.
3
As can be seen from the following
table, whether they came from the city or the country, most came from
families where there were between six and nine children, six being the
most frequent number.
4
Table 3
Number of Children Per Family Per Place of Residence
Number of children Urban Rural Total
1-2 213
3-5 314
6-9 9716
64 2 6
72 1 3
82 1 3
91 3 4
10 and more 2 5 7
28 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Families of more than ten children, though frequently presented as the
norm among Quebec francophones of this period, represent only a
minority of the sample.
5
F u r t h e r m o r e , a majority , five out of seven of these
families, lived in rural areas and it is interesting to note that the two urban
families of more than ten children went to live outside of Montreal after
the birth of the informants, both of whom were born fifth in their families.
In contrast, the small size of certain families is explained, in four cases
out of the seven, by the death of one of the parents and by the infertility
of a fifth couple who decided to adopt a single child. In the other cases,
whether the parents sought to limit the size of the family or whether it
was a question of chance is something which the informants did not
know, but in a majority of cases, we cannot observe the results of birth
control practices.
Seventeen of the informants knew that the number of pregnancies their
mothers had conceived was greater than the number of infants carried to
term and surviving to adulthood. In the thirteen other cases, either the
number of children corresponds to the number of pregnancies or the
informant did not know if her mother had miscarried or had lost children
in early infancy. If we suppose that in these thirteen cases, there were no
miscarriages or infant mortality, the number of pregnancies of the moth-
ers of the respondents then rises to an average of 9.4; one of them had
twenty-four pregnancies and ten others between ten and sixteen. Taking
into account their place of residence, whether urban or rural, the follow-
ing portrait emerges:
Table 4
Average Number of Children and
Pregnancies by Area of Residence
Origin Numberof women Children Pregnancies
Urban 16 6.3 8.2
Rural 14 8.2 10.7
Total 30 7.2 9.4
As we might expect, we can see that mothers of urban families raised
fewer children and had fewer pregnancies than those from the country-
side. Y et five of the women who raised between six and nine children in an
urban setting had more than ten pregnancies. That is to say that if the
majority of the informants grew up in families smaller than ten children,
that was largely due to the deaths of parents or infants or to miscarriage.
From Birth to Marriage 29
In chapter four, which deals with the informants’ experience of mother-
hood, we will be able to evaluate the changes that these two generations
experienced.
The birth position of children can influence their life course, in particu-
lar determining the length of schooling they acquire and the age at which
they enter the workforce, and, if the child is a girl, the role she must play
in regard to her mother and brothers and sisters. Where lack of money
dictated, the eldest children were taken out of school at a very early age so
that they could make their contribution to the family at the time when it
consisted mostly of dependents. This was generally the case for women
who were among the eldest, that is, the first three born into the less fortu-
nate families. But when the eldest went to work, the younger members of
the family were more likely to follow in their footsteps, even if they had a
somewhat greater latitude to continue their education.
6
Thus several
informants born fourth, fifth, or sixth in their families went to work at
the age of fourteen, like their elder siblings before them.
Eldest daughters were frequently recruited to help their mothers when
there were younger children to care for, but in the absence of a son, they
might find themselves on the labour market sooner so that the task of
helping the mother would devolve on a younger sister. The role of
mother ’s helper could be assumed in turn—as the older girls grew up,
they would go to work to be replaced by the next sister in line, who
would then quit school. Finally, if the mother fell ill or died and the old-
est girls were already married, a younger sister who was old enough would
have to take charge of the house for her widowed father and her unmar-
ried brothers. This was the case for four of the five younger sisters among
the informants. There is indeed no direct or automatic relationship
between birth order and remaining at home to help the mother. If the
eldest daughters of large families were more frequently recruited for this
position, various factors might come to bear so that any of the daughters
would be called upon to play her part as right hand or substitute for the
mother.
The presence of other people in the home was another factor that
modified family life. Eleven informants lived with various relatives, uncles,
aunts, but most often, grandparents, for a greater or lesser period of time.
My two maiden aunts, my grandfather and his brother all lived with us. So,
you see, at our house if we had a booboo or something, there was always a
grown-up around to spoil us or sing us a lullaby. I was always well sur-
rounded when I was a child. (E15)
30 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The presence of these people could thus translate into additional attention
and affection for the children in the family, as well as contributing addi-
tional income,
7
but they could also represent an additional restriction,
especially in terms of living space. ‘‘The children were pushed around’’
(E2), explained one informant whose grandmother occupied a bedroom
to herself, which meant that three of the children had to sleep in the din-
ingroom while three others had to share one bed. A woman spoke this
way about her sister who had returned home to live:
It was during the 1914 war when my sister came to stay with us with her
two children. Her husband was gone to the war .... W e had to help with the
little kids in the house like that.... They were really a pain. Just think,
when we were seven, eight years old, playing outside, then my mother
would call us in to take care of our little nephews. [One of them] was four-
teen months old and cried a lot. She’d say, ‘‘Come put the baby to sleep.’’ I
said, ‘‘Me, I’m last in line—I don’t have babies but I have to take care of
one.’’ (E29)
Two of the women interviewed lived with boarders, but their presence
does not seem to have presented any major problems. According to one
of the women:
To start with, my mother put beds in the double parlour and they slept two
to a bed. In those days, it didn’t make any difference.... That is, people
worked things out easily enough—there wasn’t a problem as long as they
were eating all right. (E16)
Their contribution to the family budget did not, however, slow the chil-
dren’s entry into the job market.
The phenomenon of the broken home was not a rare one in this period
because death often carried off the parents when they were very young or
illness prevented them from fulfilling their parental role.
8
Twoofthe
informants were raised by their grandparents, one after the death of both
her parents, the other because her widowed father had to earn his living
and could not take care of her and her sister from whom, moreover, she
would be separated at an early age. The youngest child of a family of seven
was raised in part by her sister, who was fifteen years older, because her
mother was too ill to care for her when she was born. For reasons she was
not told, the eldest child of another family was sent to an aunt who was
living in Ontario, where she went to primary school. She only saw her
family every two weeks during the school year and in the summer during
vacation. In order to be able to work, a widow had to place her three
daughters in convents outside of Montreal, where the board was cheaper;
From Birth to Marriage 31
between the age of seven and fourteen years old, this informant lived
there during the school year and often even during summer vacations,
separated from her mother whom she saw only two or three times a year.
Three other women lost their mothers when they were between the ages
of fifteen and twenty. When she was thirteen, another came to live with
one of her sisters who was working in Montreal as her parents had stayed
in the country. Finally, within a matter of months, one of the informants
lost her mother and then her grandmother, who had taken over; the fam-
ily was forced to scatter and she found herself, at the age of fourteen,
boarding with friends of her family and forced to work to support herself.
Thus, in eleven out of thirty cases, the women interviewed lost either
their father or their mother before reaching adulthood, or, for various rea-
sons, did not grow up with their natural parents. If we take into account
these ‘‘broken’’ families and those who were living either with relatives or
as boarders, we can observe that only fourteen lived in an intact ‘‘nuclear’’
family until they married. Thus it would appear that the model family cen-
tred on the couple and their children did not correspond to the reality
experienced by the majority of women of this generation, at least before
they were married.
School
For the majority of the women interviewed, their schooling represented
only a brief stage preceding their assignment to domestic tasks or their
entry into the job market. If most of them did learn the elements of read-
ing, writing, and arithmetic, only five of them finished school. On aver-
age, they left school around the age of thirteen, that is, even before they
had reached the legal age to work;
9
by the time they reached the age of
fourteen, twenty-one of the women interviewed, or more than two-thirds,
had either already quit school or were just about to do so. If it is true that
the economic constraints on the family represented a genuine obstacle to
education, we must also stress that quitting school was generally accepted
as automatic, often without the parents even having to ask. ‘‘We didn’t go
any further,’’ was what many of the informants said. Even if school tended
to be abandoned as soon as possible, it could sometimes serve as a substi-
tute for families who were experiencing some difficulties. Thus, several of
the women interviewed boarded in a convent for a year or two, because of
the illness or death of their parents. In rural areas, distance was a factor in
choosing boarding as a solution that would allow one or more children to
continue in school, if the family was able to pay the fees. But more often,
32 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
the fact that institutions providing education beyond the primary grades
might be far away encouraged early school-leaving.
Quitting school around the age of eleven or twelve was often preceded
by irregular attendance, generally because the child was needed at home.
‘‘I couldn’t [go to school]. I always had the kids on my back’’ (E18), as
one of them said. ‘‘[My mother] made us miss school a lot to babysit’’
(E2), another stated. In rural regions, this obligation, together with bad
weather and work on the farm, combined to reduce regular school atten-
dance to a minimum. ‘‘We hardly went at all in winter—the roads were
too bad. ... I didn’t go half the time’’ ( E3). In general, all this absen-
teeism had the effect of discouraging any interest in studying and quitting
school was therefore viewed with indifference or at least with no particu-
lar regret, even though certain of the respondents admitted to having
enjoyed school. The eldest in large families were evidently more likely to
be taken out of school very young, but, as we have already seen, the
younger members of a family had a tendency to interrupt their studies
quickly if their elder brothers and sisters had not finished school. In this
case, quitting school could become a personal decision, as this recollection
attests: ‘‘I got too many bad grades because of my handwriting. ... That’s
why I left school. I told my mother I’d rather go to work than to school’’
(E8). In general, we do not encounter much of a difference in the level of
schooling among the children of the same family; the youngest may have
had less need to work but the climate in the family often meant that very
few developed the kind of interest that would be necessary to finish a
course of studies.
Only two of those who left school before the age of fourteen asserted
that they would have liked to continue, an ambition which they passed on
to their own children. But more often, the decision to quit school,
whether imposed by circumstances or by parents, was viewed with a cer-
tain fatalism, as we see in the account by this informant:
In those days, we didn’t react the way they do now; there wasn’t any rebel-
lion. I couldn’t go board. I would’ve liked to. I couldn’t—I had to help out
at home. So, that was the end of that—that was all there was to it. I didn’t
hold it against anyone—not my parents or the children who were coming
up behind me. It wasn’t their fault. In those days, you accepted sorrows like
you accepted joys. Y ou didn’t rebel against your parents. (E20)
With the exception of one informant who went to work as a domestic,
the women who quit school at eleven or twelve did so to help their moth-
ers at home for a few years before going to work for wages. On the other
From Birth to Marriage 33
hand, leaving school after the age of thirteen coincided with taking a job.
Around fourteen or fifteen, this transition represented a normal and gen-
erally well-accepted step.
Working Experience
The years at work before marriage, more than the few years they passed in
the classroom, represented an important stage in the lives of the infor-
mants. Whether at home or in the factory, the majority contributed to the
family economy at a very young age and several of these women spent
more time at a machine or a loom than at a school desk. ‘‘I had to do
something to earn my keep’’ (E12), one explained. This sentiment that
everyone ought to take on as early as possible a portion of one’s upkeep
by going to work was still widespread among families that had recently
entered the working class.
Domestic, Factory Hand or Salesgirl?
With the exception of three informants who lived on farms until their
marriage and a fourth who was raised by her grandparents in relative com-
fort, all the women in this sample held paid employment. Ten of the
twenty-six girls who went to work first spent some months and some-
times several years helping their mothers with the housework. But all of
them who lived in the city or even near a factory area worked for wages.
In fact, their recollections indicate that the participation of girls in the
labour force had become the norm in working-class families (and even in
some farm families) at the beginning of the twentieth century.
10
The
progress of industrialization both in Montreal and in the province, as well
as changes in the job market would have brought about a greater partici-
pation of girls in the labour market.
Generally speaking, provisions of legislation concerning child labour
were widely known and respected; just one informant began work at the
age of twelve as a domestic, while three others were working behind shop
counters, part-time, at the age of thirteen. In certain families, the need for
additional income obliged the children to perform small jobs for the
neighbours in return for a little money while they were still in school
(errands, babysitting, and the like). But these small jobs seem hardly com-
monplace, at least among girls, and more often, they waited until they
were fourteen before looking around for a steady job. By that age, half of
the twenty-six women were working, while three more began work during
their fifteenth year. Among those who went to work after the age of fif-
teen, seven delayed their entry into the job market in order to help their
34 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
mothers for several years, while the delayed entrance is explained for three
others by their remaining at school longer.
The family, which determined when the child went to work, often
acted as an agent when it came time to find a job.
11
Therefore, it com-
monly fell to the mother to place her daughters as domestics. In some
cases, she would even use the classified ads: ‘‘Mama got us jobs as maids.
She put an ad in the newspaper and people came to see us; they came to
our house so that they could find out what kind of people we were. We
packed up our bits and pieces and went to their houses’’ (E2).
Apprenticing a child, though rarer, was also organized by the mother,
who always decided what trade her daughter was going to take up. This is
the way that two of the informants became a milliner and a chocolate-
maker, while three others were apprenticed as hat-makers. What these lat-
ter three have to say, however, makes it clear that fairly often they did ser-
vants’ work at the cost of their training and only one went on to take up
the trade. ‘‘The woman was supposed to show me how to make hats, but
she didn’t. She had me washing the shop windows, sweeping, and clean-
ing’’ (E16). But even if they did get good training, the conditions were
often only fair:
She showed me the trade. Those were the days when we shaped our hats on
wire forms.... She showed me how to line the hats, then put on ribbons,
do the fancy-work. Then I had to stay there Friday nights. She gave me fifty
cents for the week and my supper on Friday. She was what you call a head
seamstress, she made models and samples. She made supper for the two of
us. You know what she made? You know those nineteen-ounce cans of
creamed corn? The two of us ate that with some bread. That was our sup-
per! They were mean in those days. They made everybody work for noth-
ing. But we were so happy just to be working.... As for me... I used to
walk to save my big fifty cents so I could give it to my mother. (E16)
Those whose elder sisters preceded them at work had an easier route to
finding a job. In this connection, we should observe that the ghettoization
of female employment seems clearly to have been in play since the infor-
mants almost never mention the presence of a brother in their place of
work. One exception is worthy of note, however. In this case, the infor-
mant and her family were recruited by an agent to emigrate to Montreal
to work in a textile factory.
12
Lacking an elder sister, an aunt, a cousin, or a friend might act as go-
between. The classified ads were seldom used, since even without con-
tacts, finding a job presented little difficulty. ‘‘In those days, we just went
and asked if they needed help. It wasn’t like now .... Y ou had to go see
From Birth to Marriage 35
the owner of the plant—he was the manager. Y ou had to go through him’’
(E20). ‘‘I was the one who went to ask for a job. In those days we went to
find jobs on our own. But it wasn’t as hard as it is now to find a job’’ (E8).
Most of the informants used these informal means to get hired.
Very often they were hired on the spot on the basis of a quick glance
on the part of the employer. In any event, he wasn’t taking much of a risk
because teaching the work to the new employee fell to the part of the
‘‘senior ’’ woman who would show her how the machines operated. After a
couple of hours or a couple of days, rarely for more than a week, the new
hand would have to fend for herself and if she couldn’t, she risked being
fired. A number of the informants insisted on the quickness at which they
learned and turned out the work, an essential quality given the speed of
the machines and the piecework system, the most widespread method of
payment.
13
Rather than complaining about the pace, their comments
reflect their pride in having been able to adapt to working conditions
which demanded speed and precision.
With bureaucratic formalities reduced to a minimum, it was also easy
enough to find a new job if pay raises did not come along quickly enough
or if the employer turned out to be too demanding. Of course, the major-
ity of the respondents worked during the 1920s, a period of relative pros-
perity. ‘‘We would walk out at noon and then an hour later, start up
somewhere else’’ (E21), as one of them said. Actually, the oral accounts
allow us to observe a very great mobility in the labour force which mani-
fests itself not only in changing employers but even occupations.
Table 5
Occupations of Informants
Occupations A
a
B
b
Teacher 22
Nurse’s aid 1 1
Clerk 51
Sales clerk 6 1
Skilled labour 2 1
Unskilled labour 14 9
Domestics 71
a Number of informants in this occupation.
b Number of informants for whom this was their only occupation.
36 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Looking at this table reveals that it was the factory workers who
changed their occupation least often though the majority of them worked
for more than one employer. We may note that they worked longer than
the other women in the sample; it is among this group that is found the
four women who worked for more than ten years before marriage. On the
other hand, domestic work, generally detested because of its servile char-
acter and because of the extremely long hours which it entailed, is where
we observe the greatest mobility, as only one informant worked exclu-
sively as a domestic and she did so for a rather short period of time (one
year). As one of the women explained, ‘‘We didn’t like working in private
homes because we couldn’t go out. We spent whole weeks with those peo-
ple’’ (E2). Domestics’ wages were extremely low, between one and five
dollars a week, but according to one informant, ‘‘What our parents
counted was the food. You understand, if you have two working, that’s
two less to feed’’ (E2). Most of the time, domestic work represented a
transitional occupation between the home and the factory, or the office or
shop. These jobs, factory worker, saleswoman or clerk, generally involved a
noticeable increase in salary, but what was more appreciated were the work-
ing conditions, particularly regular hours and the possibility of contact
with other working women. ‘‘It was clean, and we weren’t bored. It wasn’t
like in the private homes, where the day was never over.... The hell with
private homes! We were happy enough—we had our evenings free’’ (E2).
In this connection, it must be stressed that it was not simply the
household tasks or the conditions inherent in this kind of work that put
them off, but also, and most particularly, the context in which they arose.
Beyond the isolation, the arbitrary employers, the long hours, and the
array of tasks demanded of them, what they detested above all else was the
idea of being ‘‘in service to’’ someone else, of playing the subordinate’s role
in a highly personalized relationship.
14
This factor would explain why
women did not express the same sentiments regarding the household tasks
they performed for their own families, as we shall see later on.
At the other end of the scale, a career as a teacher represented one of
the principal openings for young women in rural areas where the school
commissioners were not very demanding in terms of their training:
In those days, they didn’t expect normal school. We had our diploma, the
first diploma, not the higher diploma, and that allowed us to teach.... Y ou
know, it was almost automatic because there wasn’t much for girls to do
aside from teaching. You had to be satisfied with going out to clean or
being a maid. To us, this didn’t offer us girls anything—we’d had enough of
kids at home. (E19)
From Birth to Marriage 37
Thus, the restricted range of possible jobs for young women, not to speak
of the distaste they evinced in regard to working as maids, directed a
number of them to choose factory work or teaching.
One informant worked as a stenotypist; she took a private course, paid
for by her unmarried aunt, who lived with the family. ‘‘Mama could not
pay for it what with the cost of keeping up the house, so my aunt said to
me—she had read about it in the paper—‘If you want, if you’re interested,
I’ll pay for your course’’’ (E15). The other informants who worked as
office clerks or employees did not have any particular training; one of
them first worked as a sales clerk before being ‘‘transferred to the office’’
where she did the accounts; another was a domestic before being
employed checking the washing in a laundry. Finally, we must point out
that one of them was a victim of sexual harassment on the part of three
successive employers, which led her to abandon this sort of employment
to become a milliner.
15
Despite difficult working conditions and low wages, most often they
appreciated their work experience: ‘‘For me, it was like going to a wed-
ding, working there’’ (E29). Not everyone expressed such enthusiasm,
but most retained clear memories of this period in their lives that they
liked to talk about. The atmosphere and the relationships with other
women at work were generally good, but it was rare that friendships born
in the workplace went outside the factory walls and only a few mention
leisure-time activities shared with their workmates. Leaving work, which
occurred shortly before marriage, generally put an end to these short-lived
friendships: ‘‘There were some who got married while I was there, but
then they disappeared—we didn’t see them any more’’ (E23). Only two
informants preserved friendships from that period of their life. It appears
that married life provided few opportunities for women to pursue per-
sonal relationships. After they left the factory, their lives became redi-
rected as a function of their new role as wife and mother and the
responsibilities that it entailed. As we shall see, these new obligations
were so absorbing that they would hardly have time for themselves. After
they married, their social circle would shrink to women of their immedi-
ate family (and sometimes a neighbour or two), who were also married
and mothers.
Despite this complete, if sometimes only temporary, break with the
workplace, all could still describe, with effect and often with pride, the
details of the different operations they performed as part of their job in
the factory or the office. Others could recall, sometimes with emotion,
38 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
the children they took care of or the generosity of a ‘‘madame’’ who
treated them ‘‘like one of the family.’’ In general, they had few complaints
about bosses or foremen, even when they were demanding. In any case,
the absence of unions meant that they either had to adapt themselves or
quit. According to the narratives, none of them had had contact with a
union and they had little to say on the subject: ‘‘We didn’t talk about that
in our day’’ (E7); ‘‘We never heard about them’’ (E8); ‘‘We didn’t talk
about it—we only had the boss’’ (E11).
The obligation to contribute to the family finances on the other hand
excited a mass of reflections, often very different from one another, espe-
cially among the fifteen informants who gave their entire wage to their par-
ents until marriage. In the majority of cases, they would give their pay to
their mother and ‘‘you mustn’t open the envelope,’’ several specified. One
of them recalled the resentment that she felt during this period. ‘‘Myself,
when I was fifteen, I was rebelling. I said to myself, we raise the kids. If
they ’re not able to support four, why make five? I realized later that it was
how it was then, that it was a mortal sin to use birth control’’ (E6).
Most, however, recognized that their contribution was essential and
displayed a resigned understanding in this regard. ‘‘They needed the
money. We gave them our wages. Of course, we kept a few pennies’’
(E19). Several of them justified this practice by the fact that the parents
supported them and by the fact that they didn’t have much opportunity
to spend their money. ‘‘We were well dressed, well fed, we didn’t lack any-
thing. It isn’t like today, we didn’t have so many things to do in our free
time’’ (E11).
Most of the time, out of all of her salary, the young woman got twenty-
five or fifty cents, sometimes a dollar, rarely more. Much of this money
was spent on transportation; evenings at the movies at ten or fifteen cents
a time, as well as life insurance premiums, or buying silk stockings or
other personal expenses ate up the rest. One way of getting a little more
money than the parents allotted, a rather common practice, it appears, was
to erase the amount of money written on the envelope and replace it with
a lower sum, pocketing the difference. ‘‘That was stealing! That was steal-
ing from your parents. We weren’t used to that kind of thing!’’ (E23) one
informant indignantly remarked. So, if certain young women allowed
themselves to ‘‘cheat’’ in order to achieve a slightly greater degree of
financial autonomy, for this informant, as for the majority of her contem-
poraries, the children’s wages belonged to the parents by right and to
divert part of the money for your own use was seen as theft. This suggests
From Birth to Marriage 39
the degree to which the notion of the family as a labour unit in which the
needs and desires of the individuals that comprise it are not taken into
account was still firmly fixed in working-class families of the first or sec-
ond generation. It goes without saying that none of our informants
admitted to having pulled this particular trick!
It is important to point out that boys did not benefit from much
greater latitude than the girls when they were among the oldest in the
family. As they got older, however, they could keep a larger part of their
wages more often than the girls could.
16
As one informant remarked,
‘‘They kept a little more—if they were taking a girl out, that cost them
more. In those days, girls didn’t pay for anything’’ (E19).
Contributing to the family income did not bring about much of a
change in the child’s status in the family or grant her greater autonomy.
As one informant explained, ‘‘I hadn’t grown up in their eyes. Oh, no! I
started [to work] when I was barely sixteen. I was old enough to work,
but I wasn’t old enough to have a boyfriend’’ (E15). Because of their
poverty, the parents in fact had no other choice than to count on the rev-
enue provided by their children’s labour; they had to maintain a certain
degree of authority in order to require them to contribute to the family
upkeep.
When several children were working or when the family had fewer
dependents, it was then possible to keep one’s salary and contribute to the
family by paying board. This mode of functioning, which permitted a
greater financial autonomy, seems to have been greatly appreciated by
those who experienced it. ‘‘There were lots of families where they gave all
their pay—for myself, I liked it much better this way ... if I couldn’t buy
myself something to wear, I wouldn’t take it out on my parents’’ (E29). A
number of the informants began by turning over their pay but as they got
older or as their salaries rose, paid board that ranged between three and
ten dollars a week. At that point, the young worker became wholly
responsible for her personal expenses; one of the informants shared the
cost of the telephone bill with her sisters because it was principally used
to receive phone calls from their boyfriends, at least according to their
parents. Their savings also had to go toward a trousseau for their marriage
and to pay for the cost of their outfit, and sometimes even for the wed-
ding and the reception. Thus the financial autonomy enjoyed by those
who retained a part of their salary was accompanied by obligations which
meant that very few were able to save up a little nest egg that would last
until they married.
40 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Learning Domestic Work
Generally speaking, girls began to learn domestic work when they started
school, though some of them developed particular skills even younger
than that, as a respondent recalls with pride: ‘‘I started knitting before I
went to school’’ (E4). In rural areas, the children had to milk the cows
before going to school in the morning. They worked in the garden and in
the farmyard and helped out with a whole host of tasks:
She [my mother] planted flax—we shredded it into tow. Afterwards we
would spin it into weft for the loom. That’s what we did in the summer. In
winter, we prepared our weaving for the vacation. We spun wool in the win-
ter to weave, to make into wool blankets, even skirts.... Us girls did all
that. We spun scented grass and sold that in Odanak to the Indians who
made baskets out of it.... My mother would go there to sell it. Then my
mother could get a lot of goods with that, with the money. (E22)
Girls also had to help their mothers with the various tasks associated with
making bread, preserves, jam, and other foods. Making soap and candles
as well as clothing were jobs in addition to the usual household tasks of
cooking, laundry, and cleaning. The workday, which began early, extended
until late in the evening as the women spun, wove, or knitted by the light
of a kerosene lamp.
In town, the range of tasks was more restricted but girls started doing
work around the house very young as a rule. When they were of school
age, girls were doing the daily housework (sweeping, dusting, washing the
floors), accompanying their mothers to the grocery or the market, setting
the table and doing the supper dishes and sometimes those of the noon
meal before returning to school. Some of them in this period began to
accomplish more complicated tasks:
I was back from the convent school and then I sewed on the machine. I
pieced quilts.... I always helped Mama with the dishes. We had a ton of
dishes! I helped her do the cooking on the weekends. And then there was
the laundry—in those days, we didn’t have the machines you have now. I
used the washboard to help my mother. A glass board. You scrubbed. I
wasn’t very old when I was using a washboard.... I was doing the house-
work since I was no bigger than that. (E20)
Watching the babies and sometimes even taking care of them was also part
of their responsibilities, as the following remark attests: ‘‘When you’re a
big family, it’s the first one who picks up the baby that changes its diaper.
You can’t wait for Mama because she’s doing something else. ... When I
From Birth to Marriage 41
got married, my youngest brother was a year and a half old—when I
stopped having to wash diapers, I was forty’’ (E6).
A number of women assert that they were able to keep house compe-
tently by the time they were twelve or thirteen. Those who had mothers
who worked outside the home or were ill had to put into practice very
early the skills they had learned: ‘‘I was twelve then [when my mother
went to work for a few months],’’ an informant recalled. ‘‘I took care of
the house’’ (E6). Another remembered: ‘‘I was thirteen when she went to
work and I found myself taking care of the three youngest boys. ... I
kept house—I was used to it, I’d always helped out’’ (E25). If a number of
them took great pride in what they had done, some regretted that their
childhood had eluded them. ‘‘I grew up very young’’ (E6), one of them
stated, summing up their feelings.
Their fathers and brothers participated in the housework to the degree
that it involved some physical strength or took place outside (taking out
the ashes or the garbage, splitting wood, bringing in water, shovelling
snow, and the like). But these tasks, especially in the country, could just as
well be performed by the women. ‘‘We didn’t always wait around for the
men’’ (E3), and ‘‘That wasn’t always men’s work’’ (E4), were comments
that cropped up often. In some families, both rural and urban, the boys
were called upon to perform some ‘‘women’s work’’ around the house,
but as soon as the girls could take over, their contribution ceased. In one
informant’s home, ‘‘on Fridays and Saturdays, my mother went to sell at
the market... and then the rest of us on Saturdays had to do the house-
work. T wo of the boys we got to wash the kitchen floor.... The boys did
the dishes and made their beds in the mornings’’ (E21). But this level of
participation by boys was quite exceptional and the following quotation
corresponds more closely to what we more frequently heard: ‘‘Little boys
were like little kings. Very few homes made the boys work. They couldn’t
be touched. If there was something to be done, the girls did it. The boys
worked for money—delivering groceries’’ (E5).
Having a job meant less time for housework. In the evenings and on
Saturdays, young working women nevertheless helped with the house-
work, and did the shopping and the dishes, but rarely the cooking or the
washing. For this reason, certain of the respondents who had quit school
in order to take a job right away claimed that their knowledge of cooking
and sewing was rather limited and went so far as to swear that they had
not felt really ready to keep house at the time of their marriage. ‘‘I got
married without knowing how to do anything’’ (E23), said one of them;
42 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
another related, ‘‘I told him [her future husband] that since I was work-
ing, I didn’t know how to cook’’ (E15). A third agreed, ‘‘When I got mar-
ried, I’d never sewed or cooked’’ (E24).
17
Learning how to do housework could thus also be limited to the per-
formance of simple skills that did not demand the kind of technique or
knowledge associated with cooking or sewing. In part, their jobs pre-
vented the young women from being more available, but according to a
number of informants, their mothers did not seem especially anxious to
teach them how to sew and saw the kitchen as their own domain where
they did not tolerate any intrusion. Were they motivated by lack of time,
fear of waste, or by pride in their position as mistress of the house who
wanted to stay in control of these two important aspects of their work?
Their motives were not always clear, but the following remarks reflect the
lack of training experienced by some of the informants: ‘‘I used to ask my
mother to show me how to sew and she’d say, yes, yes, I’ll show you. . . .
She never did show me’’ (E15). Another said, ‘‘Mama could sew but she
never let me near her sewing machine. Never, because she could do it—
that’s what she told me’’ (E7). Another had a similar recollection: ‘‘I
couldn’t touch the machine.... She didn’t want us to be involved with
anything to do with food. We could look, but touching—no’’ (E27); yet
another: ‘‘That [cooking] she didn’t want me to do. That was for her; me,
I learned to cook after I got married’’ (E8). Additionally, the division of
work among various girls in the family could mean that some of the girls
developed certain skills while others did not. Thus, in one family, the
three older sisters shared responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and sewing,
each taking charge of one area. ‘‘If there was time to make pies and cakes,
then I was there. But my oldest sister, she was the one who did the
sewing—she sewed on the buttons and did the mending for my little
brothers. . . . When I got married, I didn’t know how to sew’’ (E19).
The following table shows the different modes of learning the two
most complex household tasks as well as at what point they were learned:
This table shows that if the majority of the informants learned the
rudiments of cooking and sewing from their mothers, how and when
these two important elements of modern domestic labour were learned
varied more than we might have thought. Thus, one-third of the women
in the sample learned how to cook after they were married, whether on
their own or from the mother-in-law, when the young couple were living
with his parents. One learned from her employer when she was a domes-
tic (recorded as ‘‘work’’ in Table 6).
18
From Birth to Marriage 43
Table 6
Learning Domestic Work
When learned How learned Cooking Sewing
Before marriage Mother (or substitute) 19 11
Training 01
Work 12
After marriage Mother-in-law 4 0
Mother 02
Organization 0 1
Friend/neighbour 0 2
Self 64
Never learned 0 7
When it came to dressmaking, the respondents note that, unlike cook-
ing, they sometimes turned for advice to friends or neighbours. Having
worked as a domestic or as a dressmaker also provided good training. An
informant who never had a paid job spent time as an apprentice to a dress-
maker in a neighbouring village:
I spent a year in M with a woman who took on apprentices. She had us
doing hems and she showed us how to sew. That’s how I learned how to
sew. Because my mother was good, she could sew well, but she told me, ‘‘I
can’t show you everything. I don’t know how to make clothes. You’ll be
better off if you go out to learn.’’ I was there a year to learn.... I lived in
the woman’s home. This woman was the sister of our old school teacher
and she did dressmaking for everyone in M. That’s how I learned.... W e
had to bring our own food. She gave us a bed, but we had to bring our own
covers. If I didn’t have something to eat, my father gave me a few bucks and
I would buy what I needed.... There were two of us—she always had two
apprentices. . . . She was always in demand as a sewing teacher. (E17)
School does not appear to have played a large role in the teaching of
sewing, nor, for the most part, of cooking either. In fact, none of the
women we interviewed attended homemaking schools and very few
learned basic cooking at school; at the most, they were taught to mend
and to knit. The cost and the space needed for the equipment to teach
these subjects probably explains why so few of the schools in the public
sector offered them.
Even more striking is the relatively high number of women who did
not know how to sew when they got married—sixteen out of thirty—
although a very large majority of their mothers did sew. Seven of them
44 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
never learned while nine others had to learn as the constraints of a very
tight budget left them no option. Abandoning instruction in sewing,
which was, up until then, an important part of domestic labour, represents
the clearest indication of the kind of transformations in housework that
was occurring in this period.
T
he view we get from the analysis of the first stage of the life cycle
of these informants allows us to observe that their socialization,
centred on the roles of wife and mother to which they were destined, was
also punctuated by experiences that might contradict these objectives. In
fact, most working-class families could not do without the financial con-
tribution of their daughters, fostering their entry into the job market,
sometimes to the detriment of their training as future housewives. But as
wage work was imposed because of the priority given to the family econ-
omy, without regard to individual needs and aspirations, it contributed to
reinforce the sense of duty and the values of devotion and self-effacement
that girls were expected to develop in preparation for their future mar-
riage. The poverty in which they grew up represents another factor that
demands our attention, because the women would evaluate the difficulties
they encountered during the Depression in the light of their living condi-
tions as children and young women.
From Birth to Marriage 45
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Chapter 3
Beyond Romance: Courtship
and Marriage
‘‘Then you were happy—you got married and you
thought you were going to heaven.’’ (E2)
M
arriage represented a critical stage in the life of women of this
generation. Even if, by virtue of the Civil Code, the young woman
only left her father’s authority to pass to the guardianship of her husband,
marriage marked a new stage in the life cycle which was emphasized by
the religious ceremony and the celebrations which accompanied it. In
marriage, the young woman took her partner’s name, swore to honour
and obey him, left her parents for a new home, and expected to engage in
sexual activity, which was now sanctioned to the degree that it would
allow her to become a mother, the only condition which conferred on
women genuine adult status.
One of the effects of the Depression was the postponement or even
cancellation of many marriages; this effect did not appear in the present
sample.
1
This group consisted of eighteen women who were married
between 1919 and 1929 (five of them in 1929), ten women married
between 1930 and 1932, and two married in 1934 and 1935. Thus twelve
of them were married after the Depression had begun, but with the excep-
tion of one woman, who delayed her marriage for three years because
fiancé was unemployed, only one couple, married in the autumn of 1929,
was worried about the economic climate to the point that they investi-
gated the likelihood of the husband’s losing his job and chose a closer, and
therefore cheaper, destination for their honeymoon. It should be noted
Notes to Chapter 3 are on pp. 198-201.
47
that they were the couple who were the best off in the sample and thus
had the most to lose. As we shall see, this indifference on the part of the
other couples indicates clearly that men and women of modest circum-
stances did not hope for ideal conditions before being wed.
Courtship
Going to work around the age of fourteen marked the beginning of meet-
ings and outings with boys. Generally, however, it was not before the age
of sixteen or even eighteen that parents would permit their daughter to
entertain her suitor in the evening, a symbol of the serious dating that
preceded a trip to the altar. In order to reduce the risk of premarital sex,
they sought to reduce the length of time that the young people might go
steady, something that was not supposed to occur before the suitor was
ready to start a family.
These acquaintances commonly were made within a rather narrow cir-
cle of people. In the majority of matches, the informants met their hus-
bands through their families, friends, or neighbours, most often through a
combination of the three: ‘‘I knew his sister, she lived near us and I went
over there a lot. One fine day, he came when I was there’’ (E8); ‘‘When I
decided to get married, it was to a nice boy who happened to be a friend
of my brother. He lived in our street. He was a friend of the family’’
(E15).
Five of the informants, however, met their husband at their place of
work,
2
while six others made the acquaintance by chance while walking
about the neighbourhood
3
or when at the movies, thus without any intro-
duction. Thus young women met young men predominantly through
family and immediate neighbours, but their horizons were enlarged as
they went to work and as they engaged in new kinds of leisure activities,
like the movies. Automobile outings for the luckiest,
4
ice-skating on the
public rinks in winter, picnics on Saint Helen’s Island, then reached by
boat, and outdoor concerts in parks in the summer, as well as dance par-
ties in friends’ homes or in municipal halls are among the various activities
that urban young people enjoyed, sometimes in flagrant violation of the
dictates of the Church. The following recollection provides a good
description of the sort of youth many experienced before they married:
in the evenings, we’d go out, that was to walk around, eh? We took walks—
we went from St. Henri to Verdun. There was a dance hall on the water.
That’s where we went to dance. The priest were against it but... it’s funny
to tell you this, but the boys in our day, it wasn’t life like it is today, they
respected us. There were all-night parties. They arranged them with the
48 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
families. It would start around nine o’clock and go on till six o’clock Mass
the next morning! We would dance! And none of the boys would try to
kiss us. They weren’t our boyfriends—we were all just friends. When we
met each other to go dancing, it wasn’t like it is now .... W e had a lot of
fun, but it was decent. [Those boys] all lived right around us. We all lived in
the same neighbourhood. We’d meet each other at the Corona Theatre on
Notre Dame Street. We knew their families. (E29)
If some of the women interviewed claimed to have had a number of
‘‘beaux,’’ most of them went steady only with their husband. Actually, ten
of them had had two serious suitors, but only two of them chose to break
off with their first boyfriend themselves, one because the young man
made ‘‘dishonest’’ propositions to her and the other because her fiancé
had expressed his intention to go on giving his pay to his mother after
they were married. But more often, it was the young man who broke
things off, which he might do rather brutally, seeing that it would be
enough for him simply to stop coming by every week without any other
explanation. On the other hand, if his visits remained regular and the
young woman agreed to entertain him, then the couple were almost
obliged to continue in the direction of marriage. Dating etiquette, which
mandated that girls could not demonstrate any interest without trans-
gressing the norms of behaviour suitable to their sex, limited their free-
dom of choice to boys who were interested in them, and explains why
they were reluctant to break up with their boyfriends out of fear of being
left ‘‘on the shelf.’’ If she could always refuse the attentions of a suitor,
the young girl was still the one who was chosen rather than the one who
chose.
5
The following recollection is a good illustration of this situation:
His brothers came and bought a farm at S. Then he came to pay a visit to his
brothers—when he was at their place, he would come by every evening....
Finally, well, he said, ‘‘If you want to, we could get married.’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t
know, give me time to think about it.’’ Because there was another boy who
came from the town—he only came in the summers to spend his vacation
with his uncle. And he often came to our house because my father knew
them well. His aunt told him, ‘‘She’s a pretty girl and she can keep a good
house,’’ then... anyway, I decided to marry my husband. And that put an
end to my romances. (E17)
Uncertain about the intentions of the young man from the city whom
she clearly preferred but who did not seem interested in her, despite his
aunt’s hints, this informant finally chose to accept the marriage proposal
of another suitor. Her conclusion (‘‘and that put an end to my
romances’’) underlines the absence of romantic sentiment that character-
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 49
ized certain marriages, which were based more on mutual respect or a cer-
tain pragmatism.
Even if parents were generally content to exercise a discreet and indi-
rect surveillance over the unmarried couple, they rarely found themselves
alone with one another, so important was it to preserve the young
woman’s virginity, whether or not she was of age. This concern would
even grow with industrialization and the appearance of new places for
young people to meet away from traditional family settings, since it
became more difficult to exercise control over the young.
6
On dates, the
parents made sure that the couple was accompanied by a brother, a sister,
other adults, or, if necessary, their friends: ‘‘In our house, I was never
allowed to go out all by ourselves. My brother was always along as chaper-
one. . . . You know, we had chaperones in those days’’(E19). On visits to
the young woman’s home, which were a feature of serious courtship, the
young couple rarely found themselves alone in the parlour. If it were to
happen, the likelihood that a family member might interrupt at any time
was generally enough to guarantee exemplary behaviour. The fear of later
being blamed for her conduct—so embedded was the notion that only the
woman sinned if she engaged in sexual activities outside of marriage—or
worse yet, of being abandoned for not remaining ‘‘pure’’ until the wed-
ding night was generally enough to see to it that the girls would demand
that their fiancés behave themselves properly,
7
as this informant explains
in guarded language:
You must always respect yourself, that’s the main thing.... If you respect
yourself, then he’ll respect you for your whole life. Because there are plenty
of men, when the woman... later, when things go bad, they’ll shove it in
your face. I said to myself, he’ll never shove it my face.... Then later he
told me too, if you’d been a woman ‘‘like that’’ I would never have married
you. . . . no, you should never have anything to reproach yourself for. I got
married and I called him Monsieur C. and he called me Mademoiselle B.
You’re going to say that it’s ridiculous, but that’s what it was like in those
days. (E28)
In the case of long engagements, however, it sometimes required a
great deal of willpower to resist ‘‘temptation,’’ as another respondent
explained:
It was about time we got married—how many times did we almost go
wrong. Even though it was very strict, there were always ways, right? And I
could not give in to temptation. In those days, for us, you could go to hell.
It was a mortal sin. . . . And, of course, some did get pregnant. (E24)
50 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Actually, the watchfulness of companions and self-control did not pre-
vent all premarital sex. Despite the prohibitions, amorous urges some-
times overcame morals or the fear of losing, all at once, one’s virtue,
reputation, and fiancé. Thus two of the thirty informants became preg-
nant before marriage. In both cases, the couples became involved when
they were very young, a circumstance which prolonged the period of
abstinence.
8
When I was eighteen, my mother let him come to the house—before that
we used to meet on the sly .... He would come to the lane behind the house
with his bicycle and whistle.... W e met each other when we were fifteen
and gave in at eighteen or nineteen because the longer it went on, the more
passionate we felt. At the end of the day, I was pregnant when I was twenty
and got married when I was four or five months gone. (E13)
Despite the ‘‘sin’’ she had committed, her parents proved rather under-
standing: ‘‘Mama put her arms around me and hugged me and said, ‘All
right, then, you’ll get married. We have to make things right.’ No one ever
criticized me’’ (E13). Their situation was effectively ‘‘regularized’’ since in
both instances, the young man agreed to acknowledge paternity and
marry the young woman, thus avoiding the necessity for her to spend
time in Miséricorde Hospital and to give up her child to its orphanage, as
well as having her reputation and that of her family forever tarnished. It
must be pointed out that the father-in-law of one of them did suggest an
abortion: ‘‘My father-in-law heard about it and wanted me to get an abor-
tion. I said no—if I was having a baby I would keep it—I wouldn’t have
an abortion’’ (E13). The marriage, precipitated by the situation, took
place discreetly—there were few guests, the wedding dress camouflaged
the bride’s ‘‘condition,’’ and they made a brief honeymoon trip to pre-
serve appearances.
In addition to exercising fairly strict supervision, the parents generally
expressed their approval or disapproval regarding the choice of mate. If in
most cases the range of social occasions made it likely that girls would
meet young men from families that were already acceptable, still it could
happen that parents might intervene and demand that a relationship be
broken off if the suitor or his family did not seem ‘‘good enough’’ to
them, or if he did not seem serious enough to get married, or because
another candidate appeared more suitable. Four of the informants had to
break off with their fiancés for one or another of these reasons. Two of
them later met another young man who met with unanimous approval, a
third married the candidate her parents preferred, which turned out to be
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 51
a disastrous choice, while the fourth reunited with the one she loved and
married him over the objections of her mother, who did not attend her
wedding and with whom she remained on bad terms for fifteen years.
Without mounting a formal opposition, some parents expressed reserva-
tions about a marriage which they considered hasty because they thought
their daughter too young or the engagement too short. ‘‘Mama told me,
‘Y ou don’t know him, you haven’t had the time to get used to him’ ’’(E8),
said one informant who had gone out with her future husband for only
four months.
On average, the couples went out with one another for a little more
than two years before getting married, but there are large variations from
one couple to another; in thirteen cases out of thirty, they dated for less
than two years and in six of these cases, for less than a year. On the other
hand, a third of the informants dated their husbands for more than four
years before going to the altar. These long engagements were less the
function of economic difficulties than of the extreme youth of the cou-
ples, which required that they wait for a longer period of time before
being wed. They were often interrupted by breaks imposed either by cir-
cumstances or the parents:
We had a number of dates, I suppose. In the winter, we went in groups—we
went skating with my brothers. We did that all winter .... After Christmas,
then the retreats began in February, the parish retreats—the priests
preached from the pulpit [how] the boys had all the sins in the world. Then
Mama said, ‘‘No more boyfriends. If you don’t tell them, then I’ll tell them
myself.’’ So then . . . I told my [future] husband, ‘‘Mama says that we’re
too young to go out together during the retreats. . . .’’ When the retreats
came along, the boyfriends took off! That’s how it went for three years....
That meant he must have been the one for me because anyone else would
never have come back. (E15)
In one case, however, marriage was delayed for three years because the
fiancé had lost his job due to the Depression, while in another, the woman
explained her long engagement by the low salary her fiancé was earning
and the hold his mother had over him:
We didn’t have any money. Engagements lasted a long time in those days
because the pay was so low. And then, they had a mother who took all their
money. She’d say, ‘‘Give me your money and when you get married, I’ll out-
fit you.’’ In those days, it wasn’t like today, the children gave in to every-
thing. (E11)
In general, the couple’s economic situation did not seem to be the pri-
mary influence on the decision to marry. As we will later see, the majority
52 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
of them in any event were in a rather shaky economic position at the time
of their marriage.
On average, the women in the sample were 21.4 years old and the men
24.9 at marriage. In fact eighteen of the women married before the legal
age of twenty-one. Of these women, three were sixteen, seventeen, and
eighteen, and eight were nineteen. Likewise, the great majority of the
men were younger than twenty-five when they married. Given that the
sample is composed of survivors of this period, it is possible that it is
formed in part of people married younger than the average for their gener-
ation.
9
On the other hand, these figures are in accord with those Lucia
Ferretti found for the working-class parish of Sainte Brigide at the turn of
the century,
10
confirming the role played by social class in determining age
at marriage. Because they did not have to conform to the conditions pre-
vailing in rural regions, where they would have to wait until they owned
land if they did not inherit the family farm, or of the middle class, where
sons first had to acquire a profession, working-class men had the possibil-
ity of marrying at a younger age, that is, as soon as they had a reasonably
steady job.
11
This condition represented a kind of minimum standard—
among the husbands of the women interviewed, some had savings and
were earning wages sufficient to assure the decent support of their fami-
lies. For the majority, however, their low wages excluded one or the other
of these possibilities—in these circumstances, it was pointless to delay
marriage indefinitely.
The ways and places that young people became acquainted, centred as
they were on family and neighbourhood, fostered a very considerable geo-
graphical and social endogamy. In twenty-two out of thirty cases, the cou-
ples in fact came from the same district, the same locality, or from a
neighbouring district or village. As well, although it might happen that
the in-laws were better off, it was unusual for marriage to allow one of the
partners to rise to a higher social station; thus in sixteen cases, the father
and the father-in-law of the informants had similar trades or jobs. Where
differences in job status existed, these rarely reflected marked differences
in income or living standards between the two families. This similarity in
social affiliation is confirmed when we examine the status of the partners
themselves: we may note that seventeen of the couples were earning simi-
lar salaries, while two couples were the sons and daughters of farmers and
were still working on the farm when they got married. Five factory work-
ers married white-collar workers or small businessmen (shopkeeper, taxi-
cab proprietor) while four office workers married manual labourers. Their
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 53
level of schooling was also comparable, although four of the informants
were clearly better educated than their partners, including the two teach-
ers. We should observe, however, that, whether they were of equal or infe-
rior schooling to their husbands, it would appear that the women read
more than the men, perhaps because supervising their children’s home-
work permitted them better to retain the basic skills they had learned in
their brief education.
Finding a ‘‘Good Husband’’
Given the low wages and unenviable status of the spinster in the society
of that time, marriage involved an undeniably utilitarian aspect for
women—it was through marriage that they could best assure their eco-
nomic survival. But if that was to happen, they had to find a ‘‘good hus-
band.’’
The ‘‘good husband’’ that every young woman hoped to meet was
defined most of all by what he was not rather than by what was expected
of him: ‘‘He should not run around after women, he should not be a
drinker, he should not hang out in taverns. That’s what a man... stay at
home, then go to work. A good man. A little strict, maybe, but a good
husband’’ (E2). In essence, if not in this exact formulation (not drinking,
staying at home, being a good worker), this is the description to which
the informants return time and time again to depict their ideal husband or
to justify their choice of mate. If some of the informants mention physi-
cal appearance or talk about ‘‘falling in love,’’ the primacy accorded to
these first criteria more than to anything else is evidence of a certain prag-
matism induced by a fear of finding oneself dependent upon a partner
more concerned with exercising his prerogatives as head of the house than
with assuming the obligations of the position. In a society that refused to
recognize divorce and in which the Civil Code extended full authority to
the father of the household, the wife, who was required to submit herself
to his will, indeed risked finding herself without a livelihood and practi-
cally without recourse in cases of non-support or conjugal violence. As
one of them observed, ‘‘In those days, the man was lord in his house’’
(E9). The condition of economic dependence and submission in which
married women were placed inspired them to choose a man who would
willingly and faithfully assume his role as provider without abusing the
rights conferred on him by the Civil Code. Considering the narrow range
of choice of husband available to some of these women and the absence of
discussion between the future husband and wife, finding the ideal hus-
band became a real stroke of luck, as one informant explained:
54 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
I had a man made out of gold. But then I was lucky because in those days, I
have to say our eyes and ears were stopped up when we got married—we
didn’t know anything about it. We were just not informed—we could have
been in real trouble.... I’m aware that there are sometimes signs that give a
hint but when we don’t know any more than that.... I was really lucky.
(E15)
Very few of the couples actually discussed questions like managing the
budget, educating the children (let alone how many of them) or any other
sort of future plan. In order to explain this way of embarking upon a life
together, several referred to the lack of marriage preparation courses to
guide them;
12
‘‘In those days, there was nothing like that being done.
Then, it was the same for everyone. You think that’s funny, eh? We got
married, we didn’t think about the future’’ (E29).
This lack of communication, typical of a family organization based on
paternal authority and the complementary roles of provider/housewife
might mean that the young woman remained unaware of her fiancé’s old
love affairs for some time. ‘‘He had been going out with the same girl for
four years (when he started to court me) and I didn’t know about it. I
found out after we were married’’ (E8). Another recalled, ‘‘My husband
was a widower, but I didn’t even know it. He told me a couple of months
after [they started going out] that he was a widower’’ (E2). For some, this
state of ignorance extended even to the financial situation of the future
husband. ‘‘In those days, you didn’t know how much money your hus-
band had. It wasn’t like now—we didn’t know anything when it came to
money and we didn’t ask. We didn’t know what our husbands had’’ (E2).
One of the informants was even deceived by her fiancé: ‘‘He didn’t have
anything! He showed my father a bank book with a thousand dollars in it,
but he didn’t have a cent!’’ (E27).
As another remarked, such discussion hardly seemed necessary to cou-
ples who had nothing or next to nothing: ‘‘He didn’t have anything and
neither did I. There was nothing to talk about. That’s how we got married
in those days’’ (E22). In fact, expectations were clearly laid out and the
division of responsibilities, seen as complementary and indispensable to
each other, was established from the beginning: the man would go to
work and bring home his pay; for her part, the woman would take care of
the house and the children.
13
As the territory and the role of each was
determined in this way, it was hardly necessary to discuss the modalities
of the future life of the pair, especially since the decision-making power,
in theory at least, if not in practice, was delegated to the head of the fam-
ily.
14
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 55
The acceptance of the apparent immutability of these social roles is
especially perceptible in the unwritten rule that women cease work upon
marriage. This question did not become the subject of discussion for the
overwhelming majority of these couples, since it was obvious to both
partners that marriage signalled the end of paid work for the wife, who
would be henceforth occupied with taking care of the house and the chil-
dren. This social norm was considered as a rule that it was impossible to
break, as it also embodied the husband’s desires:
I worked for six years in my life because there was no question of going to
work after you got married. Your husband would really tear his hair out!
Oh no! It wasn’t allowed in those days. (E15)
Married women weren’t allowed to work in those days. My husband did not
marry me for me to support him. And it was the same for my brothers-in-
law. Nobody went to work—it just didn’t happen in those days.... No
married woman worked.... It wasn’t done. Men had their pride. They
didn’t want their wives working. (E23)
When you got married in those days, there was no question of going on
working. And for the married man it would have been a disgrace if his wife
kept on working. (E29)
These oral histories highlight the importance that men attributed to
the fact of ‘‘supporting’’ their wives—it was a matter of ‘‘pride,’’ of ‘‘hon-
our,’’ that is, of social status. If they were supporting a woman at home it
meant that they were adequately fulfilling their role as provider; addition-
ally, it was proof that they did not belong to the poorest of social classes.
15
The recollections of another informant who tried to convince her fiancé,
without success, of the advantages that might derive from a double salary
conveys this idea well:
I talked about it with my husband, but there was no question.... One of us
had to give in—I gave in instead. I would have liked to go on working, but I
saw that his pride would have taken such a huge blow that I had to make a
choice. People took a dim view of women working. It meant that the hus-
band was not able to support his wife, that he wasn’t able to earn enough
money. (E10)
In fact, only one informant did retain her job for a year following her
marriage in order to finish paying for a washer and a sewing machine that
had been bought on credit.
Thus the dictates of domestic ideology were successful in imposing the
idea that paid work for married women was unsuitable because it betrayed
56 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
great poverty. Custom and the internal rules of businesses for their part
persuaded women that for all practical purposes, they were forbidden to
work. For some, indeed, transgressing the behavioural norm was equiva-
lent to breaking the law:
16
‘‘Married women didn’t have the right to go to
work. . . . There was too much unemployment—they preferred to hire
heads of families’’ (E6).
The clergy also placed itself in opposition to the employment of mar-
ried women, but, oddly, the informants did not seem to be aware of it
though they were, for example, perfectly in touch with the positions
taken by the Church regarding contraception. Several reasons might
explain this lack of knowledge. It is possible that this prohibition was
either disseminated less widely or was limited to channels less accessible
to working-class women.
17
It should be stressed that, unlike contracep-
tion, the Church’s view on married women’s working was not a question
of dogma; rather, it was one of a number of questions of temporal order
on which the Church took a position. While taking a position on married
women’s working for wages in other forums, during the ‘‘Semaines
sociales,’’ in the pamphlets produced by the École social populaire, or dur-
ing the congress of Catholic trade unions, for example, the Church was
perhaps more insistent about the prohibition of contraception among its
parishioners, judging that this would, at the same time, limit the presence
of married Quebec women on the job market.
18
It must also be said that
the birth rate had been constantly declining in Quebec since the nine-
teenth century while relatively few married women worked outside the
home, at least until the 1950s, if we may trust the census figures. Under
these conditions, the Church might have chosen to concentrate on dis-
seminating its prohibitions against birth control, knowing that its pro-
scriptions in this area were being less well obeyed.
But if the majority of informants quit their jobs when they got mar-
ried, many of them stated that some of their fellow workers were married
though hiding their matrimonial status from the employer out of fear of
being fired: ‘‘Of course, many women were married—they were working
in secret. I knew some of them—they went on working under their
maiden name’’ (E6). This evidence tends to confirm that the number of
married women who were working was probably higher than the official
statistics would lead us to believe.
19
It should be pointed out that the
informants did not criticize these women. Rather they saw what they did
as representing a personal choice, one they respected even if it violated a
norm to which they themselves conformed.
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 57
By and large, as it was a sign of entry into marriage and thus to a supe-
rior status, the women were happy to leave their jobs. If some of them
admitted to being bored in the course of the first months of married life,
the preparations for the arrival of a baby rapidly came to fill up the days
that might have seemed a bit long at the beginning. As we shall see in a
future chapter, this obligation to renounce their jobs did not altogether
extend to other kinds of paid work that they could carry on within the
home, inside the framework of their regular domestic duties and sheltered
from prying eyes, thus preserving the husband’s pride and the hierarchy
of roles within the household.
20
The Wedding Day
All the informants very clearly recalled the smallest details of their wed-
ding day, right down to the weather. Even those, indeed, whose marriages
were not the happiest did not have to be pressed to recount the events of
the day and describe their outfit. If, however, this day remained memo-
rable, it was less because it was so magnificent an occasion than because it
conferred a new social status on the bride. For the majority of couples, in
fact, the straightened circumstances imposed by their socio-economic sit-
uation did not permit them to lavish large sums on the wedding, or to
adopt the new wedding customs which were becoming widely observed
among more well-to-do classes.
Thus the proposal most often took the place of an engagement party,
as the couple hardly had the means to multiply the festivities. The same
economic considerations governed the bride’s choice of outfit. For some
years, the white wedding dress, symbol of purity and virginity, and the veil
had been becoming more and more identified as appropriate wedding
attire. The demands of this costume, devoted solely to a single event,
however, implied a certain degree of financial comfort, as it cost a great
deal and could not easily be adapted to other occasions. For this reason,
most of the informants preferred a pastel or neutral colour for the dress
and, where necessary, the going-away outfit, which they bought or had
made. ‘‘You were supposed to get married in white, but I said, hah! I’ll
never put a white gown on again. I’d rather have a grey dress that I can
wear more than once’’ (E17). Thus, even for this very special occasion, the
women were first of all concerned with the practicality of their purchases,
which they intended to get the best use out of. Only three of the infor-
mants conformed to the new fashion of the white wedding, though eight
of them wore a veil rather than a hat. Of these, three belonged to the
58 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Children of Mary, which furnished the young bride with a veil in addition
to organ music and a special service at the Lady Altar.
21
The money the couple had at their disposal also affected the wedding
day itself, generally held at the beginning of the week. Most often, this
began with a modest religious service that involved a minimum of pomp
and that was conducted in the presence of the immediate family to whom
might be added some of the relatives. If some of the informants had a
‘‘big’’ wedding with bouquets and maids of honour, most had to be con-
tent with a ‘‘small’’ wedding, with no organ or red carpet, followed by a
modest reception to which only the brothers and sisters were invited. The
simplicity of the events of the day is explained by the modest means of
the bride’s family, the early hour of the day at which the service took
place, the fact that it was a workday, and by the immediate departure of
the bride and groom on their honeymoon journey.
Although very few of the women were married in white, more than
two-thirds of the couples followed the custom of the honeymoon, which
was borrowed from our neighbours to the south. In most cases, however,
the groom had only a few days of unpaid holiday and had little money to
devote to the enterprise. Thus the couple most often went to relatives
who lived in the country in Quebec or the United States, a circumstance
that hardly provided the sort of privacy that the honeymoon was sup-
posed to be for. The mother of the bride in one case even accompanied
the happy couple! Despite everything, it would seem, at least in urban
areas, that the honeymoon was a custom so firmly established that it was
on its way to becoming an obligation that one could not shirk without
revealing a state of abject poverty. That is why two couples, in order to
preserve appearances, pretended to take the train to some other destina-
tion but got out at Saint Hubert and returned home secretly the same
evening.
22
Setting Up Housekeeping
A review of the various possessions the couple had when they married will
permit us to get a clearer view of their economic situation and put into
some sort of perspective the impact the Depression might have had on
their standard of living. Savings aside, they might have owned furniture, a
car or other property belonging generally to the husband, as well as the
bride’s trousseau.
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 59
The T rousseau
In a study of the trousseau in France, Agnès Fine observes that, regardless
of its contents and its value, the trousseau represented an essential in
women’s lives; through the first half of the twentieth century, at least, it
seemed altogether inconceivable to be married without the provision of a
trousseau.
23
But while in the sixteenth century it involved the furniture of
the bride’s bedroom, bit by bit the trousseau was reduced to linen, espe-
cially to sheets. According to the author, however, the meaning of the
trousseau remains the same: ‘‘The bride provides the nuptial chamber....
It is the room, the bed, the sheets where the new couple will have sexual
relations.’’
24
Under the impact of industrialization and urbanization, the meaning
and tradition of the trousseau seem to have lost their force. Perhaps we
should also consider how and to what degree transporting this custom to
North America might have altered it. Nevertheless, one fact remains—the
trousseau represented an important element of the marriage at the begin-
ning of the century. This is what the oral witness of most of the infor-
mants makes plain and, indeed, only three of them lacked a trousseau. A
few of them, married in the countryside, were even given bedroom furni-
ture, as in the tradition reported by Agnès Fine: ‘‘I had my bedroom set.
In our family it was Papa who gave it to us—he provided our bedroom
set. There was a dresser and a chest of drawers, a vanity table and a bed,
with the mattress and pillows—everything that went with it’’ (E17).
In the majority of cases, however, the trousseau was confined to house-
hold linen, though for some informants, the term also referred to the
clothing, underwear, and nightdresses that they wore on their wedding
day.
25
I had my trousseau for myself, to get married in, but I didn’t have a
trousseau for the house’’ (E23). This trousseau was generally collected
over a number of years, starting when the young woman left school and
sometimes even earlier than that. It was often made from purchased yard
goods, though occasionally the material was woven on the farm. The fash-
ion of embroidery was still quite widespread, as almost half the women in
the sample embroidered the tablecloths, sheets, and pillowcases that made
up their trousseau. In the poorest families, they bought unbleached cot-
ton and used sugar sacks as well, which they bleached before sewing and
embroidering them. The coarse cloth might also come from the factory
that employed a member of the family. It is impossible to know if this
60 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
material was given away by the companies or if it was spirited off by the
employees. The latter hypothesis seems the more probable.
The trousseau often represented the only property that belonged to the
young woman herself, a fact which could take on special significance if she
was going to live with her husband’s family. But unlike the custom Agnès
Fine remarks upon, the women in the sample did not try to preserve their
trousseaus untouched. In fact, the trousseau was made of sturdy material,
in the expectation of a long and constant use. In this sense, it represented
an important contribution to the family property because it obviated the
need to buy household linen for some years to come. ‘‘I had all my linen. I
didn’t have to buy anything for maybe ten years. And that helped a lot.
Now that’s wealth, eh? Those beautiful sets of sheets’’ (E24). Once they
were worn, the sheets and tablecloths could be cut down to fit a child’s
bed or converted into dust cloths. If once there had been a sexual signifi-
cation associated with the trousseau of which a few hints still remained,
for the urban working class, it was viewed much more as an important
economic contribution made by girls and their mothers who invested time
and money in the making and accumulation of items which would become
a significant part of the young married couple’s possessions.
Savings and Personal Property
Once the wedding had been paid for (that is, the clothing, the service, and
the honeymoon), barely more than half of the couples possessed savings
which, in some cases, were from the young woman’s nest egg. Even then,
the amounts saved up would not have been sufficient to support the cou-
ple for more than a week or two in the event of unemployment.
26
In these
circumstances, it is certainly not surprising that the majority of couples
first went to live with other members of their family, most frequently
with the husband’s parents, precisely in order to avoid the expenses con-
nected with setting up a home of their own.
Some couples already had some furniture when they got married. Four
girls brought their bedroom furniture with them,
27
while two couples had
acquired a dining-room suite. A widower had retained the furnishings
from his first marriage, another just the bedroom furniture. Quite often,
when the couple lived with the parents, these provided the bedroom fur-
nishings, which the young people could take with them when they left.
By the time they were finally settled, whether immediately after their
marriage or some months later, the majority of couples furnished two or
three rooms: the bedroom, the kitchen, including an icebox and a coal or
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 61
wood stove, and, in more than two-thirds of the group, the living room,
usually including a sofa bed, in the expectation of children. Rather fre-
quently, this last room was sacrificed, either because the rented flat con-
tained only two rooms or because buying living-room furniture was
beyond the couple’s means.
Of the nine couples who bought their furniture on time, six were living
with the husband’s family, which suggests that sharing expenses in the
early months of marriage did not necessarily allow the young couple to
save up the sum needed to set up housekeeping. Rather than relying on
credit, more than half the couples bought their furniture used. Three cou-
ples furnished their first home with donations from members of their
families, while seven others bought all new furniture, paying cash.
28
Between these two extremes there are a variety of situations involving a
combination of gifts and cash or credit purchases of new or used furni-
ture. In general, we observe a level of poverty which limited the quantity
and quality of the furniture and accessories the couples could acquire—
few of them could permit themselves a carpet, occasional tables, or other
decorative items. Only eight couples acquired a washing machine, which
meant that, at the beginning of their marriage, at least, the majority of the
women scrubbed clothes by hand, at the washboard, in a tub or in the
bath, if the flat had one. Finally, seven couples had a sewing machine, but
in five instances this was one they inherited or they were given, either
because the informant’s mother had died or because she no longer used it.
We should observe that the acquisition of a sewing machine often came
before the purchase of a washing machine, because it was the better
investment since it permitted clothing to be made at home, at a consider-
able saving.
All the small utensils and appliances that the couple received as gifts
should be added to the inventory of goods they owned at the beginning of
their marriage. Most of the informants stressed the utility of the gifts that
came from their families. If most received dishes, pots and pans, and trays
of all sorts, and sometimes household linen, those in luck were given elec-
tric appliances (toasters, irons) and silverware.
With few exceptions, the trousseau, the savings, the furniture and the
wedding presents constituted the entire wealth of these households. For
the woman who was about to take charge of the house, these goods both
represented the tools of her trade and would affect the way in which she
would carry out her household tasks, a subject that we will examine in
greater detail in a later chapter.
62 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The First Home
For most of these couples, the first months of their life together, far from
being intimate, were passed in the midst of one or the other of their fami-
lies. One couple who came from the country went to live for six months
in a room in the house of someone they did not know, four couples lived
with the grandparents, or with the sister or the brother of the bride, but
the majority, thirteen couples out of eighteen, lived with the husband’s
family. This patrilocality should probably be interpreted as smacking of a
tradition which goes back to the pre-industrial period, when the young
woman went to live on the land her husband would inherit; moreover,
four of these couples were living in rural areas when they got married. In
the urban setting, this practice emphasized the role of provider which was
extended to the husband’s family. This period could also be considered as
a transitional period in which the bride was initiated into the way her hus-
band and his family liked to live.
The insecure economic situation not only of the couple, but sometimes
of the husband’s family, most often explains why these shared living quar-
ters presented themselves as an inherent condition of marriage: ‘‘It was
agreed that I would stay with his mother—he didn’t talk about it much—
he put his cards on the table and that was that’’ (E2). Two of the women
interviewed referred specifically to their fathers-in-law being out of a job
to explain this decision. A consequence of the Depression indeed was to
accentuate the economic dependence of certain parents on their children:
Only my husband was working, and then my sister-in-law.... Since my
father-in-law was out of work and my husband, if he married and set up
house on his own, would have deprived them of an income, my mother-in-
law said, ‘‘If you want to stay with us. . . .’’ She had four rooms and she gave
up the back bedroom to us.’’ (E16)
If the young couple was to ‘‘benefit’’ from their own room, often the
only place in the flat that permitted a modicum of privacy, the other mem-
bers of the family had to cram together, particularly at bedtime. Thus, one
informant lived with her husband, his son by a previous marriage, her
mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law in a four-room flat.
This case, though extreme, is not unique, and it likewise happened that
the living room had to be given over to the newlyweds. In conditions like
these, it is not surprising that the arrival of the first-born child gave the
signal for them to leave. In fact, the majority of couples, ten of eighteen,
lived with their in-laws for a year or less, the time required for the young
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 63
woman to become pregnant and perhaps give birth to her first baby. Only
four couples continued to live with their families in the first year follow-
ing the birth of their child.
The financial arrangements that parents and children came to were dif-
ferent, depending on the needs and the economic situation of both par-
ties. Most frequently, the newlyweds, who had smaller incomes, paid a
weekly sum for room and board. But sometimes they would share the
costs or even take over the rent, electricity, and heat, with the parents sup-
plying only their food. As their contribution, one informant worked for
her mother-in-law, who had a boarding house:
When we got married, his mother was running a large boarding house....
We stayed there with the other boarders. I lived with my in-laws for two
years. We had a bedroom and a beautiful bedroom set. And we were saving
money by staying there. I helped her out—she had to do all the cooking.
There was a meal at noon and thirty-five people came to eat. It cost thirty-
five cents a meal. They ate well.... I didn’t do the cooking—I waited on ta-
ble. . . . There were two tables, placed end to end. Before the people got
there, I had to lay the table, set out the places. I was the one who did all the
serving. Oh, my God! That was really work. And in those days, there
weren’t any dishwashers! I was the dishwasher—I was earning my keep.
She didn’t pay me anything, but I was earning my keep. As soon as we got a
little money together, after two years, we were out of there. (E11)
Another also helped her mother-in-law who did the washing and iron-
ing for her neighbours. In general, however, the daughters-in-law only
helped with the daily housekeeping, which they did together. The major-
ity of the women interviewed conformed to the way their mothers-in-law
did things without objecting and tried to maintain good relations despite
any disagreements which were bound to surface. Some of them also bene-
fited from their stay by learning how to cook. ‘‘I learned to cook after I
got married because I was living with his parents and his mother was a real
cordon bleu chef. That meant that I learned to cook from her’’ (E8). Even
when both women got along well, the daughter-in-law was usually happy
to leave to set up housekeeping with her husband on their own. ‘‘I was
glad. I was the happiest person’’ (E2).
Thus, the custom of shared living arrangements seemed to have been
alive and well in the urban working-class setting.
29
This situation is
explained in part by the newlywed couples’ lack of savings and their inade-
quate income (and sometimes that of the parents). But if they lived
together for economic reasons, it is also true that several couples finally
moved out on their own without having saved up a nest egg sufficient for
64 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
them to set up housekeeping. Thus sharing a home did not seem to be the
result solely of economic considerations—tradition must also be taken
into account in their choice. More than marriage itself, the arrival of the
first child symbolized the foundation of a new family and truly involved
the establishment of a separate household. This coincidence between the
birth of the first child and family autonomy means that the majority of
couples would not experience an intimate relation of just two persons
until old age, if, indeed, both partners survived until then.
F
or women, marriage meant, in principle, that they more or less put
themselves henceforth in their husbands’ hands in order to ensure
their support. Consequently, courtship was not free from economic con-
siderations when we look at it from the woman’s point of view. Her
choice of partner was based on practical considerations which could easily
overwhelm amorous sentiments. Those for whom the two coincided were
generally thought to be lucky because the passive role women played in
courtship limited their choice, which could turn out to be cruelly disap-
pointing.
Because of the socio-economic background of most of the couples,
material considerations also influenced the style of the rituals involved
with the marriage service and wedding reception. Despite all the symbol-
ism associated with the event and the importance which it held for women
particularly, the marriage was rarely celebrated with any sort of splendour.
One got married according to one’s means and, as Lucia Ferretti observes,
‘‘the wedding appeared... less as a celebration than as a bureaucratic for-
mality.’’
30
Indeed, at every stage of the couple’s relationship, from
courtship to marriage, to the first years of married life, we observe the
influence of the poverty of their background, which often existed well
before the Depression. Finally, we must add that marriage for these cou-
ples had as its primary objective the establishment of a new family. There-
fore, hardly any time would go by before the arrival of the first child. This
is the subject that will occupy the next chapter.
Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage 65
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Chapter 4
Motherhood
‘‘Life was having children.’’ (E24)
T
he reproduction of human beings is at the heart of all endeavours in
the private sphere. Bringing children into the world and taking care
of them represents the principal element in domestic labour. It not only
consumes the most time and affects the quantity of housework, but in a
much more fundamental way, it is principally this responsibility, attributed
exclusively to women, that has come to justify the existence of a separate
domestic sphere, set apart from the marketplace, and the assignment of
the wife/mother (and, by necessity, child-rearer) to this sphere and to the
activities that it entails. Motherhood, the foundation of modern domestic
labour, has occupied the greatest part of the lives of the women inter-
viewed.
In this period, as we know, clerical and medical discourse associated
marriage and sexuality very narrowly with procreation and most often
reduced women to their biological capacity to bear children.
1
Exalted
again and again, motherhood represented at once the primary reason for
marriage, the ‘‘natural’’ and inescapable destiny of women, their unique
vocation, the condition essential to their full physiological and psycholog-
ical development, a noble duty, when it was not seen as a ‘‘blessed
bondage,’’
2
that women could avoid only by defying their fundamental
nature and endangering their physical and moral health. Thus the use of
contraception was not only formally prohibited by the Church, but cer-
tain physicians warned that it could have dangerous effects. Among the
Notes to Chapter 4 are on pp. 201-204.
67
numerous evils that lay in wait for women who sought to limit their fami-
lies were: ‘‘More and more neuropathic women, premature ageing, uterine
fibroids, certain organic scleroses, total neurasthenia, nervous imbalances,
[and] uterine cancer caused by more than one chemical irritant used
habitually.’’
3
Acceptance of and blind submission to this sort of discourse was not
altogether invariable. If all the women we interviewed did consider moth-
erhood the principal reason for marriage and sexual activity, once the first
child, however ardently desired, appeared, the halo of romanticism sur-
rounding maternity often began to fade. Abruptly brought into contact
with the physical realities of pregnancy and childbirth, seized by the daily
responsibilities of the child’s care and upbringing without always having
the means at their disposal to carry them out, most of the women wished
to space out their pregnancies and several couples did not hesitate to use
means to prevent them.
Sexuality and Contraception
Generally, the women knew nothing about sex when they got married. As
girls, they were not warned about the arrival of their menses and received
no explanation once their periods started except that it would happen
every month and that they ought not to talk about it with anyone. The
details of the sexual act, associated as it was with sin, were never described
and thus remained a mystery until the wedding night, which sometimes
had quite a surprise in store for them: ‘‘I never thought it would be like
that’’ (E7), said one of the informants, summing up the general feeling.
Even as teenagers, most of them had not been advised about their
mother ’s pregnancies or the imminent arrival of a new baby. When the
mother went into labour, they would be shooed out along with the other
children and if they no longer believed in the ‘‘Indians’’ who were sup-
posed to have brought the baby, ‘‘we never did know the real truth’’
(E20), as one of them said. The secrecy that surrounded these events
hardly encouraged them to ask questions. Modesty, shyness, or fear of
committing a sin, all of which were inherently associated with sexual mat-
ters, kept them from satisfying their curiosity by asking friends or women
at work who, in any case, knew very little more than they did. Those who
were born on farms were not any better informed because they had gener-
ally been kept well away from animals who were breeding or giving birth.
4
If they had never changed a little brother’s diaper, they would have had no
idea of masculine anatomy.
5
‘‘When I got married, I was completely
stupid,’’ one of them said. ‘‘But in any event, I managed like everybody
68 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
else. . . . No, it’s true ... I was married at twenty-three and I tell you, I
didn’t know what a man was’’ (E28). In these circumstances, it is hardly
astonishing that once they got pregnant, some of them wondered how the
child would be born. ‘‘When my first baby was about to come into the
world . . . three months before he was born I asked my neighbour where
he would come out. ... She had a good laugh at me for that’’ (E6). Her
naivety is not unique; at least two of the other informants admitted to
having asked the same question.
Men were not as ignorant of sexual matters and they undertook to initiate
their wives: I was completely dumb. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know
how ‘‘to buy’’ a baby
6
when we got married. My mother never told us any-
thing about all that. She was embarrassed to talk about such things with us.
He told me on our wedding trip what was about to happen to me. I didn’t
know. I wasn’t afraid. He was sensitive about it. If I hadn’t wanted to do it,
he would happily have waited. (E12)
The husband’s attitude in these first moments of intimacy determined
the view that these women would have of sex. But if some of them
referred to their husband’s ‘‘sensitivity,’’ for most of them sex became a
‘‘duty ’’ from which they derived no pleasure. Even if not all of them
broached the subject directly, many of them complained indirectly about
their husbands’ sexual appetite, which to them seemed insatiable, or
expressed a certain comfort in having a husband who was not too
demanding in this regard,
7
which leads us to suspect that, one way or the
other, sexual relations were for them a real chore.
Thus, while motherhood might be considered woman’s primal vocation
and the primary purpose for marriage, most of the informants were kept
in ignorance of the biological realties bound up with it and the question
only rarely was discussed by the partners, at least before marriage. A kind
of fatalism, which can be attributed as much to ignorance of contraceptive
practices as to the religious context of the period, characterizes the atti-
tude of almost half the couples: ‘‘There wasn’t anything, you never heard
of anything that would prevent a baby .... Y ou’d often think, if I only had
something. . . . Some had ways that they talked about, but I only learned
about them later’’ (E3); ‘‘Birth control was out of the question. It was
the law of the Church. Y ou had to have babies.’’ (E29)
Nevertheless, despite Church teachings, which were widely dissemi-
nated during the annual parish retreats and familiar to everyone, fifteen of
the couples tried to limit the size of their families, though, it must be said,
with limited success. In almost every case, they came to this decision after
marriage and the birth of one or more of their children, as their sexual
Motherhood 69
intimacy aided their discussion of the subject.
8
Unless they were under
the care of a physician, resorting to contraceptive methods or devices
appeared aimed less at preventing all further births than at delaying the
arrival of a new baby for as long as possible. The workload involved in a
large family, the couple’s financial situation, and the desire to raise and pay
enough attention to each of the children were among the reasons most
frequently provided. The following quotation illustrates the variety of rea-
sons at the heart of such a decision very well:
I told the good Lord to send me children, but that I did not want them to
suffer later. Large families always have problems. Someone is always over-
looked in a big family, even if it isn’t meant. So I said, we’re going to avoid
that. That’s what the two of us decided. Because my husband made such-
and-such a salary, and I said, I wanted to see that they were educated.
That’s what I was missing. I really suffered because I couldn’t finish
school. . . . So I said, my kids, if they want, they’re going to get an educa-
tion, they’re going to study and I’m going to help them. And that’s what I
did. You have to plan. I said, I’d rather have a small family and be able to
give them what they need. It was their education that I was thinking about
for later. (E16)
The economic climate particular to the 1930s certainly exercised a deci-
sive influence on some of the couples; in fact, the majority of those who
used contraception were either living on home relief for a greater or lesser
period of time or were suffering from reduced incomes. Despite all that,
as we have just seen, few of the women used exclusively economic reasons
to explain their decision. Furthermore, other couples who experienced
similar economic difficulties did not think it right to limit the size of their
families, which tends to demonstrate that low incomes do not always con-
stitute a sufficient incentive for birth control.
9
The internalization of reli-
gious values, the rural origins of the couple, and a large number of
children in their original families constitute a number of the factors which
could have led them to have large families despite an uncertain economic
situation. Thus, the five women in the sample who had more than eight
children either came originally from the countryside or from families of
more than eight children. One of them, who had sixteen pregnancies and
brought eleven children into the world despite an income which was
largely inadequate, said, ‘‘I thought that’s the way it always was, since I
came from a big family’’ (E22). On the other hand, the reverse is not
always true: not all of those who came from large families had a lot of
children. How the women viewed their mothers’ experiences of mother-
hood also had a role to play.
10
As one woman who came from a family of
70 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
eleven commented, ‘‘I didn’t want to have a big family. I didn’t want to
bring up eleven like my mother. I thought she’d had enough problems. I
didn’t want to follow in her footsteps’’ (E19). Finally, it must be empha-
sized that those couples whose relationship was based exclusively on the
husband’s authority and in which there was an absence of any discussion
between the partners were clearly less likely to control their fertility, tak-
ing into account the necessary cooperation which such control demands.
According to their testimony, these women most often originated the
decision to limit the size of the family. ‘‘A fter the third, I said it’s time to
take a little ‘break’. We can’t manage—we’ll never make it’’ (E23). ‘‘After
I had my little girl, the oldest one ... I said, ‘Well, that’s that for a while.’
Then my husband said, ‘There’s always a way to be careful’ ’’ (E19). How-
ever, as the last comment suggests, the methods used, a condom in three
and withdrawal in eight of the fifteen cases,
11
required women to depend
upon their husbands. The Ogino-Knauss (rhythm) method, based on
fluctuations on the menstrual cycle and used by the other couples, equally
required the husband’s cooperation.
Before their marriage, the women were altogether ignorant of these
various ways to limit family size; it was the husband who knew about con-
doms when the couples used them and it was the doctor who explained
the rhythm method—the only one acceptable to the Church
12
—while
not every doctor was willing to reveal information of this kind, even to
women whom they had told not to have more children because of their
many miscarriages.
13
As for the couples themselves, despite their married
status, they were too embarrassed to ask for explanations of this method
they had heard about: ‘‘We had too much modesty to go to the doctor and
ask how it worked’’ (E6). Moreover, although they knew well enough that
their recommendations to limit family size flew directly in the face of
Church teachings, the doctors did not seem particularly interested in reas-
suring their patients on this score: ‘‘The doctors, you know, didn’t say
what they thought about the clergy or all that—they left it up to you. . . .
I felt I was being pulled from one side to the other’’ (E15). Caught
between contradictory instructions emanating from the two authorities
they had been taught to respect, the women found themselves in an espe-
cially cruel dilemma when the doctor recommended sterilization:
Every year there was a new baby. I had seven of them. If I had listened to
the doctor, I wouldn’t have had seven, I would have had five. He wanted to
operate on me, but the priests in those days said it was a sin to be operated
on. So that meant I had seven and the last two were crippled.... In those
days, you weren’t supposed to be operated on. [The priests] would say, ‘‘It’s
Motherhood 71
better to die than to have the operation.’’ We were here in order to procre-
ate. But when I saw that I was beginning to bring children into the world
who weren’t well, I said, that’s the end! And I had myself operated on.
(E12)
Unlike the condom and the rhythm method, withdrawal had the
advantage of requiring neither special knowledge nor expense to use. As
one informant explained, the practice was ‘‘simply natural’’ (E5) and the
decision was only the couple’s business. All these considerations probably
explain why this method was the most widely used although it was the
least reliable.
In the religious climate of the time, the decision to use contraception
(or to undergo a hysterectomy) represented a genuine moral dilemma.
Even when women were convinced of the logic of their decision and fully
conscious that the intransigence of the Church and the priests verged on
absolute contempt for women’s health and even for their lives, they felt
nevertheless that they were breaking the rules of the Church and contin-
ued to confess their sin:
It was cruel when you went to confession. It was not a small thing to say
that you had used birth control. But I had to confess it.... the priests
would scold us.... W e would tell them, ‘‘The doctor said that I mustn’t
have any more children.’’ They didn’t care—the baby would live even if the
mother died. That’s all they had to say to us. It wasn’t right.’’ (E5)
For the Church’s part, in fact, no motive, not even a medical one, could
justify the use of mechanical contraceptive methods. Abstinence and the
rhythm method, which in short allowed the determination of periods of
abstinence during the menstrual cycle, were the only permitted means.
Because the rhythm method required explanations which were hard to
come by, it was not widely used. Most of the couples therefore used con-
traceptive methods forbidden by the Church and almost all of the women
involved found they were refused absolution at one time or another.
Rather than meet with such a refusal or abandon the Church alto-
gether—which would have been clearly impossible as a result of the
importance of religion as a social behavioural standard—some of the
women chose to practice their religion only halfway, in part so as to be a
good example to their children, but staying away from confession and
communion. Others knew how to find a confessor who would make con-
cessions; according to one informant, the Franciscans were particularly
tolerant and the news got around. ‘‘Everyone went there. They were a lit-
tle less.... But the parish priest, you couldn’t get away with anything
72 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
with him’’ (E20). The next comment is a good illustration of the different
strategies used by couples in order to receive absolution:
I remember going to confession so I could make my Easter duty, to go to
church, and my husband said, ‘‘I’ll go ahead of you.’’... He’d go in, con-
fess, and come out and give me a signal not to go in if he hadn’t got it
[absolution]. . . . Oh, yes, they refused to give us absolution!... One time,
we tried three priests. Finally we hit upon one... I don’t know, maybe he
was tired, it was late, he must have been hungry and he must have wanted to
get out of that blessed confessional box—anyway, he ran us through quite
quickly. I don’t even know if he heard my confession. We managed to whis-
per as much as we could—just in case. (E10)
If the confessional allowed the priest to exercise a direct and individual
control over women’s sexual lives and fertility, the annual retreats, which
men and women attended separately, represented a choice medium
through which to spread the message and castigate the recalcitrants before
a large audience. The newspapers voluntarily reprinted the sermons given
by prestigious preachers invited by the richer parishes, facilitating the
wider distribution of these directives, so no one could claim not to have
heard of them.
14
These annual retreats, during which women were recalled
to their duty in fiery rhetoric, were often successful in reawakening guilt
in even the most hardened. Some of them nevertheless managed to relieve
their guilt, at least in part, by telling themselves that they were respecting
the spirit of Church regulation. The Church, in fact, had always con-
demned the use of contraception, linking it with the desire on the part of
women to free themselves of their family responsibilities in order to bene-
fit from a greater freedom. When that was not the motive, then breaking
the Church’s commandment appeared less serious:
Oh, yes, madame, I was refused absolution, yes, indeed, that happened to
me. I didn’t repent because I was using my head. In my opinion, the priests
were there to inform us, but they weren’t there to raise our kids. And in
those days, it wasn’t easy. So if we wanted to look out for our kids’ welfare,
we had to use our heads. I would have gone along [with the priest] if I had
been doing it for my own pleasure, you know, to be freer. No, on the con-
trary, I was always at home.... Y ou know... women always felt guilty
because in those days, they had those retreats and when you went to the
retreat—I went to them all—you were going to go to hell.... It shook you
up, let me tell you. And afterwards, you went back to normal, but you
thought about all that. But I always said to myself, it is the good Lord who
will be the judge. If I’m guilty, then something will happen. (E16)
Motherhood 73
It should be noted that even if it was the men who actually employed
contraceptive methods, it was the women who felt the guilt and who were
blamed. Men seemed to have a much more elastic conscience and, in order
to be left in peace, did not hesitate simply to hide the facts from their
confessor. One husband recommended that if his wife wanted absolution,
she not tell ‘‘what we do in our own bed’’ (E6). Another felt fully justified
in limiting the size of his family in the light of his income: ‘‘My husband
said, I’m the one who earns the money. It doesn’t make sense to live like
the animals, neither better or worse’’ (E5). This attitude on the part of
men can be linked to several factors. In the first place, their socialization
was less focussed on obedience to the standards of behaviour than that of
women and they were generally allowed a greater latitude and freedom of
will. Thus they were used to exercising their authority. Certain kinds of
behaviour were tolerated in men, even when they were forbidden by the
Church, like sexual activity outside of marriage. Moreover, it was certainly
easier for men to justify their decision to limit the size of their family as
their earning capacity was mathematically demonstrable. More children
meant more work for women but the amount of extra labour entailed was
less easy to quantify.
Thus, regardless of the religious climate of the period and the guilt
which it engendered, more than half of the fertile couples in the sample
(fifteen out of twenty-eight) chose to control the size of their families for
a number of reasons. This number would tend to suggest that the women
of that generation were less submissive to the Catholic Church than is
generally thought, at least in urban areas.
15
The number of sermons
preached on the subject, moreover, indicates that the Church was well
aware that its directives were not always being observed.
Except on medical advice, the use of contraception was intended more
to space out new arrivals after the first few births than to prevent them
altogether to accord with a pre-established ideal family size. All of these
couples in fact wanted to start a family and all of the women wanted sev-
eral children, which is hardly surprising in view of their socialization and
the social value placed on motherhood. Even among couples who used
contraceptive methods, the number of pregnancies and of children is still
quite high compared to our present standards.
16
Thus nine of the women
who admitted to contraceptive use had had at least five pregnancies and
six had had five or more children, none of whom were necessarily ‘‘acci-
dents.’’ The use of unsure methods or the failure to utilize them cor-
rectly, however, did mean that some of them had more pregnancies or
74 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
more children than they had planned on: ‘‘My last, he’s my little Ogino’’
(E24), one informant explained, with a certain degree of humour. For the
same reason, contraception did not always contribute to the shortening of
the period of family increase that still took up the major part of these
women’s lives.
17
‘‘After twelve years,’’ explained one of the informants,
who had had five children, ‘‘I had my little girl, and then five years later, I
had another one.... They were accidents.... They didn’t have the pill in
those days. ... After I had them, I was glad I did, but when I first got
pregnant, I wasn’t thrilled’’ (E23). Nevertheless, those who used birth
control methods had, on average, two fewer children than the others and
completed their families in four years less, as the following table indicates:
Table 7
Average Number of Pregnancies and Children and
the Y ears between the First and Last Child
According to Use of Contraception
Couples Pregnancies Children Years
No contraception (13) 7.5 6 16
Contraception (15) 5.4 4 12.4
Fertile couples (28) 6.3 5 13.8
As we can see, these women, whether they used birth control or not,
had fewer children on average than the myth of the large family
18
would
have endowed them with. Of the twenty-eight fertile women in the sample,
only five had more than eight children and of those, three had more than
ten. Most often, in eleven of twenty-eight instances, they had between
three and five children and six of them had fewer than three. These women
had, therefore, on average, two fewer children than their mothers had.
Motherhood
While the Catholic Church tried to maintain its ban on contraception,
physicians increasingly were invading the fields of obstetrics and child
care. Indeed, from the end of the nineteenth century, scientific discover-
ies in the area of health had provided a new occasion for the medical pro-
fession to rely on recent knowledge to impose itself on the population
and especially on women. To doctors, the high infant mortality rate was in
itself a sufficient reason to justify their intervention more.
19
Women who
failed to consult them and who preferred to bottle-feed were roundly
condemned and held responsible for the death of their offspring.
Motherhood 75
Although the women interviewed were strongly encouraged to see
their doctors, their lack of money did not always allow them to avail
themselves frequently or directly of medical advice. That is why most of
them made use of the three kinds of health services that had been created
around the First World War and that acted as a kind of go-between for the
doctor. These were the visiting nurse service of the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, the Goutte de Lait, and Assistance maternelle. As they
were frequently mentioned in the course of the interviews, it is useful to
provide a brief discussion of the origins, objectives, and services offered
by the three organizations.
Because Metropolitan Life charged premiums as low as five cents a
week and because they sent an agent weekly to the home to collect, the
company had been successful from the turn of the century in attracting a
clientele among working-class families. In 1909, the company created a vis-
iting nurse service for their policy holders who were ill and for their preg-
nant wives. During the seventh month of pregnancy, the nurse would come
to explain to the expectant mother how to prepare to give birth at home in
the most hygienic and sterile conditions possible in order to avoid any
infection or complication. After the delivery, she would come during the
nine-day period of confinement then observed in order to take care of her
patients and bathe the mother and the infant, teach the young mother how
to give her baby a bath, and prepare her breasts if she were nursing.
20
Complementing this service, Goutte de Lait (well-baby clinic) provided
free medical consultations throughout the early years of the child’s life.
Created in 1901, the first Goutte de Lait clinics were primarily intended to
promote breast-feeding and to distribute safe milk to those who were not
able to nurse. After 1913, they multiplied along parish lines and became
real clinics for newborns and young babies. The organization also offered
prenatal classes where women learned how to care for and feed their chil-
dren and at the same time received advice on hygiene in general.
21
Finally, for the most deprived, there was Assistance maternelle, which
began activity in 1913, created for their express benefit by Caroline
Leclerc Hamilton. This organization both made home visits (most often
to make sure that their beneficiaries were indeed in dire poverty) and pro-
vided free medical advice and assistance for mothers and layettes for
babies. The organization had a clinic of several beds for giving birth and
occasionally paid the cost of a hospital delivery.
22
In 1924, Assistance
maternelle aided 824 mothers whose cases had been brought to its atten-
tion, often through the agency of other charitable organizations like Saint
76 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Vincent de Paul, and distributed 374 layettes.
23
During 1932, one of the
hardest years of the Depression, the organization helped 4,194 mothers
and furnished more than two thousand layettes.
24
More than doctors, whose fees were a severe strain on the family bud-
get, it was the nurses and volunteers of these three organizations who
instilled in the women interviewed the new standards defined by medicine
in the areas of childbirth and care of the newborn. In fact twenty-seven of
the twenty-eight fertile women in the sample used the services of the
Goutte de Lait clinics while twelve also received visits from the Metropoli-
tan Life nurses and three were aided by Assistance maternelle.
Expecting
‘‘Once I got married, then the babies started to come’’ (E2). As one infor-
mant explained, the first child often arrived barely nine or ten months
after the wedding, rarely as much as a year and a half. As they wanted to
have a family, most of them were happy to find they were pregnant after a
couple of months or even weeks of married life. Evidence of a second
pregnancy, which often occurred shortly after the birth of the first child,
was not always as heartily welcomed. The experience of a particularly dif-
ficult first labour, for example, could give rise to feelings of panic: ‘‘After
that, when I saw I was starting another one, I cried. I’d had so much mis-
fortune’’ (E2), said one informant, who had lost her first-born. ‘‘With the
girls, I was happy, they were the first,’’ said another, referring to her twins,
‘‘but the others, I loved them, but I was so sick, I was close to death each
time. That meant I was afraid of having my baby each time I found I was
expecting’’ (E29). Difficult economic conditions, inadequate income or
unemployment due to the Depression also meant that the arrival of
another baby was dreaded. ‘‘He was working up until 1933. ... After that
there wasn’t any more construction. And the little ones kept coming
every year. That was really hard. They have to eat, eh? But when the man
isn’t working—’’ (E12).
As one of the informants observed, the feelings of despondency or
even rejection that accompanied repeated pregnancies might be shared by
the husband as well:
You know sometimes, you have children, it’s not what you’d like. It’s the
same for a man. For woman, the more children, the more work she has. It’s
the same for a man—the more there are, the more money he has to bring
home, the more he has to provide and he has to work. He wouldn’t have to
Motherhood 77
worry so much otherwise.... If I had listened to my husband, I would have
had two or three . . . maybe he was discouraged. (E2)
Thus, men and women both dreaded the successive arrival of numerous
babies. Repetitive pregnancies and deliveries represented a heavy burden
for women who saw their strength and health undermined while their
work grew. For men, additional children meant an increase in their eco-
nomic responsibilities.
Preparing for the Birth
To get ready for the birth, most of the women did not consult a doctor
until around the sixth or seventh month. According to one informant,
when the mother felt the baby move, then she knew that she should see
the doctor shortly. If everything was unfolding normally, they would not
go back to the doctor until they went into labour. Some of them had
never met the doctor until the last moment; in contrast, others saw a doc-
tor several times throughout their entire pregnancy. These were either the
best off or the poorest among the women, those whom Assistance mater-
nelle took into its care.
They gave us a large flannel blanket, two sheets, some pillowcases and they
gave us linen for the new baby .... W e were followed up by them—we had
to go, you know, once a week.... They gave me a bassinet, they gave me
some bottles.... W e would go to the Assistance maternelle in the afternoon.
We’d have a snack, the doctor was there, and the nurses gave us advice—it
was just like today with the prenatal courses.... I had to have a lot of milk,
so they had Poupart Dairy leave me two quarts free. I wasn’t the one who
paid, they did. Then, when the babies were here... we went there and they
gave us cod-liver oil and drops to put in their ears if we needed them. You
know, they kept an eye on the babies until they were six months old. (E25)
Several informants made use of the prenatal clinics offered at the
Gouttes de Lait. ‘‘Every Wednesday, the doctor held a Goutte de Lait.He
taught us. Wednesdays were for women who were expecting. They
showed us how to make a layette and how to organize our work [so it
wouldn’t be too much]’’ (E21). One of the women also recalled going to
get a pamphlet the organization was distributing without charge. Finally,
more than a third of the women had the benefit of advice from the
Metropolitan Life visiting nurses. According to their reminiscences, the
nurses seemed to stress cleanliness and antiseptic bed linen and articles for
the birth.
78 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
From the seventh to the ninth month, she would come once a week to show
us how to make mattress pads for the bed for the delivery. She had us take
newspaper, sterilize it in the oven, then buy some cheesecloth. She had us
alternate the paper and the cheesecloth and sew it all together with big nee-
dles. She had us make big ones and little ones. (E15)
We got a little tray ready with everything we would need for the baby....
We had very clean jars with lids for boiled water. And for the cord, the
bellybutton, we had real linen cloths—we cut them into squares with a hole
in the middle for the cord to pass through. Then we wrapped all of it in a
clean sheet and put it in a hot oven to be sterilized. After that, we wrapped
it in another clean sheet—and put the whole thing on the little tray. When
the nurse came [in the days following delivery], she had the things we’d
prepared, she had a basin of water that had been boiled to give us our bath.
(E29)
According to the oral histories collected, the extent of the preparations
appeared to vary, as did the frequency of visits before the delivery. In any
event, it is clear that these preparations were more elaborate than those
undertaken by the women who were content to make a few pads out of
old sheets stuffed with newspaper as their mother or mother-in-law
advised. As the informant just quoted stated, ‘‘In my mother’s day, there
wasn’t anything of the kind.... The nurses showed us everything. ... I
have to say we really worked in those days when we were having a baby
because we weren’t rich!’’ (E29). Making all the necessary items con-
sumed a great deal of time, but most of the women who were aided never-
theless appreciated the service, especially because the nurses provided
follow-up care during the eight or nine days of confinement following the
birth. For those who had trouble finding help or advice, there is no doubt
that the visiting nurse service provided precious support.
Giving Birth
The Metropolitan Life nurses did not aid the doctor during a delivery. A
few of the informants were able to pay for a private nurse but the majority
had to rely on the support and help of their mothers or, where the young
couple was still sharing living quarters with the husband’s family, of their
mothers-in-law. A sister or a neighbour might also substitute for the
mother when she was deceased or lived too far away. Even if Quebec no
longer trained midwives after the end of the nineteenth century,
25
the
women often used the term to describe the women who helped them in
childbirth. ‘‘I always had Mama come and be my midwife’’ (E27).
Whether he just happened to be at home at the crucial time or whether
he had been sent for on purpose, the husband in more than a third of the
Motherhood 79
cases was present for at least one birth, supporting his wife or even taking
an active part in different stages of the process. ‘‘My husband held my
shoulders’’ (E2), one related, while another said, ‘‘He was the one who
gave me the chloroform to put me to sleep’’ (E4). Other men, however,
expressed strong feelings of helplessness and fear when their wives were
in pain and preferred to wait in the next room or even flee the house. ‘‘He
would take the children to my mother’s, and he wouldn’t come back
home—he couldn’t—he was a sensitive man. He wasn’t able to watch me
suffer. He was good for making them but not for watching them come’’
(E12). Even if he preferred to leave the house or, if he did stay, could not
always make himself useful (one informant’s husband took the chloro-
form himself that had been meant for his wife!), the partner was still not
automatically excluded as would be the case for hospital deliveries until
the 1970s. Rather, the presence or absence of the husband seemed to be a
question of personal choice, a function of both his inclinations and the
state of the relationship with his wife. These oral narratives tend to con-
firm the findings of an American study that husbands were more fre-
quently present at the birth during the nineteenth century, when the
obstetrician came onto the scene, their presence coinciding with the emer-
gence of new feelings about the relationship between husbands and wives
and with children. The reduction in the size of the family, which made
each birth a rarer and thus more precious event than had been previously
the case, would also have contributed to a closeness between the partners
at this crucial moment.
26
Childbirth, even if it took place in the privacy of the bedroom, never-
theless had become ‘‘medicalized’’; in addition to striving to reproduce a
sterile environment worthy of a hospital, the oral histories commonly
mention the frequent use of anaesthesia (ether and chloroform) and
often, as a result, of forceps. Thus, during her first delivery, one informant
was too drowsy from the ether administered by the doctor to push, so he
had to use the forceps, almost pulling the baby’s head off in the process.
‘‘He was a butcher,’’ she said. ‘‘If we’d had a competent doctor, the baby
might have been saved’’ (E16).
Almost a third of the women, especially those who had their babies
after 1940, delivered at least one of them in a hospital.
27
Opinions about
this experience were somewhat divided: if for some the hospital offered
the advantages of safety and of rest following delivery, others asserted that
childbirth was no less painful in the hospital and that the period of
bedrest could be stressful due to worry about the children who were left
80 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
at home. ‘‘My mother-in-law was looking after my children. I was more
worried about them because she was so old’’ (E2).
In fact, the majority of these women said that they would not have
used the services of a midwife exclusively, as often their mothers had
done, because they thought it too risky. It would appear that the medical
campaign on the incompetence of the midwife had had its effect. Their
confidence in modern medical technique did not always prevent them
from severely judging the practices and competence of certain obstetri-
cans. Thus several women remarked that, despite their fees, which ranged
between ten and twenty-five dollars, sums that might represent a week’s
wages, the doctor would show up at the last minute while a nurse fol-
lowed the progress of labour. Rather often as well, whether or not a nurse
was present, he only certified the birth, leaving ‘‘chores’’ like bathing the
baby to one of the women, a nurse, a midwife, or someone else, who had
come to help the woman giving birth.
Despite the claims of the medical profession, doubt often was cast on
the competence and effectiveness of these practitioners in relation to the
very high rate of infant mortality of the period. ‘‘In those days, women
would have fifteen or sixteen children because they would lose five, six, or
even more. That’s how the babies died—the doctors didn’t know a thing’’
(E29). Several also reported having cured their babies themselves, using
traditional remedies, after they had followed their doctors’ advice in vain.
In at least two cases, premature babies were saved thanks to the treatment
provided by a mother-in-law or a neighbour. ‘‘The old women said that
this child would not live. My mother-in-law was the one who saved him.
He didn’t have any fingernails, he didn’t look good. She put him to bed in
his bassinet and surrounded him with bottles of hot water,’’ one infor-
mant recounted. According to another, paregoric, then widely used, was
even dangerous for babies. ‘‘They slept so deeply you would have thought
they were dead’’(E5). Whether founded or not, these charges reveal that
there was no general agreement yet about medicine and the medical pro-
fession and that women were relatively critical of the intrusion of these
‘‘experts’’ into the areas of obstetrics and child-rearing. Despite the medi-
cal campaign which sought to charge women with the responsibility for
infant mortality, the latter generally considered it to be an inevitable phe-
nomenon, considering the state of the evolution of medicine, thus tossing
the ball back to those who would make them feel guilty.
This critical attitude is also reflected in the small proportion of women
who nursed their babies and in the comments collected in connection
Motherhood 81
with the service rendered by Goutte de Lait. Thus, despite numerous
exhortations in favour of breast-feeding, the only effective means of com-
batting infant mortality according to the ‘‘experts,’’ half of the women did
not breast-feed at all, and of those who did, several stopped after the first
month.
28
Lack of milk, but also the numerous inconveniences associated
with this practice explain why women did not nurse more often or for
longer periods of time. The enormous demands made by nursing on the
mother ’s time, the impossibility of her being able to accomplish other
tasks at the same time as breast-feeding, even the isolation in which nurs-
ing had to take place so as not to offend modesty, meant that a number of
the women left off, especially when their other children demanded their
time and attention. The majority of these women knew that breast-feed-
ing could delay a new pregnancy and those who nursed for long periods
generally did so for this reason.
A very large majority of the women we interviewed took their children
to the Gouttes de Lait. Here the children were examined, weighed, and
vaccinated; their young mothers were given nutritional advice and told
how to take care of their babies. The fact that almost all in the study used
the service does not mean that every woman was uniformly happy with it.
For various reasons, some of the women definitely appreciated it, espe-
cially for their first children. ‘‘I found that it helped young women who
didn’t know anything, like me’’ (E15), one of them stated. Another
added, ‘‘It was the only chance we had to weigh our babies’’ (E13). On
the other hand, several also emphasized that the service involved various,
and not inconsiderable, drawbacks. One informant explained, ‘‘I didn’t
like going there that much because when you went, the temperature was
different for the baby—they took all his clothes off. There were babies
there with colds, with whooping cough . . .’’ (E20). Even without the risk
of infection, several informants also remarked that it became difficult to
get to the clinics after the second or third child. ‘‘But after that, the third
one, I didn’t go to the Gouttes de Lait anymore. I had to take all three of
them with me’’ (E23). Although it seems to represent an exception, the
recollections of one of the women interviewed provides us a glimpse of
the conflicts that could arise between the mother and the volunteers
about what was appropriate care for the new baby:
Me, I never liked to go to the Goutte de Lait. No. The Goutte de Lait used
to tell us, ‘‘All right, don’t give this to your baby or he’ll die—don’t give
that to your baby or he’ll get sick. Give him this, don’t give him that.’’ They
made babies sick that way. In my case, I took my children there. Then [the
nurse] didn’t want me to feed them solid food before they were nine
82 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
months old. The baby was crying day and night. No matter how much I
nursed him I couldn’t fill him up just on milk. So then I started to give him
solid food. When she found that out, she told me not to come back to the
Goutte de Lait because I was an unnatural mother who didn’t want to raise
her children. (E25)
Furthermore, after a couple of pregnancies, mothers developed a cer-
tain expertise when it came to the diagnosis and treatment of common
children’s ailments.
When the children were sick, we were the ones who took care of them. We
knew what they had, all the kids had it. For measles, we knew to keep the
room dark—we learned that ourselves, listening to other women talk. I had
two sisters older [than] me, watching what they did, you learned automati-
cally, I suppose. (E23)
It is important to note that the clinics only screened children; in case
of illness, they were referred to the family doctor.
29
The women preferred
to go directly to the doctor, if they were not caring for the child them-
selves. Since the Gouttes de Lait did not treat the more serious medical
problems, a number of the women did not see the need to make regular
visits which ate into precious time for their daily routine. Despite the
desires of those promoting the service, who insisted on the necessity of
regular medical care for every child, very few of the women went regularly
to the Gouttes de Lait with every one of their children.
The Confinement
According to the medical directives of the period, new mothers were sup-
posed to remain in bed for nine days following the birth. Although not
every woman followed this prescription to the letter, since some found it
excessive, still they needed to rest before they could return to their daily
rounds. Slightly more than half of the women in our sample had either a
private nurse or a visiting nurse from Metropolitan Life to provide medi-
cal follow-up during the period of confinement. Their visits were espe-
cially appreciated by inexperienced young mothers who learned from
them how to feed and care for their new babies. Some of these women
had in fact taken care of their little brothers and sisters, but it was unusual
for them to have been entrusted with a newborn and they often felt bewil-
dered following the birth of their first child. Those who either could not
pay for a private nurse or who were not insured with Metropolitan Life
turned to older and more experienced women—a mother, mother-in-law,
sister-in-law, or older sister—who would come to help out after the birth.
During their daily visits, these women would take over the various domes-
Motherhood 83
tic tasks like cooking, cleaning, and laundry that had to be done day after
day and which the nurse would not undertake. Even when she was con-
fined to bed, sometimes the new mother would have to lend a hand:
‘‘They kept us in bed for nine days. It was awful. I would peel the pota-
toes in bed. And I would change the littlest ones in bed’’ (E14). This
informant confessed that she had not observed the nine-day customary
confinement because, as she said, ‘‘When you got up, you had a lot of
trouble walking—you were all numb’’ (E14).
Death, distance, or the care of a still large family meant that only a
minority of women in the sample had the benefit of their mother’s help.
Nor could everyone count on her mother-in-law or the relatives for long
periods of time; more than a third, therefore, turned to paid help. These
‘‘servants,’’ very often young neighbours who were hired for three or four
weeks, received pathetic wages of between two and five dollars, food, and
sometimes a bed (that is, they slept on the chesterfield in the living room
or shared the children’s room), which explains how even the least well off
among the informants could afford them. As a result of the Depression,
large numbers of young women were available for this kind of work,
which would not be the case during the war. ‘‘During the Depression,
there wasn’t any work for girls so the girls hired out to do that [work as
servants]. . . . When the war was declared, they started to need girls. A lot
of them went to work at Saint Paul l’Ermite where they were making
munitions. . . . That’s when it started to be hard to find help’’ (E10).
A few women could not get any help, whether free or paid, and thus
had to turn to their husbands to do the most pressing of the daily tasks.
‘‘He wasn’t any good at taking care of babies, but he helped me by wash-
ing out a few things until I could get out of bed’’ (E2). This situation
sometimes shortened the rest period considerably: ‘‘After two or three
days, I went back to the housework,’’ a mother of eleven remarked. ‘‘I
didn’t have anyone to help me out’’ (E22). In the case of large families or
where the births had been spaced over a number of years, the eldest
daughter would often have the responsibility of helping out her mother
after the birth of the last children.
As we can see, professional and paid support complemented and some-
times even substituted for the mutual aid extended by the family to take
care of new mothers. Furthermore, we observe a certain specialization in
the kind of help afforded. The nurses, who to some degree replaced the
midwives, provided care and advice, leaving the domestic chores to the
female relatives.
30
The young wives obviously turned to the latter for
84 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
advice when they could, but because the family could not always come
together to provide needed aid, they valued having a nurse at their bedside
during the days following the birth. This kind of service forecasts an era
yet to come when women would give birth exclusively in the hospital,
under the exclusive watch of hospital personnel.
The Care and Discipline of Children
Feeding, clothing, caring for, and raising children demanded from women
their total attention and a solid sense of organization. Get up at night to
feed the baby or care for an ailing child and be on her feet early in the
morning to get the oldest ready for school. Hurry to finish a laundry
before they all come back for lunch. Take the littlest one out and do some
shopping in the afternoon and come back in time to cook the evening
meal. Oversee homework and put the children to bed and then do some
sewing in the evening—all of this made up the daily round of tasks and
activities that these women had to accomplish often without the space,
conveniences, or budget necessary to do the work.
If it is possible to make a list of the daily tasks that come with children,
it is harder to sum up the thousand and one activities which their social-
ization entails and to measure the worry, the sleepless nights, the joys and
sorrows their health and their education arouse. While studies of house-
work have focussed more on the quantity of work that the presence of
children creates, it is this other aspect of motherhood that was more often
evoked in the course of the interviews. ‘‘Work doesn’t kill you. Worries
and problems do’’ (E16).
It went without saying that the nurture and education of the children
fell, if not exclusively, then first and foremost, on women. As it was
unusual for couples still to be sharing the mother-in-law ’s house after the
birth of their first child, most of these mothers found themselves all alone
to perform the various tasks that children bring with them. Their hus-
bands were involved to varying degrees, but in any event, these women
expected to assume these responsibilities by themselves. ‘‘It was just us
who raised the children in those days... that’s what we were used to’’
(E23).
Fathers would voluntarily look after the children when the mother had
to go out to do the shopping, attend church, or, more infrequently, so she
could go to the movies to take her mind off things. ‘‘I would go out. That
would cheer me up a little. One week, I would go out, the next he would’’
(E5), one informant explained. In general, the men were happy to rock
the baby or play with the little ones, but rarely would become involved in
Motherhood 85
their actual care. The tasks that men least often undertook were, in order,
giving a bottle or a bath, changing a diaper, taking care of a child who was
sick. The reasons the informants most frequently put forward as explana-
tions of their husbands’ lack of involvement were their daily absence from
home and the fact that women did not work outside the house. ‘‘When
your husband works long hours every day, he doesn’t have time to bring
up the kids and help you at the same time’’ (E24), or ‘‘In those days, the
wife didn’t need so much help—she stayed at home’’ (E3). This separa-
tion of roles was so well established that even when some of the husbands
lost their jobs during the Depression, their greater availability would not
often translate into increased help, unless they were already used to look-
ing after the children, as a minority of them were:
My husband was really good. I never had to get up at night for the babies—
he would get up. He’d heat the water to warm up the milk to feed them. In
the morning, he would get up first and change the baby’s diaper and give
him a bottle. He would put the baby back to bed for his breakfast and feed
the other one. At night, he’d help me bath them. He didn’t want me to put
them to bed before he got home from work. (E4)
The social division of labour meant that fathers might spend the
greater part of the day away from home and thus were rarely available to
be involved with the socialization and education of the children, which
requires a constant presence. Even if her husband had helped a great deal
with the baths and the bottles and the diapers, one informant noted:
It was me who raised the children practically single-handed because he
worked nights. In forty-four years of working, I think he spent only the
last ten working in the daytime. When the children were little, I was the one
who saw to things. And I wasn’t the kind of woman to wait until her hus-
band got home or got out of bed to tell him, ‘‘So and so did this, so and so
did that.’’ For me punishment should come straight away, and they knew
why. He was the kind who never said no and, because he didn’t want to say
no, he’d say, ‘‘Go ask your mother.’’ (E15)
A majority of the women we interviewed agreed that it was less diffi-
cult to bring children up properly in that era than today, since respect for
authority was still a feature of the parent-child relationship and all meth-
ods of education, as yet uninfluenced by psychological theory, sought to
instill discipline. Some of the women sometimes regretted that their hus-
bands had not been stricter with the children, leaving them the unhappy
job of scolding them:
86 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
He never said a word. Sometimes, I’d tell him, ‘‘Y ou could get mad once in a
while.’’ It meant that I had to be the strictest one—he wasn’t strict enough.
I would have liked him to be more strict—because it meant that I was
always the one who was yelling. I said, ‘‘I’m always the one they hate.’’
(E19)
More than their husbands’ failure to help with child care or their lax-
ness when it came to discipline, these women seemed to have trouble
accepting their lack of sympathy and support when the wives were anx-
ious about the health or future of their children. A number of the women
referred to this constant worry, which was the more heavy to bear when it
was not shared. In the view of one woman, it was this above everything
else that distinguished the mother of a family from a member of a reli-
gious order:
I think that the mother of a family deserves more credit than a nun. The
nun, she goes to bed at night, she doesn’t think about her children. When
you are raising a family, and you go to bed, you’re happy when the children
are little—they’re all in bed. But when they’re older, then you never have an
easy night when you go to bed—they’re starting to fall for the boys or the
girls. . . . A nun doesn’t have to worry about her children. (E2)
It was the women who oversaw their children’s schooling and who urged
them, the boys especially, to stay in school and acquire a trade, if not a
profession, whenever it was possible. The economic situation of the
household played a major role in the decision to keep children in school.
Therefore, in certain families, only the younger children completed their
courses. But even with their economic difficulties, some of the women
believed it important that their children stay in school, often because they
regretted their own lack of education and passed their hopes on to their
children. In order to make this dream a reality, a few even worked after
they were married to pay school fees.
Infertility and Mothering
Two of the women in the sample did not have children. Their oral testi-
mony is of particular interest not only because their situation is represen-
tative of a not inconsiderable portion of the population,
31
but also because
it sheds some light on the experience of childless women.
Given the degree to which motherhood was valued in the period, it is
hardly surprising that both of these women express their great disappoint-
ment at not having children. One of them even had to put up with her
husband’s reproaches: ‘‘The wife isn’t good for anything—she can’t make
a baby,’’ he would tell her. After nine years of marriage, when the couple
Motherhood 87
had finally decided to adopt a daughter, it was the informant’s sister-in-
law who went with her to the orphanage to ‘‘pick out’’ a baby, as if even
this special kind of maternity was still, for the husband, women’s busi-
ness.
The solution of adoption was not considered by the other couple, who
very rapidly found themselves in great demand from all sides. After they
had lived for two years with the husband’s parents, the young couple
moved in with her father, who had recently been widowed. Hardly had he
remarried then her father-in-law died; the couple then returned to live
with the mother-in-law and an unmarried sister who was to stay with
them for thirty-five years. Over the years, the couple successively housed
the informant’s three sisters who were in temporary difficulties. Further-
more, they raised a niece until she got married. A brother, his wife, and
their eleven children also took shelter with them when he had lost his job
due to health problems:
He was on the street with eleven children. We told him, ‘‘Come to our
house.’’ We didn’t have enough beds for everyone.... When they got up in
the morning, he and my brother-in-law would say, ‘‘It’s worse than a battle-
field in here—there are dead bodies everywhere.’’ They were sleeping every-
where but in the bathtub. They stayed with us for three months. Then I
told my brother, ‘‘You have to understand, we can’t take care of you for
your whole life like this. Try to find a flat.’’ Afterwards, we were sorry—he
rented a basement and his baby caught a cold and then died.... There were
thirteen extra. The baker was happy when he got to our house—he emptied
his van every morning at our place! (E8)
This couple undoubtedly is an extreme case. Less in demand, the other
childless informant nevertheless frequently took care of their children
when her sisters-in-law were having babies or had to go to the hospital.
After having kept one of their nephews from the time he was eleven
months old until he was six, in order to relieve his mother, the couple
took him back when he was twelve and raised him until his majority. In
addition, this informant, who had originally lived with her grandparents,
successively took care of her father and her husband’s father and mother
until their death. Finally, this couple, who did not have a great deal of
money, nevertheless paid the grocery bills and bought shoes for their
many nieces and nephews in order to help out the parents.
The experience of these two women would suggest that childless
women were called upon first to care for destitute parents and to substi-
tute for mothers in difficulty. As they had more time and space, they
were left to look after the poor, sick, and elderly in a kind of sharing of
88 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
mothering among the female relatives. It should also be pointed out that
among the women who did have children, three also brought up children
from their husbands’ first marriages and several raised the children of a
son or daughter who was dead, divorced, or destitute. These various expe-
riences demonstrate that neither the birth rate nor the fertility rate closely
express reality in regard to women’s maternal duties.
T
he inevitable fate of marrying and starting a family appears as
something to which all of the women in the sample aspired. This
desire for children, which was usually not slow in being realized, was,
however, accompanied by an ignorance of sexual matters which might
seem paradoxical. At first glance, the use of contraceptive methods by
more than half the couples is no less astonishing, despite the hold the
Catholic Church had over Quebec society of the day and regardless of the
high value placed by social leaders on the ideal of the large family.
The economic crisis which was wreaking havoc at the time when most
of these couples were establishing their families seems to have prompted
some of them to adopt the ideal of a family smaller in size but better
suited to their available means. In the list of motives put forward for lim-
iting family size, the desire to educate the children and to reduce the
mother ’s workload so that she might have enough time for each child
invariably appear right next to arguments of a purely economic sort. In
this chapter, the interviews have brought out the complexity of motives
bound up in such a decision and the importance of such factors as geo-
graphical origin and greater or lesser adherence to religious values. Along
with the job status of their husbands, to which the women interviewed
frequently referred in order to explain family size, their responses reveal
the equal importance of how they viewed motherhood, which was often
coloured by their own mothers’ experience. The physical conditions in
which these women fed, clothed, raised, and educated their children will
be examined in the following chapters. The impact of the Depression,
responsible in part for the reduction in family size, will emerge more
clearly as will the strategies utilized in order to cope with all these respon-
sibilities despite what was frequently a difficult economic situation.
Motherhood 89
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Chapter 5
Working for Pay
and Managing the
Household Finances
‘‘My mother-in-law used to laugh at me—she’d say,
if I gave you a nickel, you’d turn it into a dollar.’’
(E11)
S
tudies dealing with the period just before the Depression years of
the 1930s show that, without exception, workers’ wages were insuffi-
cient to ensure a decent standard of living for an average family.
1
In the
absence of a family wage, children and women as well had to do what they
could through various kinds of work to increase the family income. Even
in a period of relative prosperity, additional pay was as necessary a part of
balancing the household budget as were the wages of the principal earner,
but so was extremely strict management and very careful housekeeping.
Because of unemployment, however, the Great Depression came to
exercise additional pressure on family finances. In these conditions, how
did families ensure their survival? In order to answer this question, the
next three chapters will examine, in order, the role of paid work in the
family economy, that of domestic labour and finally of other means of
support to which the families in the sample turned, including public bene-
fits, private charity, relatives and friends, going into debt, and any other
expedients they may have employed.
In this chapter, we will first of all consider the question of income. It is
important to examine this subject at the outset because income deter-
mines the family’s standard of life, the quantity of housework as well as
what equipment the women had at their disposal to do it with, and the
degree to which households had to turn to other means of support. We
Notes to Chapter 5 are on pp. 204-206.
91
will concern ourselves not only with income deriving from the husband’s
principal activity, but also with the contributions deriving from the wife’s
labour, with budget management, and with the impact of unemployment
on the household economy and on the sexual division of labour.
A Living W age
It was generally understood that, after marriage, women would quit their
jobs in order to take care of the house and children. In addition to these
tasks, the majority would also take over the management of the family
finances, which initially comprised the husbands’ wages as principal
breadwinner. The funds they had to spend would depend on his occupa-
tion. In most cases, this factor would also determine whether or not the
wives would have to undertake some sort of paid activity in order to make
up for a lack of income.
The following table indicates the husbands’ occupations just before the
beginning of the Depression or at marriage if this occurred after 1929:
Table 8
Husbands’ Occupations in 1929
or at Marriage
Status Number
Self-Employed
Shopkeepers, tradesmen 3
Waged
Non-manual workers 6
Manual workers 20
Out of Work 1
Total 30
As we may observe, only one of the husbands, who had been in fact
unemployed since the couple was married in 1927, did not have a perma-
nent job at the beginning of the thirties, while three had small businesses
(a barber shop, a corner restaurant, two taxicabs). Among the manual
workers, eleven were factory workers, while the rest were working in con-
struction (a bricklayer, two labourers), in small businesses (barbershop
employee, butcher shop employee, delivery man), and in services (two
maintenance workers, one auto mechanic). The non-manual workers
92 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
included a laboratory technician, a junior manager, two shop assistants,
and two office clerks.
According to the unemployment statistics, a number of these occupa-
tions were especially vulnerable as the Depression set in. This was particu-
larly true for industrial and construction workers,
2
but in fact almost
every one of the couples in the sample was affected one way or the other
by the economic crisis. Of the three small businessmen, for example,
only the barber was able to retain his business, although he suffered from
a decline in revenue as he had to lower his prices by 30 percent, while his
clientele also shrank. In 1934, he had to get rid of the second-hand car he
had purchased the year before. The other two had to sell up their busi-
nesses to avoid bankruptcy. According to their wives’ recollections, their
failure was the result of their clients’ overwhelming demand for credit and
the general decline in business:
When the Depression came, we were obliged to extend too much credit,
even though we had to buy for cash. We could have wound up on the
street. We had already lost $900 in bad debts. Before we lost everything, we
sold up. As for myself, I didn’t want to buy on credit—I wouldn’t have
been able to sleep.... There are always people who don’t pay. But during
the Depression, they always had an excuse. Or they would pay us, but not
the whole thing. We lost control over our lives. (E7)
When I first met [my husband], he owned two taxicabs. And when I got
married, in 1929, that’s when the crash happened. Then a year later he sold
his two cars. He had one man working for him but... he had to sell, he
wasn’t making enough. Marriages in those days—he got paid five dollars for
a wedding party. I was happy [when he sold his cabs] I was happier when he
had a job and a salary we could count on. He had lots of money in his pock-
ets, but you couldn’t count on it... he had to make the payments every
month. We did not live well. We were doing very well if we managed to
have enough to eat all the time. (E29)
Both of them experienced unemployment, and in one case, home relief,
before finding a paying job, which one of them kept for the rest of his life,
the other until the Depression was over. The fate of these small business-
men was not very far removed from that of elements of the working class
on whose members they depended to make a living and from which they
had often themselves originated. Without sufficient assets to pay their
obligations and wait for better times, fearful of falling into too much debt
and losing everything or refusing outright to go into debt at all, large
numbers of them would be vulnerable to a major economic crisis like that
of the 1930s.
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 93
Of the twenty-six who worked for wages, only four escaped any loss of
employment or cut in salary. Four others had their workweek cut to one
or a couple of days and three, while working the same number of hours,
had their wages cut by 20 percent. Seven were without a steady job for
more than three years, six others for a period of between one and two
years, and the last, and most fortunate, for several months only. T wo oth-
ers—including one whose husband was out of work at the time they were
married—had to turn to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society or to relief, but
according to their accounts, their husbands’ laziness and refusal to pro-
vide for the family were to blame rather than lack of jobs during the
Depression. All in all, fifteen couples needed governmental aid to survive
and two chose to go back to the land as a solution.
With the exception of two informants who were never told, the women
remembered very clearly what their husbands were earning when they got
married. As they recalled, the level was very low—if two of them were
earning as much as thirty-five dollars a week, others made as little as ten
and more than half less than twenty dollars a week. According to the data
of the federal minister of labour, however, it required $20.18 a week in
Quebec in December 1929 and $14.29 a week in December 1933 simply to
cover the costs of food, heating, light, and rent for an average family of
five.
3
In 1931, the living wage for Canadians was figured at $1050 a year,
or about twenty dollars a week, while it would take at least $1500 a year
($28.84 a week) to provide a comfortable standard of living.
4
In this sam-
ple, only five men made more than twenty-five dollars a week at the end
of the 1920s or at the beginning of the 1930s.
5
The unemployment and
short weeks from which more than two-thirds of the respondents’ hus-
bands suffered obviously involved a reduction in income and accentuated
the financial difficulties they were already experiencing. So, in addition to
paying $8.50 in rent directly to the landlord, the Unemployment Relief
Commission of Montreal established the sums of $7.15 a week in winter
and $6.55 in summer as the amount of aid to be paid to a family of five.
These amounts were supposed to cover all other necessities of life (food,
heating, clothing) and represented a total of $39.48 and $36.88 a month,
depending on the season.
6
Even if we take into account the decline in
prices of around 29 percent, according to the data cited previously, these
sums represent barely more than half of the $14.49 required in 1933 to
cover the basic living expenses of a family of five each week. It seems clear
that the families of the unemployed could not survive merely on the
grants they received.
94 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Income to Balance the Budget
The inadequacy of workers’ wages is already well known. What remains to
be documented is the range of other forms of work undertaken by men
and women to manage to balance the family budget.
7
Participating in
informal economic enterprise was more often left to women because their
family and household responsibilities, which, although preventing them
from entering the job market, still did allow them a greater flexibility with
which to organize their time, so that they were able to engage in different
activities in the home.
8
Nevertheless, a considerable number of men were
looking for additional income, as the recollections of our informants indi-
cate.
9
Odd Jobs
Given the inadequacy of their wages, it comes as no surprise to learn that
even when they had steady jobs, several of the husbands did other work
or made some sort of exchange in order to supplement their incomes,
either during or after the Depression. During the Depression years them-
selves, seven of the husbands looked for ways to increase their incomes.
Thus, a mechanic made money fixing cars after work, while an office
worker did different kinds of maintenance at night and on the weekend
for the recreation club he worked for. Together with his wife, a wood-
worker made checkerboards which he disposed of in a draw after his gro-
cer had sold ten dollars worth of ten-cent tickets in his shop, where they
were on display. In a flagrant violation of the law forbidding lotteries, one
of the husbands sold ‘‘hockey cards’’ at the factory where he worked.
Another kept the books for a small grocery on top of his work as a civil
servant. The man who owned a corner store retained his sales job while
his wife kept the shop during the day and he took over in the evenings. It
was, moreover, exactly for this reason that he decided to get married right
away: ‘‘That’s why we got married, so we wouldn’t have to pay a store
clerk’’ (E7). Another, who was working for a Montreal department store
as a receiving clerk, got permission to run a little snack bar for the use of
store employees. He had one woman helping him at lunchtime and he
called upon his wife to make certain purchases:
When he was working, he had the restaurant and at noontime he hired a
woman. . . . It brought in enough. He sold soft drinks, chocolate, gum.
There were people who came downstairs to grab a chocolate bar. When he
could get hold of some fruit, he bought it. I didn’t mind, sometimes he’d
call me up and tell me, ‘‘Come bring me this or that.’’ I would go and walk
down there with the baby in the carriage.’’ (E21)
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 95
Clearly the Depression only made it more pressing to turn to all sorts
of expedients to make up for shortages in the family income. Before going
to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society or the Montreal Unemployment
Relief Commission for help, or even while they were receiving benefits,
10
six of the husbands had sought to support their families by undertaking
all kinds of activities. Some of the notable stopgaps which the men, newly
unemployed, turned to in order to find new sources of income included
digging out a cellar with a shovel, washing walls and ceilings, shovelling
snow in the affluent districts of the city, reselling breads and cakes bought
directly from a commercial bakery at the end of the day when the unsold
merchandise was returned, peddling the remainders of blocks of ice or
bootlegging alcohol which the man made in his shed (and hid in the baby
carriage for delivery), and opening a little ‘‘restaurant’’ at home. The
informants also report other activities or deals carried out by different
members of their acquaintance, suggesting that this phenomenon was
very common. For example, a brother-in-law went hunting and sold the
game he had killed and butchered, a neighbour cultivated eight garden
plots on land furnished free by the city and sold the vegetables, and so on.
To this list should be added the different jobs that the men accepted on
a temporary and often part-time basis before they found permanent
employment. In the majority of cases, indeed, their years of unemploy-
ment were interspersed with periods when they had jobs (not counting
the public works that some of them were required to do), which brought,
along with a supplementary income, just enough hope to support the next
period of joblessness. These odd jobs and other forms of paid activity did
not always mean that their wives could avoid having to find ways to earn
money.
Working in Your ‘‘Spare Time’’
We generally tend to think of women in this period as homemakers and
this is largely how they appear in the census figures. In the sample col-
lected here, however, only six did not engage in any paid activity after
they were married. Among those who did contribute to the family
income, six began work after 1939, when it was easier for them to free
themselves of family responsibilities and at a time when paid work for
married women, if not altogether acceptable, was in any event more toler-
ated. One of the others decided to go to work in a munitions factory at
the beginning of the war in order to recoup the family finances that had
been sapped by the six years that her husband, a bricklayer, had been
almost constantly out of work.
96 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Among the women who worked for pay during the decade of the
1930s, five had jobs outside the house, while the thirteen others worked at
home in one or several paid capacities. Needlework of various sorts—
dressmaking, embroidery, beading, smocking, knitting—represented the
most common kind of work, with eight of the informants engaging in it
either for companies or independently. Another worked for two years for
her mother-in-law, who was keeping a rooming house, in exchange for
room and board for herself and her husband, while six let rooms or took
in boarders.
11
In four cases, the lodgers were parents or friends of the
family, who would sometimes put up with living conditions that a stranger
might have had more difficulty accepting, like sharing a sofa bed in the
living room with one of the sons of the family or sleeping on a folding cot
set up for the night in the hall leading to the kitchen. Taking in roomers
or boarders in fact involved a small investment that not all were able to
make. A flat with an extra room was required and it was necessary to get
hold of an extra bed, a set of sheets and some blankets, none of which
could be managed by the poorest and largest families. A study conducted
by the federal government into the Canadian family concluded:
It is clear that the families who take in lodgers are not those who are living
in uncomfortable living quarters or with limited facilities.... It would
appear that taking in lodgers is more a source of revenue for the more pros-
perous class of wage earners than for the poorest class and that this practice
cannot be turned to as a way of relieving poverty.
12
Two informants took in washing and hired themselves out as cleaning
women,
13
while three others ran a little business. One of these first man-
aged her husband’s business until he was forced to sell. After being out of
work for several months, she sought work as a private dressmaker from
the owner of the concern where she had worked before her marriage. He,
however, preferred to employ her husband as a private chauffeur on a per-
manent basis, while hiring her as a maid when he needed extra help, for
parties and so on. Another woman invested an insurance payment that she
received following an accident in a little ‘‘restaurant’’ which she ran with
her husband for a short period while he was out of work:
I think we started with about fifty dollars worth of stock. Nothing much—
a little candy, a few cigarettes, a little of this, a little of that. Nothing much.
We lasted about a year. Yes indeed! Five cents for a Coke! There were a lot
who didn’t have the five cents to buy it. (E26)
An informant, widowed in 1930, also decided to open a little restaurant.
She rented out a room as well to different relatives and also did dressmak-
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 97
ing for her neighbours. Despite all her efforts, the income she derived
from these three occupations was not enough to support her children.
After exhausting the life insurance payment from which she paid her rent,
she had to contemplate, with some reluctance, the solution of remarrying:
When you see you have no more money.... The Depression was starting.
When you were selling only five or ten cents worth a day, you’re not making
much. . . . You start thinking about a lot of things. You say, my children
what are they going to do? Soon I’ll have no more money. That’ll be it. Y ou
say, OK, I’ll get married.... If I’d had a pension... I would have kept my
restaurant. I wouldn’t have remarried. For a while, I wanted to go to
Ontario. If I’d known anyone there I would’ve gone because they paid wid-
ows a pension there. (E3)
This extract highlights the economic importance of marriage for women.
As fate would have it, the second husband lost his job a month before
they were married and the couple finally decided to go back to the coun-
try to live.
Finally, the third woman sold her baking while she was living in the
country for a time in hopes of improving the health of her paralyzed
daughter:
I said to my husband, ‘‘Do you know, I’d like to make pies and cakes. I
think I can sell them on Sundays.’’ Yes, indeed, that’s what I started to do,
madame. . . . I never had enough of them! I sold out. My husband said,
‘‘Y ou’d do better with a store.’’ Well, I said, ‘‘If only I could.’’ We had a kind
of little shed, it was about as big as my hand and we used to put the wood in
there. It was not exactly a good store. But he made me a counter and I put it
in there. On Saturdays, I would have to spend my whole day making pies
and cakes! I would make them on Saturday, I would make my pastry, my
cakes. (E17)
This informant was not the only one to make money from her culinary
talents. Another of the women, who also cleaned houses and did dress-
making, made baked beans and maple butter (out of black-market brown
sugar) during the war that her husband sold for twenty-five cents a con-
tainer at the grocery where he was working. ‘‘I made them in my spare
time, all by myself,’’ she said. Sewing and cooking, traditional feminine
accomplishments and two important elements in the domestic labour of
women, could be easily transformed into paid work. These strategies are a
tribute to the resourcefulness of these women who sought to take advan-
tage of the skills they had mastered so well and demonstrate as well that
the line between the marketplace and the unpaid economy was, for them,
a slender one indeed.
98 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The work that married women did for pay was thus indeed far from
being inessential, even if it was, for the most part, accomplished at home,
unseen and unrecorded.
14
When we look at the list, the first thing that
strikes us is precisely the variety of things that women were doing, often
several at the same time, especially those who had always worked at home.
As one respondent, who also worked cleaning houses, explained: ‘‘I did
alterations, hemmed dresses, took up slips, and did mending. Then there
was ironing. There was a little woman... she always brought me [her
washing] on Monday morning. I would do a small wash for a dollar or
seventy-five cents, whatever I could pick up. I always did those things’’
(E16). Another related:
We didn’t have enough money. I used to smock baby clothes. Then I had
my boarder who gave me six bucks a week. That helped a little, my husband
was making ten dollars a week.... I was always doing some kind of sewing
to make money. I was sewing for practically thirty years. (E13)
Clearly, it was economic necessity that motivated the women who decided
to earn a little money. Some did not look for ways to improve their level
of income, however, despite their husbands’ inadequate wages, while oth-
ers, whose husbands were doing better or who had smaller families, never-
theless did work, often for specific purposes, like paying off a debt or
educating their children. In other words, the notion of what was necessary
to assure the well-being of a family varied from woman to woman accord-
ing to individual standards. The amount of the husbands’ income was
therefore not the sole factor that came into play when a woman decided
to work, although in a majority of cases, it was the determining one.
15
As
we shall see later on, their husbands’ opposition meant that certain
women did not go to work, regardless of their financial difficulties.
In general, the majority of the women who contributed to the family
income during the 1930s had begun working even before their husbands
were laid off or had their wages cut:
He was making ten dollars a week. We couldn’t manage on that. I started to
work. I sewed for everybody, I knitted, and I did everything to make ends
meet. . . . I did dressmaking, knitted for everybody, made little dresses—I
knitted socks and mittens, I braided rugs—fifteen cents for mittens, thirty-
five cents for socks, a dollar and a quarter for a braided rug. It wasn’t a for-
tune. Although for me, it helped me a lot. (E22)
According to their recollections, only three informants began to work
specifically because their husbands were out of work. On the other hand,
nine of the husbands lost their jobs for periods ranging from several
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 99
months to several years without there being any question of their wives
going to work. A number of reasons were brought forward to explain
what might appear as a paradox:
I thought, but who would I leave the kids with? There wasn’t any daycare.
You were taking a chance leaving kids with a neighbour.... There wasn’t
any point in trying to get work to do at home, because there wasn’t any. Or
if there was, then it paid practically nothing.... Y ou couldn’t have stayed
on relief .... I felt it was better if my husband did odd jobs here and there.
(E25)
The number of dependent children as well as the husbands’ opposition
comes up constantly in the oral histories, revealing a considerable ambiva-
lence: ‘‘I would have liked to go to work,’’ one of them maintained, ‘‘but he
didn’t want me to. Anyway, the children were too little, I couldn’t leave
them. In those days, you didn’t leave your babies with someone else’’
(E20). Another was sure that she would not have been able to find work:
There wasn’t any more work for girls than there was for men in those
days. . . . And I’d never had a job,
16
let me tell you I’d have had a lot of trou-
ble finding work too. Later on, when I was older, I figured things out. Then
I was too timid. Maybe if I had more guts I could have found myself some
kind of job. But my mother-in-law had never worked outside the house.
Myself, I felt I had to be like her. (E19)
Underneath these arguments, one detects a certain reluctance, as much
on the women’s part as on their husbands’, to bring about a reversal in
roles that would be incompatible with defined and accepted social norms.
The presence of young children especially represented a major obstacle to
women’s working for pay, even if the out-of-work father would have been
available to take care of them. The majority of the women also were posi-
tive that there was no work for women without actually having looked for
any. In fact, in the nine cases where the wife had never made any financial
contribution to the family, the sexual division of labour was so rigidly
ingrained that it prevailed over the need to find additional income.
Otherwise, when we look more closely at the five women who did
work outside the home before 1939, we realize that two of them worked
for less than a year, while another was employed only part time. Only two
became the principal family breadwinner—one for a period of four
years—and only one of the two husbands had totally stopped working at
the time. Moreover, neither had more than two children and these were
cared for by someone other than their husbands even when he was free to
do it.
100 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The women who were already doing paid work at home before their
husbands became unemployed continued their work and even increased
their efforts whenever possible; as a result of the Depression, however,
many of the private dressmakers lost a part of their clientele. But no one
of this group ever entertained the notion of replacing their work at home
with work outside it: ‘‘I sewed for other people for housekeeping money
during the Depression. I was a big help to my husband—he was doing
what he could and so was I,’’ one respondent said. But when she was
asked if she ever thought about getting a paying job, she answered, ‘‘My
husband wouldn’t have allowed it, no. He said that a wife ... we could
only go out by the day,
17
there wasn’t any other work’’ (E5). Just like the
men whose wives made no financial contribution to the household before
they were unemployed, those who accepted their wives working at home
for pay would never have stood for her finding a job outside the home.
This reversal of roles would have been a direct threat to their superior
position as head of the household and would have represented too sharp a
blow to their pride which had already been fairly well shaken by failure to
fulfil this role adequately. It would seem that the family model of bread-
winner/homemaker was so entrenched that even extreme poverty was
insufficient to dislodge it.
18
In general, and in an altogether astonishing way, the women had more
trouble recalling their own incomes than their husbands’ wages. Two fac-
tors may explain this phenomenon. On the one hand, the relative lack of
importance that they accorded to the money they made, which they
regarded as a secondary income, hardly aided recollection. On the other,
the amounts they got varied enormously, depending on their clientele (if
they were self-employed, for example), or the amount of work they could
do when they were paid by the piece. ‘‘It was an extra. It didn’t give me a
steady income’’ (E22), as one of them said. The proportion of women’s
earnings in the total household income is therefore almost impossible to
establish. From the information we have, we observe, however, that these
earnings varied from three to ten dollars a week and that, in certain cases,
they might represent up to 50 percent of the husband’s wages. One thing
is certain—the money they earned went toward the needs of the house-
hold and not those of the women, as they paid the rent and bought gro-
ceries and clothes for the children. The following is a representative
statement from the histories: ‘‘It didn’t pay a helluva lot, but it was only
that it gave me a little something at the end of the week. ... When [my
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 101
husband] didn’t have enough, then I was the one who paid, I would put it
toward the rent or to buying clothes for the kids’’ (E17).
Less commonly, as we have already pointed out, the sums were accu-
mulated with an eye to paying for the children’s schooling. ‘‘With that
money, I was able to send two to high school,’’ one informant proudly
declared. But this form of savings was only possible in smaller or better-
off families, where the husband’s paycheque was enough to cover basic
expenses. In most cases, the wife’s earnings were used to pay for part of
the rent or the groceries. This contribution could, moreover, make the
difference between living below or just a little above the poverty line.
Managing the Budget and Women’s Economic Power
Regardless of any additional revenues, the income of these households
remained generally very low. Making ends meet was a real feat and one
which confronted most of the women in this sample. According to a tra-
dition that was deeply rooted in the working class in Quebec as well as
elsewhere, it was most often the wife who was had the responsibility of
administering the family budget.
19
How money was handled between hus-
band and wife could, however, take on different forms, revealing power
relations within the family.
In half of the families in the sample, the husband turned over his entire
pay to his wife, who gave him an allowance for his personal expenses. The
practice was prevalent throughout the working class, especially among
those who earned the least, thus tending to confirm the hypothesis that
holds that it represented, for men, a way of avoiding the challenge of man-
aging on wages insufficient to support a family.
20
Quite frequently, these
men did not even know what the household financial situation was, as
they had no interest in the subject:
I was always the one who handled the budget because my husband was not
good at it. He would always say, ‘‘You take care of it.’’ Like with the insur-
ance and so on. He would never know how the insurance got paid and all. It
wasn’t his problem.’’ (E19)
Even if they only rarely interfered once the money was given to their
wives and did not demand a precise accounting of expenses, this way of
handling money did not necessarily mean that they had given up all their
economic power. Some of them, for example, expected that there would
always be something left over to supply their need for extra cash. ‘‘That’s
why he gave me the wallet, he knew I would take care of it and when he
asked me for five dollars, he knew I would have it. I always had it. If I’d
102 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
said, ‘‘I don’t have it,’’ he wouldn’t have liked that. Y ou learn these things
once you get married’’ (E2). Others threatened to take over the family
finances where they were badly managed. ‘‘My husband told me, I am
going to give you my pay. But if I see you’re wasting it, then I’ll keep it
and take care of things myself’’ (E5). Whether they were completely
detached from household matters or managed to retain a certain degree of
control by insisting on their own demands or floating the possibility of
interfering in the management of the money, these men did not have as
their first concern balancing the budget.
In nine families, the husbands exercised a greater degree of power over
how the money was used. Some of them kept the amount they wanted for
their expenses (tobacco, transportation, etc.) and gave the rest to their
wives, while others gave over only the amounts required to pay part or all
of the running expenses. The two following recollections illustrate these
different modes of operation. ‘‘When Friday night came around, he kept
his expenses and the rest I had. I was the one who took care of every-
thing. I was the one who paid the rent, the lights, I was the one who saw
to everything’’ (E8). ‘‘He gave me the money to meet our expenses. But
it was my husband who handled the purse strings and he knew how to
manage. He didn’t drink’’ (E29). This way of handling money appears
most often among the families where the husband was earning a higher
wage, but also where the husband had his own business or where part of
his income came from tips or commissions. As these situations resulted in
variable incomes, the wives we interviewed did not know precisely how
much their husbands earned. Such was the case for another informant,
married to a barber:
I never knew exactly how much he made, never. Because they made tips.
Anyway, he had to keep them to pay for everything—cleaning his outfits,
his tools, he was the one paid for those things. He had to be sure to have
enough. But I always had enough for the household expenses. (E24)
This practice of keeping the extras also occurred in connection with other
kinds of activities, not always entirely legal, that brought in money, as we
see here:
He would come home and give me all of his pay. There wasn’t any lottery in
those days, but he sold hockey cards and he sold a lot of them. The guy who
ran the whole thing would bring him the complete series and he would sell
them at the plant. So he made money that way. It wasn’t an enormous
amount, but for his expenses.... Because a man, he needs money in his
pocket. . . . That money was his. I was lucky that he made that money
because I didn’t have to give him a cent. (E11)
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 103
Wiser because of the experience of her mother, who had had to solve
by herself the problems arising from an inadequate family income, one
informant insisted that this task be shared: ‘‘When I got married, I said
that the money had to be dealt with by both of us. That way, it’s not
always the same one who has to worry .... I said that we both had to han-
dle it. We had the best system. We talked about it before we got married’’
(E6). This way of managing was, however, only adopted by three of the
couples in the sample.
At the opposite extreme, three participants, married to workers, never
had any money at all in their possession, their husbands taking over pay-
ing all the bills, including the groceries. Philosophically, one of them said,
‘‘I said to myself, if anything happens, I won’t get the blame’’ (E30). She
insisted, however, on the fact that her husband had ‘‘always fed her’’ very
well, suggesting that he had therefore fulfilled his obligations toward her.
In this regard she was, nevertheless, better off than another woman,
whose husband drank and played cards:
I didn’t have anything to manage, he wouldn’t give me money. You know,
there were men in those days.... I didn’t know he was playing cards. He
was drinking, too, when he played. I knew, I found out all about it a little
while later. He would pay some of the rent and the food. At first, he was the
one who bought the food. He didn’t want me to buy just anything. He
only bought what was strictly necessary .... I used to cry a lot. I asked my
mother, ‘‘Is this what marriage is?’’ (E18)
This last example, although it might seem unrepresentative, is neverthe-
less not unique and allows us a glimpse of how far the economic depen-
dence of women could go. This situation has, moreover, much in common
with that of two other of the women whose husbands, who also had
drinking problems, only worked now and then, both during the Depres-
sion and after it. One of them, pathologically jealous, refused even to
allow his wife to work to support the family. All in all, seven of the hus-
bands were in the habit of drinking regularly, often to excess. In at least
four cases, the money they spent on their addiction deprived their families
of the minimum they need to live and forced their wives to rely on their
own paid work or on charitable organizations, the government, or their
relatives to get by. In three other cases, the informants stated that their
husbands had prevented the family from improving its economic condi-
tion. Excessive drinking, apparently quite common as it affected more
than 20 percent of the husbands in the sample, had grave consequences
for the standard of living of these families. Their behaviour also shows
with total clarity that the pay envelope belonged by right to the husband
104 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
and that he could dispose of it virtually as he chose. It was, furthermore,
because so many men were given to drink that the Dorion Commission
had agreed to recommend changes to the Civil Code in this connection.
21
Refusal to support was clearly against the law, but it was difficult for
wives to launch proceedings and these often proved ineffective. One of
the informants brought her husband to court on three occasions. As she
herself said, the spouses who were found guilty were liable to a month in
jail, which would not have given their wives any greater means of support-
ing the family decently, in fact, quite the contrary: ‘‘when the judge saw
him the third time, he told him, ‘if you come before me one more time . . .
there won’t be any more talking. ... I won’t listen to your wife and you’ll
go inside.’ Inside! What good would that have done me?’’ (E27).
When we raised the question of their management, the majority of the
women, especially those who held the purse strings, were quick to say
that they were not wasteful, that they always tried to get all they could
out of everything they had, and that they managed on the money they had
at their disposal. ‘‘We always got by on what he made,’’ one of them said.
‘‘We never went into debt’’ (E4). In fact, making ends meet without com-
plaining about having too little money seemed to be a mark of a good
homemaker and a good wife. On the one hand, it was a way of showing
that their housekeeping and managerial skills were advanced enough to
compensate for a lack of income; on the other, by being undemanding, the
women also avoided placing their husbands’ breadwinning capabilities
into question, thus preserving their dignity. For both these reasons, they
were generally very proud of having successfully coped on their own with
balancing the budget. In the end, however, some of them realized the
drawbacks of a system which rested the entire weight of this responsibil-
ity on their shoulders while opening the door to their husbands’ com-
plaints:
In the beginning, I didn’t mind because I was a good manager. But what
happened was that he didn’t actually do the shopping anymore and he didn’t
know what things cost. He’d fuss about the prices. It was all right at the
beginning. But afterwards when our expenses got bigger, he didn’t know
what things cost and he’d say, ‘‘That cost an awful lot! Where is the money
going?’’ Then you feel guilty, you say, ‘‘My God! Am I wasting your
money? Am I a bad housekeeper? You feel guilty and it’s not your fault.
(E16)
This guilt is linked to the fact that the women felt that the money was
not theirs but belonged to their husbands, even when the men did not go
out of their way to make them feel that way. The sense that they were
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 105
spending someone else’s money also explains why they so seldom com-
plained of being short of money and why they generally did not feel they
had the right to intervene on the subject of their husbands’ work, even
when the possibility of better-paying jobs existed.
22
One informant,
whose husband worked as a machinist in a textile factory, said of his pay:
We had to be careful—he didn’t make a lot of money. He could have made
more, as other factories were paying better. But he was so used to working
there, he’d been there for years... he loved where he worked. I never told
my husband what to do because it’s important to have a man who’s working
and who loves his job.’’ (E11)
Some of them even had qualms about asking for money, relying on
their husbands’ goodwill: ‘‘I had a cup—he’d leave me money in it. Every
day he’d leave me some. It embarrassed me to ask him for money. I didn’t
like it—he was the one who left it for me’’ (E4). The status of breadwin-
ner also conferred certain privileges which, as we have seen, were demon-
strated not only in the habit of some of the husbands of keeping back part
of their earnings for drink, but also in the custom of some of the wives of
reserving the best of the food for their husbands: ‘‘I was always careful
that he got served first,’’ one of them said, ‘‘and always the best piece of
meat. Sometimes, I thought it was unfair’’ (E2). If the purchase of furni-
ture was generally decided by both of them, the husband generally got
what he wanted when it came time to think about more important expen-
ditures. Thus, one respondent had to accept her husband’s decision to
buy a house, which they lost during the Depression: ‘‘I was never fussy
about buying houses in the city. I didn’t like the idea. But it was my hus-
band’s money and that’s what he wanted. It was his money and no one
could say anything about it’’ (E17). Another woman, in contrast, would
have preferred to invest in a house rather than borrowing to buy an auto-
mobile: ‘‘My husband wanted to have a car. I wanted a car too but it
would have been better to buy a house, but my husband didn’t think of
that’’ (E2).
Giving over the pay envelope to the wife, whether in whole or in part,
was far from representing a form of power for the women, something of
which they were, for the most part, perfectly aware.
23
On the contrary,
these oral histories tend rather to refute the thesis that holds that the
domestic sphere represents an area of power or of counter-power for
women because it is there that they exercise control.
24
At first sight, it
would seem logical that women who were in charge of making purchases
should be left with the money to do so. Too often, however, this practice
106 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
allowed the husband to get away cheaply from a permanent headache, all
the while maintaining the illusion that he was adequately fulfilling his role
as breadwinner. If disaster overtook the family finances, he could always
place the blame on his wife’s bad management. She herself would tend to
take the blame and to say as little as possible about the difficulties she was
facing because she felt that her homemaking skills were at stake.
Making Ends Meet
As we have just seen, most often it was the wives who took on the
responsibility for managing the household budget and who had to plan
for what it was spent on. Without question, the most critical aspect of
women’s domestic labour was their making ends meet on an income that
was generally insufficient, as the welfare of the whole family depended on
their ability to make do on the money they had available. Checking prices,
buying only what was strictly necessary, wasting nothing, not going into
debt were constand bywords in their oral histories: ‘‘I never wasted any-
thing’’(E1); ‘‘Every cent counted’’ (E2); ‘‘Y ou had to count the pennies all
the time’’ (E5). One respondent explained just how she managed to get
along despite her large family and a desperately low income: ‘‘Only I
never had my hair done, never bought lipstick, never bought a stick of
gum. Never make an unnecessary expense, eh? Never, ever, ever. I never
went to the movies—I didn’t know anything about it’’ (E22).
Looking back, all of these women were surprised themselves to observe
that they had managed to get by on so little. When asked what she had
done to manage, one of them answered, ‘‘I can’t tell you. All I can say is
that God was with me. I never went into debt. When I wanted to have a
little something, I had the money saved up.... How did I do it? I don’t
know ’’ (E22). ‘‘For a while,’’ said another, ‘‘I had to work miracles’’ (E2).
A third maintained, ‘‘Don’t ask me how I did it. I don’t know’’ (E28).
In fact, as they described in detail how they managed, it became evi-
dent that these women had a very strict set of priorities that they tried to
observe, even when the intervals between paydays sometimes made their
task complicated. This was particularly true of those whose husbands
were paid twice a month, which sometimes required them to get through
three weekends on one pay.
First of all, they had to pay the irreducible expenses like electricity and
rent, the last of which the landlord generally collected at the door, encour-
aging promptness. ‘‘Rent and electricity, those are the first things to put
on the budget’’ (E5). ‘‘The rent money was the first thing of all. I would
rather skip eating’’ (E14). Thus, the rent and the electricity were seen as
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 107
‘‘debts’’ that they made a point of honour of paying regularly. Once these
obligations were met, the remainder of the money went to pay for food,
for wood or coal for the stove, and, in last place, the expenses connected
to clothing, transportation, insurance, and if there were a few pennies left,
to recreation.
If we look in detail at each line of these budgets, we note that the
women tried first of all to find a place to live with a rent that was no more
than their husbands’ weekly salary. Given the smallness of their wages,
this meant that the living quarters open to them were often of very poor
quality or too cramped for the size of their families.
Once the family was housed, it was next necessary to think about feed-
ing it. According to data furnished by the Labour Gazette, feeding a fam-
ily of five cost on average $11.02 in December 1929 and $6.72 in
December 1933; these figures indicate that for these two years, food rep-
resented 54 percent and 46 percent respectively of basic expenses.
25
Despite this reduction, food represented an important item in the budget.
In order to meet their families’ needs without putting too great a strain on
the household finances, these housewives performed feats of ingenuity
both in buying and preparing food for the table. They chose the cheaper
cuts of meat and avoided purchasing prepared foods that were too expen-
sive. ‘‘We never bought anything already made’’ (E2), as one of them said.
Tinned products were largely confined to tomatoes, corn, salmon, peas,
and beans for the majority of the women. Fresh fruit, with the exception
of apples and bananas, appeared only rarely on the menu, and in general,
they contented themselves with a rather narrow range of vegetables: pota-
toes, carrots, turnips, and onions making the most frequent appearance on
the table.
26
The tiny sums paid by home relief would further reduce the
quality and variety of food consumed. As one informant noted, ‘‘We
bought potatoes. In those days, potatoes didn’t take too much out of
your pocket. ... They cost less than anything else, so you could eat more
of them. It was a way of filling yourself up without it costing too much’’
(E19).
The importance of food, as a basic need that had to be satisfied, and the
difficulties that might accompany the task of feeding the family appeared
spontaneously in the comments that were collected on this subject. Quite
frequently, indeed, the informants insisted on saying that despite all their
financial difficulties, and despite the Depression, their families, the chil-
dren in particular, never lacked for food, which implies that nourishing
the family was a constant worry. ‘‘To want for food, that was the worst
108 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
possible thing. I would rather not have had clothes on my back. Eating
was enough’’ (E2). ‘‘We always ate our three meals a day’’ (E14). Not
missing a meal did not, however, necessarily mean that the food was the
best quality or that the menus were well balanced, as some of the women
were well aware. ‘‘We always ate, maybe not as well as we might—but we
always ate’’ (E23). ‘‘I used to put all kinds of things together to make one
big dish. We couldn’t eat steak, but we never, ever suffered because of a
meal’’ (E28). For others, ‘‘not having food’’ meant literally not having
something to eat, without regard to the quality of the meal: ‘‘We often
had mustard spread on bread. But we always had something to eat’’ (E19).
Another informant said, ‘‘We were never really destitute during the
Depression. We always had something to eat’’ (E8); her comments
express the idea that it is the total absence of all food that was often asso-
ciated with genuine poverty. That is to say, their desires, even at the level
of satisfying their basic needs, remained very modest.
Among these needs, spending on clothing came in last place and was
often reduced to the minimum. The husband and the older sons almost
always wore store-bought clothes while the clothing of the other children
was made at home, either from new material or, more frequently, remade
out of old garments donated by relatives. In order to cut costs, the
youngest children wore hand-me-down clothes and even shoes when their
father was handy at replacing soles. Those who were less talented at
sewing would buy their clothes from Saint Vincent de Paul and the Salva-
tion Army or from pedlars who would charge interest for spreading out
the payments.
What with the husband, who had to go out every day to work and the
children, who had to be decently dressed for school, the women, who
spent more of their time at home, found their needs being met well after
those of everyone else. Their wardrobe was limited to a couple of cheap
cotton housedresses and one or two better dresses that were suitable for
the rare occasions that they went out: ‘‘At home, with the kids, we wore
cotton housedresses. We never put pretty dresses on our backs. We had
cheap cotton housedresses with an apron over them. On Sundays, we
wore a good dress. When we went out, we dressed up’’ (E11). One of
them, who for fifteen years wore the same winter coat she had bought the
year she got married, explained, ‘‘After I took care of my children and my
husband, there wasn’t anything left for me. So I wore other people’s stuff
that I fixed up for myself. I wore other people’s clothes for a long time’’
(E16). Another recounted, ‘‘I remember when we had the restaurant, I
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 109
had just two dresses—wash the dress, iron the dress. Day after day—wash
the dress, iron the dress. . . . Me, who hates to iron!’’ (E26).
In the majority of families in the sample, virtually the entire budget
was devoted to basic necessities, and that was even before the effects of
the Depression made themselves felt. Because of job losses and wage cuts
the crisis often required them to make cuts in their essential outlays—
housing, food, clothing, and heating—despite the reduction in prices that
the Depression brought about. The women did not, by the way, comment
on this price reduction, probably because it coincided with the growth in
the size of their families. In order to maintain at least a minimum quality
of life, the women would utilize even more energetically those various
strategies with which they were familiar or which they were forced to
adopt—increasing their work in the home to supplement their income,
but also packing the family into a smaller flat, keeping a closer watch over
the budget, buying less and buying cheaper, inventing yet more economi-
cal recipes, calling more on relatives when possible. These last strategies
will be examined in greater detail in the next two chapters.
E
xamining the incomes of the families in the sample, the sources of
this money, and how it was managed has allowed us to observe that
the breadwinner/housewife model did not correspond to the reality expe-
rienced by the majority of the families under consideration, as eighteen of
them were dependent for their survival on the combined incomes of the
two partners, in the 1930s alone. The Depression is not, however, alto-
gether responsible for husbands’ working two jobs or wives’ working for
pay, as the majority of these households (fifteen out of eighteen)
depended on various sources of income even before unemployment
deprived them of the wages of their principal breadwinner. Rather than
changing the nature of the remunerative activities that women engaged in,
since they, for the most part, continued to turn to work in the home, the
Depression caused housewives to intensify their efforts. In fact, the sexual
division of labour was rooted so deeply that just one woman was in the
position of chief family breadwinner during the period of her husband’s
joblessness.
The overwhelming majority of these women was responsible for mak-
ing the purchases and paying the running expenses of the household.
Because they were required to translate their husbands’ wages into goods
110 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
for their family’s consumption and because where they lived was often the
place where they also worked for pay, there was no clear distinction for
these women between the public and the private sphere.
27
The intercon-
nection between different forms of work which were carried out in the
two spheres was especially visible during the Depression while the impor-
tance of their role as housewife and administrator only grew in proportion
to the degree that unemployment deprived them of their normal sources
of income.
28
To guarantee the well-being of their family while buying the least they
could at the best possible price sums up the challenge faced daily by the
majority of these housewives. Regardless of the additional income they
could raise from their paid activities, there is no doubt that they would
not have met it without extremely careful household management. As one
informant explained, ‘‘I never went without food or clothes. But if I
hadn’t sewed and bought cheap, I would have gone without’’ (E3). This is
the area we will examine in the next chapter.
Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances 111
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Chapter 6
Housework
‘‘I was quite a success in my life as a housewife.’’
(E5)
H
ousework, by which we mean the various tasks required to feed,
clothe, and care for a family, undoubtedly represents the most sub-
stantial element of women’s domestic labour. Unlike the kinds of care
and worry associated with motherhood, for example, household tasks are
indeed easier to conform to what we generally see as ‘‘work,’’ because the
time they take to accomplish can be measured and because they lead to
the production of specifics (meals, clothing) that are also quantifiable. As
we were able to observe in the previous chapter, household tasks further-
more are easily transformed into paid activities or a job, which accentuates
the parallel.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this form of work has
undergone numerous transformations, as much in the sort of tasks that
had to be done as in the kinds of tools available to do them. Industrializa-
tion in fact permitted a growing number of urban housewives to buy cer-
tain manufactured articles instead of making them at home: bread and a
few other basic commodities; soap, yard goods and, to a certain extent,
clothing were among the products that would henceforth be purchased by
the majority of these women, at least from time to time. Electricity and
running water, which were generally available in working-class districts in
the second decade of this century, were certainly the two innovations that
had the greatest effect on how they did their work. Finally, from the
Notes to Chapter 6 are on pp. 206-10.
113
beginning of the twentieth century, housework became the object of a
series of pronouncements aimed at rationalizing its execution in confor-
mance with the new scientific and hygienic standards that were beginning
to appear. From the 1920s onward, it would also begin to be invested with
an emotional charge that would make it into a ‘‘labour of love.’’
Despite all these transformations, it was still the fact that, for the
women interviewed, the family represented more an area of production
than of consumption, and that would be true until at least the 1940s. In
fact, their insufficient incomes meant that the majority of them had no
other choice than to produce the most goods and services possible while
devoting what little money they had to those expenses that were essential
and unavoidable. In this sense, what they produced represented a crucial
contribution to the economy of the household, as this production met the
needs that their cash income would never have stretched to satisfy. More-
over, it encompassed such a range of products that when the Depression
arrived, it was difficult for them to add new tasks to those that they were
already doing. Unlike middle-class women, who could substitute their
own labour for the purchase of consumer goods during the Depression,
the majority of the women in this sample had not as yet attained mass
consumption and thus could not return to practices that they had never
abandoned. The Depression, however, did have the effect of expanding
their workload while making it more difficult to carry out those tasks
they were already doing or increasing the frequency with which they had
to be done.
Women’s Space and Workplace
The new gender division of roles brought about by industrialization went
hand in hand with a spatial segregation for activities appropriate to each
sex. Bit by bit, after the middle of the nineteenth century, the urban
dwelling becomes the space specifically for domestic labour and the place
where in the future only women work. The domestic workspace, however,
reaches beyond the narrow confines of the home to extend to all those
places where some part of housework is carried out:
1
shops, school, medi-
cal clinics and the like. The conditions in which these housewives had to
live and work therefore depended, in part at the very least, on the degree
to which their housing provided healthy conveniences, on the general lay-
out of these lodgings, and on the range of services available in the districts
in which this housing was situated.
114 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
The Neighbourhood
During the 1920s and 1930s, the women we interviewed lived in various
working-class districts in southwest Montreal and the east end of the city,
in Verdun, and in certain newer areas like Rosemont, Villeray, and the
Plateau Mont-Royal. Except for Verdun and the Villeray and Plateau dis-
tricts, which were almost exclusively residential, the older areas were
developed at the same time as industrialization and, at the beginning of
the Second World War, still exhibited characteristics left over from the
nineteenth century. First of all, these districts, situated along the Lachine
Canal and Notre Dame Street to the east, always contained within their
limits a mix of industrial, commercial, and residential areas. Even if these
last were separate, the air one breathed was polluted by the factory chim-
neys that dispensed black soot everywhere. On the other hand, the prox-
imity of workplaces and businesses allowed the men to get to work on
foot or by a short streetcar ride and the women to do their shopping
without having to traipse long distances.
2
The informants, furthermore,
underscored these advantages as only one of them brought up the draw-
backs connected to the industrial environment in Saint-Henri, where she
lived for just one year as a result of her husband’s changing jobs. Because
she had not been born in the district, she was perhaps more able to recog-
nize these inconveniences that had become invisible to the other infor-
mants, who had been used to them for a long time:
It was quite dirty and full of smoke, with all the cars passing and the facto-
ries. . . . You would do the wash and then you had to hurry and get the
clothes in before noon, [because] when the [factory] whistles blew, all that
coal dust would fall all over our clothes—all those little black polka
dots. . . . And of course the children, they were always dirty—they were all
covered in soot. I would send them out dressed in white by the front door
and let them in by the back and they would be all black. I would have to
wash them.... And remember, there was a park just across from our
house—people said we lived in the nicest part of the neighbourhood! (E21)
The residential areas of Montreal’s working-class districts, whether old
or new, typically lacked green spaces and contained the highest concentra-
tion of population and the least adequate housing. These districts, built to
accommodate a rapidly growing working-class population, featured
streets lined with two- and three-storey attached houses that held from
two to six flats. The oldest of these dated to about 1860—built close to
the sidewalk and having neither front yard or balcony, they had interior
Housework 115
staircases and sometimes portes-cochères that led to other housing situ-
ated at the back of the rear yard.
3
The exterior staircases, which along
with rear laneways would become characteristic of the Montreal urban
landscape, made their appearance around 1900. These lanes were particu-
larly lively. They were at once playgrounds for the children and passage-
ways for pedlars and for the coal and wood delivery men who could thus
reach the rear sheds where the fuel was stored—and represented the
quintessential area of urban socializing for the women and children of the
working-class neighbourhoods.
While the urban working-class district at the beginning of the century
was often polluted and over-populated, it was not transformed during the
day into an exclusively female zone, in contrast to the modern suburb.
Morning, noon, and night, it was criss-crossed by children on their way to
school, by men and young people going to work, and by numerous deliv-
erymen, itinerant salesmen, and pedlars offering their wares door-to-door
or shouting them in the street. These neighbourhood bonds, which
merged, as often as not, with those of kinship, also contributed to the
intense life of the district and helped to keep its housewives from the iso-
lation that was frequently deplored in the period after the war.
4
Housing
The working-class districts in Montreal where the informants lived during
the Depression had been built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, when building standards were not overly demanding. Each of
these neighbourhoods, of course, contained its better-off areas where the
local elite lived, such as the streets surrounding Georges Étienne Cartier
Park in Saint Henri or the eastern part of de Maisonneuve, also called
Viauville, but by and large the amount of money these households had to
spend on rent, between twelve and eighteen dollars a month, kept them
out of the better and larger flats.
5
In the majority of cases, these women
had to be satisfied with a four- or five-room flat on the second or third
floor, as the occupant-owners commonly kept the first floor, roomier and
giving onto the yard, for themselves.
Whether this housing was old or new, the buildings generally filled the
whole width of the lot and were attached on both sides. To allow each of
the rooms a bit of light, most of these flats had a double room at the front
although in some of the older ones, the centre room had no window at
all.
6
In addition to the absence of natural light and ventilation, these long,
narrow flats often had but one room that could offer a modicum of pri-
116 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
vacy. This was, however, kept for the children, who went to bed early,
while their parents had to be satisfied with the room off the parlour,
which was simply curtained off.
More often than not, the lack of adequate insulation meant that, espe-
cially in the third-floor flat directly under the roof, the tenants sweltered
in summer and froze in winter and had to pay considerably more for their
heat, which generally came from a stove in the kitchen at the far end of
the flat.
7
In these conditions it was very difficult, if not impossible, to dis-
tribute heat evenly through the entire flat. For the women, these circum-
stances meant that they did their work in badly lit and poorly ventilated
rooms, in uncomfortable temperatures—conditions strongly reminiscent
of the factory floor.
All of the housing inhabited by the informants in the survey was con-
nected to the municipal water mains and had electricity. The hot water
heater was not, however, included in the rent and had to be bought or
rented by the tenants. Still, the kitchen had to be large enough for one of
these boilers and the flat had to be connected to the gas lines which
fuelled them. In any event, because of their minimal incomes, most of the
informants were not able to afford this luxury—in fact, only three of
them had always owned a water heater and just seven more had rented one
shortly before the Second World War. These boilers did not work auto-
matically. They had to be lit each time before hot water was desired. Cer-
tain kinds were attached to the stove and only worked if the stove was lit,
something that was hardly practical in summer. In order to save money or
time, the hot water reservoir was often used only for the weekly baths and
laundry, which meant that the housewives who had one still continued to
heat water on top of the stove to do the dishes or other household tasks
that required smaller amounts of water. ‘‘The gas was expensive. Y ou had
to save on everything’’ (E19), said one informant. Another explained, ‘‘It
didn’t work automatically like today—it was easier to put a kettle on to
do the dishes. We heated the boiler more for the laundry or for a bath’’
(E15).
Though all of the flats had a flush toilet, in several cases this had been
added after the house was built and installed in one of the rooms where it
was walled off by a flimsy wooden partition.
8
Only fourteen of the infor-
mants had always lived in accommodations that boasted a bathtub, while
seven more had to wait until after the war to achieve a flat with this con-
venience. Unless she had a hot water boiler already, the housewife had
somehow to heat the water the family needed to wash themselves. The
Housework 117
absence of a bathtub, as well as the fact that there was almost never a sink
in the lavatory, meant that housewives had to rely solely on the kitchen
sink, at which the family got washed, meals were prepared, and dishes and
laundry done. This sole source of running water was in heavy demand on
washdays and complicated women’s work. In certain flats, the kitchen
sink was so tiny that they had to wash the dishes on the kitchen table in a
basin while others possessed large washtubs that were more useful but
that took up a lot of space in the small rooms. The absence of counters
and storage space did not make the women’s work easier, either. In short,
these facilities were far from the functional kitchens recommended by the
‘‘experts’’ and from which better-off housewives were beginning to bene-
fit.
9
Finally, most of the old flats had softwood floors that had to be
scrubbed with a brush and ‘‘lessis’’ (soap ends), a particularly hard job.
10
This is why several of the informants spontaneously remarked on the
presence of hardwood floors in some of the flats they had lived in. ‘‘One
place I had was ever so beautiful—hardwood floors and everything’’
(E29). Lacking these, and if they could afford to, buying linoleum floor-
ing made cleaning the floor much easier.
Lack of money also meant that families often had to sacrifice the par-
lour to make an extra bedroom. Having neither room nor money, twelve
of the women in the sample thus waited several years before acquiring the
furniture for this room. Whether they bought it when they were first mar-
ried or some years later, most of them preferred to get a more versatile
sofa bed than a chesterfield. The parlour, even if it was furnished, was thus
often transformed into a bedroom by night and was not reserved for a sin-
gle function, which was a sign of a greater degree of financial comfort.
Nevertheless, the youngest child often slept in the parents’ room until
quite an advanced age, while the children’s rooms, and even their beds,
were always shared. Some members of the family might have to sleep in
the kitchen or the hallway on a folding bed. This crowding and the use of
extra beds (folding beds, sofa beds) that had to be put up and taken down
daily and the several kinds of activities that took place in each room
increased and complicated the work of the housewife who was anxious to
have a tidy house.
11
Keeping order was not made easier when the number
of persons per room exceeded a critical number, since space to store
things was especially lacking. Hooks put up behind the bedroom doors
and in the hallway near the entrance did their best to make up for an
absence of wardrobes. Large appliances like wringer washers and sewing
118 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
machines were squeezed in with some difficulty, generally winding up in
the kitchen. The space available in some flats was so tight that the idea of
buying such equipment could hardly be entertained. The shed, situated
behind the building, where coal and wood was stored and an outside cup-
board installed along the partition that separated the rear balconies of the
attached houses added to the storage space. Among other uses, perishable
food could be stored in this cupboard during cold weather.
The costs of moving to new accommodations could severely strain an
already tight budget. A popular saying of the time, indeed, asserted that
‘‘three moves equals one fire.’’
12
Nevertheless, at least half of the women
in the sample moved at least every year or two from the time they were
married until the end of the thirties. There are a number of explanations
for these frequent moves. Commonly, when a young couple first set up
housekeeping on their own, they often picked a two- or three-room flat,
which was initially cheaper but which would prove too small after the
birth of the second or third child—after a few years, they would have to
find something larger. The poor quality of the flats—inadequate insula-
tion, presence of vermin, absence of certain amenities, too-small rooms—
would encourage regular moves thereafter. If the head of the family took a
new job, this might also be a reason to move, as the men generally pre-
ferred to be able to walk to work to save on transportation and to come
home to eat their noon meal.
In view of the very low wages, the slightest rise in rent also might force
a family to move. ‘‘I sure have moved in my life! When I think about
it. . . . If the landlord raised the rent a dollar a month, we moved. It was
too much, we couldn’t pay it’’ (E29). The Depression of course con-
tributed to increasing the frequency of these moves, since half of the
women we interviewed had to shift to cheaper accommodations, in other
words, to a smaller, less comfortable, and often less well-equipped flat,
thus giving up what little comfort and convenience they had previously
had.
13
If the entire family suffered from the deterioration in their housing
conditions, it was the women, for whom the home was the place where
they at once both lived and worked, who were the most affected.
For women, moving to new accommodations represented an increase
in their work as well. Not only did they have to find the new flat and pack
and unpack the family’s belongings, but they also had to clean it from top
to bottom and, if they had the money, repaint or repaper, run up new cur-
tains, and so on. In order to reduce costs, they often called upon their rel-
atives to help out and, if possible, got a contribution from the landlord:
Housework 119
so I took another place, but it was so dirty! I cleaned the flat. The landlord
gave us wallpaper and he gave us paint, we had to do it all ourselves.... W e
worked like crazy but it didn’t cost us anything. When you moved, you
rented a truck—if you had a relative with a truck then he’d come help you
move and it didn’t cost anything. That’s why we moved so often. (E29)
Ownership would permit important renovations that would effectively
improve the conditions in which the homemakers did their work
14
—refit-
ting the kitchen, adding a bathtub, hooking up to the gas lines, or doing
electrical work. But few couples were able to treat themselves to such lux-
uries. In fact, only four of them owned a house before the war.
15
Two of
them had inherited, while the other two could make the purchase thanks
to the absurdly low cost of some properties:
We bought ourselves a little house.... W e paid two hundred dollars for it,
just for the taxes.... It had four rooms. The inside was finished in BC fir,
varnished wood, both the ceilings and the walls. We had a toilet but no bath.
There were four nice rooms. The front of the house was clapboard and
there was only one balcony that didn’t have a railing. The other three sides
of the house were made out of Coca-Cola signs! Well, all kinds of tin signs
that had been painted over. (E6)
The Depression in fact brought about the bankruptcy of many small
owners who were stuck with tenants who could not pay the rent or who
themselves were out of work and thus could not keep up the mortgage
payments or pay their taxes. This exceptional situation meant that certain
families could buy houses for a song. But it also meant that others lost
everything they had. This is what happened to one couple who had
bought property thanks to an inheritance shortly before the Depression
began. It would seem, indeed, that this last situation was the more fre-
quent and that the Depression did not encourage property acquisition
since in Montreal, in 1941, only 11.5% owned their own homes compared
with 15% ten years earlier.
16
Finally, we should also remark that another couple was able to afford a
good quality flat because some landlords, in desperation, were ready to
lower their rents rather than see their flats go empty:
I got married in 1932, so the Depression wasn’t over yet. The Crash had
happened but the hard times were still with us. There weren’t any jobs, the
houses were empty .... In January, we took . . . the streetcar up to Jean
Talon—it was Isabeau then.... All north of Saint Denis there, the second
and third floors were all for rent. There was practically a for rent sign on
every other house. That’s where we rented in January, but we didn’t have to
start paying until we moved in in April. The landlord was very happy that
120 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
we’d rented it. At eighteen dollars a month. The most beautiful flat I ever
had—I had hardwood floors, double doors separating the dining room from
the kitchen, walnut coloured. It was all enamelled—the woodwork, all of
that. It was beautiful—four rooms with a bathroom and a nice cold pantry.
(E15)
The instances when women and their families could benefit from
improved housing because of the Depression were, however, rare. As was
remarked earlier, the Depression was more likely to raise the number of
relocations and reduce the number of small owners. Due to the uncertain
economic situation, these were unlikely to be motivated to undertake
major renovations that could have improved the living conditions of their
tenants. Indeed, the number of renovation permits noticeably diminished
during the Depression as did the number of new housing starts.
17
Nor did
the war encourage the construction of domestic housing, so that by the
end of the 1940s Montreal families were in the grip of an unprecedented
housing crisis. By postponing home building and by limiting home
improvements to middle-class owners, the Depression, in addition to
increasing the number of removals, also held back the improvement of the
workplace of housewives of the poorest classes.
18
Implements of Work
A majority of household appliances, like the washing machine, the vac-
uum cleaner and the dishwasher, were patented in the United States in the
course of the nineteenth century, very often by women.
19
But it was not
until the beginning of the twentieth century that they became available on
the market, often to meet the needs of hotels and restaurants and several
more decades would have to pass before they would be adapted for use in
the home and homemakers could buy them.
20
Certain small appliances,
like the electric iron or the electric toaster, became more rapidly available.
In general, however, the high cost of the new large appliances as well as
lack of space or the absence of the utilities needed to run them (inade-
quate electrical wiring, no gas connection) meant that working-class
housewives had to do their work without modern equipment until at least
the Second World War. An examination of the tools available to the
women in our sample will allow us to determine which of them could be
found in the majority of houses and to consider their advantages and dis-
advantages for the housewife.
Among the appliances which offered more disadvantages than advan-
tages were the wood, coal or combination stoves (wood and coal, gas and
coal) used by more than two-thirds of the women interviewed during the
Housework 121
1930s. Their surfaces were not entirely enamelled and thus required con-
siderable upkeep if they were not to rust. Another of their considerable
disadvantages was that they gave off an intense but local heat, which did
not manage to spread the full length of the flat but which did overheat the
kitchen, especially in the summer during mealtimes or on laundry day. In
addition, these stoves had to be continually fed and they produced ashes
which had to be thrown away after they were sifted to retrieve lumps of
coal (‘‘clinkers’’) that had not burnt down. Most of the informants had no
regrets that this drudgery disappeared when they bought their first gas
range:
Then I screened the ashes!... In the beginning, we sifted them with a
screen, we would put a sack underneath. Later on, my husband had bought
a sheet metal rocker—there was a screen on top and a handle on each end,
then you dumped the ashes in, they fell into the rocker, then the bits that
weren’t completely burnt stayed on top. (E28)
Considering the astronomical cost of electric refrigerators,
21
it is
hardly surprising that only one of the informants possessed one at the
time of her marriage. T wo others had bought an enamelled icebox, but all
the others had to make do with a wooden icebox that most of them kept
until the end of the 1940s. Six others did not even have this convenience
when they were first married. At any rate, the icebox could keep food for
only three or four days and only in small amounts, which was not espe-
cially useful to mothers of large families. In addition, one had to keep an
eye on the icebox because it was necessary to empty the container that
caught the water from the melting ice. Because of lack of space or in order
to avoid water damage, some housewives preferred to put the icebox in
the shed or on the back balcony. In winter, several also kept food outside,
in the icebox or in a cupboard placed at the edge of some balconies. This
practice made it possible to save on ice (which cost between seventy-five
cents and a dollar fifty a week, depending on how much was bought) as
well as saving on the chore of emptying the meltwater.
Electric washing machines, with a metal tub and an electric or manual
wringer, began to appear in the 1920s and were, without a doubt, a marked
improvement over the washboard or the washing machine that was agi-
tated by hand
22
or by water. But their high price and the amount of space
they took up meant that most of the women interviewed waited until they
had one or more children before buying one. More than two-thirds
scrubbed their washing on a board for a number of years;
23
a few of them
did their wash at their mother’s or mother-in-law ’s, or, unusually, bor-
122 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
rowed a neighbour’s machine. But even when they had a machine, most of
them continued to do their daily wash by hand in a tub, at the kitchen
sink, or in the bathtub. ‘‘You didn’t bring out the machine every day to
wash the diapers’’ (E2), as several of the informants explained. That was
because these machines were not without their disadvantages, especially
when they did not work entirely by electricity. As well, the machine had
to be moved to the sink where it obstructed access or took up a large part
of the kitchen and it was also necessary to heat up large quantities of
water to fill it. Finally, one had to keep a close eye on it to avoid damage,
especially with certain models:
There was an agitator that worked on water power—you hooked up one
hose to the tap, the other you left there in the sink so the water was running
all the time. You had to watch it—it worked on electricity but you had to
be careful that the hose didn’t fall out of the sink or there would be damage.
And then there was the manual wringer that you had to turn by hand. That
was hard on buttons—there was always a button missing. Y ou had to put it
through just right.... Let me tell you, I was over the moon the first time I
got an electric washer and drier. (E8)
The sewing machine was a tool much more important than the washing
machine because it allowed the making of clothes and household linen in
order to effect appreciable savings.
24
In fact, only five of the women did
not have one and most of those who did bought it before they bought a
washing machine. Several of the women, especially the youngest in the
family, inherited them from their mothers, who had no further use for it
after their daughters were married. These were not electric but treadle
machines, which meant that a sewing session involved a fairly considerable
expense of physical energy. Over the years, however, most of the women
had a motor installed, which considerably lightened this particular chore.
The toaster and the iron also were part of the household equipment.
These small appliances, more affordable than washers and sewing
machines, were often given as wedding presents. Some also took advan-
tage of advertising promotions that offered electric irons and ironing
boards as a bonus for buying electric washing machines.
25
But those who
got married at the beginning of the twenties, when electric irons were just
beginning to appear on the market, or who lived in the countryside when
they were first married, used irons that had to be heated on the stove. The
electric iron allowed women to iron without having to put up with heat
from the stove. It could, however, weigh up to seven pounds, and as it
lacked both steam and a thermostat, the housewife had to dampen her
ironing with a spray bottle of water and disconnect it when it got too hot.
Housework 123
Altogether, then, there were few conveniences and a narrow range of
rather rudimentary tools available to these housewives. The fact that
most of these household appliances did not work automatically, along
with the restricted space and lack of amenities of their housing, did not
make it easy for women to accomplish several tasks at the same time, a
possibility that would increase as the housewife became equipped with
increasingly sophisticated appliances. It was indeed difficult to wash
dishes and clothes at the same time with but a single sink at one’s dis-
posal. This meant that the women often had to drop one chore for
another more pressing one, creating considerable discontinuity.
The introduction of electricity and plumbing into workers’ housing
certainly represented two important improvements that separated these
women from those of previous generations and from rural women. But in
order fully to enjoy all of the advantages that these utilities could provide,
the housewife needed the plumbing fixtures (bathtub, water heater, sec-
ond sink) and the appliances (electric washing machine, gas or electric
stove, refrigerator) that few had available to them. One informant, how-
ever, who came to Montreal when she married, summed up the advantages
of electricity like this: ‘‘Back home, even if we didn’t have electricity, we
had Aladdin lamps. ... so I didn’t find that there was that much of a dif-
ference. There would have been the laundry, a washing machine, that
would have been the only change’’ (E22).
None of the women interviewed had to dispose of their appliances
because of the Depression, though it did cause them to put off buying
certain articles of furniture and equipment. During the 1940s, as their eco-
nomic situation improved, the majority of them were quick to change
their old wood or coal stove for a new, more practical, gas range.
26
It must
be observed that these purchases necessarily coincided with the rental of a
flat containing the requisite connections, which often rented for a larger
amount. All the same, those who did not already have a washing machine
bought one during or immediately after the war, while the others traded
their old model in on one that functioned completely electrically (both
tub and wringer).
Nevertheless, the Depression did temporarily deprive several of the
women of their appliances for various reasons. For example, one infor-
mant did the laundry for several months in the bathtub because she did
not have the money to get her machine fixed. ‘‘I had a wooden agitator
with a handle in the side and the wringer was broken, which meant I had
to do the wash in the bathtub. And it was only something that cost thirty-
124 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
nine cents. I did the laundry for I think five or six months in the bathtub
like that’’ (E27). In order to save on electricity, another woman used a sad
iron her mother lent her that she could heat on the stove. Finally, two
informants had their electricity cut off because they could not pay their
bills. These cuts seriously complicated their work because they had to put
off doing some of it until after dark, when they could reconnect illegally
without worrying about inspectors from the company coming by.
27
Two of the women interviewed went back to live on the land because
their husbands were not able to find a job. Without electricity or running
water, they had to give up their washing machines and other electric appli-
ances (toaster, iron) and return to making a good number of items at
home (bread, soap, preserves and so on) that they had formerly bought.
One of these couples bought a little farm that was already in cultivation,
but the other had to set up in a ‘‘colonization zone,’’ and to undertake the
hard work demanded by the clearing and ploughing of a tract of land.
These two women had already experienced this kind of life, which made it
easier for them to adapt to their new situation. It should be recalled that
between 42,000 and 52,000 persons took up land in the colonization
zones during the 1930s,
28
so that such would have been the fate of a con-
siderable number of women, many of whom would not have been pre-
pared to deal with changes of this sort.
Organizing Household T asks
The sexual division of labour within the home meant that housework in
general remained the almost exclusive responsibility of women. Moreover,
the majority of women in this sample viewed this work as theirs and
sought no help with it whatever from their husbands. ‘‘When you are mar-
ried, each one has their own work’’ (E7). This way of conceptualizing the
assignment of tasks and roles within marriage came up on several occa-
sions in the oral histories and shows clearly that these women put their
work on the same plane as that of their husbands. In reference to the shar-
ing of housework by young couples, one informant commented:
When all that began to change, I was really taken aback. For me, a woman
who doesn’t wash her walls, things like that.... well, I said, that’s not what
a man should be doing, that’s women’s work. She’s the one living in the
house. He has his own work, outside.... Everything but the ceilings. My
husband never wanted me to wash them, or do the painting either—he
always did that. He always painted—he painted my house every year. My
paint was really good. (E23)
Housework 125
As this recollection suggests, male participation in housework was
most often limited to heavy or dirty work—washing walls and ceilings,
painting, hanging wallpaper, emptying ashes, taking out the garbage. A
few husbands dried the dishes, at least until their daughters were old
enough to do it, and washed floors, but in general, the women insisted on
doing the housework by themselves. To ask for help was the same as
admitting that they were not able to shoulder their responsibilities:
I was strong enough to do all my work. He didn’t help around the house, I
have to say. I can’t say I ever asked him to. Three rooms, four rooms—it
would have been ridiculous to make him do anything. I was quite capable of
doing my own work. I had the time. (E22)
Another woman even maintained that men who helped their wives might
become the neighbourhood laughingstock:
The man next door, he helped his wife. So my [husband and brothers]
laughed at that guy! They called him the ‘‘diaper-washer.’’ That was awful,
eh? A man who helped his wife—they made fun of him in those days!...
And we didn’t ask them to help us—as far as we were concerned, it was our
work. We said, ‘‘We don’t want to have them in our pots and pans.’’ We
were the ones who looked after that. (E29)
The idleness brought about by unemployment did not lead to a greater
participation by men in housework.
29
Just as wives did not try to take
their husbands’ place as principal breadwinner, no more did the men med-
dle in the housework. If they did lend an occasional hand, it was only to
do the jobs they had done previously—going to the store, taking care of
the children, washing the floors. According to the respondents, most of
the men spent the greater part of their time out of the house, looking for
work. Even if they were not home all that much, some of the women
found their unusual presence a nuisance: ‘‘Oh, sometimes, I’d really get
fed up. I used to think, this is not his place. A man’s place is to go to
work, not to hang around the house’’ (E19).
In order to get their work done, most of the women had developed a
strict schedule. Thus, Mondays and Tuesdays were devoted to washing
and ironing as well as the mending. Wednesday was the day for sewing or
cooking depending on circumstances, while Thursday and Friday were for
the weekly cleaning and shopping. On Saturday, some would take advan-
tage of their husbands’ presence to do the baking while he looked after
the children. This pattern was generally observed, no matter what hap-
pened: ‘‘On Mondays, regardless of what kind of day it was, I did the
wash. I always did’’ (E23). A few of the others maintained that they used
126 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
to have more flexible timetables, even going so far as to make fun of this
rather obsessive regularity:
When I couldn’t [maintain the schedule], I didn’t give a damn.... It all
depended on how I got out of bed in the morning.... If I didn’t feel so
well, I’d put it off till the next day .... I told myself when to do things. I
didn’t have anyone breathing down my back. I was the boss. I did what I
wanted—as long as the work got done, it was all right. I was never that
fussy about things like that. (E12)
This attitude, less common, was found more among those women who
had learned their domestic tasks on the farm, where housework followed a
different rhythm, or among those who had not experienced the discipline
of the factory floor. Factory work, which instilled habits of punctuality
(by docking wages if necessary) and taught that the least particle of time
should be made profitable, certainly helped to accustom these women to
respect precise schedules and to carry out their work according to a virtu-
ally unchangeable plan. Several of the women who placed a great impor-
tance on their work routine and on a rational allocation of their time,
moreover, maintained that their mothers (who had often grown up on the
farm and who had never worked in a factory) were less strict in this
regard: ‘‘My mother would put things off till tomorrow more easily than
me. ‘If I don’t do it today, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ For me, it was today, never
tomorrow ’’ (E2). One of the women in the sample described extremely
clearly this new mental attitude, with its overtones of Taylorism, which
was to condition the way the majority of the women would complete
their household tasks:
I worked at home just like a regular job. My daughters used to laugh at
me. . . . They ’d say, ‘‘Mama, you work just like you had a foreman on your
back.’’ I did everything to the minute and kept the house spick and span. I
had a day to wash my windows. In those days, you washed your windows
every week.... I had a day to do the laundry. I did the ironing the same day
I did the wash and then I had a day to wash the floors—I had a day for each
thing. Saturday was when I cooked. I would make my pastry and I would
cook my meats. I had a program like that all the time, every day just like
that. . . . I taught myself how. I really liked to do my work on time. Even so,
I was really fussy—I’d say ‘‘Oh, this time yesterday I did this and that, and
today I haven’t done it yet.’’ I worked at home just like a regular job. But I
liked that, you understand. (E29)
A heightened concern for cleanliness went along with this discipline.
‘‘We had to have everything just so—we kept our houses more spick and
span than our parents had’’ (E2). For some of the women, cleanliness was
Housework 127
almost an obsession: ‘‘I washed by hand like crazy because the washers we
had then didn’t get clothes clean enough—so I had to scrub my wash-
ing. . . . I did a spring cleaning in the fall as well as the spring—two spring
cleanings a year. I never went a year without painting’’ (E23). Afraid of
neglecting her house, one of the women interviewed got jaundice from
which she was slow to recover after her first child was born:
Now I understand that it was because of the incredible stress I was under. I
didn’t want to neglect my house or my baby .... I was running here, there,
and everywhere, after the house, the baby, and then my husband, who was
working nights—he slept during the day so I had to be careful not to make
too much noise. All in all, I see that I must have been under as much stress
as you can be. (E15)
Along with the scientific organization of labour, a concern for order
and cleanliness were two preoccupations that appeared at the same time as
industrialized society.
30
These were associated not merely with hygiene
but also with the moral values they served to reinforce—a clean and
orderly home at once reflected the presence of an accomplished house-
wife, preserved the family core from being dispersed, and inculcated in the
family members fundamental Christian virtues basic to society.
31
A clean
and well-kept home suggested that its occupants, especially the woman
responsible for its maintenance, were of high moral character. ‘‘Is not to
present a clean and orderly dwelling but a way of showing the will to
maintain order everywhere and in everything, as the interior of the home
reflects the person.’’
32
In this atmosphere, it is to be expected that the
women interviewed were absolutely insistent on their concern for order
and cleanliness.
The Cycle of Household Chores
With the passing of days and weeks, the women interviewed performed
the same tasks sometimes more, sometimes less, frequently. The laundry,
for example, far from being merely a weekly chore, could become a daily
one when there were young children.
33
An insufficient supply of diapers,
mattress pads, nightgowns, and flannel blankets would make a daily laun-
dry necessary; for women who had several babies, this would mean a num-
ber of years of daily washes. ‘‘Every morning, you knew there was a boiler
full of diapers waiting for you’’ (E2), one woman recalled. As one infor-
mant, who did nevertheless have a machine, pointed out, these ‘‘little’’
washes were done by hand, on a washboard placed in a tub or in the bath-
tub, and the women often ‘‘took advantage’’ of these sessions to wash out
128 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
certain articles of clothing. ‘‘When I was washing the diapers, I also did
some things that were easy to wash’’ (E6).
As mentioned earlier, most of the women interviewed did not have a
washing machine until after the birth of their first, and sometimes second
or third, child. Despite this fact, only seven of them used the services of a
commercial laundry, most of them on an irregular basis and more fre-
quently toward the end of the decade, and three of these had their own
machines. In most cases, only the very large and difficult to launder
items, like sheets and towels, were sent to the laundry every two weeks.
The rates, by the pound, were not very high—it cost about twenty-five
cents to wash the bed linen, towels, and dishcloths. At this price, however,
the laundry was not returned dry, but as ‘‘wet wash,’’ to the housewife,
who had to hang it out before ironing it. Even this minimal cost repre-
sented a major obstacle since the family budget was very tight. That is
why even those who used this service only did so occasionally, in order to
lighten a particularly heavy week. When the husband was out of work, it
was obviously impossible to make use of the service.
There were other reasons offered to explain why the women in the
sample made so little use of the laundry services. One of them, for exam-
ple, could never resign herself to sending her washing out of fear of being
considered lazy: ‘‘Oh, no, I would have done the laundry in the bathtub
rather than send it out. I would have been ashamed to send my sheets to
the laundry. They would have said, ‘[She] is really lazy, that one—she
doesn’t wash her own sheets!’ Oh no!’’ (E17). One informant who used
this service several times found the system too complicated and not suffi-
ciently hygienic: ‘‘I didn’t like it that you had to make a list of everything
that you sent and had to keep one copy and give them the other. And then
on top of that, people began to say, ‘Y es, well, they wash all kinds of stuff
there, along with everybody else’s wash.’ So I stopped sending it out’’
(E15). Another woman, who never used the service but who had worked
in a laundry both before and after her marriage, had similar reservations:
‘‘No, first of all, it cost too much.... Then they would lose things. Y our
wash would go in with everyone else’s and that was something I didn’t
like the idea of very much’’ (E28). It seems that fear of infection did in
fact influence the decision of some of the women, even if there was no
proof that this kind of service gave rise to any health problems. The dis-
course on hygiene fed these rumours and supported the interests of the
manufacturers who would rather sell a washing machine to each separate
family. It must also be added, however, that ownership of a machine was
Housework 129
also seen as an advantage by these women not only because they were
loath to use a commercial laundry but because they could thus save
money in the long run.
34
Doing the washing was a lengthy and arduous chore that everyone
remembered as a horror. ‘‘Y ou started at eight o’clock in the morning and
were lucky if you were finished before three. Along the way, you had to
feed the kids, mop up, make the beds’’ (E10). For each load of wash, it
was necessary to heat huge quantities of water, empty it into the washtubs
or the washing machine, add the soap, bleach, and blueing depending on the
load, empty the dirty water into the sink, wring out the clothes, and start all
over again.
35
Each load had to be washed and rinsed twice, not to mention
that certain items had to be soaked before being laundered. If signs of ele-
vated standards of cleanliness might be detected in all this, it must also be
noted that some clothing, especially work overalls, could be very dirty
indeed. Other items demanded special treatment—diapers, for example,
had to be boiled, as much to get them clean as to conform to a notion of
hygiene, while cotton had to be rinsed in blueing to keep it white.
After it was washed, the laundry was hung outside if the weather was
fair, or inside if it was raining or too cold. For part of the day, and often
until the next morning, the flat was festooned with wash lines. Once it
was dry, some items, especially shirts, had to be dipped in starch water and
rolled up in towels to stay damp until ironed. Almost everything had to be
ironed—sheets, tablecloths, diapers and practically every article of cloth-
ing. Shirts, always numerous, were especially hard to do without creasing
them. Even if they were not fond of this job, several of the women inter-
viewed said that they went so far as to starch their tablecloths and sheets
and iron their tea towels and dishcloths.
Just like the laundry, cleaning the house was something that took place
on a weekly and a daily schedule. ‘‘After breakfast,’’ one informant
explained, ‘‘I did the bedrooms. I made the beds and mopped the floor. In
those days, we had linoleum everywhere. After that, I did my dusting.
That was a regular thing, every day’’ (E20). This routine, reported by
almost every one of the women, was extended at the week’s end to
include a more thorough cleaning of every room—windows, baseboards,
bathroom, and floors all washed. If the floors were softwood, they would
have to be scrubbed with a brush and ‘‘lessis’’ in order get them back to
golden; linoleum floors, easier to keep up, nevertheless had to be waxed
and, as one woman recalled, ‘‘In those days, floors had to be done with
paste wax. We didn’t have liquid wax’’ (E20).
130 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
It was also on Fridays that these housewives did their major shopping.
From time to time, they would make an excursion to one of the city mar-
kets to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, but most often these purchases
would be made at one of the numerous grocer-butcher shops that could
be found in the area and that did not require a long journey. Unlike a
supermarket, these little concerns offered personalized service in that each
of the customers was waited on individually. The informants were quite
insistent on this point so as to emphasize the attention they received: ‘‘In
those days, we didn’t wait on ourselves’’ (E10). Supermarkets, which
began to appear in the 1930s, were at first viewed as an aberration because
shoppers could take products directly from the shelves. ‘‘When they first
started, we said, good heavens, they are going to be robbed! Everybody is
going to get at everything’’(E15). Rather quickly, however, the women
observed that self-service had certain advantages, as they sometimes felt
uncomfortable rejecting a piece of meat that had been expressly cut for
them or an article they had asked the price of.
36
On the other hand, the
small grocery stores offered free delivery, which the supermarkets did not
necessarily do. Certain grocers even sent a clerk on a daily round of the
best customers in order to take their orders. ‘‘We didn’t have a phone,’’
one of the respondents remarked. After it was taken, the order was then
sent to the house. ‘‘And we didn’t pay for all that,’’ one observed. Indeed,
this service was almost indispensable since iceboxes could not keep meat
for a whole week and the women could not readily get out to shop with
young children in the home.
Groceries were not the only business that delivered. According to one
woman, ‘‘Eaton’s would make a delivery for something like ten cents’’
(E6). Items like milk, bread, ice, wood, and coal were also delivered at no
charge while pedlars hawked their fruits and vegetables, chips, and ice
cream in the street. Most of the women regularly used the services of one
or more of these merchants and were grateful for them despite certain
drawbacks—ice that melted on the staircase, coal men who dirtied the
halls, milk that froze before it could be taken in, and the like.
The women in the sample most often turned to local shops, generally
concentrated on a nearby commercial street, for almost all their pur-
chases, including yard goods, clothing, household articles, and furniture.
They very rarely visited the downtown department stores except for sales
or at Christmas. A few of the poorest women got their clothes and furni-
ture from the outlets of the charitable organizations in their parish, like
the Saint Vincent de Paul Society. Pedlars sold clothing door-to-door but
Housework 131
their prices were usually higher because they sold on credit and only a few
of the women interviewed bought from them: ‘‘It was the Jews who came
to the door selling bed linen, sheets, pillowcases, coats, dresses, every-
thing like that. ... It was a lot more expensive, but we were stuck. . . .
They would come to collect from us’’ (E27).
Thanks both to the variety of products that was delivered to the home
and to the nearness of most retail stores, these women spent relatively lit-
tle of their time shopping or bringing things home. In fact, this last activ-
ity was most often undertaken by pedlars or by a young deliveryman
employed by the merchant; it would be accurate to say that it was not as
yet part of everyday housework.
37
When it was a question of making purchases involving large sums of
money, like furniture and household appliances, husbands more fre-
quently accompanied their wives to the store and some even went on their
own. On the other hand, they were rarely involved in buying material or
clothing, except for their own, though a majority of them did at least
some of the shopping for food. In most cases, this occurred when they
were sent to the store now and then by their wives for odds and ends,
though almost a third did all of the shopping on a regular basis. This was
true for two husbands who worked in a grocery store and who were thus
on the spot to bring home supplies and for three others who would not
permit their wives to handle the money. These men went so far as to
decide on the menus, so as to be sure that their preferences would be
respected:
He was the one who did the shopping, because I had the kids to look
after .... I was the one who went to buy clothes and so on, but for things to
eat. . . . he was always the one who went. Sometimes, I’d say, ‘‘Buy this or
that,’’ but he was always the one who decided. It was OK by me as long as
he was happy. That’s what I was like. . . . He told me what to do. (E23)
As is the case in this reminiscence, most of the women used their mater-
nal obligations to justify this division of tasks, which reminds us that
child care was the woman’s responsibility and that, as a result, their
mobility was more circumscribed than that of their husbands.
38
Most of these women spent several hours a week sewing or mending
clothes for their families. More than two-thirds of them made most of
their children’s clothes, only a third made their own clothes, and none
sewed for their husbands. Husbands thus accounted for the greatest part
of clothing expenditures, but women, more than children, also wore
store-bought clothes.
132 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
According to these oral histories, if the women did not make their hus-
band’s clothes, it was in part because the men were ‘‘too proud’’ to wear
homemade garments, but also because men’s clothing required too much
work and, if they were to fit properly, greater skill than the women had.
As we may recall, most of them had received only a sketchy training in
sewing and some of them felt particularly lacking when faced with this
task:
I was not a real, one hundred percent seamstress. I only sewed for my chil-
dren, for the littlest ones.... I made things for my little guys to start out
with because I had two in a row .... I learned, but I had to put my head
down on my machine lots of times because I was crying lots of times. I was
so discouraged. I didn’t know how to go about it and then I was not some-
one who would ask. (E23)
According to how much money there was, the children’s clothes were
made out of new material or remade out of their father’s old clothes
39
or
those of other relatives, which required a lot of work: ‘‘those old
things . . . that I took apart, turned inside out, washed, ironed, remade. . . .
I even made my daughters’ coats. I did a lot of work then’’ (E19). Just like
their fathers, the boys graduated to ready-to-wear more quickly than their
sisters. ‘‘I made all my children’s clothes, even the little boys’ until they
started to wear long pants... when they were twelve, but I made my girls’
clothes all the time, all the time. ... I even made the clothes they wore to
get married in’’ (E24).
As for themselves, the women did not go out very much and thus had
less need of many clothes. Around the house they wore cotton house-
dresses that cost so little that they were hardly worth sewing at home. ‘‘In
the house, I always wore a ‘duster’ and an apron. But I didn’t go out, you
know ’’ (E28). The low price of these garments made specifically for
housewives (the women interviewed used the English term ‘‘duster’’ for
them) allowed them to save precious time to work on clothes for their
children who were getting bigger and going to school.
If not all the women sewed, the majority of them mended clothes that
were torn or coming apart at the seams—‘‘You put on patches, in those
days’’ (E2), one of them observed—and made sheets, pillowcases, cur-
tains, aprons and the like out of old clothes, cut-price remnants or even
from white sugar sacks.
Like knitting, which several of the women did, sewing is a precise
undertaking that demands a certain degree of peace and does not improve
by being interrupted. This is why the women did their sewing most often
Housework 133
at night, when the children were in bed, or in the afternoon, when they
were in school or taking a nap. More than any other household task,
sewing involved the establishment of broad exchange networks among
families and reinforced the bonds among the female relatives; the richer
ones gave their used clothes to the poorer ones and mothers and mothers-
in-law lent their sewing machines and sometimes took over sewing for
their grandchildren.
Within this weekly cycle of housework, there were of course the daily
tasks, like preparing meals. Cooking took up a considerable amount of the
housewife’s day, since virtually all of the women made all the food, from
soups to desserts. Two-thirds of them also did some canning, and made
their own pickles, jams, spruce beer, dandelion wine, ice cream, and so on.
They also had to cut up and mince the meat: ‘‘They didn’t have all the
cuts of meat like nowadays—you got a big piece of meat in those days
because the families were so big. If you bought a big piece, ten or twelve
pounds, it was cheaper’’ (E16).
Even if some of them reserved one day a week for cooking, still every
day they had to prepare the meat, clean and slice the vegetables and cook
or heat up the lot. Preparing meals also involved setting and clearing the
table, doing the dishes and the pots, cleaning the stove and sink, and
sweeping the kitchen. In fact, many of the women maintained that cook-
ing took up the greater part of their time. ‘‘We spent two-thirds of our
time preparing meals’’ (E5). ‘‘It’s the everyday stuff [that takes up the
most time]. When you have a lot of kids, of course you have to do more.
Fixing the vegetables. . . . That’s what takes the most time’’ (E17).
The expression ‘‘everyday stuff’’ used by a number of the women indi-
cates the routine aspect of this chore and the simplicity of the meals that
they prepared for their families. In general, these were casseroles, stews,
hash, boiled dinners, all inexpensive but requiring a long time to cook,
especially on a wood stove. In the middle of the afternoon, they had to
start thinking about making dinner. The same sort of meat was often
eaten for a whole week because the women tried to make the most of
their purchases and never to throw anything away. Beef, pork, and veal in
turn started as the Sunday roast and then reappeared on the table, pre-
pared in various ways, until Thursday. On Friday, a fast day, there were
pancakes, baked beans and fish. Those recipes they did not themselves
invent came from their mothers, sisters-in-law, cousins, and neighbours.
134 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Cutting Back on Necessities
All in all, the Depression did not seem to have added new jobs to the
housewife’s roster of tasks. As we have seen, the majority of them were
already using all of their resources and skills to get the most out of what
they had. Because they were not consuming anything except essentials,
however, the Depression forced them to cut to the bone, which meant
that they had constantly to search for alternatives and make important
changes in the way they shopped, sewed, and cooked, all of which seri-
ously complicated their household tasks.
Buying as little as possible at the best price was already a way of life for
these housewives. As far as actual food purchases went, however, it was
often difficult to cut back on quantity. Therefore, the housewives sought
new ways to economize by buying lower quality and by stocking up in
different ways. Therefore, some of the women began to buy their meat
directly from the abattoir rather than from the local grocery, which per-
mitted them to obtain greater quantities at the same price:
In those days, you could buy twenty-five pounds of meat for ninety-nine
cents, I think it was
40
—there were soup bones, all kinds of things—sausage,
blood-pudding, not the expensive cuts, you know, but you could get an
awful lot for ninety-nine cents.
It was also possible to get cut-rate meat by buying it late on Saturday
evening, just before the stores closed;
41
a number of grocers who did not
have refrigeration preferred to get rid of their stock rather than risk losing
their merchandise by storing it until Monday morning. Finally, one of the
informants also bought horsemeat, cheaper than the other kinds.
Some of the women would buy fruits and vegetables that had been
reduced because they were wilted, even if it meant taking a little more
time to prepare them: ‘‘It was a lot of work to make them all right to eat.
Sometimes they were starting to go. But if you picked out what was edi-
ble’’ (E5)—
We would go look for basket of bananas at A’s, a grocery not far from us.
The kids would look for a basket of overripe bananas for five cents. Some-
times, they weren’t edible. Bread, butter, and bananas—that’s what they ate.
Me too. (E27)
Other women would go to the market to pick up fruits and vegetables
that were thrown out at the end of the day by the farmers who had given
up all hope of selling them. ‘‘My husband would go to Bonsecours mar-
Housework 135
ket for vegetables. The farmers threw out quite a lot—what was still good,
my husband brought home and we ate it. . . . Y ou can’t be fussy!’’ (E25).
As mentioned previously, two-thirds of the women interviewed were in
the habit of making pickles and preserves. This activity, however, was not
linked to the Depression. On the contrary, a lack of income and the way
in which direct relief was dispersed made it difficult to buy the large quan-
tities necessary for their production: ‘‘I never canned anything—in the
first place, I never had the money to put things up, to buy the jars and
everything else you need. I didn’t have the money for that’’ (E12). ‘‘ We
didn’t have the money to buy anything. How was I going to buy all the
stuff you need to make ketchup, all that kind of thing! They gave us just
so much sugar—it takes a lot of sugar to make jam—I didn’t make any’’
(E19). All the same, a single informant tried several times to make bread
while she was living on home relief, but it was a long and complicated pro-
cess, not to mention that her inexperience made it more likely that there
would be waste. It was cheaper to go directly to the bakery at the end of
the day:
We would go there at four o’clock in the afternoon when the bread runs
came back. We could fill up a whole pillowcase with bread for twenty-five
cents. Y ou’d see everybody there—I would see them on the corner, they all
had a pillowcase folded up under their arm or some of them had bags. (E20)
Preparing the same amount of food with fewer means and from infe-
rior quality products required a good pinch of ingenuity to create appetiz-
ing meals. Sausage, minced meat, spaghetti and noodles appeared very
often on the table, prepared in every imaginable way. Dishes in sauce,
made with a base of flour and water, were also an economical solution,
since they generally did not contain meat: ‘‘I made potatoes and white
sauce, eggs and white sauce, beans and white sauce, and tinned salmon and
white sauce. We ate a lot of paste!’’ (E25). Desserts were skipped alto-
gether or consisted of ‘‘broken biscuits’’ sold cheaply in bulk or made
from recipes that did not ask for expensive ingredients, like the famous
‘‘pouding chomeur’’ (literally, unemployed pudding, poor man’s pud-
ding): ‘‘If it wasn’t going to cost too much, you had to make a cake that
didn’t take more than one egg’’ (E25). ‘‘I made all my own cakes and I
didn’t put in any eggs—just a little milk and some baking powder and my
cakes were always light’’ (E29).
Despite all of these strategies, some of the informants simply had to
deprive themselves of food so their children could have it:
136 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
I would make a stew, as we called it .... I would make it out of spaghetti and
whatever stuff was the cheapest and the most nourishing. But that doesn’t
mean we were well fed.... All it meant is that we had something to eat and
even then sometimes we had to leave it all for the children. (E27)
On those days when there was hardly anything in the house to eat, the
father might disappear around mealtime, saying he was going to look for
work, so that his wife and the children could share whatever food there
was. One couple often made do with macaroni and butter and sugar
spread on bread, while another informant admitted that she had often
eaten sugared bread dampened under the faucet. Another explained:
We often ate mustard sandwiches... before the next cheque would come.
When we got to the last stretch, we had a little jar of mustard and a few
slices of bread and we would say, we’re going to have to be happy with
that—what do you want, there isn’t anything else.... My mother-in-law
would come and take my little girl. As long as I knew my little girl would
have something to eat, it was all right, I knew we’d get by. (E19)
In regard to nourishment, the Depression made the housewives’ task
more difficult both in terms of getting provisions and devising meals.
Even more serious, however, was that it also forced a significant number
of them to deprive themselves of food.
During spells of unemployment, buying clothing was the first thing to
go. ‘‘We didn’t have much to wear’’ (E6), a number of the informants said
in essence. Very often, the women, but also their husbands, wore their old
clothes year after year in order to preserve their limited resources to
clothe their children. Two of the women interviewed who had not previ-
ously done any sewing took it up to make clothes for their children
specifically on account of the Depression:
That’s when I learned to sew because I used to buy ready-made clothes for
my kids in the beginning but later on, I couldn’t.... Y ou had to make new
clothes out of old ones. I would pick them apart to make new out of old.
That’s what I called it.... Everybody gave me clothes—I’d take them apart
and make them up for the kids. That’s how I learned to sew. I didn’t have a
machine—I’d go to my mother’s to use hers. My husband took care of the
kids at night and I went to my mother’s to sew.... Anyway, my kids were
very well dressed—people gave me good stuff, they didn’t give me rags.
(E12)
In most cases, however, the women who did not know how to sew were
more likely to go to the stores run by the Salvation Army or the Saint
Vincent de Paul Society.
Housework 137
Finally the costs of heating, electricity, and gas were reduced as far as
possible by cutting back on the time they were in use (at night, for exam-
ple) or by avoiding the use of electric appliances, as we have already seen.
Some families turned to fuel picked up along the railway lines or on build-
ing sites, or made from cardboard boxes or old newspapers. It was the
men who salvaged these materials:
He’d go out in the morning to look for wood in Saint Lambert.... After
that, he’d go to the store so he’d have some cardboard. He’d take the card-
board cartons apart, roll them up, and tie them with wire and stack them in
the shed to make wood for next winter. Then . . . he’d soak newspapers in
water in a basin... and make them into balls... and then let them dry.
There, that was our coal for the winter. (E25)
Ac c o r d i n g to this informant, this kind of fuel increased the risk of fire and
required her to ‘‘mind the fire’’ all night long, taking turns with her husband.
Despite the fact that they had to move more frequently, do laundry
more often, had greater difficulty in stocking the larder and even suffered
deprivation, and constantly had to look for some way to find possible
substitutes to satisfy their families’ needs, the women interviewed were
not unanimous in their view of the effects of the Depression on their
household work. Some among them believed that the lack of money did
not mean that they had to do much more work. Others agreed that they
were forced to do somewhat more, but hastened, however, to add: ‘‘Work
around the house never bothered me’’ (E6), and ‘‘Yes, but it’s just like I
told you. It was routine. It didn’t make much difference to me. I knew
how to manage so we had food on the table’’ (E29). These statements at
once communicate the self-denial of these women faced with their fami-
lies’ needs as well as their pride in being able to confront every situation
with no exceptional difficulty. Furthermore, they reveal that the women
have a most elastic conception of their time and their capacity for work;
even in normal times, the list of household tasks represented a significant
number of hours of work in a day that began at dawn with breakfast and
the care of the smaller children and continued until late in the evening in
front of the sewing machine, whereas their husbands could take a little
rest: ‘‘Y ou got up in the morning and you never stopped. ... After supper
he [her husband] read his paper—us women, we had the dishes, the kids’
homework’’ (E2).
Several of the women also had to find the time to do work for which
they got paid, without, however, neglecting their household responsibili-
ties. Their workday was therefore longer and more broken up, but they
138 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
asserted that they managed to sort everything out without help and drew
a certain satisfaction from having been successful in accommodating
everything. One of them, who managed her husband’s shop during the
day, stated, ‘‘I managed. ... Y ou can always find some way to work things
out. . . . I don’t remember having had much trouble. ... I had a lot of
energy ’’ (E7). Thus, even though she was continually being interrupted by
customers and though she had to put off doing a number of her house-
hold tasks like washing and ironing until the evening, when her husband
minded the store, this informant did not conclude that her workload was
too heavy or too difficult to manage. In fact, although a number of these
women were clearly overloaded and frequently working under difficult
conditions, most of them agree that at the time it would never have
occurred to them to complain:
To tell you the truth, it was a really, really miserable time. In those days, you
didn’t think it was so hard, because it was what you had to do. But today,
when you think about it all and then what it’s like today, what a difference!
Take hot water, for example—now all you have to do is turn on the faucet.
But then, you had to heat up the water... for the dishes, you had to heat
up the water for every meal.... It was really hot in the summer .... F or a
long time I used to do the laundry in the bathtub on a washboard. Some-
times it would slip—the tub was too wide. The washboard would get
away.... And doing sheets... or even long johns.... Sometimes times I
just wanted to throw them out! Long johns were a real job. Oh, we had a
hard time of it!... Oh! I wouldn’t go back to those days. It’s not that you
want to moan about it when you talk about it now, it’s not just to com-
plain . . . no, no. It’s not in order to complain. That was how we lived.
(E27)
Still, the women were reluctant to say which job they liked the least. ‘‘I
liked to do what came along—I’m not the kind of woman who picks and
chooses’’ (E17). ‘‘I don’t know. It had to be done—I did it. I was happy to
do it. I liked it’’ (E20). ‘‘When we were young, we were made to do what-
ever had to be done in the proper order’’ (E13). As these comments
stress, the sense of duty and the confidence of having performed work
that was essential to their families’ welfare motivated these women to do
their daily work. More than the weight of their chores or the harshness of
the conditions in which they were carried out, their oral narratives trans-
mit their pride in being able to assure this well-being despite economic
hard times and the Depression.
Housework 139
W
hen considered in connection with the overall family economy,
housework would appear as the essential counterpart to the wage.
Indeed, analyzing various household tasks reveals that those occupying
the greatest amount of time were allocated to the production of goods
and services directed toward satisfying the basic needs of family members.
Production in the home could make up for inadequate family incomes by
allowing what money there was to be devoted exclusively to the purchase
of goods and services that would otherwise be impossible to obtain. The
women themselves, moreover, were aware of the economic importance of
their labour, which they thought of in the same way as that of their hus-
bands: ‘‘He had his work and I had mine,’’ they were happy to recall, thus
putting both kinds of work on equal footing.
In general, the level of consumption on the part of these families was
already at a minimum when the Depression occurred. In these conditions,
the extra restraints that they had to impose on themselves in the matter of
food and housing, among other things, seriously affected the welfare, if
not the actual health, of family members and especially impinged on
women in regard to their working conditions and their own subsistence.
Obviously, the search for makeshifts to allow families to be fed, clothed,
and housed despite a loss of income fell to the housewife. As we shall see
in the next chapter, the immediate family also played an important role in
this regard.
140 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Chapter 7
State, Family, Neighbours,
and Credit
‘‘In those days, there wasn’t any money—everybody
was in the same boat.’’ (E28)
T
he extraordinarily high rate of unemployment during the 1930s
forced the government to provide financial support to thousands of
households across Canada. The amounts dispensed either as direct relief
or in return for public work did not, however, claim to be a substitute for
traditional sources of support, like neighbours and relatives, that were
already functioning well before the advent of the Depression. The condi-
tions of eligibility for direct relief stipulated, moreover, that the needy
first had to turn to their immediate families before asking for state aid. In
reality, as we shall see, the support of the institutions of both state and
family was required to provide households on assistance with their basic
necessities. In this final chapter, we shall examine, in order, the contribu-
tions made by these two institutions to the household economy, as well as
the role played by neighbours and by going into debt, the feelings that
having to turn to these resources could give rise to, and the importance
these various strategies could assume during this decade.
Government Assistance
At the beginning of the thirties, unemployment was still regarded as an
individual problem caused by some moral failing, like laziness or drunken-
ness, or, at best, by misfortune. As a faithful proponent of laissez-faire
capitalism in economic and social matters, the provincial government of
Quebec was quite satisfied, from 1921 onwards, to finance private chari-
Notes to Chapter 7 are on pp. 210-12.
141
ties, religious communities, or other organizations that ran hospitals and
cared for the needy, orphans, the aged, and the infirm. The Saint Vincent
de Paul Society, which had been deeply rooted in francophone Catholic
Quebec since the nineteenth century, had as its particular vocation the
impoverished who were not in the care of institutions.
1
Operating from a
parish base, this organization was in a position to connect with the entire
francophone population; during the 1920s, for example, it extended aid to
between three and four thousand Montreal families each year.
2
When the
Depression set in, the unemployed turned spontaneously to the parish
branches of the society; like other charitable organizations, it was rapidly
overwhelmed by the demand.
By 1930, the extent of the crisis and of unemployment forced the fed-
eral government to react. The Conservative Party, headed by R. B. Ben-
nett and recently elected on a promise to deal with unemployment,
adopted in special session its first Unemployment Relief Act, which ear-
marked sixteen million dollars for public works and four million to be dis-
tributed in relief payments. This amount represented only Ottawa’s
contribution; in fact, for each dollar spent on public works, the federal
and the provincial governments had to provide twenty-five cents each,
while the municipalities made up the other 50 percent. As for the financ-
ing of direct relief, that was divided equally among the three levels of gov-
ernment. The local governments, traditionally responsible for the
indigent, were thus charged with organizing and dispensing relief pay-
ments,
3
but, in the absence of the competent personnel and adequate
funding necessary to oversee their distribution in most municipalities, this
function was primarily left to private charities.
Until 1933 in Montreal, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society would con-
tinue to dispense relief to the Catholic population. The advisory commis-
sion on unemployment, created by the municipality, was satisfied to
channel funds through the various Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant orga-
nizations while a city council commission on unemployment served as a
placement office to hire men for public works projects.
4
Traditionally,
Saint Vincent de Paul had dispensed mostly goods in kind. With the inter-
vention of the government, this system was replaced by vouchers good
for food and heat; the quantity as well as the variety of products was,
however, controlled. In distributing its aid, the society depended on its
traditional, and rather arbitrary, procedures: the recommendations of the
parish priest or other parish organizations and visits to the home. The
onus on the unemployed to give proof of their religious convictions,
5
the
142 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
complaints of merchants about the slowness with which they were reim-
bursed for vouchers, accusations of favouritism on the part of certain
shopkeepers who were deprived of the business of beneficiaries, as well as
the refusal of the society to provide a list of recipients so that they could
be independently verified finally required the city to take over the distri-
bution of relief.
In order to do so, the city established an unemployment commission
which laid down new procedures and imposed stricter conditions for
admissibility: to be eligible, the claimant had to be fit to work, a resident
of Montreal for at least one year (which was soon to become three years),
and continue to renew his oath that he was impoverished and unable to
obtain help from his family.
6
Following a home investigation and an
inquiry to his last employer, the claimant would be given a grant accord-
ing to the size of his family.
7
If all went well, fewer than three days would
elapse between his application and receipt of the first assistance. There-
after, he was required to go to the distribution office in his district to
receive his grant. The beneficiaries were expected to report any paid work
they might have had during the previous week. If they had earned less
than three dollars, nothing would be deducted from their allowance. Their
wives and children were required to declare 50 percent of their earnings.
8
In view of the numerous complaints of small landlords who were facing
bankruptcy, the commission also decided to subsidize rents, for which the
landlord had to make a claim.
Beginning 1 December 1933, aid was dispensed by cheque. Montreal
was one of the few Canadian cities to adopt this system, which ran
counter to usual practice. According to the common prejudices of the day,
in fact, the unemployed were considered irresponsible, as they were
unable to provide adequately for their own needs and those of their fami-
lies. They were not to be given money directly out of fear that they would
waste it on drink or frivolous purchases. But, faced with an ever-increas-
ing number of persons in need, cheques soon came to be seen as the sim-
plest and cheapest solution from an administrative point of view; cheques
avoided the need to print vouchers and eliminated the bureaucracy
required to redeem them.
9
The city of Verdun, where a number of the women interviewed lived,
established an unemployment commission in 1931. While this body
undertook the distribution of aid to English-speaking Protestants,
French- and English-speaking Catholics had to apply to Saint Vincent de
Paul, although it was the object of the same criticisms as the society in
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 143
Montreal. Starting in 1933, Verdun took charge of all relief. Spurred on by
the newly elected mayor, Hervé Ferland, the commission initially replaced
the vouchers that had been good for a predetermined list of foodstuffs
with a system of ‘‘open coupons,’’ that permitted families on relief to
choose from a broader variety of foods, and finally issued coupons that
bore only a cash value, thus allowing mothers of families freely to choose
what food they bought.
10
Faced with mounting cases of fraud, Verdun
turned to distributing cheques, adopting this system a few months before
Montreal. The city, whose scale of aid payments was one of the highest in
Quebec,
11
also paid up to 50 percent of the rent for those on relief. Ver-
dun instituted other relatively generous measures, such as distributing oil
lamps to those whose electricity had been cut off, providing furniture and
clothing, paying electricity bills, and issuing special grants to those who
were forced to move, and the like, all of which drew the unemployed to
that city from elsewhere; in 1934 alone, a thousand families left Montreal
to move to Verdun.
12
At the beginning of the Depression, the funds allocated by the federal
government primarily encouraged hiring the unemployed for municipal
and provincial public works. The Unemployment Relief Act of 1930 allo-
cated 80 percent of its funding to public works and only 20 percent to
direct relief. The extent of unemployment, however, obliged the federal
government to review its position. Between 1932 and 1936, the funds
approved for public works projects diminished, only to increase again in
1939. Altogether, direct relief absorbed 60 percent of aid expenditures on
the part of the three levels of government.
13
The fifteen families in our sample who received public assistance
received help in the form of vouchers, cheques, or in return for work ben-
efits, according to when it was that they needed support. In every case,
the steps required to obtain aid were undertaken by the man, who, as the
head of the family and breadwinner, was the only one qualified to request
it.
14
The women interviewed were not, however, offended by being
excluded in this way. On the contrary, to appear before a Saint Vincent de
Paul Society volunteer or a municipal clerk to claim benefits in fact repre-
sented a kind of degradation for most of those who had to bring them-
selves to do it. This is why the women were not particularly anxious to
assume this responsibility. As one of the informants explained, ‘‘It wasn’t
me who would have gone—I would have starved to death before going to
ask for direct relief .... He knew perfectly well that he was the head of the
family—it was up to him to go see them. It wasn’t up to me’’ (E19). In
144 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
this very special circumstance, breadwinner status was nothing to envy.
Remitting aid to the head of the family only confirmed the economic
dependence of wives. For those whose husbands drank, entrusting them
with this money, which was all the more precious because there was so lit-
tle of it, could have dramatic consequences, as was the case for one of the
women interviewed:
The dole was given in the husband’s name, not the wife’s. So that meant
that he went to collect it and if he spent it, then you had nothing. It hap-
pened a lot—he went to get relief money and when he came home, he didn’t
have a penny left.... They gave it to the man, they didn’t give it to the
woman. Maybe they didn’t have enough information... maybe if I had
gone, then I would have been the one to get it. (E22)
In fact, article 23 of the Montreal Unemployment Commission regula-
tions stipulated that ‘‘If the husband drinks or gambles away his aid
cheque, then the registrar should immediately be informed. He will see to
it a new registration is made in the spouse’s name or that of another
responsible person or Society that can replace the head of the family.’’
15
The complete list of commission regulations does not appear to have been
widely circulated, however, with the exception, of course, of those articles
dealing with conditions of admissibility and cases of fraud.
16
Only one of
the women in the sample whose husband refused to provide for her was
able to get aid benefits paid to her directly. She had been directed toward
the relief offices by the Grey Nuns, to whom she had regularly gone for
food. Her circumstance represents a good example of the transference of
‘‘charity cases’’ to governmental responsibility that was taking place at the
beginning of the Depression. In the second half of the decade, the state
would move to eliminate cases of this sort from its benefit rolls. Thus,
after 1937, couples living in common-law marriages and those incapable of
work had once more to approach the charitable organizations while
‘‘needy mothers’’ and the aged were provided with a pension, however
minimal.
17
The majority of the men had trouble accepting the loss of their status
as breadwinner and their new condition as part of the ‘‘deserving poor.’’
18
One of the few husbands who was present for part of the interview with
his wife and who had experienced this situation recalled:
When I got to be one of the ‘‘deserving poor,’’ I went to get my ticket from
Saint Vincent de Paul in the church basement, I went with my head hanging
and my eyes were as red as if I had been bawling before I left the house....
When we went on relief... when they came to the house, I lay down on the
sofa and I cried like a baby. I would say to myself, I have two strong arms,
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 145
two strong legs—(E20)
This reminiscence sums up very well the feelings that filled these men
when they had to go and apply for the dole and then appear week after
week before the same volunteers or civil servants to receive their vouchers
or their cheque. The comments of most of the women communicated
much the same feeling:
He had to haul himself down there and line up, that was humiliating. The
first few times he really hated it.... He found it humiliating to go get his
tickets to have something to eat, but if he didn’t go, we wouldn’t have had
any food. I wasn’t the one who had to go, eh? It was him. As for me, I
wouldn’t have liked to go at all, either. (E23)
More than any regulation, it was this feeling of failure and humiliation
that acted as a powerful check on any attempt to abuse the system. Even
after fifty years, a number of the women recalled this period in their lives
only reluctantly. Their memories became rather vague and only after a
certain degree of prodding were they more specific:
I don’t remember any more how long he was [out of work]. Sometimes you
forget that kind of thing. Like that—there are things you don’t want to
remember more often than [you have to], which means you forget them
quicker than when you go back to a good memory .... It lasted . . . it must
have been . . . a year. (E23)
The shame which some couples experienced because of their destitu-
tion was nevertheless mitigated by the extent of unemployment and by
the need to ensure their children’s welfare: ‘‘If you had children, you said,
we’re doing it for the children. Well, we got something out of it too, of
course. If we’d known other people who had jobs, that would have made
it worse. But everyone was the same. It wasn’t as humiliating in those
days’’ (E5). ‘‘I wasn’t up in arms, not at all. That’s what the times were
like, that’s what life was like. What could you do? Y ou had to take it. No,
the main thing was whether you could eat and pay your rent. ... No, it
didn’t make me upset’’ (E29).
Contrary to the fears of the government and those in power, the
majority of the couples resigned themselves to asking for help only as a
last resort, when their personal savings were exhausted or when any possi-
bility of a job had evaporated. ‘‘When the Depression started, we had a
little money put by—we ate up all our money’’ (E20). Some of the cou-
ples passed through periods of unemployment without going on the dole:
one of them chose to invest their savings in a plot of land; one of the
women was helped by her grandfather while a third approached her old
146 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
boss, who employed her husband as a chauffeur for several years. Finally, a
former farmer, who had come to Montreal to join his wife after several
months of separation, took advantage of the government’s ‘‘back to the
land’’ scheme rather than live off public assistance:
My husband couldn’t find any work—when he didn’t have anything left, he
had to go get a paper for food because they didn’t give money then—they
didn’t have welfare in those days. When he saw all that, he wrote to the
Quebec government... and he got the land.... That’s how we went back
to the land. (E9)
In order to ascertain that applicants were genuinely poor, volunteers
from Saint Vincent de Paul, and later civil servants specially hired by the
municipality, made home visits to investigate the beneficiaries’ declara-
tions, even though they had been made under oath. This inspection was
made in order to ensure that the family did not own any goods or furni-
ture of value, like a piano, that they could have sold, and that the home
was well kept, a way of measuring if its occupants had high moral stan-
dards and if they could manage the aid that they would be provided with.
‘‘They looked in all the rooms, to see if they were clean’’ (E5). Even if
wives were not able to claim assistance in their own names, the inspectors
thus implicitly recognized the importance of the role played by house-
wives in the proper management of family affairs.
This visual inspection was in addition to the questions applicants had
to answer to demonstrate that they were altogether without resources and
unable to obtain any help from their families. As one informant stressed,
‘‘We felt as if we were asking for charity and it was very hard’’ (E6). With
but two exceptions, all of those who were visited by an inspector were vis-
ited only once, and several were never visited at all. Despite the claims of
the public authorities, the ever-increasing numbers of the unemployed
made an investigation into every case extremely difficult. One of the
informants who had never been inspected stated that the civil servants did
not find these visits necessary: ‘‘They knew everyone was the same,’’ but
she went on to say, ‘‘Only, the men, they had to watch out not to work. If
they did some work ... if they made some money, they took it off their
cheque. If they did odd jobs, they had to work on the sly’’ (E12).
Despite the implications of these last remarks, ‘‘fraud’’ was not very
common and the amounts involved were very small indeed.
19
In general,
when a man found a job, even a temporary one, he was just happy to see
his name stricken from the relief list. Out of the fifteen families in this
sample who received public assistance, only one man worked as a watch-
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 147
man two nights a week while he was receiving benefits, which earned him
a visit from an inspector who was not, however, able to establish his guilt.
Most of the men preferred to augment their income by doing odd jobs, as
mentioned before, and which hardly provided them with the three dollars
permitted by the commission regulations. Just one of them lost a week’s
benefits because, according to his wife, he gave a haircut at home that
made him only twenty-five cents.
Even if the women interviewed were by and large not subjected to
harassment by the inspectors, documents and newspapers of the period
give evidence of a kind of pathological fear of ‘‘profiteers’’ and a fre-
quently expressed desire to carry out strict checks. The state was much
less concerned with the welfare of the families it was aiding, for whom a
meagre cheque seemed quite sufficient. As one informant pointed out, it
was only during the Second World War that the government undertook an
extensive campaign in the newspapers and on the radio to advise house-
wives on how to make the best of the fewer available resources, like cloth,
food, and soap. All of these tips would, however, have been extremely
useful during the Depression.
A few of the families in the sample received aid in the form of goods
while most came under the system of vouchers or cheques. Of the three
modes of assistance, distribution of goods in kind was the least liked, not
only because of the poor quality of the products distributed, especially
meat, and the limited quantity, but also because this method reeked of
charity and exposed their situation to the whole neighbourhood. The
voucher system, adopted thereafter, was not without its drawbacks. For
one thing, the family was labelled indigent among the dealers who sup-
plied them (the grocer, the wood or coal dealer, the milkman, and the
baker), and, for another, it limited the variety and quantity of most of the
products that could be bought.
20
‘‘Even so, when you’d put your order in
and ask for a pound of tea and a pound of coffee, they’d send you a quar-
ter of a pound. So much a person, that was it. We put the rest on the
account’’ (E20). As this recollection indicates, some families got the
quantities or the products they wanted by going into debt at the grocer’s
for the value of the supplies not covered by their vouchers. But many of
the couples were loath to go into debt, especially when out of work, as we
shall see later on in the chapter. None of the informants, however, ran
into any difficulty in exchanging their vouchers, regardless of the many
problems merchants encountered being reimbursed for them. The cheque
system, while being less conspicuous, also allowed mothers of families on
148 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
relief to buy the kinds of food they were used to eating. Whatever system
was in use, the amounts dispersed remained minimal and the women, as
we have already seen, had to move mountains to manage to feed their
families. When they received a cheque covering all expenses, they could,
however, decide to allot a greater proportion of it to food, even if it meant
going short on clothing and fuel.
In return for obtaining relief, a third of the husbands took part in pub-
lic works. These were men who lost their jobs at the beginning of the
Depression or at the end of the decade, when unemployment was being
reduced and governments were tightening up access to relief. Their hus-
bands’ participation in these projects seems to have aroused mixed feel-
ings in the informants. On the one hand, as one of them remarked, the
fact of having worked in exchange for money received constituted a kind
of pretext that allowed him to save face. ‘‘He was never, ever happy about
it, but what could you do? He did it a lot. It was always a little less of a
disgrace than the dole. At least he was working for what he got’’ (E29).
But some of the respondents also felt that these public works projects
represented a kind of exploitation: ‘‘He had to go work for nothing, for
that six bucks. A truck came to pick them up and he went to work all day,
I don’t know where, for nothing, for the six bucks a week they gave us’’
(E22). Even for those who were participating, hiring was irregular. ‘‘He
had [work] from time to time. He was working on the canal from the
aqueduct, digging the canal. I saw my husband go out for a dollar a day if
the city had something to do—on the roads, Hydro,
21
the canal. ... And
then they would cut his relief cheque’’ (E5). As this recollection suggests,
participating in public works projects did not substantially increase bene-
fits. In the early days of the Depression, men working at municipal sites
were earning forty cents an hour and were supposed to be hired on for
thirty-two hours a week, which means that, theoretically, they were mak-
ing a weekly wage of $12.80.
22
In practice, however, an ever-increasing
number of unemployed men had to share a shrinking number of jobs, so
that very few of them were able to work full-time or for long stretches.
23
Distributing these jobs also seems to have been subject to considerable
patronage and at least two women reported that their husbands had
obtained work at the municipal yards thanks to friendly relations with an
alderman.
24
The majority of the men preferred to rely on their own initia-
tive to find a job:
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 149
He grabbed onto little jobs here and there but never anything regular before
signing on with the city. He worked at R—.... That was iron, steel. As
soon as there was a little slump then the last hired were the first fired. You
understand, there wasn’t a lot of work around at the time. It was the Great
Depression. (E19)
Some of these families survived in this way for several years—on a combi-
nation of direct relief, public works, and temporary or part-time jobs: ‘‘We
lived on hope’’ (E20), one informant stated.
The families that did not experience a lengthy spell of unemployment
were able to benefit from the drop in the cost of living that characterized
the 1930s; despite cuts in wages and hours, their lot did not substantially
deteriorate. For many of these couples, however, these years also corre-
sponded with a critical stage in their family life cycle, marked by the
arrival of children and thus of new dependents, which to some degree nul-
lified the favourable effects of deflation. It was for this reason that one of
the women interviewed admitted to having experienced periods during the
thirties when she was deeply discouraged and even asserted that prices had
gone up:
Children came along, and wages went down but the cost of living went up.
In the end (around 1936), my husband was earning forty-five dollars every
two weeks. I had four children and my husband always had to have his car.
His car—that was really important.... I had a lot of things to be worried
about. What with the cuts in wages, it became very discouraging. (E2)
The economic situation of those who were living on relief during these
years, as was the case for seven of the households in the sample, can be
termed desperate. In every case, but especially for those on the dole for
many years, the family played an essential role in helping them get
through this difficult period.
Unemployment and Husband-Wife Relations
Before going on to the other forms of help that couples received in this
period, we should briefly consider the repercussions that unemployment
had on the relationship between marriage partners. In general, we may
observe that the oral narratives tend to confirm the conclusions of studies
undertaken in the United States during the 1930s, revealing that previous
relationships between husbands and wives represented the determining
factor in explaining how they got along during the Depression.
25
Indeed, for those couples whose roles were clearly defined and
accepted and where the relationship was founded on mutual respect
(which does not exclude relationships of domination), the Depression did
150 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
not have any particularly destructive effects. Comments collected on this
subject bear witness to this fact: ‘‘We both cheered each other up. In the
first place, I’m not the sort of person to criticize or put the blame on
someone else. Never, ever, ever did I criticize him, whatever happened. It
wasn’t his fault—it was the same for everybody’’ (E20). ‘‘It was like I told
you. I loved my husband so much. And he was so good. Provided I had
my husband at my side, I never lost heart. We made it through as if it were
nothing’’ (E29). Several even asserted that these dismal years, looming
over the early days of their marriage, forged stronger bonds between
themselves and their husbands. ‘‘We talked to each other more. We didn’t
have much choice. ... He was out of work, he was always around the
house, and that meant we got closer to one another like that. In the
evening, after the kids were in bed, we would play cards. ... W e would
talk and cheer each other up’’ (E25). According to another of the women,
the fact of their being barely adult and, in her case, being the product of a
poor background, also helped them get through this difficult period of
their lives: ‘‘We were both young and I came from a poor family—we were
always contented with very little’’ (E6).
The impossibility of their husbands’ carrying out their role as bread-
winner did not cause these women to start resenting or despising them.
But those who were in this situation over several years did sometimes
question the amount of effort their husbands put into finding work:
Six and a half years, that was a pretty long time. Sometimes, I would get dis-
couraged. I’d tell him, ‘‘Get out and look for a job... look in La
Presse. . . .’’ He didn’t feel like it. At last, I would nag him, ‘‘Y ou have to get
a job.’’ In those days, he would go out, he would look around.... Everyone
was saying that there wasn’t any work... but I thought that if no one took
a chance, if they didn’t go to the factories, if they didn’t show up, then....
(E25)
There were times when I would get mad and say, ‘‘It seems to me that you
aren’t looking hard enough. Y ou should be able to find something. . . .’’ But
there weren’t any jobs. It wasn’t that he wasn’t looking, it wasn’t that he
was lazy. It was because he wasn’t finding anything. (E19)
The economic dependence of women presumed by the breadwinner/
housewife model explains these women’s anxieties when faced with their
husband’s prolonged unemployment. As we have already seen, the major-
ity of them did not dream of looking for work during the Depression; in
any event, their husbands would have been against it. They had only their
husbands to turn to redress a situation that was daily becoming more and
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 151
more insupportable, thus this insistence that the men find themselves a
new job.
If the wives played an important role in preserving their husbands’ self-
respect, by avoiding criticizing them, for example, then the men very
often comforted their wives when discouragement overwhelmed them.
‘‘Sometimes, I would cry .... He would say, ‘Keep your chin up, we may
be having hard times now, but we’ll be better off by and by, you’ll see’’’
(E25). Indeed, several of the women confessed that their husbands had
been in better spirits than they were, or at least appeared to be: ‘‘He
wasn’t a man who got depressed very easily—he kept his morale up’’
(E19). It is certainly possible that some of these men had kept their feel-
ings of insecurity or desperation to themselves in order to preserve their
image as a protector able to cope with any situation. The man whose
words were quoted earlier did, furthermore, acknowledge that he fre-
quently cried in secret. It should also be noted that the men could take
advantage of a range of organizations, like the clubs for unemployed men
that existed in some of the city districts, to find emotional support.
According to one of the informants, this was why her husband remained
in good spirits: ‘‘He had a lot of friends. And he also had a club on Notre
Dame Street between Bourget and [Ste. Rose] de Lima. ... They used to
play cards in the afternoon’’ (E5). These networks of masculine solidarity
probably allowed these men to distract themselves from the problems
they were experiencing, something which their wives, constantly faced
with the realities of the Depression and the need to cope with it, were not
able to do.
In contrast, the women whose husbands were irresponsible or
drunken, or whose marital relationship was based on fear, saw their
resentment or indifference increase during this period. One of these
women, who had taken her husband to court three times for abuse and
non-support, admitted with difficulty that the Depression could be used
as an excuse for not finding work:
He had some good jobs... but after two months it was all over. [I asked
him]: ‘‘Why aren’t you working anymore?’’ [He said]: ‘‘There’s no more
work.’’ He was telling me a pack of lies. There was work all right—he’d quit
his job. So, there we were, back on relief. Some of our hard times were his
fault. (E27)
The recollections of another woman, whose husband drank, suggests
that she was completely resigned to this situation and no longer tried even
to communicate with him. Thus, she did not know exactly why he had
152 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
lost his job, or what he did with his days when he was not working any-
more, or which of the public works projects he was on: ‘‘He’d come home
and he’d say, ‘No more work for me.’ I’d never ask him why.... Some-
times he went to his brother’s place. ... There’s no way I could tell you
how he spent his time. ... I don’t know where he was working—I never
asked him where he went’’ (E22). With her entire concern the survival of
her children, she concentrated all of her energies on making sure that they
had at least the minimum of what they needed.
I managed even though I didn’t have very much. I knew what to expect—I
knew my husband! That meant you had to be prepared.... I had children
and they were my kids. Let me tell you, they didn’t deserve to have so little.
They weren’t the ones who asked to be born. I gave my whole life to them.
(E22)
Finally, those women whose husbands kept their jobs do not appear to
have been excessively worried that they might lose them: ‘‘He had such a
good job, I didn’t worry very much’’ (E8). ‘‘The whole place would have
had to shut down—he had the union and the union was very strong’’
(E15). This optimism about the security of their husbands’ jobs had its
source in the rationalizatons that the men proposed in order to reassure
their wives. This confident attitude can also be explained by the very
human tendency to believe oneself proof against disaster. In this way,
another woman, whose husband in fact did lose both his job and his busi-
ness, stated, ‘‘I was never afraid [of having to go on relief]—that hap-
pened to other people. No, I was never afraid, I never thought about
being afraid’’ (E7).
The Family
Recent work in the history of the family has stressed the enormous capac-
ity of the family to adapt to the conditions imposed by industrialization
and has particularly observed that certain elements of its internal dynamic
inherited from the rural past, rather than disappearing, have been rein-
forced. For this reason, the working-class family at the turn of the century
is seen as a work unit in which each of its members old enough to do so
make a contribution to the collective budget. Fr o m this perspective, child
labour does not appear so much an aberration of industrialized society as a
transference into an urban context of a long-tested survival strategy.
Among these strategies, family networks appear as ‘‘the cornerstone of
help and social assistance in times of crisis before the state took over these
functions.’’
26
The support that could be contributed by the family and
especially by the immediate family (parents, brothers and sisters) did not
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 153
occur merely during depressions—it was more a matter of habit, made
necessary by inadequate incomes, and one that could only become more
significant when looking at an economic period as particularly difficult as
the 1930s.
27
For this sort of mutual support to be readily available, it was at least
convenient, though not essential, if the family lived nearby. This is why
urban families had the tendency to settle in the same neighbourhoods. In
Andrée Fortin’s words, ‘‘the neighbourhood is enclosed in the meshes of
the family network.’’
28
These connections were strengthened by the exo-
dus from the countryside and as new families were established and main-
tained in the face of frequent changes of address. When you first came to
the city, you looked for housing in the same neighbourhood, on the same
street, as your relatives. These would, moreover, often provide shelter for
a period of time, easing the transition from country to city and fostering
the establishment of the rural family in the neighbourhood.
29
When you
got married or moved, you chose generally to remain in the same parish or
neighbourhood. At the worst, you could go and live in a nearby district,
even if it meant dying of boredom, as one informant recounted: ‘‘I was
bored stiff in Pointe Saint Charles. I was used to Saint Henri—I knew
everybody.... That’s why I didn’t want to stay there. I didn’t know any-
one. [Well], there was my brother—his wife came from the Pointe’’
(E29). As this comment reveals, the family collected in the same area
according to the female connections; but if the bride’s parents were still
living in the country or were no longer alive, then the couple usually went
to live near the husband’s parents. In any event, the pair frequently came
from the same neighbourhood, which allowed them to live close to both
their families and to maintain close ties to each of them:
I lived next door to my mother—there was a passage into the courtyard and
I lived in a little place right next to it there.... When I was stuck and if I
needed to know something, I could go to my mother’s and she would
explain it to me, or else my mother-in-law, she lived across the street. (E12)
This visiting back and forth, sometimes daily in the early days of the mar-
riage, mostly involved the mother and her daughters. ‘‘Well, my mother
didn’t live very far away .... I would go over there a lot but I came back
home in the evenings’’ (E29). These visits, which provided both advice
and company, also allowed the young bride to brush up her household
skills as she often discovered certain shortcomings in that area.
Few of the couples tried to distance themselves from their immediate
families when they were first married by going to live in a neighbourhood
154 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
distant from their original one. Those who did so rather rapidly came to
regret their decision, as was the case for one informant, originally from
Verdun, who moved to Villeray after her wedding:
We were young and we didn’t want to live near the family—when you’re
young, you’re cocky. After I had my first baby, it wasn’t so funny—then
after the second one, it got serious! Take the streetcar to Christophe
Colomb, then change at Place d’Armes, then take the number 25... it went
on and on!... And then I didn’t have a washing machine at the time.
Mama did my wash. My husband worked on Saturdays. That meant my sis-
ters used to come on Saturday... to get me and the children and they
would carry the suitcase full of dirty laundry. But when I went back home
again, I went with my husband—and we had a child each plus the suitcase
full of clean clothes, plus of course the bag full of diapers. That was why we
decided to come back to Côte Saint Paul. It was better. (E6)
Another woman, who was living with her mother-in-law when she was
first married, decided to move a distance away because of conflicts with
her that were likely to explode. The Depression and her husband’s unem-
ployment were a harsh reminder to her that this distance could also
involve a number of inconveniences:
I remember one Sunday, he wanted to go see his mother and we didn’t even
have the twenty-five cents for the street car. So we walked—from Rachel all
the way to St. Henri. Let me tell you, that was quite a walk with the baby in
the carriage. It was quite a hike. And remember, the streetcars weren’t
expensive—four tickets for a quarter at the time—but you had to be careful
with your money. (E19)
Even if their choice did not work out as well as it might have, given the
circumstances, it does illustrate a desire for autonomy on the part of cer-
tain couples. Their attitude is, however, far from representative of that of
the majority.
Several couples were the first of their family to migrate to Montreal
and thus they found themselves rather more isolated, although they did
have cousins or aunts to whom they could turn. Moreover, distance did
not prevent them from keeping up the relationship with their families and
it was not unusual for the couple in the early years of their marriage to
take the train every weekend to go visit their family. As the family grew
and it became more difficult and more costly to make the trip, these visits
became less frequent, but the wives and their children continued to spend
part of the summer with their mothers or sisters in the country. The men,
who did not as yet get paid vacations, stayed by themselves in the city and
went to join their wives on Friday nights.
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 155
The family still living in the country was not always in a position to
help those who were living in the city, even when it came to gifts of farm
produce. In the first place, getting it to the city posed certain problems: it
might be impossible to send perishable or fragile items to the family in the
city, not to mention that the cost of doing so could obviate any savings
such gifts might represent. Some vegetables, like potatoes and onions,
hold up relatively well for long periods of time, but the tight quarters in
which working-class families lived often prevented them from finding suf-
ficient and adequate space to store them. One informant, who on the
advice of her doctor went back to live for a few years in the village where
she was born, could get help there from her father and uncles, who pro-
vided her with milk, vegetables, meat, and maple products. But when she
went back to the city, the aid came to an end: ‘‘They couldn’t send the
stuff to the city. As long as we lived close by, they sent it to us’’ (E17), she
explained. Another, who had spent several years on relief, observed:
Oh, they helped me a lot because they brought me lots of vegetables from
the country. I had a sister... who was married to a farmer and that meant
she could bring me lots of vegetables. She would do that in the summer, but
in the winter!... Winter was the worst because we had to pay for the heat,
too. (E19)
These contributions of food were generally limited to the good weather.
Putting up the city family for several weeks in the summertime, as well as
gifts of clothing, were also among the ways that the rural family most fre-
quently helped out.
The proximity of urban families made it easier to exchange favours,
which could also be more varied: babysitting during childbirth or in case
of illness and swapping or giving clothing were probably the most com-
mon, but we note very frequent references to the sharing of certain
household tools, like sewing or washing machines, or the use of the tele-
phone. Although the women did most of their housework by themselves,
sharing certain appliances meant that chores were sometimes exchanged
or done communally. A mother-in-law might do her daughter-in-law ’s
wash while the younger woman might do the ironing for both families;
some mothers did their daughters’ laundry if they did not have a machine;
a number of women went to sew at their mother’s or mother-in-law ’s
house while one used her godmother’s machine. Although exceptional,
the experience of one of the informants, whose husband’s family owned a
bakery, is worth noting:
156 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
On Sunday evenings, we would go and have supper at his mother’s. I would
take my laundry and go wash it on Mondays along with his mother. Every
Monday, I would go and help her .... W e did the laundry. As soon as it was
dry, we both took it down and ironed it.... Then on T uesday . . . I’d go
help her do her housework.... I would spend the whole day helping her.
She had twelve kids, and none of them married young, that’s what made so
much work for her .... On Wednesdays, we went to the bakery and washed
the showcases and all the glass in them and the shop windows and put back
the shelves—all of that.... Then we’d go back home for lunch. After that,
in the afternoon, sometimes she had mending to do. I did all kinds of
things—sometimes I went out and ran errands. I did all that. I had my own
little baby and still I went to help her out. (E21)
This informant was compensated for the help she provided her mother-in-
law, both with the housework and in keeping up the bakery, by gifts of
food: ‘‘We got all our sugar from them, and our flour, eggs, butter, short-
ening. Not to speak of the desserts—my father-in-law was always sending
me cakes.’’ (E21)
Generally speaking, food was given less frequently than clothing, and
was not considered the same sort of thing. Swapping or receiving cloth-
ing, especially children’s clothes, made a certain economic sense, even if it
often involved at the same time a degree of charity; in fact, children grow
faster than they can wear out their clothes and to throw them out while
they were still wearable seemed like wastefulness. This is why two of the
informants who experienced no particular economic difficulty (one of
them, in fact, was quite well off) nevertheless were given clothing for their
children. More often, however, it was the better off members of the fam-
ily, or the mothers with fewer children, who gave to the poorer ones or
those with more children, though of course the two circumstances often
went hand in hand. Donations of food only came about in the case of
extreme poverty and those who received them felt dependent on their
families: ‘‘It was my mother who had me under her wing. Mama would
send over food to eat—we didn’t have anything to eat—he was out of
work’’ (E27). Another remarked, ‘‘I didn’t like it very much. If I had
been on my own, that’s OK, but there was my husband and my little boy’’
(E9).
Within the family circle, direct relief vouchers were also exchanged:
[Both my parents and his parents] really liked tea and coffee with sugar—
they used a lot more than I did. So I would give them my coupons.... Like
butter . . . I would buy my butter and pass it on to my mother, and she would
buy me fruit for the children. ... M y mother-in-law, she would come over for
vouchers for coffee and then she would buy some meat for me. (E25)
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 157
Loans and gifts of money among family members did not occur very
often and primarily were intended to deal with exceptional circumstances.
In every case, it was the informant’s father who was asked for or who
offered his aid. Two of the women borrowed money to settle urgent
debts or to get through a tight spot caused by the husband’s illness, while
two others received sums of money ‘‘as a present,’’ in one case to avoid
the bailiffs. Finally, one woman lived for several years on the weekly
allowance from her grandfather, who had raised her.
Like donations of food, loans or gifts of money were more difficult to
accept because they were a last recourse that exposed not merely extreme
poverty but also the husband’s failure to provide for his family’s needs.
The couple felt it humiliating to be on the receiving end of this kind of
favour that went beyond the range of ordinary exchanges. The ideal of
financial autonomy, a measure of respectability, could even impel them to
hide their financial problems from other members of the family. Thus, a
woman stated that her father could have helped them avoid the loss of
their house, had he known about the foreclosure: ‘‘[My father told me]:
‘If he’d called me, I would have given him the money and you wouldn’t
have lost your house.’ But my husband was too embarrassed to ask for the
money ’’ (E17). Another couple hid the fact that they were on relief from
their friends and relations, which led to a rather embarrassing situation:
when the informant’s mother was visiting, the milkman employed by
Saint Vincent de Paul to deliver milk to those on its rolls arrived, shout-
ing, ‘‘It’s Saint Vincent de Paul, madame!’’ Rather than tell her mother the
truth, she told her that he had come to the wrong address: ‘‘I was too
proud, you know’’ (E20), she concluded.
Some of the couples could not get material help from their parents.
‘‘My parents had no more money than we did, far from it. When my
father died and then my mother, they didn’t even have a penny of insur-
ance. My husband and my brothers and sisters paid for the funerals’’
(E29). ‘‘Y ou couldn’t feel sorry for yourself. Y ou didn’t complain in those
days. Me complain? Who was I going to go crying to? I had no mother
and no father. My parents were gone. I had nobody left’’ (E22). In fact, in
one case, the young couple saved the husband’s father from bankruptcy
by buying back, for ‘‘one dollar and other considerations,’’ the last house
that this man, a contractor, had succeeded in retaining. For the next two
years, they took over the mortgage as well as working on the electricity
and plumbing, after which they sold it back to the original owner on the
same terms.
158 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Shelter, either temporary or long-term, represented another form of
quite considerable assistance. As we saw in chapter 3, eighteen of the cou-
ples in the sample lived with one or the other of their families, generally
that of the groom, for periods ranging from a few months to two years.
The husband’s losing his job or falling ill, as well as a temporary marital
separation, forced four of the women to go back to live with their parents
for a number of months. In return, though more often after the end of
the Depression, almost half of the women took into their homes members
of their family or their husband’s family (parents and parents-in-law,
brothers, sisters, brothers- and sisters-in-law, sometimes with their chil-
dren, nephews, and nieces), either free of charge or in return for board
which was often token.
In addition to the help extended in all these areas, there were other
kinds of assistance, which could take various forms: a handyman brother-
in-law who could help install a new electric motor on an old manual wash-
ing machine, another who found a temporary job for his sister’s husband,
a third who provided free firewood, an aunt who paid her nephews’ high
school fees, a father-in-law who was happy to take advantage of his job at
a biscuit factory to bring some home to his grandchildren, a father who let
his daughter live rent-free in one of his flats. These kinds of assistance
seem to have increased tenfold because of the Depression, which also
encouraged an increase in barter. Thus, one of the informants who was
especially broke was able to swap a lace tablecloth for the sewing machine
she desperately needed. In another case, tenants traded a dining-room set
and a sewing machine for the rent they could not pay. Another woman
worked in exchange for rent for the landlord of her parents who were liv-
ing on relief and in whose house she had gone back to live.
Quite as much as the state, the family made a large contribution to the
support of couples in trouble by finding them clothing, food, or even a
roof over their heads. In this connection, the stories and commentaries
are very eloquent:
We would go over to my mother’s, sometimes for weeks at a time.... If we
didn’t go, she’d send someone over to us.... She’d say, ‘‘Come over, I want
some company.’’ Then I’d do a lot of little things while we were there...
like sewing, knitting. I made a lot of things when I was at my mother’s. . . .
We were lucky to always have my mother-in-law.... If we didn’t have
enough to eat, we would go and eat at her house, and that was that.... My
mother-in-law would come for my little girl.... Sometimes she’d keep her
for three or four days. (E19)
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 159
In fact, relief payments were so small that it was impossible to live on
them for extended periods, at least not without going seriously into debt.
After they had exhausted all of their resources and whatever tactics they
could use to reduce their expenses, these couples turned to their families,
most often their mothers. It was these who took up again the responsibil-
ity of sheltering, feeding, and maintaining their children. The domestic
labour of these women, which had begun to diminish as their children left
home, increased once more as a result of the Depression and its unem-
ployment.
The Neighbours
As we have seen, the neighbourhood was most often indistinguishable
from the relatives, and ‘‘neighbourly visits’’ in reality meant dropping in
on the parents. Indeed, it appears that ‘‘one is not close to the neigh-
bours,’’
30
who might be viewed with a certain distrust. Many of the infor-
mants in fact stated that they didn’t bother about their neighbours or that
they had only limited contact with them: ‘‘We knew all of them and spoke
to all of them, but we didn’t visit back and forth’’ (E19). ‘‘ I didn’t have
time when I was young to go over to the neighbours’’ (E23). ‘‘I was
always the type of person who got along with everyone, but I wasn’t
someone to go by the neighbours ... and, you know, gossip’’ (E30). ‘‘I
didn’t bother with the neighbours. I stayed home in peace and did my
work. . . . Anyway, the way I look at it, our money problems, what’s going
on in our life, are our business. Other people don’t have to know about
them’’ (E22).
These remarks indicate that while it was generally desirable to ‘‘get
along’’ with the neighbours, relations with them were limited to greetings
on the street or a ‘‘bit of chat’’ on the balcony in the summertime. This
attitude reflects the women’s concern to keep their private lives private, in
order to camouflage their problems and their poverty; it carried with it a
consequent deep isolation. Speaking of her mother-in-law, who took in
washing and went out to work by the day (as a cleaning woman), one
woman remarked, ‘‘Nobody knew. Everybody kept everything hidden in
those days’’ (E16). Another woman said of her mother, ‘‘My mother’s
poverty never showed’’ (E2). Being broke was hidden as much as possible,
as it was seen as shameful and synonymous with failure, and the attempt
was made to project an image of an economically independent family,
which was the symbol of success in social terms. Women were not only
reluctant to open their doors to their neighbours, but some of them even
refrained from enlisting their help when they needed it, on the grounds
160 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
that the request could be seen as evidence of an inability to shoulder
domestic responsibilities.
These various considerations might lead to the conclusion that a gen-
uine barrier was erected between unrelated families in the same district or
even the same street. In fact, comments about relations with the neigh-
bours are often contradictory and coloured with considerable ambiguity.
The reality is much more complicated and a more detailed analysis of the
oral narratives shows that in fact, the neighbours did nevertheless occupy
a place in the network of mutual aid. ‘‘Not interference, but not indiffer-
ence’’ it would seem is the key to good neighbourly relations:
If we were in a fix, they would help us out, but we didn’t get involved in
each other’s business. (E16)
It’s like a small town here—they were good people—no one had any money,
but we helped each other out.... But we did keep to ourselves.... But in
the street then, if someone was in trouble, we would have helped them out.
It’s not like that today. But that was not because we used to visit one
another. I would go to Madame M. upstairs but not to the others, no.
(E28)
If it was going to be acceptable, the help the neighbours provided must
not imply any direct intrusion in the recipient’s private life and had to
take place on neutral ground, like the street or the balcony. The examples
of favours that were exchanged reflect this code, to which most of the
women interviewed appear to have adhered. Using a neighbour’s phone
was a noteworthy exception, but the women were quick to point out that
they did not abuse the privilege and that ‘‘as soon as I was off the phone, I
went right back upstairs to my house’’ (E20). As well, two of the infor-
mants learned to sew at their neighbours’, which required joint sewing
sessions and therefore several visits. But by and large, these exchanged
favours did not involve going to one another’s homes. A neighbour
might, for example, take care of the children when their mother was giv-
ing birth, or was sick, or needed to go to the doctor’s or the store. The
ways in which they might help each other out were not, however, con-
fined to just these. One informant, for example, frequently did the shop-
ping for a neighbour who had difficulty getting about; another would go
to the market with one of her neighbours so they could share the cost of
the taxi on the way back. Another took care of her landlord’s dog and
chickens when he was away; in exchange, he provided her with fruit and
took her and her children on excursions in his car on Sundays. One
neighbour who worked in a laundry brought an informant’s washing to
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 161
his place of work. One neighbour did a respondent’s washing during her
first couple of deliveries; another could also depend on a neighbour to do
part of her ironing. This recollection is particularly interesting, since it
describes very clearly how the whole undertaking would happen without
the privacy of either party being violated:
There was a lady who lived next door—when I would hang out the shirts,
sometimes a dozen of them, she would say, ‘‘Send the shirts over here and
I’ll iron them for you.... I only have girls, I don’t have any men around.’’
Sometimes, I’d put them in a pillowcase and send them over to her by the
clothesline and when she was finished, she put them on hangers and send
them back the same way. (E30)
Thus, neighbours helped each other in a variety of ways. If there is a
reluctance to recognize this right away, it is not only due to pride, but also
because the women who regularly provided aid and support or with whom
a continuing relationship was established to some degree changed their
status—they were no longer considered neighbours but friends or mem-
bers of the family. Several of the informants who received help from older
neighbours identified them with their own mothers: ‘‘She was like a
mother to me’’ (E6), ‘‘As if I were her own daughter’’ (E7) and, ‘‘I
thought of her as the mother I no longer had’’ (E22). The following per-
sonal narrative is interesting because it shows how, after denying the exis-
tence of any form of mutual aid, the informant goes on to describe a
series of exchanges with a neighbour whom she was careful to identify as a
friend:
We didn’t help each other out much to speak of. Well, we did look after each
other ’s kids. My neighbour had three and I had four. When she had some-
where she had to go, I would look after her kids. We were together all the
time. You see, my husband worked nights in the taxi and her husband
worked days—they would come over to my place—they didn’t have a radio
and they’d come to listen to the programs with me. We’d play cards
together—we used to play three-handed. Her husband, he’d rock my baby
the whole night long. She’d put hers to bed before coming over—we were
next door to each other on the same floor. She didn’t have a washing
machine and I did. When she wanted to do her wash, her husband would
come and get my machine—we were on the same landing and she would do
her laundry.... She’d come to see me and if I had some dirty clothes, she’d
take them and do them because I would lend my machine. That was her, not
any of the others. . . . But she was my very good, close friend. (E29)
The informants who had a close relationship with their neighbours are,
however, an exception and generally lived far from their relatives or had
lost their parents, especially their mothers. Those who were living at the
162 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
centre of a close family network rarely developed bonds of friendship
with their neighbours, although this does not mean that they never helped
each other out. On the subject of babysitting, for example, one of the
respondents declared, ‘‘That didn’t happen in those days. No, because
everyone had such large families, they were so big that you wouldn’t dare
get a babysitter. If they did need to be looked after, it would more likely
be by one of the children in the house’’ (E27). Another remarked, ‘‘There
weren’t any sitters except for my mother-in-law who would take care of
my kids because she was used to us. Aside from that, I never had a sitter.
Oh, no!’’ (E23).
Whether or not they became friends, the help neighbours gave each
other took the form of an exchange of material aid and always excluded
loans of money. In general, the help was intended to assist in the carrying
out of household tasks: taking care of the children, lending the telephone
or other household appliances, sharing the shopping, and so on. There
certainly were exceptions: one very poor informant, for example,
depended on her landlord to supply her with coal; another, who had suf-
fered a fire, could turn to a neighbour for temporary shelter;
31
yet another
helped out the neighbours by illegally reconnecting their electric meter.
But more often than not, it was to the immediate family that they turned
when they needed money, food, clothing, fuel, or lodging.
Debt
The 1920s marked the beginning of delayed payments (the installment
plan), a tactic newly conceived to encourage consumption at a time when
increases in productivity had not been translated into raises in wages.
32
In
Canada as in the United States, specialized financial institutions appeared
that advanced capital to retailers so that they could sell on credit. The
department stores followed close behind, offering their own credit sys-
tems, while other corporations, like the Central Finance Corporation
(CFC), created in 1928, made loans directly to consumers.
33
These new
sales techniques were added to the possibilities for credit offered by the
small neighbourhood merchants. Working-class families, however, still
viewed using credit and going into debt, especially just to satisfy a desire
for consumer goods, with fear. The following statement sums up very well
the feelings of the majority of the informants on this subject:
We were never in debt. I never bought anything on credit because I told
myself that if I didn’t have the money today, I wasn’t going to have it
tomorrow. Y ou mustn’t go into debt. If we had, I don’t know how we could
have paid it. In our day, we always thought that maybe tomorrow we
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 163
wouldn’t have a paycheque. There wasn’t anything to fall back on, you
know. Y ou couldn’t count on anybody. Y ou could only count on yourselves.
That’s why we often had to go without things we would have liked to have.
But listen—we couldn’t buy it, we didn’t have it and that was that. (E17)
Therefore, the absence of social policies that would compensate for the
loss of income meant that these women and their husbands were acutely
aware of their financial limitations. Employment insecurity, especially in
the 1930s, intensified their fear of being unable to repay their debts. As
was mentioned previously, one couple chose to sell their restaurant rather
than ask their suppliers for credit, even though such credit is common
business practice. Another couple preferred to sell an insurance policy
when the husband was on strike for five weeks in the 1930s rather than
take a loan on the policy as the company agent suggested. At least half the
couples went without certain things rather than buy them on credit:
We never went into debt. No, we never ran a bill in any grocery store. Well,
my husband bought something on time one year during the Depression—
he bought a suit. He paid fourteen dollars for it. We couldn’t pay the whole
thing. But that was the only time. Don’t talk to me about being in debt. It
makes me feel like someone is creeping up on me. He didn’t like debts, and
I didn’t either—we never went into debt. We may not have had so much,
but what we had was ours. (E23)
The women had other reasons as well to justify their refusal to resort
to credit. One of them, for example, stated that she was both too embar-
rassed and too proud to put their groceries ‘‘on the tab,’’ a remark that
reveals that credit was closely associated with poverty. Another remarked
that her husband was against it (as did a number of others) and that the
use of credit encouraged merchants to cheat their customers as well as
fostering impulse buying or the substitution of more extravagant alterna-
tives:
My husband never would do that. I felt the same way, because it was well
known that most [of the shopkeepers] would rather you ran a bill. Y ou had
to check on them though, because I’m telling you, they would cheat you. If
you wanted something, and they didn’t have it, then you would take some-
thing more expensive, while if you were paying cash, then you would go
somewhere else and find what it was you wanted. And then my husband’s
opinion was that if you were paying cash, then you were living on the
money you had while otherwise sometimes you would get carried away and
buy more than you could afford. (E29)
But once again, what was done was often far from what was enunciated
as a principle. Thus several informants, after having declared that they had
164 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
never gone into debt, admitted that they would buy their groceries ‘‘on
the tab,’’ that they would spread out the payments for their deliveries,
that they would buy furniture and clothing on the installment plan, that
they had sometimes been late with their rent or that they had borrowed
against an insurance policy. It must be said that advertising and certain
merchants encouraged the use of credit by playing with words in order to
get around the consumer’s fears. This is why one respondent, who always
bought her furniture by paying half down and the half in three months
could state, ‘‘That didn’t become credit for ninety days. They didn’t call
that a debt—they called it a current account. And I always managed to
pay the whole thing in ninety days’’ (E25). In her mind, as in that of many
of the others, having debts meant paying interest, which was not charged
if one succeeded in paying the whole sum off by the due date. Generally,
however, it did cost more to buy on extended payments, which allowed
the retailer to cover the cost of providing this service.
34
Those who did use credit did so most of the time to buy furniture and
groceries and did so, especially in the 1940s, when their financial situation
had improved and they were able to rely on a more regular cash income.
During the Depression, a few women bought clothing on credit from
pedlars, some others owed money to their landlords or their doctors, and
just one went into debt to buy an automobile. The sums they owed were
tiny compared to present-day standards—they rarely exceeded one or two
weeks’ wages. In fact, it can be said that credit was not as yet a part of the
consumption habits of the majority of these households which would
rather confine what they thought of buying to what their means allowed.
F
or the first time in the course of the 1930s, the state was obligated
to contribute directly to the family economy of an impressive num-
ber of families, particularly of the working class. This contribution, how-
ever critical, was obviously insufficient and could not as yet be placed in
the very precise perspective of the redistribution of the collective wealth
that was the case for various social programs after the Second World War.
In principle, the state extended aid only to those unemployed who were
wholly without other recourse and who could not expect help from their
families; in practice, these families contributed in a range of ways to meet
the needs that the meagre relief allowances paid to the unemployed could
not cover. The Depression thus made it more common and more frequent
State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit 165
to turn to those traditional resources of mutual aid that rested on the
household labour of the women of the previous generation. Through their
labour, these women made a contribution just as essential as that of the
state to maintaining a minimum standard of living for those on assistance.
To put it another way, all of the women within the family circle, and not
just the wives of the men who were out of work, absorbed the impact of
the Depression.
166 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Conclusion
T
he interviews collected in the course of this study provide support
for the hypotheses of other researchers, and particularly have per-
mitted us to revise our view of the women of this generation by revealing,
for example, the lack of training in household tasks given to girls, the
importance of paid work for ‘‘housewives,’’ and the extent to which con-
traceptives were employed at a time when the Catholic Church was firmly
in control of Quebec society.
The oral narratives also highlight the complexities of certain phenom-
ena and the virtual impossibility of grasping their outlines with the aid of
only written sources, regardless of their reputation for superior objectiv-
ity. Among other things, they have demonstrated beyond all doubt the
necessity, previously expressed in various works, to turn to criteria other
than the occupation of the principal breadwinner to establish the family
living standard; the domestic and paid labour of women and children, but
also the size of the family, moonlighting on the husband’s part, and the
help contributed by relatives appeared as equally determining factors in
developing an accurate picture of living conditions for these families.
In this regard especially, it can be stated that, at least during the 1930s,
the standard of living for a number of the families in the sample was more
alike than different, regardless of what sort of job the principal breadwin-
ner held. The Great Depression probably contributed to this phe-
nomenon as it brought with it a reduction in the clientele of the small
shopkeepers, when they did not lose their trade altogether, as well as
unemployment not only for unskilled labourers but also for certain skilled
workers, particularly in construction, and for white-collar workers as well.
Note to the Conclusion is on p. 212.
167
As has already been stressed, the Depression coincided also with a critical
stage in the life cycle of these families, one marked by the arrival of chil-
dren; the presence of numerous dependents in the better off families
sometimes contributed to reducing their standard of living to one
approaching that of poorer but smaller families or those in which the
mother was making a financial contribution.
Another factor enters into the balance to explain why the gap between
the families was quite narrow during this period: the thrifty practices of
those who enjoyed higher incomes. In fact, even women who had enough
money at their disposal did not buy more than what was absolutely neces-
sary and would produce the most for their money, which permitted them
not only to put a little aside, but also meant that their families’ living stan-
dards were limited for a longer or shorter period of time. After the war,
however, these savings allowed some of the couples pay for their chil-
dren’s education or to buy a house, which differentiated them clearly
from the others: ‘‘We were always very careful with money,’’ one of the
women stated, whose husband bought a barber shop in 1926 and a house
in 1953. ‘‘I only got one dress a year, and I made it myself. I made all the
children’s clothes. I didn’t find this hard, because everyone was doing the
same thing. ... People today don’t believe in saving their pennies any-
more’’ (E4). On the other hand, especially among the families of unskilled
workers, neither women’s paid labour nor a smaller number of children
was sufficient to generate a surplus that could be invested in education or
property.
The economic mobility of certain families is explained in part by
women’s domestic and paid labour and by their careful management of
the family finances, something which few studies have taken into
account;
1
changes in the principal breadwinner’s employment (either after
a promotion or additional training) are another significant variable. This
phenomenon, relatively frequent according to the oral narratives, high-
lights the arbitrary nature of social status assignments when they are
applied to an individual or a family without taking into account their evo-
lution over time.
Otherwise, the analysis of the recollections of the women interviewed
demonstrates that, at least in their eyes, the Great Depression did not
have a particularly catastrophic effect on their work in the home, or, for
that matter, on their standard of living. Several factors explain this appar-
ently paradoxical phenomenon. On the one hand, it is necessary to recall
that even before these households were affected by job losses or salary
168 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
cuts, they were already dependent on the contribution made by women’s
domestic and paid labour and on other strategies without necessarily
being assured of achieving a minimum level of comfort and well-being. Of
course, the relative poverty in which the majority of these families lived,
even before the Depression intervened, meant that they were obliged to
cut back on essential expenses rather than just the inessentials. But at the
same time, this impoverishment had accustomed them to live frugally and
certainly contributed to softening the impact of the Depression. For
these women, the conditions brought about by unemployment were not
in such stark contrast to their previous quality of life. Moreover, even if,
at the moment the Depression began, a number of these couples had been
married only a short time and none had as yet experienced unemploy-
ment, most of the women interviewed had grown up in poor families
where unemployment was a constant reality. Faced with poverty from
childhood, they had learned to come to terms with it and were familiar
with the strategies required to deal with it. The oral narratives of women
who had lived through the Depression when they were older might have
provided other indicators of its consequences on their domestic work and
brought to light other strategies for coping with it (like sending their chil-
dren to work, for example), but on the grounds of their age alone, it is
impossible, even through the techniques of oral history, to access their
experience.
How the informants judged the impact of the Depression on their
work and on how they lived goes back to their previous experience of life.
The fact that the Depression coincided with the beginning of the married
life of the majority of these women also plays an important role. At this
stage, it was still possible for couples to put off having children in order to
lessen their financial obligations and few of them had as yet accumulated
any possessions that the Depression might jeopardize. Still on the thresh-
old of their adult lives, they could entertain hopes for better days, some-
thing which surely helped them bear up under the difficulties they were
encountering. That, at least, is what emerges from the set of narratives
collected here. If this period was particularly striking in our collective his-
tory, it certainly left its mark on each individual destiny, though, it may be
said, in less specific and predictable ways. All of the women interviewed
recalled this period very clearly as well as the extent of unemployment,
but closer questioning revealed rather more measured comments regard-
ing the personal consequences of the Depression. Summing up the general
Conclusion 169
sentiment, one of the women, asked if the Depression was a particularly
traumatic period in her life, answered:
No. As I said, I don’t know if it was because we were young... but I can’t
say that it left its mark on us. We always had hope that things would
change. I think that if the Depression were to happen today, we would panic
more than in those days because we weren’t so spoiled. That’s how it was in
those days. We got along with very little, because we had to, to tell the
truth. Those who lost a lot were the ones who had money and who lost it
all. There were some who took their own lives—it was serious. But when
you don’t have any money then you don’t worry about it, eh? (E29)
170 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Appendices
Appendix A: Interview Guide
Part One: General Information
A. Identification
1. Last name, first name
2. Y ear and place of birth
3. Number of siblings, place in birth order, other persons living in home
4. Year first arrived in Montreal; district lived in, reason for moving to Montreal
and subsequent moves; return to the countryside
5. Father ’s occupation; mother’s occupation before marriage
B. Education
1. Age on entering school
2. Years completed
3. Type of school attended (country, neighbourhood, convent, private or public
school)
4. Training received (especially in domestic science)
5. Siblings’education
6. Age on school leaving; reasons for leaving
7. View of the experience; would she have liked to continue?
C. Work Experience before Marriage
Paid work
1. Age at first employment
2. Was the decision voluntary or made by parent; agreement to leave school
3. How first job obtained: contacts, classified ads, etc.
4. Other members of the family working at the same place
5. Kind of work, kind of company
171
6. Situation of workplace; close to or distant from home
7. Work performed
8. Hours, days of work, general work conditions
9. Why this work was chosen; other possibilities
10. Training: who provided it; for how long?
11. Wages: amount, how paid (by the hour, by the piece) how spent
12. Did status in family change?
13. Unionized premises? participation in union? in strikes? causes of strikes; set-
tlements? causes of non-participation?
14. Relationships with other workmates; any lasting friendships? leisure activities
and excursions with workmates?
15. Length of employment; reason for leaving
16. Feelings about work experience
Note: points 4-16 to be repeated for each different job
Domestic work
1. Tasks performed; training; frequency
2. Voluntary help or not
3. Who else helped out (siblings, father, etc.)? what did they do? how often?
4. Feelings about domestic work
Chapter 5: Note: These questions should be repeated in regard to three possibili-
ties: domestic work while still at school, while still at work, between the end of school
and marriage.
Part T wo: Dating and Marriage
A. Dating
1. Dating before meeting husband
2. Meeting husband: where? under what circumstances? why chosen?
3. Age at which partners met
4. Origin of partner: area, neighbourhood, family, number of siblings, father’s and
mother ’s occupation; years of schooling
5. Occupation of husband when first met: kind of job, company, duties, wages
6. Length of engagement; reasons for long engagement: unemployment, family
reasons, etc.
7. Desire to enter a convent? If not, why not?
8. Premarital sexual experience; out-of-wedlock pregnancies; abortion; child
placed in orphanage; ‘‘shotgun wedding’’
9. Economic effects of marriage on birth families
10. Parental approval?
172 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
B. Marriage
1. Age at marriage for both partners; if the couple was married after 1929, aware-
ness of economic conditions
2. What kind of wedding? clothes worn? honeymoon?
3. Matrimonialregime
4. Husband’s occupation at marriage; wages
5. Occupation of informant; cessation of paid work; why? willing or not to quit.
In cases where she continued to work: why? husband’s attitude?
6. Financial situation of the couple: savings, debts, trousseau; furniture and
domestic appliances; whether bought or received; description
7. Aid offered by parents or others when couple set up housekeeping; what form
did this take—presents, financial gifts, other?
Part Three: Family Economy during the Thirties
A. Housing
1. First residence with parents of one of the pair; why? for how long? what space
did couple occupy? Feelings about the experience
2. First house and subsequent housing: location (close to or distant from family;
why?) who was responsible for finding the housing? how much rent?
3. Physical description of the premises: number of rooms and how used, condi-
tion of the premises (cleanliness, dilapidation, presence of vermin); amenities:
hot and cold running water, electricity, gas, kind of heating, toilets, bathroom,
number of sinks
4. Number of years spent in each lodging; reason for leaving
5. Expectation of owning a home: if not, why not; if yes, after how many years of
marriage did the project materialize? lost due to Depression?
B. Motherhood, Contraception, Care and Raising of Children
1. Discussion between partners regarding number of children desired?
2. Number of children; sex, years of birth; miscarriages; deaths of infants or chil-
dren; number and ages of children at home between 1929 and 1939
3. Place of childbirth; who performed the delivery?; cost
4. Aid received following childbirth: who provided it? for how long? was it free or
paid? who took care of the children for subsequent childbirths?
5. Nursing experience with first child; if no experience, who helped and advised
(mother, doctor, nurse, government pamphlets, etc.)? was the advice welcome?
6. Birth control: level of awareness of contraceptive methods; learnt from whom?
were any of the methods used? if yes, which? if no, why not? were the attempts
successful? awareness of and opinion of the Church’s position on this matter
7. Influence of the economic climate on the number and spacing of children
Appendices 173
8. Help by the father in the care and raising of children: baths, bottles, diaper-
changing, babysitting, discipline, games, help with homework
9. Husband’s unemployment: did he concern himself with the children more?
10. Work outside the home: who looked after the children (free or paid babysitter);
feelings about leaving child with a sitter
11. Feelings about the experience of motherhood
Note: other points in this third part cover one of the three following possibilities and
were not raised in every interview:
1. Wives whose husbands were never out of work
2. Wives whose husbands experienced brief periods of unemployment or short
weeks but did not have to go on relief
3. Wives whose husbands experienced prolonged periods of unemployment that
obliged the couple to go on relief
C. Income and Source
Couples who did not experience unemployment
1. Husband’s employment during the Depression: hours and work schedule;
impact on housework and married life; wages; management of salary; who
decided how to spend money: on food? furniture? clothing? rent? other
expenses?; who controlled the purse strings?
2. Insufficient wages to live on: among the following, which were used when
money was short?
a Children’s working: age at first job; how many worked between 1929 and
1939?; how much of the wage was given to the parents? how was the money
used? agreement to work? feelings about their children’s contribution
b Mother ’s work in the home: during what period? why? room used; payment;
how was money used? effect on housework, child care, on the use of space;
husband’s opinion; length of employment
c Mother ’s work outside the home: during what period? why? kind of work?
hours of work? wages and how used; reactions of husband and family; child
care, effect on domestic tasks; help from husband
d Renting rooms and taking in boarders: parents or strangers; why?; in what
period? for how long? effect on housework; amount charged; how was the
money used? advantages and disadvantages of having roomers
e Debt: who was owed? how much? how often were debts incurred? for what?
how were payments made? credit possibilities
f Outside help: from whom?; in what form? how often? feeling about this kind
of aid
g Other stopgaps: which?
174 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
3. Situations of financial difficulty when wives did not work: why
Couples experiencing unemployment
1. Loss of husband’s job: what year? for how long? reactions of the couple faced
with the situation; steps taken to find work; results; support provided; conse-
quences on the couple’s relationship
2. Means of survival: savings; parental aid; wife’s paid employment (refer to ques-
tions in previous section); going into debt
3. Wife’s paid work during husband’s unemployment: sufficient wages to live on?;
reactions of husband and wife to this role reversal; involvement of husband in
domestic chores and child care
4. Other stopgaps: outside help, from whom? moving house; where? differences
in rent; description of new housing; sale of furniture; how much obtained?;
reductions in expenditures; which? (food, clothing, health care); cuts in ser-
vices (gas, electricity); impact on family life, on housework
Couples living on direct relief
1. Steps taken to obtain aid; what happened?; inspection visits; aid received
(money, vouchers, provisions); conditions imposed; relations with those in
charge of applying the rules; being checked up on
2. Direct relief; amount received (by the week); what was done to live on the
sums provided
3. Payment in kind: provisions distributed; quantities; did the provisions accord
with family’s habitual eating patterns?
4. Vouchers: limitations imposed by this method of distribution
5. Going back to the land; reasons for choosing this solution; year of departure;
previous experience with living on the land; effect on domestic work
6. Feelings about help received
D. Housework: T ools Tasks, Organization, and Distribution
For all situations:
1. Tools of work: household articles and appliances on marriage or acquired dur-
ing the 1930s: washing machine, stove (gas, coal, wood, electric), refrigerator
or icebox, dishes, pots and pans in sufficient quantities, telephone, radio, iron
and ironing board, toaster, rugs, floor covering, sewing machine, furnace (oil,
gas, coal, electric)
2. Amenities: see description under housing
3. Organization of work: description of a typical day, a typical week; same routine
as mother?
4. Description of chores: washing, housework, ironing, cooking, length of time;
assessment
5. Purchases: who made them?; what was bought (food, clothing); delivery ser-
vice; who made purchases of food, furniture, clothing?
Appendices 175
6. Meals: products bought; made at home?; grown in garden? menus; source of
recipes used; examples of recipes; lack of food: how dealt with (cutting por-
tions, skipping meals)
7. Clothing: which were bought; where?; which made at home? from new or used
fabric? received from whom?; knitting, crochet, other needlework
8. Sharing of tasks: husband, children, domestic help; chores done by these per-
sons; how often?; tasks done outside the home (laundry, for example): how
often? for how long? cost?; tasks undertaken in common with other women:
which ones?; how often?; tasks which took the most time, the least time; feel-
ings about tasks.
Couples having experienced a period of unemployment; add the following questions:
1. Supplementary work required by lack of money; what sort?; tasks most
affected; concrete effects on housework, laundry, meals, purchases
2. Husband’s help while out of work: estimation of his presence in the home;
absence of husband; how did he spend his days?
B. Community Life
1. Leisure activities: movies, outings, all-night parties, visits from family; effect of
Depression on leisure activities
2. Mutual aid—parents, neighbours: what kind?; favours exchanged; concrete
examples; impact of the Depression on mutual help
3. Awareness of the extent of the Depression; where information obtained (radio,
newspapers, personal effects) feelings about the Depression; acquaintance with
people on relief; help provided; what sort; for how long?
4. Participation in or awareness of unemployment demonstrations in Montreal.
5. Awareness of the back-to-the-land campaign; contemplated as a solution?
acquaintance with anyone who went
6. Opinion at the time of the measures taken by governments to end the crisis.
7. Church discourse on the subject of the Depression
8. Other recollections of the era and influence of the period on later life.
176 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Appendix B: Thumbnail Biographies of the Women Interviewed
(in chronological order of interview)
Note: These biographies have been attached in order to situate the quotations drawn
from the interviews within the larger context of the life course of the informants and
thus restore their full sense. In order to preserve confidentiality, names of places, com-
panies, or any other details that might aid identification of the informants have been
omitted.
Informant E1
Born in rural Quebec in 1904; elder of two girls; father a farmer and logger;
mother died when informant was two years old; raised by her grandparents, sepa-
rately from her sister. At thirteen, she left school and came to live in Montreal
with them. For sixteen years she worked in different factories until her marriage in
1933 to a factory worker. Her marriage was delayed for three years because her
fiancé was out of work. She continued to work for the first year of her marriage as
her husband was working short weeks. Unable to have a child, she adopted a
daughter in 1939.
Informant E2
Born in rural Ontario in 1905; came to the Montreal region in 1908; second girl in
a family of eight children; father a foreman, mother let rooms. At twelve, she left
school and worked as a domestic until she was eighteen, then in a factory until her
marriage in 1926 to an automobile mechanic, a widower with no children. Mother
of eight children (nine pregnancies), born between 1927 and 1941. Her husband
worked short weeks for several years. In the 1940s, she worked part time and also
took in lodgers.
Informant E3
Born in rural Quebec in 1899; second child and first girl of a family of eleven;
father a farmer. At twelve, she left school to help her mother at home until she
married a farmer-logger in 1919. The couple arrived in Montreal in 1925. Widowed
in 1930, with three children to support, she opened a little restaurant-convenience
store; she did dressmaking and took care of relatives to support herself until her
remarriage in 1933 to a construction worker, a widower and father of five. He lost
his job and the couple decided to go back to the country to live on a piece of land
bought with the husband’s savings, where they were to live for thirty years. Four
other children were born in this marriage, the last in 1939.
Informant E4
Born in rural Quebec in 1903; last of a family of seven living children (thirteen
births); father a farmer; raised in part by her sister who was fifteen years her
senior. At fourteen, she left school to assist her ailing mother until she married a
barber in 1923 who took her to live in Montreal. In 1926, he bought his own bar-
177
ber shop. Mother of eight children (nine pregnancies) born between 1924 and
1940.
Informant E5
Born in Montreal in 1907; eldest of a family of six surviving children (fourteen
pregnancies, nine births); father a carpenter, later a contractor; mother a former
teacher. At the age of fourteen, she quit school and worked as a saleswoman until
her marriage to a factory worker in 1926. During the Depression, her husband lost
his job and for six years the family was obliged to live on direct relief, public
works employment, or other temporary jobs. At this time, she took in boarders
and did sewing at home. Mother of two (five pregnancies) born in 1927 and 1929.
Informant E6
Born in an urban area outside Montreal in 1914; came to Verdun in 1917; eldest of
a family of eight (nine pregnancies); father and mother both weavers. At thirteen,
she left school and worked as a saleswoman and then as an office clerk until she
‘‘had’’ to get married in 1932. For the first three years of her marriage, her hus-
band worked only part-time and the family had to live for some weeks on direct
relief. Mother of three children (eight pregnancies) born between 1932 and 1952.
Informant E7
Born in the United States in 1910; came to Maisonneuve in 1914; younger of two
children (five pregnancies) but only girl; her father, a machinist in the United
States, opened a restaurant-convenience store when he moved to Maisonneuve.
When she was eleven, she left school for health reasons and helped out at her
father ’s store until she was sixteen. She worked as a dressmaker until her marriage
to a shopkeeper in 1929. She managed the business while her husband worked
another job. In 1933, they had to sell up to avoid bankruptcy. Mother of one son
(seven pregnancies), born in 1930.
Informant E8
Born in Montreal in 1902; next to last of a family of seven; father a printer. At
twelve, she left school and worked as a wrapper in a department store and then
worked in a factory until she married a factory worker in 1923. He worked short
weeks during the Depression. The couple had no children.
Informant E9
Born in Maisonneuve in 1904; next to last of a family of five, but the only girl;
father a mason. At fifteen, she left school and went to work as a nurse’s aide until
she went to live with her family who were moving to the country because of her
mother ’s illness. She married a farmer in 1920 and went back to live in Montreal in
1925, where her husband joined her a few months later. Between 1926 and 1934,
she worked as a nurse’s aide to support her husband, herself, and her only son,
born the year she returned to Montreal. In 1934, the family went back to live on a
178 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
farm, due to lack of work; she returned to the Montreal area in 1952. The couple
lived for some time on relief before going to live in a region of colonization.
Informant E10
Born in rural Quebec in 1909; came to Maisonneuve in 1914; last of a family of six
(second daughter). At seventeen, she finished her commercial course and stayed at
home to help her ailing mother for the next two years before going to work in an
office and then as a milliner until her marriage to a laboratory technician in 1932.
Mother of five, born between 1934 and 1940.
Informant E11
Born in rural Quebec in 1901; fifth child of a family of nine; father a barber. Came
to Montreal in 1916; whole family employed in a cotton mill; she worked there
until her marriage to a machinist in the same factory in 1929. Mother of three,
born between 1930 and 1933.
Informant E12
Born in Verdun in 1912; fourth in a family of nine (third girl); father a butcher.
She left school at fifteen to help her mother at home until she was seventeen. She
then held several different jobs as an apprentice seamstress until her marriage to a
bricklayer in 1929. Mother of seven born between 1929 and 1940. Her husband
lost his job in 1933 and remained unemployed throughout the Depression. The
family lived on public works employment and relief until 1940, when she decided
to go to work in a munitions factory.
Informant E13
Born in Montreal in 1912; third in a family of four (second girl); her father, a car-
penter, died when she was eight; her mother worked as a dressmaker and put her
children to board. At fourteen, she left school, worked for a few weeks in a shirt
factory and then as a domestic until she ‘‘had’’ to get married in 1932 to a white-
collar worker. Mother of five (seven pregnancies) born between 1932 and 1949.
She took in a boarder and sewed at home during the 1930s.
Informant E14
Born in rural Quebec in 1904; second in a family of three (second girl); orphaned
at the age of twelve, she and her two sisters were raised by her grandparents who
owned a door and window factory. She left school at fifteen to help her grand-
mother until she married a grocer’s son in 1928. She came to Montreal in 1930
with her husband, who worked for a while in construction, then became unem-
ployed. Mother of three born between 1930 and 1934, she did embroidery for vari-
ous companies at home and took in a boarder. Her grandfather’s help allowed the
family to avoid going on relief.
Appendices 179
Informant E15
Born in Montreal in 1909; fourth in a family of six (second girl); father a furrier.
She left school at fifteen to work as a stenotypist until she married a fellow
employee in 1931. Mother of three boys (eight pregnancies), born between 1933
and 1941. Her husband worked short weeks during the Depression.
Informant E16
Born in the United States in 1909; came to Montreal at the age of six months fol-
lowing the death of her father; youngest of a family of three; her mother worked
in textile and shoe factories before her remarriage. The family then went to live in
a region of colonization until returning to Montreal when she was thirteen. She
left school at fourteen and worked in a hat factory until her marriage to a
butcher ’s clerk in 1932. Mother of three (four pregnancies), born between 1933
and 1938. After her marriage she did various jobs at home (sewing, laundry) and
worked as a housekeeper.
Informant E17
Born in rural Quebec in 1899; next to last of a family of six (first girl); mother
died when informant was sixteen; father a farmer and farm machinery salesman.
She left school at fourteen and apprenticed as a seamstress for a year and filled her
mother ’s place until she married a farmer’s son in 1919. She came to Montreal in
1923, where her husband became a deliveryman. Mother of ten children born
between 1921 and 1940, she took in sewing at home for thirty years, beginning in
1935.
Informant E18
Born in rural Quebec in 1913; second child and first girl in a family of ten; father a
painter-decorator, mother a housekeeper and factory worker. When she was
eleven, she left school to take care of her younger brothers and sisters. She came
to Montreal when she was fifteen and worked as a domestic until she married a
factory worker in 1930. Mother of seven children born between 1931 and 1957,
she took in washing and sewing and worked as a housekeeper to support her fam-
ily.
Informant E19
Born in rural Quebec in 1912; third child (second girl) in a family of eleven; father
a carpenter. She finished her high school diploma at the age of seventeen and
taught for a year before marrying a clerk-salesman in 1931 and went to live in
Montreal. Mother of four born between 1932 and 1951. Her husband lost his job
in 1933 and they lived on relief until 1936.
180 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Informant E20
Born in Montreal in 1904; fifth child (third daughter) of a family of eleven; father
a machinist. Her family left Montreal when she was very young and she spent the
greater part of her childhood in Ontario. Her family then moved to a rural area
south of Montreal. When she was twelve, she left school to help her mother at
home, then, at fourteen, she went to work in a local woollen mill until she married
a lathe operator in 1927. Mother of two daughters, born in 1928 and 1930; her
husband lost his job in 1930 and the family was obliged to go on relief for about
six months.
Informant E21
Born in rural Quebec in 1905; second daughter in a family of fifteen children;
father a farmer and blacksmith. She left school at fourteen to work in a stocking
factory until she married a clerk in 1929 and they came to live in Montreal.
Mother of eight children born between 1930 and 1946; during the war she worked
with her husband making figures for Christmas crèches.
Informant E22
Born in rural Quebec in 1906; last in a family of ten; father a farmer. When she
was seventeen, she finished her normal school course and taught for two years
before filling in for her deceased mother for her unmarried brothers and her
father. She married a plasterer and carpenter in 1930 and came to live in Montreal.
Mother of eleven (sixteen pregnancies) born between 1931 and 1947, she did
needlework and sewing at home during the early years of her marriage. Her hus-
band lost his job in 1937 and the family was obliged to go on relief until they
returned to the country in the early 1940s.
Informant E23
Born in rural Quebec in 1906; sixth child of a family of nine (third girl); father an
‘‘engineer ’’ in the sawmills. She left school at eleven and stayed at home until she
came to Montreal when she was thirteen, where she went to live with her sister.
The following year, she went to work in a ribbon factory until she married a fac-
tory worker in 1925. Mother of five children born between 1932 and 1945 (seven
pregnancies). Her husband lost his job for a year and the family had to go on
relief.
Informant E24
Born in Montreal in 1905; fourth child and first girl in a family of seven; father a
baker. She left school when she was fourteen to learn the trade of chocolate-mak-
ing, which she engaged in until she married a barber in 1932. Mother of five born
between 1932 and 1945 (seven pregnancies). The family was on relief for six
months during the Depression.
Appendices 181
Informant E25
Born in Montreal in 1916; third child and second girl in a family of six (twelve
pregnancies); father a clerk. When she was twelve, she left school to take care of
her younger brothers as her father’s illness obliged her mother to go to work.
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, she worked in the same factory as her
mother until she married a factory worker in 1934. Mother of seven children born
between 1935 and 1954; her husband lost his job in 1936 and the family lived on
relief and public works employment until 1941.
Informant E26
Born in Montreal in 1908; an adopted and only child; father a day labourer. She
left school at thirteen and became a millinery apprentice and then a saleswoman
until her marriage to a clerk in 1927. After her marriage she continued to work
part time now and then. Mother of two (three pregnancies) born in 1928 and
1930. Her husband lost his job and the couple tried without success to open a lit-
tle restaurant before going on relief for a couple of years.
Informant E27
Born in Ontario in 1907, she came to Montreal when she was four; third child and
first girl in a family of nine; father a day labourer. At fifteen, she left school and
became a domestic and then a saleswoman until she married an unemployed man
in 1927. Mother of five (eleven pregnancies) born between 1928 and 1944. Because
of the husband’s chronic unemployment, the family always had difficulty support-
ing itself.
Informant E28
Born in Montreal in 1908; eldest of a family of eight; father a carpenter; on the
death of her grandmother, who had taken the place of the informant’s mother
who had died the year before, the family was dispersed and she went to work, first
as a domestic and then as a clerk, before marrying a cigar-maker in 1932. Mother
of two sons (four pregnancies) born in 1934 and 1942. After her marriage, she
worked for four years while her husband was unemployed.
Informant E29
Born in Verdun in 1908; last child in a family of six; father a painter. She left
school at the age of twelve to help her mother at home before going to work in a
cigarette factory until she married a widower, father of one child, in 1929. Mother
of five (six pregnancies), born between 1930 and 1941. Her husband was obliged
by the Depression to sell his taxis and the family lived on public works employ-
ment and other odd jobs for about four years.
182 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Informant E30
Born in Montreal in 1897; fifth child and third daughter in a family of eleven;
father a day labourer. She left school at twelve to help her mother at home until
the age of nineteen. She then went to work in various factories until she married a
cigar-maker, a widowed father of six, in 1927. Mother of one daughter (three preg-
nancies), born in 1929. During the Depression, her husband experienced short
weeks.
Appendices 183
Appendix C: Scale of Winter and Summer Rations
Approved by the City of Montreal (c. 1935)
Food Fuel ClothingTotal Rent Total Total
Number (weekly) (weekly) (weekly) (weekly) (monthly) (monthly) (yearly)
Winter Rations
1 1.65 0.00 0.15 1.80 6.00 13.80 165.06
2 2.50 0.90 0.30 3.70 7.00 23.03 276.40
3 3.15 1.15 0.45 4.75 7.50 28.08 337.00
4 4.15 1.15 0.60 5.90 8.00 33.57 402.80
5 5.05 1.35 0.75 7.15 8.50 39.48 473.80
6 5.80 1.40 0.90 8.10 9.00 44.10 529.20
7 6.60 1.50 1.05 9.15 9.50 49.15 589.80
8 7.35 1.55 1.20 10.10 10.00 53.77 645.20
9 8.00 1.80 1.35 11.15 11.00 59.32 711.80
10 8.65 1.85 1.50 12.00 12.00 64.00 768.00
11 9.25 2.05 1.65 12.95 12.00 68.12 817.40
12 9.85 2.05 1.80 13.70 12.00 71.37 856.40
13 10.45 2.25 1.95 14.65 12.00 75.48 905.80
Summer Rations
1 1.65 0.00 0.15 1.80 6.00 13.80 165.60
2 2.50 0.60 0.30 3.40 7.00 21.73 260.80
3 3.15 0.70 0.45 4.30 7.50 26.13 313.60
4 4.15 0.70 0.60 5.45 8.00 31.62 379.50
5 5.05 0.75 0.75 6.55 8.50 36.88 442.60
6 5.80 0.75 0.90 7.45 9.00 41.28 495.40
7 6.60 0.75 1.05 8.40 9.50 45.90 540.80
8 7.35 0.80 1.20 9.35 10.00 50.52 606.30
9 8.00 0.80 1.35 10.15 11.00 54.98 659.80
10 8.65 0.80 1.50 10.95 12.00 59.45 713.40
11 9.25 0.85 1.65 11.75 12.00 62.92 755.10
12 9.85 0.85 1.80 12.50 12.00 66.17 794.10
13 10.45 0.85 1.95 13.25 12.00 69.42 833.10
Note: In 1933, the amount allocated for a family of five was $670 a year for rent, food,
clothing, fuel, and lighting.
Source: Montreal Unemployment Commission, Renseignements à l’usage des chômeurs
nécessiteux et des propriétaires, n.d. 10-11.
184
Appendix D: Furnishings Bought by an Informant
upon Her Marriage in 1932
Furnishing Price
Kitchen
maple furniture including
1 table
4 chairs
1buffet $78.50
Dining Room
Gibbord-style polished walnut dining-room
set with mahogany inlays including:
1 table
1 armchair and 5 sidechairs
1 china cupboard
1buffet $129.00
Living Room
Chesterfield-brand suite
in beige bouclé:
1 three-seat sofa
1 low-back armchair
1 high-back armchair $145.00
Bedroom
American walnut suite:
1 bed
1 night table
1 bureau with mirror
1 dressing table with mirror $135.00
Carpets
Synthetic fibres
living room $26.00
dining room $31.50
bedroom $27.50
Occasional table $1.00
Total $573.50
185
Appendix E: Floor Plans of Working-Class Flats
Source: Réal Bélanger, George S. Mooney et Pierre Boucher, Les Vieux Logements de
Montréal, Montréal, Commission métropolitaine de Montréal, 1938
186
Appendix F: Percentage of Montreal Households
Owning V arious Equipment 1931-1958
Equipment 19311941 19481951 1958
b
Heating
By stove — 51.5 — 54.8 55.5
Wood and coal — 92.3 — 48.0 34.4
Cooking Fuel
Wood and coal — 17.7 50.9
b
8.2 24.1
Gas and electric — 80.6 39.8
b
87.4 68.6
Bathtub — 83.9 — 86.7 73.7
Hot and cold water — — — 62.8 71.6
Refrigeration
Mechanical — 25.1 38.061.1 —
Icebox —65.0 —36.2 89.7
None —5.1 —2.3 2.2
Washer
Electric ——89.0
b
— 87.1
Manual ——8.7
b
— 0.3
Gas ——2.1
b
— 0.4
Sewing Machine — — — 74.0
a
75.5
Electric ———24.2
a
—
Treadle ———75.7
a
—
Radio — 85.5 — 96.1 96.6
T elevision — — — — 79.4
T elephone 10.5
b
44.9 — 77.1 80.0
Vacuum cleaner — 28.2 41.0 43.6 49.1
Automobile — 15.7 — 24.2 46.7
a In 1950.
b Percentages for all Quebec.
Source: Canada, Recensement du Canada 1931, vol. 1: 1417; Recensement du
Canada 1941, vol. 5: 50-85; Recensement du Canada 1951, vol. 3:
20-3 to 40-2; Canada, BFS, Appareils de chauffage, appareils de TSF
et téléphones dans les maisons canadiennes, août 1947 (Ottawa, 1948)
3; Canada, BFS, Accessoires ménagers, novembre 1948. Appareils de
cuisson, lessiveuses, réfrigérateurs, aspirateurs et radios dans les
maisons canadiennes 3-12; Canada BFS, Appareils ménagers appareils
de chauffage, machines à coudre, juin 1950, 10-11 and 18; Canada,
BF S, Household Facilities and Equipment, May 1958 (Ottawa, 1959)
Quebec, ASQ 1939, 396.
187
Appendix G: Household Appliances and
Other Articles Used by Housewives
The illustrations on the following pages are from A Shopper ’s View of Canada Past.
Pages from Eaton’s Catalogue, 1886-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1969).
Eaton’s Catalogue, Spring/Summer 1923, p. 221
188
Eaton’s Catalogue, Spring/Summer 1929, p. 241
Appendices 189
Eaton’s Catalogue, Fall/Winter 1926-1927, p. 267
190 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Eaton’s Catalogue, Fall/Winter 1926-1927, p. 285
Appendices 191
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Notes
Introduction
1 ‘‘More than a million umemployed in December: the slump as great as the ‘30s.’’ Le
Devoir 9 Jan. 1982: 1; ‘‘Poverty indicators higher than in the 1930s,’’ La Press 23 Jan.
1982: B1; ‘‘1,241,000 Canadians looking for work: highest unemployment since the
Great Depression,’’ La Presse 5 June 1982: B1.
2 Some of the more recent works on this period include Andrée Lévesque, Virage à gauche
interdit. Les communistes, les socialistes, et leurs ennemis au Québec 1929-1939 (Montreal:
Boréal Express, 1984); Allen Seager and John H. Thompson, Canada 1922-1939: Decades
of Discord (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1985); James Struthers, No Fault of Their
Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914-1941 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1983). For a more extensive bibliography of this period, see: Centre pop-
ulaire de documentation, ed., Le Choc du passé. Les années trente et les sans-travail.
3 La T urlutte des années dures, dir. Richard Boutet and Pascal Gélinas, Vent d’Est, 1983.
4 Barry Broadfoot: T en Lost Years: 1929-1939 (Toronto: Doubleday, 1973)
5 See, for example; Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship
between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); Louise A. Tilly and Joan W . Scott, Les Femmes, le
Travail et la Famille (Paris: Rivages, 1987); Bettina Bradbury, ‘‘L’économie familiale et la
travail dans une ville en voie d’industrialisation: Montréal dans les années 1870,’’
Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d’école: Femmes, famille, et éducation dans l’histoire de
Québec, ed. Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1983)
287-318 and ‘‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among Montreal
Families,’’ Labour/Le T ravail 14 (1984): 9-48.
Chapter 1: Domestic Labour and Economic Crisis
1 M.C. Urquhart and K.A.H. Buckley, Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan,
Cambridge University Press, 1971) 303; Michiel Horn, ‘‘The Great Depression: Past and
Present,’’ Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 11.1 (1976): 45;
Canada, Report of the Royal Commission into Relations between the Dominion and the
Provinces I (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1939): 149-50; Struthers, 215; Michiel Horn. The
Dirty Thirties: Canadians in the Great Depression (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1972) 10.
193
2 C.H. Goldenberg, Finances municipales au Canada Study prepared for the Royal Com-
mission of Inquiry into Relations between the Dominion and the Provinces (Ottawa:
King’s Printer, 1939) 68-71; Montreal: Rapport de la Commission d’enquête du chômage
(Montreal, 1937); Horn, ‘‘Great Depression,’’ 43.
3 L.C. Marsh. Canadians in and out of Work: a Survey of Economic Classes and Their Rela-
tion to the Labor Market. McGill Social Research Series 9 (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1940) 345-46. These figures reflect the situation at the worst moment of the
Depression, the winter of 1932-33. According to the distribution established by Marsh,
only 2.6 percent of the unemployed receiving aid were of the professional class and 10.1
percent were clerks, 54.9 percent were unskilled labourers, 16.9 percent semi-skilled
labourers, and 15.5 percent were skilled labourers.
4 Montreal Board of Trade and City Improvement League. A Report on Housing and Slum
Clearance for Montreal (1935) 6. David Lewis and F.R . Scott. Un Canada Nouveau
(Montreal: Valiquette, 1944) 88, cited in Lévesque, Virage 22. Between 1929 and 1933, the
average industrial wage in Montreal dropped from $1022 to $777 a year (Marsh 198-99).
5 See Marsh, 193. Appendix C reproduces the table of summer and winter rations
approved by the Montreal Unemployment Relief Commission.
6 Réal Bélanger, George S. Mooney and Pierre Boucher, Les Vieux Logements de Montréal
(Montreal: Commission métropolitaine de Montréal, département d’urbanisme et de
recherche, 1938); A. E. Grauer, Hygiène publique, a study prepared for the Royal Com-
mission of Inquiry into Relations between the Dominion and the Provinces, 5 (Ottawa:
King’s Printer, 1939): 73.
7 Terry Copp, ‘‘The Health of the People: Montreal in the Depression Years,’’ Norman
Bethune: son époque et son message, ed. A.E. Sheppard and Andrée Lévesque (Ottawa:
Association canadienne d’hygiène publique, 1982) 129; Lévesque, Virage 11.
8 L.C. Marsh, A. Grant Fleming and C.F. Blackler, Health and Unemployment: Some Stud-
ies of Their Relationships, McGill Social Research Series 7 (Toronto: Oxford University
Press, 1938) 155-58, 163-64, 213-15.
9 Terry Copp, ‘‘The Montreal Working Class in Prosperity and Depression,’’ Canadian
Issues 1 (1975) n.p.
10 Bradbury, ‘‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders,’’ 9-48.
11 A number of writers observe that sexuality is an element in spousal psychological and
emotional support. Veronica Strong-Boag clarifies the point, in my view a very important
one: ‘‘Naturally, not all sexual exchange falls into the category of labour. T wo critical dis-
tinctions between work and non-work for housewives would surely be reciprocity of plea-
sure and absence of coercion of any kind,’’ ‘‘Keeping House in God’s Country: Canadian
W o m e n at W ork in the Home,’’ On the Job: Confronting the Labor Process in Canada, ed.
Craig Heron and Robert Story (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986) n. 49,
150.
12 This discussion has been developed in a number of publications since the early 1970s. For
a synthesis of these works, see, among others, Nathalie Sokoloff, Between Money and
Love: The Dialectics of Women’s Home and Market Work (New York: Praeger, 1980);
Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and
Louise Vandelac, et al. Du travail et de l’amour, Les dessous de la production domestique
(Montreal: Éditions Saint-Martin, 1985).
13 Monique Haicault, ‘‘Sexes, salaire, famille,’’ in La famille en question, Annales, Université
Toulouse-Le Mirail XVI, 4, 1980; Katherine Blunden, Le Travail et la Vertu. Femmes au
194 Notes to pages 5-9
Foyer: une mystification de la Révolution industrielle (Paris: Payot, 1982) cited in Vandelac
et al., ‘‘Problématique,’’ 23-68.
14 Heidi Hartmann, ‘‘Capitalism, Patriarchy and Jobs Segregation by Sex,’’ Capitalist Patri-
archy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1979) 206-48.
15 Vandelac, et al., ‘‘Problématique,’’ 28.
16 Catherine Hall, ‘‘The History of the Housewife,’’ The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen
Malos (London: Allison and Busby, 1980) 45-71; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History
of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Diane Bélisle et Yolande Pinard,
‘‘De l’ouvrage des femmes québécoises,’’ Vandelac, et al., 99-133.
17 It was not, moreover, until the 1950s that the majority of Montreal households had the
benefit of an electric stove and refrigerator. Appendix F presents a table of the percent-
ages of Montreal homes possessing various appliances between 1931 and 1958.
18 Bélanger et al. 6-14.
19 Diane Bélisle, ‘‘Une histoire de ménagères,’’ Vandelac et al. 85-90; Glenna Matthews, Just
a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New Y ork: Oxford University
Press, 1987) 145-71.
20 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘‘Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The
American Housewife Between the Wars,’’ Decades of Discontent: The Women’s Move-
ment, 1920-1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1987) 179.
21 Marie Lavigne, ‘‘Réflexions féministes autour la fertilité des Quebecoises,’’ Fahmy-Eid
and Dumont 323.
22 Denyse Baillargeon, ‘‘Les gardes de la Métropolitain, les Gouttes de lait, et l’Assistance
maternelle: l’encadrement de la maternité au Québec entre les deux guerres,’’ Bulletin du
RCHTQ 47-48, 16.2 (1990): 19-45.
23 Andrée Lévesque, La Norme et les Déviantes: Des femmes au Québec pendant l’entre-deux-
guerres (Montréal: Éditions du remue-menage, 1989).
24 Terry Copp, Classe ouvrière et pauvreté: Les conditions de vie des travailleurs montréalais,
1897-1929 (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1978) 108.
25 See Katherine Blunden, in Vandelac et al., 23-68.
26 Elizabeth Roberts, ‘‘Women’s Strategies, 1890-1940,’’ Labour and Love: Women’s Experi-
ence of Home and Family 1840-1940, ed. Jane Lewis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 223.
27 Marie Lavigne and Jennifer Stoddard, ‘‘Ouvrières et travailleuses montréalaises,
1900-1940,’’ Travailleuses et féministes: Les femmes dans la société québécoise, ed. Marie
Lavigne and Y olande Pinard (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1983) 102.
28 Tamara Hareven, ‘‘Les grands thèmes de l’histoire de la famille aux États-Unis,’’ Revue
d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 39.2 (1985): 185-209.
29 Examples of this sort are not lacking. Andrée Léveseque’s La Norme et les Déviantes
presents an excellent synthesis of the normative discourse formulated by the Quebec
elites regarding motherhood and female sexuality. See also Sylvie Van de Casteele-
Schweitzer and Danièle Voldman, ‘‘Les sources orales pour l’histoire des femmes,’’ Une
histoire des femmes est-elle possible? ed. Michelle Perrot (Paris: Rivages, 1984) 60-70.
30 Interviews undertaken in France have thus demonstrated that people remember rather
little about events such as the Popular Front, the rise of Nazism, or the Resistance but
have retained memories of their impact on daily life. Philippe Joutard, Ces voix que nous
viennent du passé (Paris: Hachette, 1983) 174-75; 179, 181.
Notes to pages 10-14 195
31 On this question, see Paul Thompson, ‘‘Problems of Method in Oral History,’’ Oral His-
tory 1.4 (n.d.) 5-12.
32 Hareven, Family Time 374; Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, ‘‘Mémoire et récits de vie,’’ Pénélope,
Mémoires de femmes 12 (1985): 51; Alessandro Portelli, ‘‘The Peculiarities of Oral His-
tory,’’ History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 102.
33 In this connection, see Portelli 102; Hareven, Family Time 376-77.
34 Regarding specifically female memory and the way it is structured, see Bertaux-Wiame
47-54 and Anne-Marie Devreaux, ‘‘La mémoire n’a pas de sexe,’’ Pénélope 55-68;
Michelle Perrot, Histoire orale et histoire des femmes, (Bulletin de l’Institut d’histoire du
temps présent 3, 1982) 47-50.
35 In the course of their research into the economic behaviour of working Quebec families
during the 1950s, Fortin and Tremblay also noted that only women could provide them
with the details necessary to their research. [Gérard Fortin and Marc-Adélard T remblay, Les
Comportements économiques de la famille salariée du Québec (Quebec: Laval University
P r e s s , 1964).]
36 A wing of the Communist party which attempted to mobilize women around questions
of housing and feeding the unemployed. For an historical review of this League, see Luc
Chartrand, ‘‘Au temps où les femmes prenaient les tramways d’assaut,’’ Châtelaine 19.10
(1978): 56-57, 76, 79.
37 On the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, see Casteele-Schweitzer and
Voldman 60-70; Joutard 196 ff.
38 Joutard201.
39 SeeAppendix A.
40 On this issue, see Hareven, Family Time 371.
41 Daniel Bertaux, ‘‘L ’approche biographique, sa validité méthodologique, ses potentialités,’’
Cahiers internationaux de sociologie. Histoires de vie et vie sociale 69 (1980): 205.
42 J. Poirier, S. Clapier-Valadon and P . Raybaut, Les Récits de vie. Théorie et pratique (Paris:
PUF, 1983) 144; Also: J.-C. Bouvier, H.-P Bremondy, P. Joutard, G. Mathieu, J.-N.
Pelen, Tradition orale et identité culturelle, problèmes et méthodes (Marseille: Éditions
CNRS, 1980) 67, cited in Joutard 227.
43 The class affiliation of the respondents posed a particular problem because women of
that generation were generally not involved in the market economy following marriage.
We had to confine ourselves to the husband’s class, which made it difficult to make class
a specific criterion from the beginning. This is why place of residence prevailed as a crite-
rion since it has a general effect on the way of life and constitutes an excellent indicator
of the standard of living. Isabelle Bertaux uses the expression ‘‘women of ordinary cir-
cumstances’’ precisely because it is imprecise. According to Bertaux, the term ‘‘refers . . .
to the difficulty of classifying women who ply different trades in the course of their lives
and often do so in a discontinuous fashion.’’ [Isabelle Bertaux, ‘‘Mobilisations féminines
et trajectoires familiales: une démarche ethnosociologique,’’ Les Récits de vie. Théorie,
méthode et trajectoires types, ed. Danièle Desmarais and Paul Grell (Montreal: Éditions
Saint-Martin, 1986) n.5 98.]
44 To be precise, the majority of the respondents lived during this decade in St. Henri,
Hochelaga, Maisonneuve, Rosemont, and in Verdun, which was included not only
because of its proximity to Montreal and its primarily working-class character, but also
because a number of the respondents who lived there at the beginning of the Depression
also lived in St. Henri, or Pointe Saint Charles before, during, or after the Depression.
196 Notes to pages 15-19
Moreover, Verdun forms part of a larger subsection (called the Southwest) inside of
which the border between the two municipalities is largely absent in determining the nat-
ural ‘‘territory’’ of these women and their families.
45 Bertaux-Wiame ‘‘Mémoire,’’ 50.
Chapter 2: From Birth to Marriage
1 Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, Les Femmes au tournant du siècle, 1880-1940: Ages de
la vie, maternité et quotidien. (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture,
1989) 58.
2 The mother of one of the informants was a forewoman in a shirt factory; another
returned to the job as a weaver she had before she was married; three others had several
jobs in the garment trade or in shoe factories and one of these also worked as a domestic.
3 It appears to be especially difficult to establish the numbers of live and stillbirths. When
informants were among the younger members of the family and were not present at
every birth, a baby who lived only a few hours, or even a few weeks, might easily be con-
sidered ‘‘stillborn’’ although demographically it would count as a live birth.
4 Jacques Henripin and Yves Peron note that French Quebec women born around
1887—that would be about the same generation as the mothers of our informants—who
were still alive at the 1961 census had had an average of 6.4 children. This average
includes all the women who were alive in 1961, regardless of whether or not they had had
children. [Jacques Henripin and Yves Peron, ‘‘La transition démographique de la
Province de Québec,’’ La Population du Québec: études rétrospectives, ed. Hubert Char-
bonneau (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1973) 40.]
5 As Marie Lavigne has observed, if it is true that almost half of Quebeckers born around
the turn of the century were raised in families of more than ten children, these were
borne by only 20 percent of married women born about 1887 (Lavigne 324).
6 On this question, see Bettina Bradbury, ‘‘L ’économie familiale,’’ 300.
7 The informants were not always aware of the financial arrangements made with their par-
ents. In general, it appears that younger adults (uncles, aunts) paid board, while grand-
parents, if they had no means of their own, were dependent on the family, which took
them in since in this period there was no old-age pension.
8 In her study of Saint Brigide’s parish, Lucia Ferretti also observes this rupture in the
birth family. Her study of 1,105 couples married in this parish between 1905 and 1914
reveals that in 45 percent of the cases, one or even both parents had died before their
children were married. [Lucia Ferretti, ‘‘Mariage et cadre de vie familiale dans une
paroisse ouvrière montréalaise: Sainte-Brigide, 1900-1914,’’ Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique
française 39.2 (1985): 244-45.]
9 In Montreal in 1926, 94 percent of francophone students left school after the sixth grade.
[P .A. Linteau et al., Histoire du Québec contemporain, vol. 1 (Montreal: Boréal Compact,
1989) 618]; Veronica Strong-Boag notes that English Canadian working-class girls also
quit school at the same age to go to work. [Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day
Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919-1939 (Toronto: Copp Clark
Pitman, 1988) 48].
10 Bettina Bradbury, who has studied child labour in Montreal in the nineteenth century,
notes that in the working-class districts of Sainte-Anne and Saint-Jacques, ‘‘Almost every
boy older than twenty was working, whereas only half the girls of the same age were
employed. About 75 percent of the boys aged between sixteen and twenty had a job, and
Notes to pages 20-34 197
only about 40 percent of the girls. If there were boys in the family, the older girls com-
monly stayed home to help with the housework and the care of the younger children.
Boys of any age were far more likely to work than girls.’’ (Bettina Bradbury, ‘‘L ’économie
familiale et le travail’’ 295.)
11 In the nineteenth century, Bettina Bradbury observes, ‘‘finding a job for the children
seemed to be a family responsibility .... It was apparently common for mothers to look
for work for their sons and daughters and to act as an agent.’’ (Bradbury, ‘‘L’économie
familiale,’’ 295). See also Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, ‘‘Familles et destins
féminins. Le prisme de la mémoire, 1880-1940,’’ Recherches sociographiques, La Famille de
la Nouvelle-France à aujourd’hui 28.2-3 (1987): 259-62.
12 Hiring by the family seems to have been especially frequent in the textile sector. In this
regard, see Hareven, Family Time; Jacques Rouillard, Ah, les États! Les travailleurs canadi-
ens-français de l’industrie textile de la Nouvelle-Angleterre d’après le témoignage des derniers
migrants (Montreal: Boréal, 1985).
13 Piecework seems to have been especially common in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s
(Strong-Boag, New Day 57-58).
14 According to David M. Katzman, the very word ‘‘servant’’ is in conflict with the demo-
cratic spirit of nineteenth-century America. [Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic
Service in Industrializing America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981) 238.]
15 Few of the informants broached the question of sexual harassment. One mentioned that
the male workers ‘‘bothered them’’ sometimes. But with other people around, it was eas-
ier to defend yourself. ‘‘We put them in their place’’ (E1). The sexual segregation on the
shop floor and as the workers entered and left the factory seems also to have contributed
to a lessening of this problem. ‘‘There was one staircase at the back and another at the
front for the men and the women’’ (E1). No one mentioned being subjected to sexual
harassment on the part of a foreman.
16 Tamara Hareven also observes the same phenomenon. According to American statistics
in 1923, boys gave 83 percent of their wages to their families while the girls gave 95 per-
cent (Family Time 189).
17 It was on the basis of similar observations that the ladies of the Fédération nationale
Saint-Jean-Baptiste decided to open a school to teach housekeeping. See Nicole
Thivierge, Écoles ménagères et instituts familiaux: une modèle féminin traditionnel (Que-
bec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1982) 122.
18 Training homemakers was the subject of a brief thesis during the 1940s. According to the
author, women generally were badly trained, especially in nutrition and dressmaking, to
fulfill their role (Madeleine Mercier, ‘‘Étude de la formation domestique de quinze mères
de famille de Québec,’’ MA thesis Université Laval, 1946). In this connection, also see
Denise Lemieux, ‘‘La socialisation des filles dans la famille,’’ Fahmy-Eid and Dumont:
237-61.
Chapter 3: Beyond Romance: Courtship and Marriage
1 In Montreal, the rate of marriage declined from 9.9 percent to 6.9 percent between 1929
and 1933 (Quebec: Annuaire statistique 1930 et 1934, 75, 80).
2 T wo of the informants had saleswomen’s jobs in a business near where their fiancés were
working, another was working as a domestic in the home of her future sister-in-law,
whereas only two couples were working in the same factory; the sexual division of the
job market probably explains why few women met their husbands at work.
198 Notes to pages 35-48
3 In her study of English working-class women between 1890 and 1940, based on oral his-
tories, Elizabeth Roberts also reports evidence which stresses the importance of the walk
as an opportunity for young people to socialize. This sort of activity was approved by
adults, according to Roberts, because it takes place in public, thus permitting effective
control to be exercised over the young. In working-class districts, it could also get round
the cramped lodgings, where it was less easy to organize the social evenings which
allowed young people to meet in rural areas. See Elizabeth Robbins, A Woman’s Place: An
Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) 72.
4 The suitors of three of the informants had cars when they were dating. Two of them,
who were widowers, had inherited a small insurance payment which they had invested in
buying an automobile; except for one of the widowers, who made his living driving a taxi,
the other two sold their cars when they got married or when their first child was born.
5 In his study of the village of Saint Denis, Horace Miner describes this reality in these
terms: ‘‘The girl is not obliged to marry any one of her suitors, but as she has no direct
way of getting to know candidates, she must be happy with their initiative.’’ [Horace
Miner, Saint-Denis: un village québécois (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH (1985) 276.]
6 Lemieux and Mercier 136.
7 Ignorance of sexual matters, however, meant that, while worried about what their fiancés
might do, the young women were not too sure what they were afraid of. The next chap-
ter, on motherhood, will go into greater detail on this question.
8 Only one of these two women told me about her experience during the interview. In the
other case, it came to my notice through a diary that the informant entrusted to me after
the interview was over. This reluctance to broach the subject more than fifty years later
conveys the disgrace which attached to the reputation of the ‘‘unwed mother.’’ If there
were two premarital pregnancies, we may suppose that a larger number of couples engaged
in sexual relations before marriage without suffering the consequences. It is, however, dif-
ficult to ascertain how widespread such behaviour was, since it represents a transgression
of moral standards, a phenomenon which is frequently kept hidden. We observe that the
number of illegitimate births (that is, outside of marriage) for Quebec as a whole between
the years 1929 and 1939 varied between 2,055 and 2,668 (Lévesque, La Norme 121).
9 That is, 28.9 years old for men and 25.4 for women in Quebec in 1930. [Canada, BFS,
Annuaire du Canada 1933 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1933) 165.] Note that these averages
are based on the age at first marriage while the sample includes three couples in which
the men, aged respectively twenty-eight, thirty-two, and forty-three, were widowers.
10 ‘‘The average age of those married for the first time between 1905 and 1914 in Saint
Brigide’s parish was almost twenty-five for men and twenty-two for women.’’ She notes
as well that more than a third (35.2 percent) of the young women were minors when
they married compared to only 13.3 percent of the young men (Ferretti 247).
11 Lemieuxand Mercier, Les Femmes, 130.
12 These would be in place in the diocese of Montreal by the end of the 1930s (Lévesque,
La Norme 52-53).
13 Elizabeth Roberts notes that English couples at the beginning of the century shared the
same vision of marriage: ‘‘marriage was seen as a life-long working partnership, both hus-
band and wife having different, clearly defined roles, both of which were critical for the
well-being of each other and of any children. The man was seen as the basic wage-earner
and the woman as the household manager with prime responsibility for rearing the chil-
dren’’ (A Woman’s Place 83).
Notes to pages 48-55 199
14 According to a study carried out in the 1950s by Philippe Garigue, wives generally
accepted the husband’s authority if he fulfilled his duty as provider: ‘‘The role of the man
as familial authority ... is... the result of the recognition, especially on the part of
women, that it is the ‘‘normal’’ role of the man to the degree that he fully carries out his
responsibilities.’’ [La Vie familiale des Canadiens français (Montreal: University of
Montreal Press, 1970) 38.]
15 Blunden33.
16 In fact, no law forbade all work to married women. In certain sectors, however, like
teaching and the public service, a woman who married was deemed to have ‘‘resigned.’’
See: Carolle Simard. L ’Administration contre les femmes (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1983);
Maryse Thivierge, ‘‘La syndicalisation des institutrices catholiques, 1900-1959, Fahmy-
Eid and Dumont, 176. During the 1930s, a member of the legislature named Francoeur
tried without success to have a law passed that would have seriously limited the hiring of
women on the pretext that they created unemployment [Collectif Clio, L’Histoire des
femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles (Montreal: Quinze, 1982) 255]. The Confédéra-
tion des travailleurs catholiques du Canada likewise adopted a resolution to this effect
(Lavigne and Stoddart, ‘‘Ouvrières et travailleuses’’ 111).
17 Jacques Rouillard notes the same ignorance concerning the Church’s disapproval of
French-Canadian emigration to the United States (Rouillard 30-31).
18 We should recall that it was though the agency of the parish retreats and the confessional
that the Church disseminated its message regarding contraception and that this position
was reinforced by the medical profession. According to Church rule, violating this prohi-
bition was a grave, that is, mortal sin, one that had to be confessed, of the same degree of
seriousness as murder or theft. Regarding the confessional as a means of controlling
female sexuality, see Eli Zaretsky, ‘‘Female Sexuality and the Catholic Confessional,’’
Signs 6.1 (1980): 176-84.
19 According to Lavigne and Stoddart, in 1931, 12 percent of the working women in Mon-
treal were widows or married, while 87.7 percent were unmarried (‘‘Ouvrières et tra-
vailleuses,’’ 392, n.4). These examples of women’s hiding their matrimonial status in
order to work are a good illustration of the strategies of resistance to the confinement to
the domestic sphere that was imposed on women.
20 Strong-Boag, New Day 95.
21 In Saint Brigide’s parish at the beginning of the century, this group gave the bride a crown
to wear at her wedding; in return, the bride offered her bouquet to adorn the Lady Altar.
Fo r other advantages enjoyed by Children of Mary at their weddings, see Ferretti 249.
22 In the Quebec City region, couples made several round trips on the Lévis ferry (Lemieux
and Mercier, Les Femmes 164).
23 Agnès Fine, ‘‘À propos du trousseau: une culture féminine?’’ Histoire des femmes, Perrot,
ed.: 155-89. A study of marriage contracts in southwest France between the sixteenth
and twentieth centuries and the use of oral sources for the more recent period enable her
to demonstrate that the trousseau was a very old and widespread tradition, one that at
first was a legal obligation before being transformed into a moral one.
24 Fine 165, 168.
25 The study of marriage contracts in France shows that at a certain period, the wedding
dress, generally black, formed part of the trousseau (Fine 165).
26 T wo exceptions must be noted: the husband of one of the informants, a laboratory tech-
nician in an oil company, had accumulated around one thousand dollars in stocks offered
200 Notes to pages 55-61
by the company as a bonus; another, employed by a railway company, had more than
three hundred dollars in his account.
27 As we have already seen, three of them were given it by their parents, while a fourth, who
boarded with family friends, had her own furniture.
28 Appendix D contains a complete description, with prices, of good quality furniture
bought for cash by one of the couples in the sample.
29 Households comprised of two families represented 4.1 percent and 6.4 percent of all
households in Verdun and Montreal respectively in 1931 and 4.9 percent and 6.3 percent
in 1941 (Canada, Recensement du Canada vol. 5, 998-91; and Recensement du Canada
1941, vol. 5, 102-103, 106-107). Certainly the census figures provide a snapshot of a pop-
ulation in a given period of time. In fact, the sample supports the idea that a higher per-
centage of young couples lived with one or the other of their parents, most often with
the husband’s family, in the early months of their marriage.
30 Feretti 250.
Chapter 4: Motherhood
1 In the second chapter of La Norme et les Déviantes, Andrée Lévesque provides an excel-
lent overview of the medical and clerical discourse on the subject of motherhood
(Lévesque 25-59).
2 An expression used by ‘Fadette,’’ (Henriette Dessaulles) in a paper entitled, ‘‘L ’éducation
familiale,’’ presented during the ‘‘Semaines Sociales du Canada’’ (Semaine sociale du
Canada, 4th session, La Famille) (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l’Action française, 1923:
290).
3 Dr. Gaston Lapierre, ‘‘La limitation des naissances et les lois de stérilisation,’’ Annales
médico-chirurgicales de l’hôpital Sainte-Justine, 2.2 (1935) quoted in Lévesque, La Norme
31.
4 In his study of Saint-Denis, Horace Miner notes also that parents usually kept young
children away from this sort of ‘‘show’’ (Miner 271-72).
5 Elizabeth Roberts remarks correctly that this ignorance, which she also observed, is prac-
tically a miracle when we take into account the crowded living conditions of the English
working class at the beginning of the century (Roberts 16). The same remark applies to
working-class Quebec families whose children often shared the same room, if not the
same bed. Even if they were separated according to sex, it is amazing that this crowding
did not facilitate a knowledge of the anatomy of the opposite sex. Even if the fear of sin
was enough to stifle a perfectly natural curiosity, unquestionably the mother had to
expend boundless ingenuity in seeing to it that everyone dressed and undressed, washed
and slept, while respecting very strict rules regarding modesty at all times. The works
denouncing cramped worker’s lodgings make frequent reference to the moral dangers
they represented, in order to alert families: ‘‘There the family loses its privacy and
becomes depraved, the innate sense of dignity of the children withers and fades, modesty
is destroyed, and decency and virtue are so outrageously offended that they yield to
vice,’’ writes Thomas Watson, health inspector-in-chief of Saskatchewan (Cited in
J.A.Beaudoin, ‘‘La famille et l’habitation,’’ Semaine sociale 4th session: 103).
6 According to Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, the term ‘‘to buy,’’ used in this sense,
refers to the visit of the ‘‘Indians,’’ who would leave the mother a baby which she had to
accept, even buy (Les Femmes au tournant du siècle 195).
Notes to pages 61-69 201
7 Elizabeth Roberts has observed the same phenomenon: ‘‘for some women, the most
admired men seem to have been those who ‘indulged’ themselves the least’’ (A Woman’s
Place 84).
8 According to Jacques Henripin, French-Canadian couples in Montreal did not begin to
control their fertility before 1925. The use of contraceptive methods became more com-
mon after a certain number of children had been born and when the wife was over thirty
[‘‘From Acceptance of Nature to Control: The Demography of the French-Canadians
Since the Seventeenth Century,’’ French-Canadian Society, vol. 1, ed. Marcel Rioux and
Yves Martin (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964) 204-16]. Veronica Strong-Boag
also stresses that the fertility rate of Canadians between the ages of thirty and thirty-four
fell by 20 percent between 1921 and 1931 and fell a further 18.7 percent during the fol-
lowing decade. Between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, the reduction was nine-
teen percent and 25.1 percent and 23.9 percent and 30.6 percent for those between forty
and forty-four (New Day 147).
9 The 1930s nevertheless was marked by a reduction in the birthrate from 29.9 percent in
1929 to 25.1 percent in 1939 while the overall fertility index dropped from 4.09 to 3.28
during the same period [Suzanne Messier, Les Femmes, ça compte. Profil socio-économique
des Québécoises (Quebec: Éditeur officiel, 1984) 172-73]. This reduction is attributable in
part to a lower rate of marriage.
10 In a study carried out in the 1960s, Colette Carisse noted that there was ‘‘no direct link
between the number of children in the families from which they came and the number of
children they wanted, expected to have, or thought was ideal’’ but that ‘‘the fact of com-
ing from a large family had a negative influence on the spouse’s attachment to this cul-
tural model [of a large family]’’ [Colette Carisse, Planification des naissances en milieu
canadien-français (Montreal: University of Montreal Press, 1964) 118].
11 These were the methods in most general use throughout Canada. According to Agnus
McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren, the lower birthrate registered in the 1920s and
1930s is due not to the dissemination of new forms of birth control, like that based on
the calculation of the menstrual cycle, which had been worked out in the 1920s, but on a
wider use of traditional methods [The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and
Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880-1980 (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1986) 22].
12 The Roman Catholic Church accepted this form of family limitation during the 1930s as
it involved abstinence (Lévesque, La Norme 31).
13 Thirteen of the twenty-eight fertile women had miscarriages, four of them more than five.
14 See, for example, ‘‘La mère et l’enfant,’’ La Patrie 20 Mar. 1926.
15 In the course of a study carried out in 1970 among married women between the ages of
fifteen and sixty-five, Colette Carisse discovered that 47.9 percent of 720 women born
between 1905 and 1935 answering the question approved of birth control and 40.8 per-
cent admitted to having used contraceptive methods, while 9.5 percent either did not
answer or refused to answer the question [La Famille: mythe et réalité, vol. 1. Report sub-
mitted to the Conseil des Affaires sociale et de la Famille (Quebec: Éditeur officiel,
1979): 79-80].
16 In her study carried out at the beginning of the 1960s, Colette Carisse noted that a fam-
ily was not considered large until it contained at least five or even six or seven children
(Planification 57).
17 According to Évelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk the period of family composition (that is, the
202 Notes to pages 69-75
time elapsing between the birth of the first child and that of the last) dropped from
twenty years to nine between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. (Nine of the
twenty-eight informants who had children took close to twenty years to complete their
families.) In contrast, the period called ‘‘parental,’’ that is, the years separating the birth
of the first child from the departure of the last only diminished by four years, dropping
from forty to thirty-six years in the course of the same period [‘‘Le cycle de la vie famil-
iale au Québec: vues comparatives XVII
e
—XX
e
siècles,’’ Cahiers québécois de démogra-
phie 13.1 (1984): 59-76].
18 In this connection, see Lavigne, ‘‘Réflexions féministes’’; Henripin and Peron, ‘‘La transi-
tion,’’ 40. As a matter of information, let us stress that, according to the latter, married
women whose mother-tongue was French and who were between the ages of fifty-five
and fifty-nine in 1961 had 5.06 children on average (live births) for both rural and urban
areas and 4.33 children, if only the metropolitan areas are counted.
19 In 1922, the infant mortality rate rose to 213 per thousand in the working-class districts
of Montreal, went to 133.7 and then to 59.3 per thousand between 1928 and 1940 (Copp,
‘‘Health of People,’’ 129).
20 In Quebec City, for example, in 1922 the company had issued 80,000 life insurance poli-
cies for a population of 100,000. The visiting nurse service, first begun in the United
States as an experiment, met with such a success that the company decided to extend it
to the whole of North America. Again in 1922, Metropolitan nurses had visited 11,472
new mothers in Greater Montreal. Additionally, this company published numerous pam-
phlets on the precautions to take to avoid deadly diseases like tuberculosis or more sim-
ple contagions and how to treat them. In the area of child care, the company published
the first edition in 1922 of a book successively entitled The Child, then The Baby, and
Your Baby. By 1945, there would be 31,872,000 copies in circulation in a number of lan-
guages. In a book published in 1947 on the history of the company, the author makes no
bones about bluntly declaring the company’s motives, ‘‘Healthy people live longer and
pay more premiums than sick people do.’’ See James Marquis, The Metropolitan Life: A
Study in Business Growth (New Y ork: Viking, 1947) 188, as well as The Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, Report on Industrial Insurance, Dec. 1921 and More than a Century
of Health and Safety Education, Health and Safety Education Division. I was able to con-
sult these publications in the company’s uncatalogued archives thanks to the kindness of
the present archivist, Mr Michel Barsalou. Additionally, see Mme L.-E. Warren, ‘‘Com-
ment venir en aide aux mères de familles,’’ La Bonne Parole 10.7-8 (1922): 6-7.
21 J.-E. Dubé, ‘‘Les débuts de la lutte contre la mortalité infantile à Montréal, Fondation de
la première Goutte de Lait,’’ Union Médicale du Canada 65 (1936): 879-91, 986-93,
1088-1102.
22 The functioning of this organization and the services it offered are described in ‘‘L ’Assis-
tance Maternelle,’’ La Bonne Parole 10.5 (1922): 4.
23 La Presse 8 April 1925.
24 La Patrie 20 Feb. 1934.
25 Hélène Laforce, Histoire de la sage-femme dans la région de Québec (Quebec: Institut
québécois de recherche sur la culture 4, 1985) 111.
26 J. Jill Suitor, ‘‘Husbands’ Participation in Childbirth: A Nineteenth Century Phe-
nomenon,’’ Journal of Family History 6.3 (1981): 278-93.
27 The percentage of hospital births went from 4.8 percent in 1926 to 15.6 in 1940 to 32.2 in
1945, more than doubling during the Second W orld W ar. In 1955, by which almost all of the
Notes to pages 75-80 203
women in this study had completed their families, it was 66.6 percent [France Laurendeau,
‘‘La médicalisation de l’accouchement,’’ Recherches sociographiques 24.2 (1983): 205].
28 Many articles on the women’s pages of La Patrie encouraged women to breast-feed and
made a direct connection between the practice and the rate of infant mortality. See for
example, ‘‘La majorité des maladies infantiles sont évitables,’’ (The majority of childhood
illnesses are preventable) (La Patrie 23 May 1921, 25). According to Dr Joseph Gauvreau,
‘‘infant mortality is the direct result of the breast-feeding strike’’ and ‘‘the mother who
places her child ... in this all too evident danger of death [is guilty] if her dereliction of
duty is voluntary and conscious.’’ He did recognize, however, that breast-feeding ‘‘is a
bondage beloved by mothers whose hearts are in the right place’’ (‘‘La mortalité infan-
tile,’’ Semaine sociale du Canada, fourth session, 162, 171).
29 According to Carole Dion, the well-baby clinics only contained a limited amount of
equipment; a baby scale, a ruled board to measure the babies with, a clinical thermometer,
and some tongue depressors (‘‘Les femmes et la santé de la famille au Québec
1890-1914,’’ Master’s thesis, University of Montreal, 1984, 149).
30 For a description of the care provided by the midwife, see the oral histories reported by
Miner, 231-34.
31 According to demographers, in fact, 10 percent of couples are sterile. See Charles Enid,
The Changing Size of the Family in Canada, Canada DBS Canada Census 1941 (Ottawa:
King’s Printer, 1948) 37ff.
Chapter 5: Working for Pay and Managing the Household Finances
1 The average family, used as a point of reference to establish the minimum budget neces-
sary to support a working-class family, generally comprises five persons: two adults and
three children, a composition that does not correspond to the reality of every family. For
a discussion of wages before the Great Depression see Copp, Classe ouvrière 149-63 and
the publication of the Federal Ministry of Labour: La Gazette du Travail et Salaires et
Heures de travail au Canada.
2 Marsh 345-46.
3 Quebec, Annuaire statistique du Québec, 1930, 1934: 400, 426; La Gazette du Travail,
Canada, ministère du Travail, Feb. 1933, 249.
4 Lévesque, Virage 22.
5 According to a study carried out in 1935, eighty-five percent of the population of Mon-
treal was dependent on an income of less than $1250 a year (around twenty-four dollars a
week) and fifty percent on an income of less than $850 (about sixteen dollars a week)
(Montreal Board of Trade, Housing and Slum Clearance for Montreal, cited in Lévesque,
Virage 22).
6 Montreal Unemployment Relief Commission, Renseignements à l’usage des chômeurs
nécessiteux et des propriétaires, n.d.10-11. In other directives issued in 1937, the amounts
went to $8.51 a week in summer and $9.11 in winter, always for a family of five.
7 Investigations into workers’ wages carried out by government agencies and charities
obviously did not take into account the money that derived from these activities as well
as the savings produced by the domestic labour of housewives. See Martha May, ‘‘The
‘Good Manager’: Married Working-Class Women and Family Budget Studies, 1885-
1915,’’ Labour History 25 (1984): 351-72.
8 Bettina Bradbury, ‘‘Women’s History and Working-Class History,’’ Labour/Le Travail 19
(1987): 38.
204 Notes to pages 82-95
9 We have virtually no data on the incidence of men working two jobs before the Second
World War. In the 1950s, Fortin and Tremblay state that 18.4 percent of the heads of
households in their sample had a second job (72).
10 It should be noted that it was not prohibited to earn a little money while receiving aid
from Saint Vincent de Paul, since the society provided only food or food vouchers but
did not pay for rent or other expenses. According to the rules laid down by the Unem-
ployment Relief commission of Montreal, the head of the family and his wife could earn
up to three dollars a week each without losing their benefits. Still, the commission
deducted 50 percent of the income derived from renting rooms from the relief payment,
even if this income did not exceed three dollars a week (Renseignements à l’usage 6).
11 Unlike boarders, roomers only got a place to stay; they had to take their meals elsewhere
and do their own washing, though not all the boarders automatically had their laundry
done for them.
12 A.J. Pelletier, F.D. Thompson and A. Rochon, La Famille canadienne, Recensement du
Canada 1931 12 (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1942) 69. Bettina Bradbury likewise notes that
in nineteenth-century Montreal, the poorest familes were more likely to live with other
families than to take in boarders, whereas the property-owning and professional families,
perhaps influenced by the ideology of the home, were less and less involved in this activ-
ity. (Bradbury, ‘‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders’’: 33-35). For a discussion of the decline in this
practice among the middle class in the United States in the nineteenth century, see John
Modell and Tamara Hareven, ‘‘Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examina-
tion of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family
(1973): 467-79. This article notes that the Depression temporarily reversed the tendency,
observed in all social classes, to cease taking in boarders, in the United States at least.
13 We must emphasize that the Depression involved an increase in the proportion of
women working in the personal service sector where domestics are classified. In Mon-
treal, for example, 20.2 percent of female labour was listed in this sector in 1921, com-
pared to 29.3 percent in 1931 and 26.9 percent in 1941 (Lavigne and Stoddart, ‘‘Ouvrières
et travailleuses’’ 101). These census figures do not always permit us to establish what
proportion of them were married.
14 The observations only confirm the theories about the invisibility of married women’s
work that several scholars with an interest in paid female labour have advanced. See for
example, Bettina Bradbury, ‘‘L’economie familiale;’’ Suzanne D. Cross, ‘‘La majorité
oubliée: le rôle des femmes de Montréal au 19
e
siècle;’’ Lavigne and Pinard 99-114; Lavi-
gne and Stoddart, ‘‘Ouvrières et travailleuses’’; Strong-Boag, New Day 41-71.
15 In this regard, see Roberts 229.
16 In fact, this informant had taught for a year before getting married, but she did not seem
to consider this a real job.
17 That is, as a daily cleaning woman.
18 Concerning the impossibility of reversing these roles during the Depression, see Mirra
Komorovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New York: Arno, 1971); Ruth
Milkmann, ‘‘Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depres-
sion,’’ Review of Radical Political Economics 8 (1976): 85.
19 Meg Luxton, More than a Labor of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home
(Toronto: Women’s Press, 1980) 161-99; Strong-Boag, New Day 133-44; Roberts 125-68;
Pat Ayers and Jan Lambertz, ‘‘Marriage Relations, Money, and Domestic Violence in
Working-Class Liverpool, 1919-39,’’ in Lewis 195-219.
Notes to pages 95-102 205
20 Ayers and Lambert 197.
21 Jennifer Stoddart, ‘‘Quand des gens de robe se penchent sur les droits des femmes: le cas
de la commission Dorion 1929-1931,’’ in Lavigne and Pinard 321.
22 This statement must, however, be qualified as three informants intervened to find work
for their husbands while another called her husband’s boss to get him a raise.
23 Philippe Garigue also observed that women did not feel that they had more authority,
even when they controlled the purse strings (La Vie familiale 38).
24 Andrée Fortin, for example, states, ‘‘It may well be said that this administrative power is
not large, managing poverty not being a secure job; one notes that ‘‘queen of the home’’
is not merely a symbolic title—she is the regent and the steward’’ [‘‘La famille ouvrière
d’autrefois,’’ Recherches sociographiques, La Famille de la Nouvelle-France à aujourd’hui
28. 2-3 (1987): 283].
25 Quebec, Annuaire statistique du Québec, 1930 and 1934, 400 and 426. According to a fed-
eral study in 1938, francophone families in Montreal devoted on average 34 percent of
their budget to this expenditure [Canada, BFS, Family income and Expenditure in
Canada: A Study of Urban Wage-Earner Families, Including Data on Physical Attributes
(Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1941) 26].
26 The study undertaken in 1938 also looked into consumption habits regarding foodstuffs
noted that, compared to the sample as a whole, among French-Canadian families in Que-
bec, ‘‘Purchases per person... were noticeably above the average for meat, white bread,
potatoes, canned fruit, and bananas. They were below the average for brown bread,
cheese, milk, and oranges’’ (Canada BFS 54). We should note that it was rare that wages
would permit buying in bulk; in any event, cramped quarters hardly encouraged the stor-
age of provisions.
27 Roberts, ‘‘Women’s Strategies’’: 223.
28 Strong-Boag, New Day 137.
Chapter 6: Housework
1 Danielle Chabaud-Rychter, Dominique Fougeyrollas-Schwebel and Françoise Sonthonax,
Espace et temps du travail domestique (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1985) 23.
2 According to data provided by a plant situated in one of the districts surveyed about
housing in 1937 by the city, the majority of the workers lived a short distance from the
factory, to which they could easily walk. Indeed, 1201 of the 1382 male and female work-
ers lived less than two miles away (Bélanger et al. 18). The large number of retail business
is a good indication of their accessibility. Thus in 1930 in Montreal there were 2180 gro-
ceries, 665 combination grocery and butcher shops, and 391 butcher shops for a popula-
tion of 818,577 inhabitants, or one retail food business for every 253 residents In 1941,
this proportion was one business for every 293 residents [Canada, Recensement du
Canada 1931 vol.11, 213 and Recensement du Canada 1941, vol. 10, 21; Gérald Bernier
and Robert Boily, Le Québec en chiffres de 1850 à nos jours (Montréal: ACFAS, Coll. Poli-
tique et économie, 1986) 56].
3 This kind of housing existed well into the 1930s. Out of the 4216 workers’ homes that were
visited during the municipal inquiry of 1936-37, they accounted for 379, or 8.9 percent of
the total. Furthermore, some of the women interviewed had lived in them (Bélanger 9).
4 Lyse Pelletier, ‘‘A u sujet des espaces féminisés,’’ Cahiers de géographie du Québec 31.83:
177-88; Anne-Marie Séguin, ‘‘Madame Ford et l’espace: lecture féministe de la surbur-
banisation,’’ Lieux et milieux de vie. Recherches féministes 2.1: 51-68.
206 Notes to pages 102-16
5 At the beginning of the thirties, more than half of the informants were paying less than
fifteen dollars a month in rent for a four-room flat. According to La Gazette du T ravail, a
six-room flat without modern facilities or with some of them absent would cost, in Mon-
treal, from sixteen to twenty-five dollars a month in 1929 and from fifteen to eighteen
dollars a month in 1933 (Canada, Minister of Labour, La Gazette du Travail Feb. 1929,
256 and Feb. 1933, 257).
6 Appendix E presents some of the floor plans taken from the municipal inquiry of 1937.
7 In 1941, 51.5 percent of Montreal flats were heated exclusively by a stove, which was the
case for almost every flat visited in 1937 during the course of the municipal inquiry car-
ried out in seven working-class districts of Montreal (Canada, Recensement du Canada,
1941 5, 54, and Bélanger 11).
8 The municipal inquiry of 1936-37 noted that in the 4216 lodgings visited, only 1716 had a
completely separate toilet; in 1431 cases, it had been added to a corner of the kitchen, in
112 cases in the parlour, in 536, in a bedroom, and in 239, in the hallway (Bélanger 12).
The floor plans in Appendix E, taken from the report, demonstrate these additions well.
9 Strong-Boag, ‘‘Keeping House,’’ 132.
10 According to the 1937 municipal inquiry, 91.5 percent of the lodgings surveyed had soft-
wood floors (Bélanger 10).
11 In another connection, this crowding reminds us that the poorest classes do not have the
benefit of any sort of privacy: ‘‘room is lacking to provide a private space for each mem-
ber of the group—private space is thus only the public space of the domestic group,’’
(Antoine Prost, ‘‘La famille et l’individu,’’ Prost and Gérard 72).
12 This saying reminds us that working-class families in this period did not carry fire insur-
ance. Mentioned in ‘‘Housing,’’ a column by Louise in La Patrie, 13 Feb. 1932: 14 and in
a talk by Mme Louis-F. Coderre on ‘‘The Home’’ for the Semaine sociale du Canada
Fifth Session, La Propriété (Montreal: Bibliothèque de l’Action française 1924: 146).
According to Mme Coderre, ‘‘A principal way of saving money is to have a steady place
of residence, or in other words, to avoid moving house.’’
13 The number of relocations in Montreal was in fact constantly on the rise during the first
years of the Depression: 54,000 in 1930, 55,000 in 1931, 65,000 in 1932, and almost
82,000 in 1933 according to data furnished by Montreal Light, Heat and Power (La
Patrie, 17 Apr 1931:7 and 17 Apr 1933: 3). Moreover, the economic situation meant that
most of these families were looking for less expensive accommodations. Thus during the
Depression, the best flats remained vacant while an overpopulation was noted in the old
housing. In this connection, see Marc Choko, Les Crises du logement à Montréal (Mon-
treal: Éditions Saint-Martin, 1980) 109.
14 One couple made major renovations thanks to a government renovation scheme. Unfor-
tunately, the informant could not say exactly what this consisted of since her husband
took care of the family finances. According to what she could recall, he would send the
bills for the materials to the bank which would deduct the amount from his mortgage.
15 In the forties and fifties, three other couples became owners of houses in Montreal, one
through inheritance, three went back to the countryside to live where they bought or
built a house, and four would come to own a summer cottage.
16 Canada, Recensement du Canada 1931 et 1941 5: 989 and 11: 98, cited in Choko 114.
17 Thus the number of permits issued by the city of Montreal for domestic renovation and
construction went from 5755 in 1929 to 2196 in 1933, later to rise to 2981 in 1939. Con-
struction of new houses was the most affected as the permits declined from 4116 to 875
Notes to pages 116-21 207
between 1929 and 1933 (from 1639 to 1321 for renovation). Moreover, a number of
houses in the working-class areas was destroyed during this period to permit the building
of public facilities or work on the infrastructure—the Atwater market, the Jacques Cartier
Bridge, and so on (Montreal construction statistics cited by Choko, 107 and 146).
18 Margaret Hobbes and Ruth Roach Pierson, ‘‘A Kitchen that Wastes No Steps: Gender,
Class and the Home Improvement Plan 1936-40,’’ Histoire sociale/Social History 21.41
(1988): 34.
19 Susan Strasser, ‘‘An Enlarged Human Existence? Technology and Housework in Nine-
teenth-Century America,’’ Women and Household Labor, ed. Sara Fenstermaker-Berk
(London: Sage, 1980) 29-51, cited in Diane Bélisle and Yolande Pinard, ‘‘Un peu d’his-
toire,’’ in Vandelac 90, 120; Jessie Bernard, The Female World (New York: The Free Press,
1981) n.1 409.
20 Appendix F includes a table showing the proportion of Montreal (or Quebec) house-
holds that enjoyed various conveniences or domestic equipment at different periods
between 1931 and 1958.
21 The item that the Woodhouse store advertised as ‘‘the famous Fisher electric icebox’’
retailed for between $225 and $736, depending on the model, in 1930 (La Patrie 1 March
1930: 37).
22 The tubs of these machines had to be agitated by a wooden handle.
23 Only four owned a washing machine when they married. Seven had to wait between one
and two years, four between two and three years, eight between three and five years, and
seven for more than five years. These figures do not take into account the period of
shared accommodations, when the bride might have been able to take advantage of her
mother ’s or mother -in-law ’s machine.
24 Elizabeth Roberts recalls that the sewing machine was for a long period the only techno-
logical innovation possessed by working-class families (‘‘Women’s Strategies,’’ 232).
25 Other items, like laundry baskets, stepladders, washtubs and wash benches were also
offered, which would seem to imply that the merchants knew that women continued to
do some laundry by hand even after they bought a machine. See, for example, the ad for
Beatty ’s in La Presse 31 October 1930: 27.
26 In 1941, 17.7 percent of Montreal households used wood or coal for cooking and only
8.2 percent in 1951. There are no figures for this subject in the 1931 census. On the other
hand, the municipal inquiry of 1937 concluded that almost all the housing visited was
heated only by a stove and that in 68.6 percent of these cases, either wood or coal was
used as fuel (Bélanger 11).
27 Montreal Light, Heat and Power exercised a virtual monopoly in the Montreal region
which allowed it to maintain high rates and to disconnect customers who did not pay
their bills with impunity. According to Robert Rumilly, more that 20,000 families were
deprived of electricity in the depths of the Depression [Robert Rumilly, Histoire de
Montréal (Fides, 1974) cited in Claude Larivière, Crise économique et contrôle social: le cas
de Montréal 1929-1937 (Montreal: Éditions Saint-Martin, 1977) 175].
28 P .A. Linteau et al. Histoire du Québec contemporain vol. 2: Le Québec depuis 1930 (Mon-
treal: Boréal Compact, 1989) 41.
29 A number of others have already observed this phenomenon in English Canada and in
the United States. See Strong-Boag, New Day 50; Komorovsky 28-130.
30 According to Maïté Clavel, ‘‘Contrary to those societies which allowed them space,
industrialized societies, excluded dirt, the buried, the hidden. Only what was clean was
208 Notes to pages 121-28
valued, promoted, and celebrated... the current value attributed to cleanliness for its
own sake would date from the seventeenth century’’ [‘‘Propreté: mots, rites, images,’’
Cahiers internationaux de sociologie. Le détour anthropologique féminin-masculin 80
(1986): 43].
31 Coderre,139-51.
32 Lemieux and Mercier 282.
33 Several authors who have studied the evolution of domestic labour have often associated
the increase in frequency of certain household tasks, like laundry, with the appearance of
more sophisticated machinery. In this regard, see Bélisle and Pinard, 91 and 125; Bernard
395 and n.4, 410; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, ‘‘The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home:
Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century,’’ T echnology and Culture
17 (1976): n.10, 5.
34 The number of commercial laundries, moreover, would diminish. In 1931, there were 358
laundries in Montreal and eighteen in Verdun; in 1941, their number had shrunk respec-
tively to 308 (of which 262 were classified as ‘‘Chinese laundries’’) and eleven, while in
1951, there were 185 Chinese laundries in Montreal (seven in Verdun) and ten ‘‘hand
laundries’’ (Verdun: six), twenty-six machine laundries (Verdun: 1) and twenty laundries
where women could do their own wash (Verdun: 2). These self-service laundries had
begun to appear in the 1940s [Canada: Recensement du Canada 1931 11: 206; Recense-
ment du Canada 1941 11: 462, 482 and Recensement du Canada 1951 8: 22-14, 22-15 and
22-41, 22-42. For Chinese laundries in Montreal, see Denise Helly, Les Chinois à
Montréal 1877-1951 (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1987)].
35 As Ruth Schwartz Cowan has observed: ‘‘Studies of energy expenditure during house-
work have indicated that by far the greatest effort is expended in hauling and lifting the
wet wash, tasks which were not eliminated by the introduction of washing machines’’
(‘‘Industrial Revolution,’’ n.10, 5). These operations were not without their risks. News-
papers of the period frequently carried stories about children who were scalded when
they tipped a washtub over on themselves. In the months of November and December
1929 alone, La Patrie reported five accidents of this kind (La Patrie 20, 23 Nov. 1929: 3,
11, 24; Dec. 1929: 1 and 26 Dec. 1929: 23). Moreover, one of the families in the sample
experienced a similar accident.
36 According to Keith Walden, the Toronto-based Canadian Grocer, a weekly trade journal,
recommended clearly visible price tags on products ‘‘‘Nowadays, every well-informed
grocer makes it a point to have everything marked.’ This would avoid the embarrassment
to customers who would have to ask the shopkeeper for the price, which might turn out
to be too expensive’’ (Keith Walden, ‘‘Speaking Modern: Language, Culture and Hege-
mony in Grocery Window Displays, 1887-1920,’’ paper presented to the Congress of the
Historical Society of Canada, Quebec, June 1989: 10).
37 According to Ruth Schwartz Cowan, delivery services began to disappear in the United
States during the 1930s, due to the rise of the automobile and to the ferocious competi-
tion among retailers trying to capture the market. This led to their cutting back their costs
of operation in order to lower their prices. [More Work for Mother: The Ironies of House-
hold Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
79-85]. The compulsory school attendance of the children who did this sort of work was
probably also responsible. Ac c o r d i n g to the oral histories, it was not until the 1940s, in
any event, that delivery services began to disappear in Montreal, which coincided with the
application of the school attendance law of 1943. In this regard, see Dominique Jean,
Notes to pages 128-32 209
‘‘Familles québécoises et politiques sociales touchant les enfants de 1940 à 1960: obligation
scolaire, allocations familiales et travail juvénile,’’ diss. University of Montreal. 1989.
38 Compared to men, women always occupy more reduced space. After retirement, for
example, men no longer go to work but start doing the shopping while their wives will
become more sedentary, saving even on movements: ‘‘everything proceeds as if the social
space assigned to women, a space delimited by housework, should be further reduced by
age in order to retain its separation from masculine space’’ (Chabaud-Rychter 82).
39 The informants rarely mentioned remaking their own clothes, probably because they had
very few of them and they wore them to shreds.
40 These figures are probably not correct—according to other informants who bought from
the abattoir, this amount of meat would cost more like two or three dollars.
41 In this period, most shops stayed open until eleven o’clock on Saturday night.
Chapter 7: State, Family, Neighbours, and Credit
1 B.L. Vigod, ‘‘Ideology and Institutions in Quebec: The Public Charities Controvery,
1921-1926.’’ Histoire sociale/Social History 11.21 (1978): 167-82; Huguette Lapointe-
Roy, Charité bien ordonnée. Le premier réseau de lutte contre la pauvreté à Montréal au 19
e
siècle (Montreal: Boréal, 1987).
2 Copp, Classe ouvrière 117.
3 Struthers; Michel Pelletier and Yves Vaillancourt, Les Politiques sociales et les Travailleurs.
Cahier 2: Les années 30 (Montreal: Yves Vaillancourt, 1975).
4 Montreal, Rapport de la Commission d’enquête du chômage, 1937.
5 Thus, according to Robert Rumilly, the priest of the parish of the Nativity, Mgr. Lep-
ailleur, required the unemployed to attend Benediction Friday evenings before receiving
their vouchers [La Plus Riche Aumône (Montreal: Éditions de l’Arbre, 1946) 156-57].
6 Regarding the administration of direct relief in Montreal, see June MacPherson,
‘‘ ‘Brother, Can Y ou Spare a Dime?’ The Administration of Unemployment Relief in the
City of Montreal 1931-1941,’’ Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 1976 13ff; Rapport
de la Commission d’enquête du chômage.
7 Appendix C provides a list of rations allocated to families according to size.
8 Dorothy King, ‘‘Unemployment Aid (Direct Relief),’’ Canada’s Unemployment Problem,
ed. L. Richter (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939): 80-84; Renseignements à l’usage des chômeurs.
9 According to the Unemployment Commission report, the voucher system required city
clerks to handle more than 200,000 documents a week. In 1935, the commission dis-
tributed 40,000 cheques a week to the unemployed and 17,000 cheques each month to
landlords (Commission d’enquête du chômage 3; MacPherson, 19).
10 Suzanne Clavette, ‘‘Aide aux chômeurs et Crise des années trente à Verdun,’’ paper pre-
sented to the Canadian Historical Society, June 1989: 10-17.
11 The amount allotted monthly for food for a family of five went to $23.22 compared with
$21.88 in Montreal (Suzanne Clavette, ‘‘Des bons aux chèques: aide aux chômeurs et
Crise des années 30 à Verdun,’’ Master’s thesis, University of Quebec at Montreal Press,
1986, 344).
12 Clavette, ‘‘Des bons’’ 20.
13 For all of Quebec, 15.6 million dollars were allocated to public works in 1931-32, which
dropped to 6.5 million the following year and to 1.4 million in 1935-36. In 1938-39, the
amount rose to 26.4 million (Pelletier and Vaillancourt, 199; 201).
210 Notes to pages 132-44
14 According to the regulations laid down by the city of Montreal, ‘‘every head of the fam-
ily capable of work but unable to find a job [was] considered as a needy person, eligible
for direct relief ’’ (Renseignements à l’usage des chômeurs, 1).
15 Renseignements à l’usage des chômeurs,6.
16 As has already been said, households turned spontaneously to Saint Vincent de Paul for
aid. Subsequently, the municipality made use of the newspapers to publicize its instruc-
tions and conditions of eligibility; the information was also spread by word of mouth.
17 MacPherson63-64.
18 This expression encompassed those who were destitute because of circumstances beyond
their control in order to distinguish them from those deemed chronically unemployed,
lazy, or drunk.
19 In 1931, the minutes of a meeting of the Advisory Commission on Unemployment
determined that of the 22,923 unemployed men and women duly registered in the several
city offices during the week of 6 December 1930, 483 cases of fraud had been reported,
or 2.1%. In 1937, when the city had 47,000 on its rolls in February and 36,700 in May, the
Commission of Inquiry into Unemployment reported three hundred cases of fraud a
week. Even according to the report, 50 percent of the ‘‘fraud cases’’ were in fact ‘‘charity
cases,’’ that is, persons who were receiving direct relief when they should have been
requesting help from private charitable organizations because they were unfit to work.
Cases of common-law couples, which did not represent financial fraud, constituted
another 5 percent. The other cases divided as follows: the idle and the chronically unem-
ployed: 10 percent; irregular cases: 15 percent; cases of fraud: 15 percent (the final 5 per-
cent is not accounted for in the report). The average amount claimed fraudulently was
established to be $10.84 for the year 1937 (Minutes of the meeting of the Advisory Com-
mission on Unemployment, 18 Jan. 1931; Commission d’enquête du chômage, 12, 16, 33,
37).
20 In November 1932, the provincial government established the following list of accept-
able products: beef (forequarter), salt pork, pigs’ feet and heads, macaroni and noodles,
milk, eggs, flour, buckwheat flour, cornmeal, oatmeal, Quebec-grown fruit, bread, pota-
toes, peas and beans by the pound, pepper, salt, lard, butter, baking powder, tea, coffee,
molasses, sugar, Quebec vegetables, fish, vinegar, rice, and yeast (Clavette, Appendix C).
21 This cannot refer to Hydro-Québec, which was yet to be established.
22 ‘‘Les travaux de chômage,’’ Le Devoir 27 Jan. 1932: 7, cited in Larivière, 236.
23 The number of jobs available at municipal yards went from a peak of 16,000 in March
1931 to 5,000 in July 1933, while on 26 July in that year, the city registered 64,000 unem-
ployed (‘‘Du travail à 16,000 hommes,’’ Le Devoir 12 March 1933:3; ‘‘La Commission de
chômage,’’ Le Devoir 26 July 1933: 3). According to Claude Larivière’s calculations,
‘‘except in 1931, never more than 15 to 20 percent of Montreal’s unemployed had work
on public projects and these percentages fall even lower if we take into account only the
number of full-time jobs (236).
24 After 1933, the practice having the unemployed register with the aldermen’s secretaries
gave rise to such accusations of patronage (Larivière 228).
25 See Ruth Shonle Cavan and Katherine Howland Rock, The Family and the Depression: A
Study of One Hundred Chicago Families (1938; New York: Arno Press and The New
York Times, 1971). Mirra Komarovsky in particular notes that the loss of his role as
breadwinner did not lead to a loss of status within the family for the husband except
where the wife was already harbouring feelings of deep dissatisfaction toward him:
Notes to pages 144-50 211
‘‘Unemployment does not so much change the sentiments of the wife towards the hus-
band as it makes explicit the unsatisfactory sentiments that already existed prior to the
depression.’’ Wives who accepted their husbands’ authority solely on the grounds of his
role as provider or whose relationship with their spouses was founded on fear were the
ones most susceptible to losing all respect for their mates. In contrast, husbands who
were able to maintain their authority despite their loss of status as a provider were able to
do so due to the love and support of their wives (Komarovsky 54).
26 Hareven, ‘‘Les grands thèmes,’’ 191.
27 Marc-Adélard Tremblay, ‘‘La Crise économique des années trente et la qualité de vie chez
les Montréalais d’ascendance française,’’ Travaux et Communications 3, Progrès techniques
et qualité de vie (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1977).
28 Andrée Fortin, Histoires de familles et de réseaux. La sociabilité au Québec d’hier à demain
(Montreal: Éditions Saint-Martin, 1987) 31.
29 The analysis of a series of interviews conducted by a team headed by Nicole Gagnon in
the early sixties among working-class Montreal families reveals that: ‘‘Y ou do not take up
residence in a neighbourhood where you have no family or that is not close to where
your family lives’’ (Andrée Fortin, ‘‘La famille ouvrière d’autrefois,’’ Recherches sociogra-
phiques 282).
30 Denys Delâge, ‘‘La sociabilité familiale en basse-ville de Québec,’’ Recherches
sociographiques 28.2-3 (1987): 305.
31 This fire was, moreover, directly related to the Depression. Her neighbours, who were
living on relief, were storing in their shed sacks of wood-shavings that they got free from
a dealer. The sacks spontaneously combusted.
32 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer
Culture (New Y ork: McGraw Hill, 1976) 30.
33 Strong-Boag, New Day 114-15. According to the 1941 Census, 28.4 percent of retail
sales in Canada were made on credit. This percentage climbed to 65.9 percent for sales of
household appliances, furniture, and radios (Canada, Recensement 1941 10, 374-77).
34 Thus, a washing-machine valued at eighty-five dollars would cost $90.40 if bought on
installments (Eaton‘s Catalogue, Spring-Summer, 1929, 395).
Conclusion
1 Here, see Bertaux-Wiame, ‘‘Mobilisations féminines,’’ 85-102.
212 Notes to pages 153-68
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228 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
Index
adoption 88
Assistance maternelle 12, 76, 78
Bennett, R.B. 142
Bertaux, Daniel19
birth rate 12, 57
Bradbury, Bettina 8
breast-feeding
attitudes toward 82
Broadfoot, Barry1
budgets
women’s control of 101
Canadian Welfare Council 6
Catholic Church
and relief distribution 143
Central Finance Corporation 163
child-rearing 85
fathers and 85, 86
childbirth 78, 79
medicalization of 75, 80
Children of Mary 58
clothing 133
gifts of 157
lack of 137
colonization zones 125, 147
confinement 83, 84
contraception
and confession 73
attitudes toward 67
use of 67-70
contraceptive failure 74, 75
contraceptive methods
condoms 72
rhythm method 71
sterilization 72
withdrawal 72
contributions to family income 39, 40
cost of living 108
courtship 47-53
and familial control 50
Cowan, RuthSchwartz 12
credit
attitudes toward 164, 165
use of 165
debt
attitudes toward 163
direct relief 141, 142, 144-46
eligibility 143
discipline
fathers and 85, 86
dole 146
see direct relief 146
domestic service
dislike of 37
Dorion Commission 105
École social populaire 57
family
229
contribution of to survival 153
proximity 153, 154
family limitation 70
family, rural
contributions to urban relatives
155
Ferland, Hervé144
Ferretti, Lucia65
Fine, Agnès60
food
buying 135, 136
lack of 136, 137
food vouchers 149
gender division of labour 10, 11, 13,
14, 55
ghettoization of female employment
35
Goutte de Lait 12, 76, 77, 78, 82
Great Depression
and marriage 47
effect on husbands’ employment
92-94
Quebec and 5, 6
Grey Nuns 145
Hamilton, CarolineLeclerc 76
home inspections 147
hot water supply 117
house ownership 120
and the Depression 120
household appliances 121
refrigerators and iceboxes 122
small appliances 123, 124
stoves 122
washing machines 122
household income
women’s contribution to 8
household tasks
learning 41-43
housework
contribution to economy of 8
effects of industrialization on 8
grocery shopping 130-32
house cleaning 130
idealization of 12
influence of factory work on 127
laundry 130
male participation in 125
meal preparation 134
moral value of 127
sewing 132, 133
housing
inadequacies of 116-18
Montreal 6, 7
new starts 121
renovations 121
sharing 158
housing conditions
crowding 118, 121
industrialization
effect on housework 8, 11
male privilege and 8, 9
infectious diseases 7
infertility 87
informants
broken homes in childhood 30, 31
childhood 23
childhood and youth 23, 24
childhood standard of living 25, 27
family size 28, 29
geographical mobility 23-25
position in family 28-30
installment plan 163
laundry
commercial 129
frequency of 129
Ligue de solidarité féminine 16
living on relief 143
living with in-laws 62-64
230 Making Do: Women, Family, and Home
loans and gifts of money
among family members 158
making do 108, 109
malnutrition 7, 13
managing money 105-107
marriage
age at 53
and end of paid work for women
55-57
and motherhood 67
choice of husband 51, 54, 55
memory 14
omissions 16
Metropolitan Commission 11
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
12, 16, 75, 76, 78, 79
midwives
decline in use 80
Montreal Board of Trade 6
Montreal Unemployment
Commission 143, 145
motherhood 67
as reason for marriage 67
moving house 119
municipalities
and relief distribution 142
neighbours
exchanges of aid with 160
lack of close ties to 160
occupations
domestic service 37
factory 35, 36
of husbands 91
teaching 37
white collar 38
Ogino-Knauss
see rhythm method 71
oral history
methodology 14-17, 19, 20
population sample 19
Plateau Mont-Royal 115
pregnancy
responses to 77, 78
public works 149
as a condition for relief payment
150
funding of 144
relief
private charities and 142
relief payments
Montreal 6
rhythm method 71
Roman Catholic Church
and birth control 57, 67, 69
position on working wives 57
Rosemont 115
Saint Vincent de Paul Society 7, 28, 76,
94, 96, 109, 131, 137, 141-44, 158
and relief distribution 147
Salvation Army 109, 137
sanitary arrangements 117
savings 61
school attendance 8
schooling 32, 33
secondary income
of husbands 94-96
of wives 96-99
of wives, attitudes toward 101
Semaines sociales 57
sexuality
attitudes toward 69
knowledge of 68, 69
premarital 50, 51
shame for needing aid 145, 146, 158
Taylorism 127
trousseau 59-61
Turlutte des années dures 1
unemployment
Index 231