Women and investment in late-nineteenth-century urban Canada: Victoria and Hamilton, 1880-1901

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 191-219

  Baskerville, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007120886     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.80.2.191     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Probate Records, Wentworth County, Ontario Archives (OA), Sept. 1879 and Aug. 1881, nos.1683 and 1684
2. Lori Chambers, Married Women and Property Law in Victorian Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997), 3, 4, 178, and chap. 9
3. Constance B. Backhouse, 'Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth Century Canada,' Law and History Review 6, 2 (1988): 211-57
4. Christopher A. Clarkson, 'Liberalism, Nation Building, and Family Regulation: The State and the Use of Family Property Law on Vancouver Island and in the United Colony/Province of British Columbia, 1862-1873' (MA thesis, University of Victoria 1996)
5. Carole Shammas, 'Re-assessing the Married Women's Property Acts,' Journal of Women's History 6 (1994): 7-30
6. L. Di Matteo, 'Wealth Holding in Wentworth County Ontario, Canada, 1872-1891' (PhD dissertation, McMaster University 1990), 48
7. See also Peter Baskerville, '"She has already hinted at board": Enterprising Urban Women in British Columbia, 1863-96,' Histoire sociale/Social History 26 (Nov. 1993): 205-224
8. See also Backhouse, 'Married Women's Property Law'
9. R.H. Chused, 'Late 19th-Century Married Women's Property Law: Receptions of the Early Married Women's Property Acts by Courts and Legislatures,' American Journal of Legal History 29 (spring 1985): 3-35
10. Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in 19th Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983)
11. Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage and Property in 19th Century New York (London: Cornell University Press 1982)
12. Paulette Falcon, '"If the evil ever occurs": The 1873 Married Women's Property Act: Law, Property and Gender Relations in 19th Century B.C.' (MA thesis, University of British Columbia 1991)
13. Peter Baskerville, Beyond the Island: An Illustrated History of Victoria, British Columbia (Burlington, Ont.: Windsor Press 1986)
14. John Lutz, 'Losing Steam: The Boiler and Engine Industry as an Index of British Columbia's Deindustrialization, 1880-1915,' Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers, 1988, 168-208
15. John C. Weaver, 'The Location of Manufacturing Enterprises: The Case of Hamilton's Attraction of Foundries, 1830-1890,' in R.A. Jarrell and A.E. Roos, eds., Critical Issues in the History of Canadian Science Technology and Medicine (Thornhill, Ont.: HSTC Publications 1983), 9-31
16. D.J. Middleton and D.F. Walker, 'Manufacturers and Industrial Development Policy in Hamilton, 1890-1910,' Urban History Review 8 (1980): 20-46. Calculated from data in Census of Canada, 1901, 3, table 13
17. Larry McCann, 'Staples and the New Industrialism in the Growth of Post-Confederation Halifax,' Acadiensis 8 (1979): table 3, 62
18. In Victoria in 1863 and 1871 women owned only 1.4 and 3.7 per cent, respectively, of the city's assessed wealth. See Baskerville, 'She has already,' table 1, 210. The most significant increase occurred only after the passage of the most enabling of the Married Women's Property Acts. Comparable data from this early period is not yet compiled for Hamilton
19. Joan Hoff, Law, Gender and Injustice: A Legal History of U. S. Women (New York: New York University Press 1991)
20. Shammas, 'Re-assessing the Married'
21. Michael Doucet and John Weaver, Housing the North American City (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1991)
22. For an analysis of some aspects of a similar company operating in Hamilton, see M. Doucet and J. Weaver, 'The North American Shelter Business, 1860-1920: A Study of a Canadian Real Estate and Property Management Agency,' Business History Review 58 (1984): 234-262
23. Hamilton Public Library, Moore and Davis, Letter Book, 1880-1, Moore and Davis to Mrs Eliza Thompson, 11 Dec. 1880 and 2 April 1881. Assessed value is taken from the 1881 assessment role for Hamilton
24. There are many such studies. One of the first and most evocative is S. Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburgh: Status of Culture in a Southern Town, 1784 - 1860 (New York: Norton 1984)
25. See, for example, Daniel Vickers, 'Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,' William and Mary Quarterly 47 (1990): 3-29
26. and the now classic study by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987)
27. BCARS, Hayward Papers. I am grateful to Susan Johnston for bringing the collection to my attention
28. Chambers, Married Women, chap. 9
29. Shammas, 'Reassessing the Married.'
30. Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990)
31. See also M.L. Locke, 'Out of the Shadows and into the Western Sun: Working Women of the Late Nineteenth Century Urban Far West,' Journal of Urban History 16 (1990): 175-204
32. The 'frontier spirit' is caught in Susan Armitage and E. Jameson, eds., The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1987)
33. and more systematically in Lillian Schlissel, V. Ruiz, and J. Monk, eds., Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1988)
34. J.C. Weaver, Hamilton: An Illustrated History (Toronto: James Lorimer 1982)
35. Baskerville, Beyond the Island, chap. 3
36. For two Canadian examples, see Julian Gwyn and Fazley Siddiq, 'Wealth Distribution in Nova Scotia during the Confederation Era, 1851 and 1871,' Canadian Historical Review 73, 4 (1992): 435-52
37. and Livio Di Matteo and Peter George, 'Canadian Wealth Inequality in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study of Wentworth County, Ontario, 1872-1910,' Canadian Historical Review ibid., 453-483
38. Matteo and George, 'Canadian Wealth Inequality,' 458
39. See also Bruce Elliott, 'Sources of Bias in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Wills,' Histoire sociale/Social History 18 (1985): 125-132
40. Jan Noel, 'New France: Les femmes favorisés,' in V. Strong-Boag and A.C. Fellman, eds., Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1991)
41. For a critique of this article and Noel's reply, see M.Dumont, 'Les Femmes de la Nouvelle-France ́Etaient-elles favorisés?,' Atlantis 8 (1982)
42. See also Yves Landry, 'Gender Imbalance, les Filles du Roi and Choice of Spouse in New France,' in Bettina Bradbury, ed., Canadian Family History (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1992): 14-32
43. The most sustained critique of this model is in Adele Perry, '"Oh I'm just sick of the faces of men"': Gender-Imbalance, Race, Sexuality, and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia,' BC Studies, nos. 105 and 106 (1995): 27-44
44. For discussions of the sex ratio in the context of the history of Australian women, see, Beverly Kingston, The Oxford History of Australia, 3 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1988), 114-21
45. and Margaret Anderson, '"Helpmeet for Man": Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century Western Australia,' in Pat Crawford, ed., Exploring Women's Past (Melbourne: Sister's Publishers 1983), 87-127
46. Marcia Guttentag and P. Secord, Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications 1983), 130
47. Scott J. South and C. Trent, 'Sex Ratios and Women's Roles: A Cross National Analysis,' Journal of Sociology 93 (1988): 1096-1115
48. Guttentag and Secord, Too Many Women? 30
49. Calculated from data in Canada Census, 1881, vol.1, table 1, and vol. 2, table 8
50. Canada Census, 1891, vol.1, table 3, and vol. 2, table 1
51. Canada Census, 1901, vol.1, table 7, and vol. 4, table 1. For Victoria in 1881 and 1891 a computer file of the nominal level census, Public History Group, University of Victoria, was used. Only adults twenty and over were included. Relatively few Native people were counted by census enumerators as living in the city of Victoria in these years
52. Perry, 'Oh I'm just sick;'
53. Ellen Gee, 'Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Canada,' Canadian Review of Anthropology and Sociology 19 (1982): 320
54. BCARS, Marriage Registration Records: 145 married women with property were linked to this file
55. For a critique of the separate spheres perspective, see Linda Kerber, 'Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,' Journal of American History 75A, 1 (June 1988): 9-39