A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: Bi-modal fertility dynamics and family life in French-Canadian Quebec

Histoire Sociale

Volumn 38, Issue 76, 2005, Pages 307-337

  Levine, David ^a   Savoie, Julie ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

^b OISE ^*  (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33744735289     PISSN: 00182257     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Ansley J. Coale, "The Decline of Fertility in Europe", in Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 29.
2. Susan Cotts Watkins, "Conclusions", in Coale and Watkins, eds.. The Decline of Fertility in Europe, p. 446.
3. See David Levine, "Moments in Time: An Historian's Context of Declining Fertility", in John Gillis, David Levine, and Louise Tilly, eds., The Quiet Revolution: European History in the Age of Fertility Decline (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1992).
4. Enid Charles, The Changing Size of the Family in Canada (Ottawa: Ministry of Trade and Commerce, 1948).
5. Roderic Beaujot, "Les deux transitions démographiques du Québec, 1860-1996", Cahiers québécois de démographie, vol. 29 (2000), pp. 201-230.
6. Henri Leridon, Human Fertility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 147;
7. see also F. Lorimer, Culture and Human Fertility: A Study of the Relation of Cultural Conditions to Fertility in Nonindustrial and Transitional Societies (New York: UNESCO, 1954);
8. John Bongaarts, "Why High Birth Rates Are So Low", Population and Development Review, vol. 1 (1975), pp. 289-296.
9. James Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10. See also T. C. Smith, Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).
11. H. E. Daly, "A Marxian-Malthusian View of Poverty and Development", Population Studies, vol. 25 (1971), pp. 25-38,
12. and "Marx and Malthus in North-East Brazil: A Note of the World's Largest Class Difference in Fertility and its Recent Trends", Population Studies, vol. 39 (1985), pp. 329-338.
13. See also J. C. Caldwell, "A Theory of Fertility: From High Plateau to Destabilization", Population and Development Review, vol. 4 (1978), pp. 553-577.
14. Danielle Gauvreau and Peter Gossage, "Empêcher la famille : fécondité et contraception au Québec, 1920-1960", Canadian Historical Review, vol. 78 (1997), pp. 478-510. J. I. Little has used a modified version of family reconstitution to compare the fertility of a group of Scots-origin women living in the Eastern Townships with neighbouring French-Canadian women.
15. See J. I. Little, Crofters and Habitants (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991). Similar studies based on census materials, comparing different ethnic groups in nineteenth-century Montreal, have been undertaken by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton;
16. see, for example, "Shared Spaces/ Partage de l'espace" (McGill University, Department of Geography Working Paper # 12/1993).
17. Hubert Charbonneau, ed., La population du Québec : études rétrospectives (Montreal: Éditions du Boréal Express, 1973), pp. 9-15.
18. This distribution would fit the "random normal" pattern mentioned earlier.
19. Jacques Henripin, Naître ou ne pas être (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1989), p. 26. The reader will note that even in "traditional" Quebec, during the reign of "natural fertility", almost half of all families (46%) had no more than four children.
20. Jacques Henripin and Yves Péron, "The Demographic Transition in the Province of Quebec", in Population and Social Change (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), p. 39;
21. Jacques Henripin and Evelyne Lapierre-Adamcyk, La fin de la revanche des berceaux : qu 'en pensent les Québécoises? (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1974), p. 41.
22. Henripin and Péron, "The Demographic Transition in thé Province of Quebec", p. 39;
23. Henripin and Lapierre-Adamcyk, La fin de la revanche des berceaux, p. 41.
24. Charbonneau, La population du Québec, p. 15.
25. e siècle, essai de mesure et d'interprétation", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 34 (1993), p. 9.
26. For a recent example of this perspective, see Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, "Women, Priests, and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 34 (2003), pp. 293-314;
27. the same argument and evidence are presented in French by Danielle Gauvreau and Diane Gervais, "Les chemins détournés vers une fécondité contrôlée : le cas du Québec, 1930-1970", Annales de démographie historique (2002), no. 2, pp. 89-109.
28. Jacques Henripin et al., Les enfants gu 'on n 'a plus au Québec (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1981).
29. Denise Lemieux and Léon Bernier, "La transmission intergénérationnelle dans les projets de procréation : une approche qualitative et subjective des changements démographiques au Québec", International Journal of Canadian Studies (1993), special issue, pp. 85-103. This contrast between the findings of Henripin and those of Lemieux and Bernier is more apparent than real since asking women about "large" families produces a different kind of answer than asking children about the size of their sibling group.
30. Gérard Bouchard, Quelques arpents d'Amérique : population, économie, famille au Saguenay, 1838-1971 (Montréal: Éditions du Boréal, 1996).
31. Marie Lavigne, "Réflexions féministes autour de la fertilité québécoise", in Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont, eds., Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d'école : femmes, famille et éducation dans l'histoire du Québec (Montréal: Éditions du Boréal, 1983), pp. 319-338. In our concern with what we might call "the tyranny of averages", we are indeed on the same wavelength as Lavigne, but we draw quite different conclusions about how we can understand the distribution of family sizes among francophone Québécoises. We do not claim that we are "correct" and that Lavigne is "wrong", nor do we dispute her claim that quite a few women were permanently celibate and that some married women had fewer than the average number of children. Rather, we are concerned to make clear that this is only part of the story.
32. Jacques Henripin, Tendances et facteurs de la fécondité au Canada (Ottawa: Bureau fédéral de la statistique, 1968), p. iii.
33. No doubt this higher aggregated fertility level in mid-Victorian Ontario needs to be more finely analysed to take into account the essential fact that migration into Ontario of people of childbearing age was much greater than migration into Quebec. Only Montreal received any substantial number of non-native-born outsiders; most other parts of Quebec reflected deeper, province-wide age distributions, and, indeed, many parts of Quebec were actually exporting people of childbearing age to the cities of the province and also to New England.
34. Jacques Henripin and Yves Péron, "La transition démographique au Québec", in Charbonneau, ed., La population du Québec, p. 39.
35. Henripin et al., Les enfants qu 'on n 'a plus au Québec.
36. Gauvreau and Gossage, "Empêcher la famille".
37. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", in Lewis Feuer, ed., Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 320.
38. Henripin, Tendances et facteurs de la fécondité au Canada, p. xxviii. In this quotation, the phrase la surfécondité des francophones refers to aggregated levels of fertility, not the kind of "super fertility" that we discuss here.
39. Henripin and Péron, "La transition démographique au Québec", pp. 41-42.
40. This criticism is relevant to the recent publications of Gauvreau and Gervais ("Women, Priests and Physicians" and "Les chemins détournés").
41. This statement is simply hyperbolic; see, by way of contrast, Daly, "A Marxian-Malthusian View of Poverty and Development" and "Marx and Malthus in North-East Brazil".
42. Philippe Gangue, "Réexamen de l'évolution sociale du Québec", in M. Rioux and Y. Martin, eds., La société canadienne-française (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1971), p. 154.
43. This article was first published in English in 1960 in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science.
44. Quote taken from J. C. Falardeau, Essais sur le Québec contemporain (Quebec: Presses universitaires Lavai, 1953), p. 8.
45. M.-A. Tremblay, "Modèles d'autorité dans la famille canadienne-française", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 7 (1966), pp. 215-230.
46. Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, "Familles et destins féminins : le prisme de la mémoire, 1880-1940", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 28 (1987), pp. 255-271.
47. An indication of Garique's invisible status is that, in a survey of twentieth-century Quebec historiography, Ronald Rudin never mentions Garigue, nor does he cite Garigue's work in his bibliography. See Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
48. Philippe Garigue, Études sur le Canada français (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1958), p. 6.
49. Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 286.
50. From Ronald Rudin's discussion of the influence of Lionel Groulx, it seems clear that there was an inverse correlation between the marginalization of francophone Quebecers from the commanding heights of the provincial economy and Groulx's glorification of "tradition" as a means of coping with downward mobility. See Rudin, Making History, especially pp. 103-104.
51. Philippe Garigue, "St Justin: A Case Study in Rural French-Canadian Social Organization", Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 22 (1956), p. 318. Hughes's approval of Gérin's description of St-Justin is quoted by Garigue on p. 302 of this article.
52. Gangue, "St Justin: A Case Study", p. 326.
53. The work by Everett C. Hughes to which Gangue refers is French Canada in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).
54. Odoric Bouffard, "Le Canadien-français entre deux mondes", Culture, vol. 28 (1967), pp. 347-356.
55. Maurice Lemire, "Bonheur d'occasion ou le salut par la guerre", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 10 (1969), pp. 23-35.
56. René Jutras, "Viabilité de la famille québécoise", L'action nationale, vol. 61 (1972), pp. 357-383.
57. Charbonneau, La population du Québec, p. 5.
58. Most, if not all, of the articles published in the scholarly journal L'action nationale were political in nature. Through their articles on Quebec society and culture, the nationalists were able to find support for their design and method to their purpose.
59. Peter Gossage and Danielle Gauvreau, "Demography and Discourse in Transition: Quebec Fertility at the Turn of the Twentieth Century", History of the Family, vol. 4, no. 4 (1999), pp. 379-380.
60. Jutras, "Viabilité de la famille québé coise", p. 361.
61. Fernand Ouellet, "La modernisation de l'historiographie et l'émergence de l'histoire sociale", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 26 (1985), pp. 11-83,
62. and "La question sociale au Québec, 1880-1930 : la condition féminine et le mouvement des femmes dans l'historiographie", Histoire sociale/Social History vol. 21, no. 42 (November 1988), pp. 319-345.
63. Bettina Bradbury, "Feminist Historians and Family History in Canada in the 1990s", Journal of Family History, vol. 25 (2000), pp. 362-383.
64. Lavigne, "Réflexions féministes autour de la fertilité québécoise", p. 320.
65. "Réflexions féministes autour de la fertilité québécoise", Ibid., p. 326.
66. Danielle Gauvreau, "Destins de femmes, destins de mères : images et réalités historiques de la maternité au Québec", Recherches sociographiques, vol. 32 (1991), pp. 321-346.
67. Recherches sociographiques, Ibid., p. 326.
68. Danielle Gauvreau and Peter Gossage, "Canadian Fertility Transitions: Quebec and Ontario at the Turn of the Twentieth Century", Journal of Family History, vol. 26 (2001), pp. 162-188.
69. Denyse Baillargeon, "La crise ordinaire : les ménagè res montréalaises et la crise des années trente", Labour/ Le travail, vol. 30 (1992), pp. 135-162.
70. It is impossible to be more precise. We estimated that the five women with eight or more children had an average of ten each, which yielded a total of 50; the six mothers of six or seven children were equally divided so that their offspring totalled 39 children; the eleven women with three, four, or five children were multiplied by four to yield 44 children; and the six with two or fewer children were allocated, two apiece, to having none, one, and two children respectively, which yielded six children. Baillargeon is imprecise concerning the total number of pregnancies and the number of children who were stillborn or died in infancy (we do not know the circumstances surrounding the infertility of two of the women interviewed), so we can arrive at only a rough approximation.
71. Baillargeon, "La crise ordinaire", p. 144.
72. Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont, "Les rapports femmes/famille/éducation au Québec : bilan de recherche", in Fahmy-Eid and Dumont, eds., Maîtresses de maison, p. 10.
73. Gérard Bouchard, "L'histoire sociale au Québec : réflexions sur quelques paradoxes", Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, vol. 51 (1997), pp. 243-269,
74. and "Marginality, Co-interation and Change: Social History as a Critical Exercise", Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, vol. 8 (1997), pp. 19-38.
75. Gérard Bouchard, "Through the Meshes of Patriarchy: The Male/Female Relationship in the Saguenay Peasant Society (1860-1930)", History of the Family, vol. 4 (1999), pp. 399, 397.
76. The same argument is advanced in a French version of this essay: "La sexualité comme pratique et rapport social chez les paysans du Saguenay (1860-1930)", Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, vol. 54 (2001), pp. 183-217.