The harsh welcome of an industrial city: Immigrant women in Montreal, 1880-1900

Histoire Sociale

Volumn 40, Issue 80, 2007, Pages 345-380

  Gauvreau, Danielle ^a   Olson, Sherry ^b   Thornton, Patricia ^a  

^a Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering

^b MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 47849092869     PISSN: 00182257     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Ron J. Lesthaeghe, The Decline of Belgian Fertility, 1800-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);
2. George Alter, "Theories of Fertility Decline: A Non Specialist's Guide to the Current Debate", in J. R. Gillis, L. A. Tilly, and D. Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility: A Quiet Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 13-30.
3. Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson, "The Religious Claim on Babies in Nineteenth-century Montreal", in Renzo Derosas and Frans van Poppel, eds., Religion and the Decline of Fertility in the Western World (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 207-237;
4. Danielle Gauvreau, Sherry Olson, and Patricia Thornton, "Three Demographic Regimes in an Industrializing City" (poster, International Union for the Study of Population, Tours, July 1, 2005), accessible at htp://artsandscience.concordia.ca/GEOG/projects/.
5. Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), chap. 5;
6. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Toward Orientals in B.C. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1978);
7. Chad Gaffield, Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict: The Origins of the French-Language Controversy in Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987).
8. M. Timlin, "Canada's Immigration Policy, 1896-1910", Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. 26, pp. 517-532;
9. Alan Green and Mary MacKinnon, "The Slow Assimilation of British Immigrants in Canada: Evidence from Montreal and Toronto, 1901", Explorations in Economic History, vol. 38 (2001), pp. 315-338;
10. Mary MacKinnon, "Unilingues ou bilingues? Les Montréalais sur le marché du travail en 1901", L'Actualité économique, vol. 76, no. 1 (2000), pp. 137-158;
11. Jason Dean, "The Economic Assimilation of Urban Immigrants in Canada during the Wheat Boom Era of 1896-1913" (presentation at the Canadian Economic Association, Halifax, June 2007).
12. e siècle", Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique, Études d'histoire religieuse, vol. 73 (2007), pp. 7-30;
13. Barbara Roberts, "Sex, Politics and Religion: Controversies in Female Immigration Reform Work in Montreal, 1881-1919", Atlantis, vol. 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980), pp. 25-38.
14. Carolyn Strange, Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995);
15. Lykke De la Cour, Cecilia Morgan, and Mariana Valverde, "Gender Regulation and State Formation in Nineteenth-century Canada", in Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 163-191;
16. Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal's Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), chap. 1.
17. Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 7.
18. Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993);
19. Michael Anderson, "Marriage Patterns in Victorian Britain: An Analysis Based on Registration District Data for England and Wales, 1861", Journal of Family History, vol. 1, no. 1 (1976), pp. 55-79;
20. S. J. Kleinberg, "Children's and Mothers' Wage Labor in Three Eastern U.S. Cities, 1880-1920", Social Science History, vol. 29, no. 1 (2005), pp. 45-76;
21. George Alter, Family and the Female Life Course (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
22. Looking at Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Fall River, Kleinberg points to ethnic attributes and widowhood of mothers as factors shaping the contours of youth participation in the labour force; she notes high levels of economic activity among French Canadian children in particular, offsetting the more precarious and lower wages of the father ("Children's and Mothers' Wage Labor", p. 69). Alter, employing rich longitudinal data for the Belgian town of Verviers, argues that parental control or filial obedience was negotiated, and as much normative as economic.
23. Cf. Jordan Stranger-Ross, Christina Collins, and Mark J. Stern, "Falling Far from the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-century America", Social Science History, vol. 29, no. 4 (2005), pp. 625-648.
24. Betsy Beattie, Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870-1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000);
25. Hilde Bras, "Maids to the City: Migration Patterns of Female Domestic Servants from the Province of Zeeland, the Netherlands (1850-1950)", History of the Family, vol. 8 (2003), pp. 217-246.
26. Irish emigrant women are particularly known for their remittances: cf. Carole Groneman, "Immigrant Women in Mid-nineteenth Century New York : The Irish Women's Experience", Journal of Urban History, vol. 4, no. 3 (1978), pp. 255-273;
27. Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989);
28. Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in New Zealand, 1853-1871 (Wellington: Allen and Unwin/New Zealand Historical Branch, 1990).
29. See also the outlook of Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, pp. 12-13.
30. See, for example, Henry E. Hale, "Explaining Ethnicity", Comparative Political Studies, vol. 37, no. 4 (May 2004), pp. 458-485. The English-speaking Catholics, here tagged Irish Catholic, included small numbers of Catholics of Scottish and English extraction as well as offspring of mixed marriages since 1760.
31. Eric W. Sager, Douglas K. Thompson, and Marc Trottier, The National Sample of the 1901 Census of Canada: User Guide (Victoria: University of Victoria, The Canadian Families Project, 1997). We included the City of Montreal and all industrial and suburban districts on the Island of Montreal, and excluded the agricultural villages of Pointe-aux-Trembles, Rivière-des- Prairies, and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue. In both 1881 and 1901, the city population is therefore augmented by about 20 per cent.
32. To the initial version of the 1881 database provided by Lisa Dillon, we added missing data on school attendance for two-thirds of Montreal sub-districts.
33. e siècle", Cahiers québécois de dé mographie, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 191-230.
34. John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Theodore Hershberg, "Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective", Journal of Family History, vol. 1, no. 1 (1976), pp. 7-33;
35. th Centuries (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 33-84.
36. By convention, this is estimated from the proportion of women who married before age 50, with expectation of children.
37. Those estimates are calculated as either the difference between the median age of entering the work force and the median age of leaving the parental home; or the difference between the age of leaving home and the median age of marriage. Given the small sizes of samples for 1901, year-by-year estimates are too fine-grained, and comparisons between the two dates are simplified to a threefold typology, explained below.
38. Kris Inwood and Richard Reid, "Gender and Occupational Identity in a Canadian Census", Historical Methods, vol. 34, no. 2 (2001), pp. 57-70.
39. Trunk railways and telegraph companies of the 1850s were models for the new management. Cf. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. with Herman Daems, Managerial Hierarchies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980);
40. Robert Lewis, Manufacturing Montreal: The Making of an Industrial Landscape, 1850 to 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Lewis reports, as an estimate of concentration, that in 1890 the 197 largest firms (14.4 per cent) accounted for 63 per cent of the rental value of commercial space.
41. As an indication of how these changes interacted with the age structure of the labour force, the municipal bureaucracy was unusual in its tendency to hire men rather advanced in age or in a second career, while the banks preferred to hire young. See Michèle Dagenais, Des pouvoirs et des hommes : l'administration municipale de Montréal, 1900-1950 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000).
42. Claire Poitras, La cité au bout du fil : le téléphone à Montréal de 1879 à 1930 (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2000).
43. Bradbury, Working Families;
44. Peter Baskerville and E. W. Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
45. Occupational status groups were formed on the basis of median rents of household heads reporting that occupation to the annual municipal tax roll of occupants; Jason Gilliland and Sherry Olson, "Claims on Housing Space in Nineteenth-century Montreal", Urban History Review, vol. 26, no. 2 (1998), pp. 3-16.
46. An apprentice printer might earn $5 to $8 a week, a union journeyman $15 to $16. Testimony on The Gazette printing office in Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital in Canada, vol. 3 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1889), pp. 321-325. The larger share of immigrants in the older generation of Irish contributed to the status difference evident in Table I. More Irish immigrants arrived in the mid-1880s, more Protestants in the 1890s.
47. This can best be observed by log transformation of rental values from the municipal taxe locative annual series; cf. Gilliland and Olson, "Claims on Housing Space".
48. Kate Boyer, "Re-working Respectability: The Feminisation of Clerical Work and the Politics of Public Virtue in Early 20th-century Montreal", in Tamara Myers et al., eds., Power, Place and Identity: Historical Studies of Social and Legal Regulation in Quebec (Montreal: McGill University, Montreal History Group, 1998), pp. 151-168,
49. and "Place and the Politics of Virtue: Clerical Work, Corporate Anxiety, and Changing Meanings of Public Womanhood in Early Twentieth-century Montreal", Gender, Place and Culture, vol. 5, no. 3 (1998), pp. 261-276.
50. Anne-Marie Sicotte, Marie Gérin-Lajoie, Conquérante de la liberté (Montreal: Éditions du remue-ménage, 2005), p. 168.
51. Marta Danylewicz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987).
52. Bruno Ramirez, "Brief Encounters: Italian Immigrant Workers and the CPR, 1900-1930", Labour/Le Travail, vol. 17 (Spring 1986), pp. 9-27;
53. Denise Helly, Les Chinois à Montréal, 1877-1951 (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1987);
54. Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community (Toronto: Lester, 1992).
55. Labourers accounted for 11 per cent of Anglo-Protestants born outside Canada (15 years and over) compared with 4 per cent of those born in Canada. The corresponding figures for Irish Catholics are 19 and 13 per cent. French Canadians exhibited the same patterns in relation to internal migration: of those born in rural areas, 17 per cent were labourers, for city-born men, 13 per cent.
56. Danylewicz, Taking the Veil.
57. By 1881, 95 per cent of working men aged 15 to 29 were already employed outside the home, in offices, factories, dockside hiring gangs, stores, and workshops. The home remained a base of operations for some grocers, doctors and notaries, cab drivers and carters, tavern and restaurant keepers, but the proportions declined even in these occupations.
58. e siècle", in N. Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont, Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d'école (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1983), pp. 76-91.
59. See also Mélanie Lanouette, "Penser l'éducation, dire sa culture. Les écoles catholiques anglaises au Québec, 1928-1964" (PhD dissertation, Université Laval, 2004);
60. Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen, A Meeting of the People: School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801-1998 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004).
61. On the social gradient in census-reported school attendance, see Kathy Provost, "Blunted Lives of Children" (MA thesis, Concordia University, 2006).
62. Karine Hébert, "Une organisation maternaliste au Québec. La fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste et la bataille pour le vote des femmes", Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, vol. 52, no. 3 (1999), pp. 315-344;
63. Danylewicz, Taking the Veil, pp. 175-181;
64. Yolande Pinard, "Les débuts du mouvement des femmes", in M. Lavigne and Y. Pinard, eds., Les femmes dans la société québécoise (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1977), pp. 61-87;
65. Fernande Roy, Progrès, harmonie, liberté : le libéralisme des milieux d'affaires francophones de Montréal au tournant du siècle (Montreal: Boréal, 1988).
66. Bettina Bradbury, "Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-wage Forms of Survival among Montreal Families, 1861-91", Labour/ Le Travail, vol. 15 (Fall 1984), pp. 9-46;
67. Peter Baskerville, "Familiar Strangers: Urban Families with Boarders in Canada, 1901", Social Science History, vol. 25, no. 3 (2001), pp. 321-346.
68. On servants, see Marilyn Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1991);
69. Harvey, "La religion"; and, for broader context, Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ed., Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity: Understanding the Globalization of Domestic Work, 16th-21st Centuries (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
70. Eric W. Sager, "National Data on Working-class Earnings: The 1901 Census of Canada", Historical Methods, vol. 33, no. 4 (2000), pp. 235-242. Response rates vary by occupational category, always at least 80 per cent (p. 236), and self-reported information poses additional problems.
71. Following the strategy of Green and MacKinnon ("The Slow Assimilation", p. 324), we standardized monthly earnings to take into account the number of months an individual was employed, and, in compiling group averages and household earnings, we excluded cases in which someone reporting an occupation did not report income.
72. Roma Dauphin, Économie du Québec, une économie à la remorque de ses groupes (Laval: Beauchemin, 1994);
73. Abdurrahman Aydemir and George J. Borjas, "A Comparative Analysis of the Labor Market Impact of International Migration: Canada, Mexico, and the United States", National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12327 (June 2006), available as Statistics Canada, Update on Family and Labour Studies, publication 89-001-XWE (Winter 2007), or accessible at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12327.
74. La Patrie, May 20, 1881.
75. Other sources pertaining to the 1880s mention that an apprentice cigar-maker 14 or 15 years old, male or female, might earn $1 a week the first year, $2 the second, $3 the third, and $4 the fourth, approaching two-thirds of a labourer's yearly wage (for example, Acts of Durand for employment by the Goulet brothers cigar makers, April 15, 1882; May 11, 1882). An experienced woman worker, even at age 30, was not likely to exceed the wage of that apprentice.
76. For households headed by a married labourer, rent distributions for 1880 show no elasticity with age, while in higher-status occupations, rents - and presumably incomes - continued to rise with age. Green and MacKinnon, from wages reported in the census of 1901, were able to pinpoint the early course of earnings among the unmarried: a steep rise with each year of age to about 25, flat thereafter ("The Slow Assimilation"). This meant that at age 25 the workingman was likely to achieve a "family wage", and his aspirations were moulded accordingly.
77. In the age cohort of 25 to 29, fewer than 47 per cent of Irish Catholic men in the highest status group were married and 69 per cent in the lowest (labourers), as compared with 58 and 83 per cent of Protestant men.
78. Robert Gagnon, Histoire de la Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal (Montreal: Boréal, 1996), pp. 73-79;
79. Marta Danylewicz and Alison Prentice, "Teachers, Gender and Bureaucratizing School Systems in Nineteenth Century Montreal and Toronto", History of Education Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 75-100;
80. e siècle", in Fahmy-Eid and Dumont, eds., Maîtresses de maison.
81. Between French Canadians and others, the gap in age at marriage remained as large, so that reproductive investment differed, highest for French Canadians, lowest for Irish Catholics. Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson, "A Deadly Discrimination among Montreal Infants, 1860-1900", Continuity and Change, vol. 16, no. 1 (2001), pp. 95-135.
82. Because domestic servants were usually fed and housed, the take-home wage (ca $100) favoured remittance or savings, and Irish Catholic spinsters were noted for legacies to nephews for schooling, enrolments in the savings bank, and their donations to finish the Cathedral and pay off the debt of St. Patrick's Church.
83. Patricia Thornton and Sherry Olson, "The Challenge of the Irish Catholic Community in Nineteenth-century Montreal", Histoire sociale/ Social History, vol. 35, no. 70 (November 2002), pp. 333-362.
84. For evidence of the networking value of boarders and extended family, see Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle-Class Homes of Industrial Chicago (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). In his data for Venice, Derosas was able to show that the size of the social network facilitated marriages and that migration into the city reduced the size of this network and the ease with which people could find partners and employment.
85. See Renzo Derosas, "A Family Affair: Marriage, Mobility and Living Arrangements in Nineteenth-century Venice, 1850-1869", in van Poppel et al., eds., The Road to Independence, pp. 143-196.
86. Of Protestant owners, 64 per cent held more than one property (counted as recorded in the tax roll), compared with only 30 per cent of Irish Catholic or French Canadian owners.
87. In 1881, 96 per cent of French Canadians aged 15 to 29 were living in households of the same affiliation, compared with 93 per cent of Protestants, but only 78 per cent of Irish Catholics.
88. See, for 1881, http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca;
89. for 1891, http://www.census1891.ca/;
90. for 1901, the Canadian Families Project, http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/cfp/;
91. for the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure 1911-1951, http://www.canada.uottawa.ca/ccri/;
92. and for links to other nations, the North Atlantic Population Project, http://www.nappdata.org/napp/.