Retirement at the turn of the twentieth century: A Canadian perspective

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 91, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 27-59

  Dillon, Lisa ^a   Gratton, Brian ^a   Moen, Jon ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Census; Labour; Life course; Old age; Retirement

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952615097     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/chr.91.1.27     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Kenneth Bryden, Old Age Pensions and Policy-Making in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974), 29-31
2. David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
3. W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
4. Paul Johnson, 'The Employment and Retirement of Older Men in England and Wales, 1881-1981,' Economic History Review, n.s., 47, no. 1 (Feb. 1994): 106-28
5. James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 50-2
6. A contemporary, pessimistic take on aging in the industrial context is found in Abraham Epstein, The Challenge of the Aged (New York: Vanguard, 1928), 1-13
7. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, 'The Labor of Older Americans: Retirement on and off the Job, 1870-1937,' Journal of Economic History (Mar. 1986): 1-30
8. Susan Carter and Richard Sutch, 'Fixing the Facts: Editing of the 1880 U.S. Census of Occupations with Implications for Long-Term Labor-Force Trends and the Sociology of Official Statistics,' Historical Methods 29 (Winter 1996): 5-24
9. Dora Costa, 'Agricultural Decline and the Secular Rise in Male Retirement Rates,' Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995): 540-52
10. Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
11. Lisa Dillon, The Shady Side of Fifty: Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), 195-8
12. Diane Gervais, 'Succession et cycle familial dans le Comté de Verchères, 1870-1950,' Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 50 (Summer 1996): 69-94
13. Brian Gratton and Jon Moen, 'Tracking the Majority: Households, Older Workers, and Retirement during the Great Depression,' Journal of Gerontology 55B (2000): S28-S32
14. Carole Haber and Brian Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 93-5
15. Chulhee Lee, 'Long-Term Unemployment and Retirement in Early Twentieth Century America,' Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (Sept. 1998): 852
16. Robert Margo, 'The Labor-Force Participation of Older Americans in 1900: Further Results,' Explorations in Economic History 30 (1993): 409-23
17. Jon Moen, 'Rural Nonfarm Households: Leaving the Farm and the Retirement of Older Men, 1860-1980,' Social Science History 18 (1994): 55-76
18. Moen, 'The Unemployment and Retirement of Older Men: Further Evidence from the 1900 and 1910 Censuses,' Historical Methods 27 (1994): 40-6
19. Ransom and Sutch, 'Labor of Older Americans,' 1-30
20. James G. Snell, 'Maintenance Agreements for the Elderly: Canada, 1900-1951,' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 3 (1992): 204-6, 215
21. Kenneth Michael Sylvester, The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 147-8
22. Matthew Woollard, 'The Employment and Retirement of Older Men, 1851-1881: Further Evidence from the Census,' Continuity and Change 17, no. 3 (2002): 445-7, 459-60
23. Eric W. Sager, Douglas K. Thompson, and Marc Trottier, The National Sample of the 1901 Census of Canada, User's Guide (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2002), 27-9
24. Donald O. Cowgill and Lowell D. Holmes, eds., Aging and Modernization (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972)
25. In the late 1970s a similarly pessimistic view appeared in cultural histories, as seen in Fischer, Growing Old in America, 140-4
26. Johnson, 'Employment and Retirement'
27. Clarence Long, The Labor Force under Changing Income and Employment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 171
28. Brian Gratton, 'The Poverty of Impoverishment Theory: The Economic Well-being of the Elderly, 1890-1950,' Journal of Economic History 26 (Mar. 1996): 39-61
29. Moen, 'Rural Nonfarm Households.'
30. James G. Snell, The Citizen's Wage: The State and the Elderly in Canada, 1900-1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 28-9
31. Edgar-André Montigny, Foisted upon the Government? State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997)
32. Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), table 6.2, 'Contributions to nuclear-family income by family members, by stages of family cycle, six cities, 1901,' 118
33. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow, Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 35
34. Gervais, 'Succession et cycle familial'
35. Sylvester, Limits of Rural Capitalism, 147-8
36. Gérard Bouchard, Jeannette Larouche, and Lise Bergeron, 'Donation entre vifs et inégalités sociales au Saguenay: Sur la reproduction familiale en contexte de saturation de l'espace agraire,' Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 46 (Winter 1993): 443-61
37. Allan Greer, Habitants, marchands et seigneurs: La société rurale du bas Richelieu, 1740-1840 (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2000), 111-12
38. Snell, 'Maintenance Agreements.'
39. Greer, Habitants, marchands, 113-15
40. Dillon, Shady Side of Fifty, 213
41. Jon Moen, 'From Gainful Employment to Labor Force: Definitions and a New Estimate of Work Rates of American Males, 1860-1980,' Historical Methods 21 (1988): 158
42. For critiques of Ransom and Sutch, see Lee, 'Long Term Unemployment and Retirement'
43. Jon Moen, 'The Unemployment and Retirement of Older Men: Further Evidence from the 1900 and 1910 Censuses,' Historical Methods 27 (1994): 40-6
44. For evidence of retirement and its potential in this period, see, for England, Matthew Woollard, 'Employment and Retirement of Older Men,' 445-7, 459-60
45. and, for the United States, Dora Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
46. Morris Altman, 'Labor Productivity in Late Nineteenth-Century Quebec and Ontario Manufacturing: Explaining Ontario's Advantage,' American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer and Autumn 1995): 219-22
47. Gordon Darroch, 'Scanty Fortunes and Rural Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century Central Ontario,' Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 4 (Dec. 1998): 632, 635-6, 649
48. Livio Di Matteo and Peter George, 'Patterns and Determinants of Wealth among Probated Decedents in Wentworth County, Ontario, 1872-1902,' Histoire sociale / Social History 31, no. 61 (May 1998): 33
49. Leo Panitch, 'Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,' in Perspectives on Canadian Economic Development: Class, Staples, Gender, and Elites, ed. Gordon Laxer (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 274-5
50. Darroch, 'Scanty Fortunes,' 641; Di Matteo and George, 14, 30, 32
51. Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers, 56-9
52. Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897-1929 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 31-4
53. Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), 88
54. Eric Sager, 'Inequality, Earnings, and the Canadian Working Class in 1901,' Household Counts: Canadian Households and Families in 1901 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 349-50
55. Bradbury, Working Families, 92, 101, 107-16, 152-81
56. see also Sager, 'Inequality,' 362
57. For a review of the essential work of Richard Harris and others on home ownership in the period, as well as a noteworthy contribution to the literature, see Peter Baskerville, 'Home Ownership and Spacious Homes: Equity under Stress in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada,' Journal of Family History 26, no. 2 (2001): 272-88
58. Eric W. Sager and Christopher Morier, 'Immigrants, Ethnicity and Earnings in 1901: Revisiting Canada's Vertical Mosaic,' Canadian Historical Review 83 (June 2002): 215, 229
59. Sager, Thompson, and Trottier, National Sample
60. Instructions for the us Census of 1900 noted briefly that no entry in the occupation column should be made 'for a lawyer, merchant, manufacturer, etc., who has retired from practice or business; . . . nor for a person too old to work.' Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King, and Chad Ronnander, '1900 Census, Instructions to the Enumerators,' Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], 2004), para. 218, http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/ inst1900.shtml#153
61. reprinted in Sager, Thompson, and Trottier, National Sample, xix. The Canadian census carried out the tentative lead of the nineteenth-century censuses of England and Wales, which, since 1851, had asked 'persons who have retired from business to be entered thus - "Retired Farmer," "Retired Grocer." ' Woollard, 'Employment and Retirement,' 439
62. Bouchard, Larouche, and Bergeron, 'Donation entre vifs,' 452
63. Craig, 'La Transmission,' 223-7
64. Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) ), 28-31, 68-72
65. Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (New York: Routledge, 1982, 1999)
66. Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 284-6
67. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, 'Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,' in Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, ed. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, 1-42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
68. Melissa Nobles, 'Racial Categorization and Censuses,' in Kertzer and Arel, 43-70
69. Nancy Shoemaker, 'The Census as Civilizer: American Indian Household Structure in the 1900 and 1910 us Censuses,' Historical Methods 25, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 4-11
70. Danielle Gauvreau, Peter Gossage, and Lucie Gingras, 'Measuring Fertility with the 1901 Canadian Census: A Critical Assessment,' in 'The Canadian Families Project,' special issue, Historical Methods 33, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 219-28
71. Peter Baskerville, 'Displaying the Working Class: The 1901 Census of Canada,' in 'The Canadian Families Project,' special issue, Historical Methods 33, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 229-34
72. See also Chad Gaffield, 'Linearity, Nonlinearity, and the Competing Constructions of Social Hierarchy in Early Twentieth-Century Canada: The Question of Language in 1901,' in 'The Canadian Families Project,' special issue, Historical Methods 33, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 255-60
73. In 1881, when 75 per cent or more of persons sharing a surname gave an ethnicity of French, that surname was identified as French. See Lisa Dillon, 'Challenges and Opportunities for Census Record Linkage in the French and English Canadian Context,' History and Computing 1/2 (2002): 190
74. Sager and Morier, 'Immigrants, Ethnicity and Earnings,' 2005
75. The 1901 census database includes information derived from Schedule 2 of the 1901 census, an enumeration of property owned or rented by individuals appearing in Schedule 1, the personal schedule. Our property ownership variable defines men as property owners if they owned a house, acreage, lot, store, barn, silo, or manufacturing establishment, and as property renters if they rented the same; men who both rented and owned property are classified as property owners. See Sager, Thompson, and Trottier, National Sample, 5, 15, 34
76. Stacie D.A. Burke, 'Marriage in 1901 Canada: Ecological Perspective,' Journal of Family History 26 (Apr. 2001): 192, 214
77. Lisa Dillon, 'Parent-Child Co-Residence among the Elderly in 1871 Canada and 1880 United States: A Comparative Study,' in Family Matters: Papers in Post-Confederation Canadian Family History, ed. Lori Chambers and Edgar-André Montigny (Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press, 1998), 444-5