This volume opens with a quartet of essays that directly interrogate what Bettina Bradbury has termed “the obsession of early family historians with questions of family structure and of demographers with ‘completed families.’”¹ These chapters pursue the impact that the death of the male household head had upon the organization of family relations. Did widows achieve a higher degree of independence once they were removed from the legal strictures ofcouverture, or were women and other female relatives consigned to even greater levels of dependency through a precipitate reduction in their wealth? Was their status ineluctably changed by their marital...

New France, like other Western pre-industrial societies, was characterized by high mortality rates in the adult population. Death occasioned frequent ruptures of the marital community, thus causing serious fissures in the structure and organization of the family, which was founded upon the union of the couple, the husband’s authority within the marriage, and the gendered division of labour.¹ In such circumstances, widows and widowers found themselves outside the framework of the “normal” family and had to face an uncertain social and economic situation created by the loss of their spouse. A number of questions arise from an examination of these...

On 15 July 1800 Jane Powell, a self-defined impoverished spinster then living in England, wrote her sixth begging letter since her father’s death to her brother, William Dummer Powell, a judge in Upper Canada (now Ontario). Fully recognizing that, despite his wealth, Powell had chosen to ignore his fraternal duties, Jane proceeded to construct a charity narrative explaining why she and her sister Margaret were deserving of familial assistance. Not only were they the innocent victims of their father’s impecuniousness, but as spinsters living on £60 per annum, they had not an independency. Knowing that poverty alone might not elicit...

Wife to widow. The possibility that wives would become widows was ever-present in nineteenth-century societies, lurking behind all sorts of other political, social, and economic issues. It was a matter of private anguish and concern and of public policy and debate. Couples and their parents invariably considered widowhood at the time of marriage, much as the possibility of divorce cannot be ignored today. Legislators could not avoid the question of widowhood whenever they rewrote laws regarding such apparently unrelated topics as conveyancing rules or property registration. When men with any property fell ill, one of their first concerns was to...

Let us begin with a riddle. What did Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Abbé Lionel Groulx have in common? Certainly not their politics. Besides being prominent Quebecers for whom many streets, buildings, and subway stations have been named, Laurier and Groulx were both stepchildren. Laurier lost his mother when he was seven years old, and his father remarried soon afterwards. Groulx was barely six weeks old when his father died; about a year later, his mother also remarried.

Laurier and Groulx, to whom we will return, were both raised in what I will call stepfamilies – families formed when a single...

One of the suggestive sub-themes pursued by Bradbury, Brun, and Christie in the previous section – the tension between individual choice and the constraints of culture, economics, and legal imperatives – forms the central interpretive axis of the essays by Ollivier Hubert, Jack Little, Gwendolyn Davies, and Michele Stairs in the following section. These essays overtly pursue the ambiguities of selfhood and social identities by studying the experience of single men and women through evidence of both prescription and practice in diaries, wills, literature, and demography. To date, the historiography on singleness focuses mainly on the experience of women, and...

The question that the “margins of the family” allows us to raise is not so much about the margins as about the family itself or, more precisely, about the nuclear family as an historical construction, every interrogation of “marginality” as a cultural fact being a means of positing the norm as a construct. Since the family is an institution that asserts itself with such socio-economic obviousness, such anthropological resonance, and such historic permanence, it is difficult to understand it as a cultural construct as well. The task is becoming easier, however, to the extent that our society questions some of...

Gender historians, such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in England and Nancy Cott in New England, have associated the rise of the “cult” of domesticity in the early nineteenth century with evangelical religion. Cott argues, for example, that this emerging middle-class ideal tacitly acknowledged the capacity of the modern world to desecrate the human spirit.¹ While that world was slow to impinge directly on the economically isolated Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, most of the published diaries and personal correspondence from the region during the first half of the nineteenth century do reveal a strong preoccupation with the family....

Early in the anonymously written letters of Patty Pry, published in theAcadian Recorderin 1826, the vivacious young Patty recoils with shock at a newspaper poem advising young men to beware of the slavery of love. “My eye balls were stretched,” she announces in mock horror, “as this is the article in which we deal and by which we hope to make our bread.”¹ Her market-economy response to the poem cuts to the heart of the fictional letters. Determined to avoid the fate of her “withered, skinny old maid”² Aunt Tabitha and sensitive to her father’s dictate that “a...

Spinsters and bachelors feature prominently in main and supporting roles in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s widely readAnne of Green Gablesand her other stories. While literary scholars have scrutinized the representation of these unmarried men and women of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Prince Edward Island, Canadian historians have paid little attention to the lives of people who did not marry.¹ In this chapter I analyze the census of 1881 to determine what can be seen of the lives of bachelors and spinsters in Prince Edward Island at the time Montgomery was writing. Her Matthews and Marillas, I argue, were...

The third section of this volume, comprising the essays by James Moran, David Wright, and Mat Savelli, Denyse Baillargeon, Suzanne Morton, and James Struthers, addresses the changing borderlines between family initiatives and the state’s growing assertion of its own conceptualization of the family. These chapters reveal that there was no simple dichotomy between imposition and resistance; for as Moran, Wright, and Savelli and Baillargeon demonstrate, what advocates of the social-control thesis have interpreted as an era in which the whole culture became encompassed within the logic of institutional regulatory practices was largely shaped by family strategies well into the twentieth...

In 1893 Frederick Garvin imagined that he was the “greatest man on earth.” His family, however, disagreed. Frederick, a married twentynine- year-old Canadian farmer, had been thrice admitted to the Hamilton Lunatic Asylum for delusions of grandeur that led to violent actions against kith and kin. On previous occasions he had injured his relatives, and after he declared that he “wanted to make a bonfire” of his house, his family petitioned to have him admitted yet again to the regional mental hospital. Two local medical practitioners, Drs Vernon and Edgar, certified that he was “a proper person for the asylum”...

Over the past several years in Quebec, the complaints of the “Duplessis orphans” (les orphelins de Duplessis) have reminded us that in the not-so-distant past, a large number of French-speaking Quebec children lived on the margins of the family in institutions run by religious communities.¹ In 1996 Marie-Paule Malouin published a study in response to the accusations levelled by this group, headed by the writer Bruno Roy, himself a Duplessis orphan, in which she examined this “universe of children in difficulty,” paying particular attention to the nuns themselves and making connections between the place and status of women in the...

For the first half of the twentieth century, Nova Scotia, the most populous of Canada’s Atlantic provinces, had the distinction of having the highest rates of births outside legal marriages in the country. In the 1950s, when British Columbia and the North, areas with very different demographic and religious characteristics, reached and surpassed Nova Scotian levels, the eastern province still maintained the highest rates of illegitimacy among what has been referred to as “Old Canada.” Only the enormous transformation of marriage and sexual practices that followed the 1960s – something that Nancy Cott has recently referred to as the “disestablishment”...

The image of a grizzled old man stares out at us from the cover of one of Canada’s most celebrated social-policy documents: the 1970 report of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty in Canada. Its counterpart, an elderly single woman bent over double on a park bench, provides the inside jacket image in the same report. If poverty had a public face in 1960s Canada, it was most often that of the single, marginalized elderly living outside the boundaries of the family. Major studies of low income during that decade seemed to provide ample statistical evidence to back up these...