Families in Transition

by Gossage, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780773518476
• ISBN10: 0773518479
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-09-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ Pr

Summary

Gossage uses a family-reconstitution method, drawing on local parish registers and manuscript-census schedules, to focus on marriage, household organization, and family size in this context of social and economic change. Family formation was profoundly affected as couples adjusted to the new urban, industrial setting. Gossage demonstrates that demographic behaviour was increasingly differentiated by social class, with distinct marriage and fertility patterns emerging among bourgeois and proletarian families. Bourgeois women who married in the 1860s, for example, were already limiting family size, a crucial shift that did not occur in working-class families until almost a generation later. Families in Transition demonstrates the extent to which stereotypes about family life in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution need to be revisited. Far from being passive, static, uniformly prolific, and constrained by religious and cultural perspectives, Saint-Hyacinthe families responded quickly to the changing realities of the day, reinventing marriage patterns and domestic arrangements to fit the new industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. In this sense they were truly families in transition.

Author Biography

Peter Gossage is associate professor of history at Universite de Sherbrooke

Table of Contents

Tables	ix
Figures	xiii
Preface	xv
Abbreviations	xix
Introduction	3	(8)
Saint-Hyacinthe in Context	11	(25)
Genesis of an Industrial Town	36	(43)
To Have and to Hold: Marriage and Family Formation in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe	79	(36)
Families at the Threshold: Newlyweds, Household Structure, and Proximity to Kin	115	(24)
Interesting Conditions: Fertility and Family Size in Transition	139	(38)
Conclusion: The Art of the Possible	177	(6)
Appendix Family Formation in Focus: An Essay on Methods	183	(30)
Notes	213	(56)
Bibliography	269	(24)
Index	293