Mapping the Margins : The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700-1975

by Christie, Nancy; Gauvreau, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780773526983
• ISBN10: 0773526986
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ Pr

Summary

Mapping the Margins examines marginal family formations - spinsters, bachelors, orphans, unmarried mothers, the insane, and the aged - that have been largely overlooked by historians. The authors challenge the view that the nuclear family was dominant in Canada, providing significant new evidence through which to understand family life in the past. They build on the new theoretical proposition that the family must be conceived of as a regulatory institution of unequal hierarchies of age, gender, and social status. In constructing broader arguments about the changing relationship between the family, the individual, and the state, this innovative volume charts a new interpretive framework that sees the family as a central arbiter in constructing identities and politics in the modernizing world.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Contributors	ix
Introduction: Interrogating the Conjugal Family	3	(24)
Nancy Christie
BROKEN FAMILIES
Introduction	27	(146)
Nancy Christie
1 Gender, Family, and Mutual Assistance in New France: Widows, Widowers, and Orphans in Eighteenth-Century Quebec	35	(34)
Josette Brun
2. A "Painful Dependence": Female Begging Letters and the Familial Economy of Obligation	69	(34)
Nancy Christie
3. Itineraries of Marriage and Widowhood in Nineteenth-Century Montreal	103	(38)
Bettina Bradbury
4 Marginal by Definition? Stepchildren in Quebec, 1866-1920	141	(32)
Peter Gossage
BACHELORS AND SPINSTERS
Introduction	173	(98)
Nancy Christie
5 The Invention of the Margin as an Invention of the Family: The Case of Rural Quebec in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries	183	(26)
Ollivier Hubert
6 The Peddler's Tale: Radical Religion and Family Marginality in the Journal of Ralph Merry, 1804-1863	209	(26)
J.I. Little
7 "Old Maidism Itself": Spinsterhood in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary and Life-Writing Texts from Maritime Canada	235	(12)
Gwendolyn Davies
8 Matthews and Marillas: Bachelors and Spinsters in Prince Edward Island in 1881	247	(24)
Michele Stairs
INSTITUTIONS AND MARGINALITY
Introduction	271	(34)
Nancy Christie
9 The Lunatic Fringe: Families, Madness, and Institutional Confinement in Victorian Ontario	277	(28)
James Moran, David Wright, and Mat Savelli
10 Orphans in Quebec: On the Margins of Which Family?	305	(22)
Denyse Baillargeon
11 Nova Scotia and Its Unmarried Mothers, 1945-1975	327	(22)
Suzanne Morton
12 Grizzled Old Men and Lonely Widows: Constructing the Single Elderly as a Social Problem in Canada's Welfare State, 1945-1967	349	(34)
James Struthers
Conclusion: The Family as Pathology: Psychology, Social Science, and History Construct the Nuclear Family, 1945-1980	383
Michael Gauvreau