Working Families takes the reader onto the streets of Montreal and into the homes of its working-class families during the years that it became a major, industrial city. Between the 1860s and 1890s the expansion of wage labour changed the bases of family survival. It offered new possibilities and created new points of tension within the families of the emerging working class. Here we meet the men, youth, and children who worked for wages. We see the women who stayed home with their young, cooked and sewed, planted gardens and tended animals, stretching their often meagre family wages into goods and services for survival. We also see the ingenuity and agony of women whose husbands lost their jobs, fell ill, drank up their wages, deserted their families, or died.
Working Families explores the complex variety of responses of working-class families to their new lives within industrial capitalist society, and offers new ways of looking at the industrial revolution in Canada.

Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Canadian Social History Series)

History

Bradbury, Bettina

Americas

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Canadian Family History: Selected Readings (New Canadian Readings)

World

Copp Clark Pitman

Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

In Wife to Widow, historian Bettina Bradbury explores the little studied phenomenon of the transition from wife to widowhood to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of early nineteenth-century Montreal.Bradbury's unique history spans the lives of two generations of Montreal women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 to reveal a picture of a city and its inhabitants across a period of profound change. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, from church and court records, censuses, and tax documents, to newspapers and pamphlets, Bradbury shows how women --Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, wealthy and working-class -- interacted with and shaped the city's culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy.Weaving together the individual biographies of twenty women against the backdrop of the collective genealogy of over five hundred, Bradbury tells the stories of these women through the traces their actions left in documents and archives. In doing so, she makes an invaluable contribution to the writing on the histories of women, families, cities, law, religion and politics.A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely readable, rigorous, and compelling work.

UBC Press

In Wife to Widow, historian Bettina Bradbury explores the little studied phenomenon of the transition from wife to widowhood to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of early nineteenth-century Montreal. Bradbury's unique history spans the lives of two generations of Montreal women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 to reveal a picture of a city and its inhabitants across a period of profound change. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, from church and court records, censuses, and tax documents, to newspapers and pamphlets, Bradbury shows how women --Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, wealthy and working-class -- interacted with and shaped the city's culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy. Weaving together the individual biographies of twenty women against the backdrop of the collective genealogy of over five hundred, Bradbury tells the stories of these women through the traces their actions left in documents and archives. In doing so, she makes an invaluable contribution to the writing on the histories of women, families, cities, law, religion and politics. A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely readable, rigorous, and compelling work.

University of Toronto Press

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