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History Post-confederation (1867-)

Working Families

Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal

by (author) Bettina Bradbury

Publisher
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Initial publish date
Aug 2003
Category
Post-Confederation (1867-), Native American
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780195412116
    Publish Date
    Aug 2003
    List Price
    $31.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802086891
    Publish Date
    Mar 2007
    List Price
    $39.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442690950
    Publish Date
    Mar 2007
    List Price
    $35.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442685475
    Publish Date
    Mar 2007
    List Price
    $45.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

Description

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.

About the author

Bettina Bradbury is an associate professor of History and Women's Studies at York University.

Bettina Bradbury's profile page