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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700-1975 Neil Sutherland Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700- 1975. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. Pp. 412, illus., $80.00 In October 1758, Jacqueline Marandeau, a Quebec widow, entered into an arrangement with her daughter Marie Joseph Nicolas and Marie's husband Etienne Parent. In exchange for a building lot, a house, and furniture, the couple agreed to lodge with her, feed her, and 'provide all the necessaries for her required by her station' (44). In that her lifelong care then came as a matter of right rather than as a favour, Marandeau was more fortunate than many other 'lesser figures' of the family whom we meet in this fine collection. In Mapping the Margins, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau have assembled a dozen original essays describing the lives of some of the 'lesser figures' – widows, spinsters, orphans, stepchildren, and the like – from the Canadian past. Their subjects range through Quebec families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women who had to beg for their support from relatives, bachelors and spinsters, inmates of the Hamilton Lunatic Asylum, unmarried mothers, and the single elderly. With the exception of the last topic, the essays are confined to Ontario, Quebec, [End Page 693] and the Maritime provinces. Nonetheless, each is suggestive for other regions as well. Each essay focuses narrowly on its subject, and each is also rich in illustrative detail. Both in her fine overall introduction, 'Interrogating the Conjugal Family,' and in three further introductions to the sections into which the essays are divided, 'Broken Families,' 'Bachelors and Spinsters,' and 'Institutions and Marginality,' Christie positions the overall collection and each essay into its historiographic context. In turn, authors carefully connect their efforts to the related Canadian and international literature. Since a brief review does not permit comment on each essay, I will mention two that in their excellence are entirely representative of their companions. Each relates to my interest in children and childhood in anglophone Canada and shows how and why certain practices in Quebec differed from those in the rest of the country. These differences, in turn, had their roots in Catholic doctrine and practice. In 'Orphans in Quebec: On the Margins of Which Family?' Denyse Baillargeon explains why late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Quebec did not follow anglophone Canada in replacing institutional care with adoption and foster homes as the preferred location for the care for neglected, abandoned, and orphaned children. In 1920, and in response to the 'request of the women's religious communities themselves, who felt unable to cope' with the overcrowding in their crèches, the provincial government introduced a law encouraging adoption. However, since, in fact, most 'orphans' had one or both parents still alive, 'the male clergy and certain nationalists such as Henri Bourassa' vigorously objected to any measure that 'would allow the civil authority to decree the loss of parental rights which had been conferred by divine law' (312). These same Catholic circles also believed that amongst the common people 'a very large number of households, if not the majority, represented potential sites of corruption for children,' so to graft children onto new family trees was to endanger their spiritual welfare (316–7). On the other hand, they argued, 'Children who lived in orphanages were not really deprived of a family ... [but] were transformed into the best family that could exist, the church, which had welcomed them at birth with a "mother's tenderness" and "adopted" them at baptism' (319). In 'Marginal by Definition? Stepchildren in Quebec, 1866–1920,' Peter Gossage responds to the question posed by his title by suggesting 'that historic stepfamilies and historic stepchildren were normative and marginal at the same time' (141). He shows that indeed some stepchildren were 'marginalized, neglected, and even victimized,' and that civil law gave them 'little standing in their relations with their step-parents' (161). [End Page 694] On the other hand, many step-parents and stepchildren 'found the generosity and other resources they needed to successfully navigate the tricky path out of the margins into a...