“Producerist Consumers?”: Women, Men, and Consumption in Rural Lower Canada, 1830–1867

Abstract

Since at least the nineteenth century, work has been described as something done for pay—and the opposite of consumption. Earlier work on eighteenth-century Nova Scotia concluded that work and consumption were symbiotically connected. Most of the goods purchased needed female labour to be consumable (flour to become bread or fabric to become clothing, for instance). Those goods were paid with the product of men’s labour (in services, kind, or cash). Women were consumers but consumed to produce, whereas men produced to consume. In Lower Canada, rural women also consumed to produce—but so did men who bought tools, nails, paint, or fodder, and all could be considered “productionist consumers.” Both men and women acquired goods that did not require further transformation (from shoes and hats to tobacco and books), but the majority of ready-to-use consumer goods were household ones, used by men, women, or children (blankets, curtains, mirrors, crockery, etc.). Although men, who held almost all the accounts, controlled transactions at the stores, these stores were full of goods normally used by women or inside the female space. The women may not have produced to consume, but they were still the buyers targeted by the storekeepers.