1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«Working Families explores the complex variety of responses of working-class families to their new lives within capitalist society, and offers new ways of looking at the industrial revolution in Canada.» (quatrième de couverture) «This book examines continuities and changes in the ways working-class men and women fed, clothed, and sheltered themselves and their families in the years between 1861 and 1891 when Montreal first became an industrial city.» (p. 14)

Questions/Hypothèses :
«What was the impact of the industrial revolution on the family?» (p. 14)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«[...] I draw on concepts, methods, and approaches developed within working-class, family, and feminist hitoriography.» (p. 14)

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

«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.» (quatrième de couverture)