1. Objectifs

Intentions :
Présenter une page d’histoire de la famille au Québec, soit l’action de l’École des Parents du Québec.

2. Méthode

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

« In a similar way to English-speaking North American societies, Quebec during the 1930s and 1940s was confronted by profound economic and social transformations that aroused considerable anxieties around the subject of the family and its ability to deal with the ’modern’ world. These apprehensions induced the Catholic Church to undertake a number of initiatives to attempt to rechristianize the family, but they also led to the formation of the École des Parents du Québec (ÉDP), an association of lay people that aimed to solidify the family by diffusing new methods of education and defending the interests of the family in the public realm. While this organization was less widely diffused than the Service de Préparation au Mariage, launched by the Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique in 1939, the ÉDP nonetheless marked one of the trained in the social sciences, to compete with the church on a terrain that the latter had historically monopolized. As a number of historians have observed, the place occupied by the laity in Catholic Action movements eventually eroded the power of the clergy and turned the Catholic vision of marriage towards more secular notions of family and conjugal relationships. However, at the beginning of the 1940s, the activists in these associations remained loyal to the notion that the church was still competent to dominate the terrain of family relations, an idea that the ÉDP was the first to contest. » (p. 239)