The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950

by Joy Parr

This is a story of two Ontario towns, Hanover and Paris, that grew in many parallel ways. They were about the same size, and both were primarily one-industry towns. But Hanover was a furniture-manufacturing centre; most of its workers were men, drawn from a community of ethnic German artisans and agriculturalists. In Paris the biggest employer was the textile industry; most of its wage earners were women, assisted in emigration from England by their Canadian employer.

Joy Parr considers the impacy of these fundamental differences from a feminist perspective in her study of the towns' industrial, domestic, and community life. She combines interviews of women and men of the towns with analyses of a wide range of documents: records of the firms from which their families worked, newspapers, tax records, paintings, photographs, and government documents.

Two surprising and contrasting narratives emerge. The effects of gender identities upon both women's and men's workplace experience and of economic roles upon familial relationships are starkly apparent.

Extending through seventy crucial years, these closely textured case studies challenge conventional views about the distinctiveness of gender and class roles. They reconfigure the social and economic change accompanying the rise of industry. They insistently transcend the reflexive dichtomies drawn between womena dn men, public and privae, wage and non-wage work. They investigate industrial structure, technological change, domesticity, militance, and perceptions of personal power and worth, simultaneously as products of gender and class identities, recast through community sensibilities.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[J. Pearce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book compares two industry-based towns in Ontario, contrasting how the specific industries affecting gender roles in each. Paris, Ontario was home to knitting factories and other types of garment works; these factories imported women from the Midlands of England to work as life-long wage earners at a time when many white women did not work outside the home after marriage. This is contrasted with Hanover, Ontario, home to furniture manufacturing and an immigrant population primarily made up of German men inheriting a tradition of craftsmanship. Parr defines these towns as a "woman's town" and a "man's town" for the purpose of her comparison.

Parr's goal is to highlight how gender roles are fluid and depend particularly on circumstances of place and time. In Paris, women wage workers were not unusual; nor were women who remained single throughout their life, often sharing homes and lifelong friendships with other single women or with extended family. She also shows how working married women in Paris took advantage of family networks and expanding services in Paris to "farm out" things such as child care and laundry service, and how men in Paris often took over some level of child-care duties. She asserts that men were less likely to remain in Paris, however, because there were fewer options for them to work there, and also because family breadwinners did not require a male head-of-household. Daughters might stay home, while sons left for more industrial pastures.

She contrasts this with Hanover, where men often had life-long careers in the factory and women mostly did unwaged work at home. Here there were far fewer laundries, for example, and child care does not seem to have been shared amongst married women. The age at first marriage and first-born child was also much lower in Hanover compared to Paris.

[AskHistorians]

This book explores industrialization in Canada through a case study of two local histories: Paris and Hanover. Parr presents a post-structuralist critique of categories such as class and gender, and attempts to illustrate the duality of capitalism/patriarchal oppression. In terms of workers’ experiences in these communities, Parr argues that class and gender were equal in their contributions to social identity.

[Marsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting comparison of these two one-industry towns. During this time period women were traditionally in the home but this history shares a community who's women went to work and the pros and cons that came from that arrangement.