The gender of breadwinners : women, men, and change in two industrial towns, 1880-1950

197 Pages·1990·17.832 MB·English

by  Joy Parr

The Gender of Breadwinners
Women, Men, and Change in
Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950
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-manufac-
turing 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 impact 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
for 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 dichotomies drawn between women and men, public and
private, wage and non-wage work. They investigate industrial struc-
ture, technological change, domesticity, militance, and perceptions of
personal power and worth, simultaneously as products of gender and
class identities, recast through community sensibilities.
JOY PARR is Professor of History at Simon Eraser University. Among
her recent books are A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945-1980, which she
edited, and the second edition of Labouring Children. In 1999 Domestic
Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years will be
published. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and, in 1999,
the William Lyon Mackenzie King Professor in the Department of His-
tory, Harvard University. The Gender of Breadwinners won the Canadian
Historical Association's Franc,ois-Xavier Garneau Medal in 1994.
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JOY PARR
The Gender of
Breadwinners
Women, Men, and Change in
Two Industrial Towns
1880-1950
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press, 1990
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-5853-1 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-6760-3 (paper)
Reprinted in paper 1991,1994,1998, 2004
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Parr, Joy, 1949-
The gender of breadwinners
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8020-5853-1 (bound). - ISBN 0-8020-6760-3 (pbk.)
i. Sexual division of labour - Ontario - Paris -
History. 2. Sexual division of labor - Ontario -
Hanover - History. 3. Work and family - Ontario -
Paris. 4. Work and family - Ontario - Hanover.
5. Penmans (Firm) - Employees. 6. Knechtel (Firm) -
Employees. 7. Paris (Ont.) - Social conditions.
8. Hanover (Ont.) - Social conditions. I. Title.
1106060.65.0:320571990 306.361509713 9€ 0-093236-8
Parts of chapter i appeared previously in 'The Skilled Emigrant and Her Kin,
Canadian Historical Review 68:4 (Dec. 1987) 529-51. Parts of chapter 3
appeared previously in 'Disaggregating the Sexual Division of Labour,'
Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (July 1988) 511-33. Parts of
chapter 4 appeared previously in 'Rethinking Work and Kinship in a
Canadian Hosiery Town, 1910-1950,' Feminist Studies 13:1 (Spring 1987)
137-62.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
To Mary Johnston of Waterloo, Ontario, and Fred Bemrose
of Paris, Ontario, with thanks
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Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS IX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xi
Introduction 3
PART ONE
1 Gender, culture, and labour recruitment 15
2 The politics of protection 34
3 When is knitting women's work? 59
4 Domesticity and mill families 77
5 Womanly militance, neighbourly wrath 96
PART TWO
6 As Christ the carpenter 123
7 Manliness, craftsmanship, and scientific management 140
viii Contents
8 For men and girls: the politics and experience of gendered wage
work 165
9 Single fellows and family men 187
10 Union men 206
Conclusion 229
NOTE ON METHOD 247
NOTES 253
PICTURE CREDITS 298
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 299
INDEX 309
Illustrations
Seamers joining cut garment pieces 19
Immigrant women dressed in their Sunday best 28
A social gathering of English mill families 31
Penmans hosiery mill, 1912 37
Penmarvian, John Penman's home 38
A postcard view of Paris 41
Strikers, wearing their blue ribbon badges, 1907 49
A Canadian stockinger knitting on a hand frame 61
Hand-powered circular knitting machine 63
Female knitters working circular rib machines 65
Male knitters running flat-bed knitting machines 68
A young girl and her supervisor 79
Penmans workers in the back garden 82
View of Penmans mills, 15 February 1949 93
May Higgins and Gertrude Williams 107
The picket line along Willow Street 112
Leta Morrison on the picket line 115
Gladys Burtch being carried from the picket line 116
Two examples of Knechtel furniture 130
The Knechtel main plant, December 1901 132
The Hanover Band 138
Three generations of Knechtels 143
Knechtel employees outside the plant, c. 1901 151
'Life's Little Jests' 156
Men and boys from the Knechtel machine room 167