Household Counts: Canadian Households and Families in 1901 9781442684430

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
PART ONE: FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY: CANADA, 1901
1. Transitions in Household and Family Structure: Canada in 1901 and 1991
2. Canadian Fertility in 1901: A Bird’s-Eye View
3. Family Geographies: A National Perspective
PART TWO: URBAN FAMILIES
4. Family Geographies: An Urban Perspective
5. Rural to Urban Migration: Finding Household Complexity in a New World Environment
6. Family Geographies: Montreal, Canada’s Metropolis
PART THREE: THE YOUNG AND THE OLD
7. Families, Fostering, and Flying the Coop: Lessons in Liberal Cultural Formation, 1871–1901
8. Canadian Children Who Lived with One Parent in 1901
9. Boundaries of Age: Exploring the Patterns of Young-Old Age among Men, Canada and the United States, 1870–1901
PART FOUR: NEW INTERPRETATIONS: FAMILY AND SOCIAL HISTORY
10. Inequality, Earnings, and the Canadian Working Class in 1901
11. ‘Leaving God Behind When They Crossed the Rocky Mountains’: Exploring Unbelief in Turn-of-the-Century British Columbia
12. Giving Birth: Families and the Medical Marketplace in Victoria, British Columbia, 1880–1901
PART FIVE: THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT
13. Language, Ancestry, and the Competing Constructions of Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Canada
14. Constructing Normality and Confronting Deviance: Familial Ideologies, Household Structures, and Divorce in the 1901 Canadian Census
Index

Citation preview

HOUSEHOLD COUNTS: CANADIAN HOUSEHOLDS AND FAMILIES IN 1901

The Canadian census taken in 1901 has surprising things to say about the family as a social grouping and cultural construct at the turn of the twentieth century. Although the nuclear family was the prevalent type of household, family was not a singular form or structure at all; rather, it was a fluid micro-social community in which people lived and through which they moved. There was no one ‘traditional’ family, but rather many types of families and households, each with its own history. In Household Counts, editors Eric W. Sager and Peter Baskerville bring together an impressive array of scholars, including Bettina Bradbury, Peter Gossage, and Kenneth Sylvester, who use the 1901 census to explore the demographic context of families in Canada. Organized into five thematic sections, the collection covers such topics as family demography, urban families, the young and old, class, religion, and identity. The remarkable plasticity of family and household that Household Counts reveals is of critical importance to our understanding of nation building in Canada. This collection makes an important contribution not only to family history, but also to the widening intellectual exploration of historical censuses. eric w. sager is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. peter baskerville is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria.

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HOUSEHOLD COUNTS Canadian Households and Families in 1901

Edited by Eric W. Sager and Peter Baskerville

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-08020-3860-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-08020-3802-9 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Household counts : Canadian households and families in 1901 / edited by Eric W. Sager and Peter Baskerville. Includes index. ISBN 978-08020-3860-9 (bound) ISBN 978-08020-3802-9 (pbk.) 1. Family – Canada – History – 20th century. II. Baskerville, Peter A. (Peter Allan), 1943– HQ559.H68 2007

306.850971’09041

I. Sager, Eric W., 1946– C2006-901300-4

University of Toronto Press, the co-editors, and the authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the University of Victoria to assist the publication of this book. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memory of our friend and supporter Tamara K. Hareven, 1937–2002

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Contributors

xi

Introduction 3 eric w. sager and peter baskerville PART ONE FAMILY DEMOGRAPHY: CANADA, 1901 1 Transitions in Household and Family Structure: Canada in 1901 and 1991 17 stacie d.a. burke 2 Canadian Fertility in 1901: A Bird’s-Eye View 59 peter gossage and danielle gauvreau 3 Family Geographies: A National Perspective 110 larry m c cann, ian buck, and ole heggen PART TWO

URBAN FAMILIES

4 Family Geographies: An Urban Perspective 131 larry m c cann, ian buck, and ole heggen 5 Rural to Urban Migration: Finding Household Complexity in a New World Environment 147 kenneth m. sylvester

viii Contents

6 Family Geographies: Montreal, Canada’s Metropolis 180 larry m c cann, ian buck, and ole heggen PART THREE THE YOUNG AND THE OLD 7 Families, Fostering, and Flying the Coop: Lessons in Liberal Cultural Formation, 1871–1901 197 gordon darroch 8 Canadian Children Who Lived with One Parent in 1901 247 bettina bradbury 9 Boundaries of Age: Exploring the Patterns of Young-Old Age among Men, Canada and the United States, 1870–1901 302 lisa dillon PART FOUR NEW INTERPRETATIONS: FAMILY AND SOCIAL HISTORY 10 Inequality, Earnings, and the Canadian Working Class in 1901 eric w. sager

339

11 ‘Leaving God Behind When They Crossed the Rocky Mountains’: Exploring Unbelief in Turn-of-the-Century British Columbia 371 lynne marks 12 Giving Birth: Families and the Medical Marketplace in Victoria, British Columbia, 1880–1901 405 peter baskerville PART FIVE

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT

13 Language, Ancestry, and the Competing Constructions of Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Canada 423 chad gaffield 14 Constructing Normality and Confronting Deviance: Familial Ideologies, Household Structures, and Divorce in the 1901 Canadian Census 441 annalee lepp Index

477

Acknowledgments

The Canadian Families Project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as a Major Collaborative Research Initiative. We also received significant support from participating universities: the University of Victoria, York University, the University of Ottawa, Université de Sherbrooke, and Concordia University. We offer sincere thanks also to the many research assistants and data-entry operators who worked for the project between 1996 and 2001. We thank especially our computer programmer, Marc Trottier, and our project manager, Douglas Thompson; without their talents and dedication this book would not exist. Our excellent maps are the result of work by Larry McCann, of the Geography Department at the University of Victoria, and Ole Heggen, cartographer in the same department. At critical stages in our work we benefited from the generosity and expertise of Steven Ruggles and his colleagues at the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota. Todd Gardner created the initial data-entry system. We are indebted to the University of Victoria, and in particular to the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Andrew Rippin, for supporting the publication of this book. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and positive comments. Finally, we thank our copy-editor, John St James, for his meticulous professionalism, and our editors at the University of Toronto Press, Frances Mundy and Len Husband.

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Contributors

Peter Baskerville teaches in the history department at the University of Victoria. He is the local director of the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project. He is co-author with Eric Sager of Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (1998). His most recent book is Sites of Power: A Concise History of Ontario (2005). Bettina Bradbury teaches in history and women’s studies at York University. She is the author of Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (1993) and of articles on family history in Canada and elsewhere. She is currently completing a manuscript on marriage and widowhood in nineteenth-century Quebec and is researching debates about marriage law and inheritance in the white settler societies of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Ian Buck was associated with the Canadian Families Project as a research assistant, establishing a geographical information system for mapping family geographies in Canada. Working with Larry McCann, he wrote a master’s thesis on the spatial parameters of social integration and segregation in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vancouver. Currently, he is a planner with the city of Campbell River, British Columbia. Stacie Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Manitoba. Her research interests include the health and demography of past populations in Canada and Europe, with a current focus on tuberculosis, families, and the sanatorium movement in Ontario before 1950. She has published in journals such as Social Science and Medicine and the Journal of Family History.

xii Contributors

Gordon Darroch is a professor of sociology at York University. He has research interests in historical sociology and social history, and has contributed publications to the history of migration, the history of families, the history of class and ethnicity, and to historical methodology. He is the author with Lee Soltow of Property and Inequality in Victorian Canada: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census, and of recent articles in the Canadian Historical Review and the Journal of Family History. He was a pioneer in the development of Canadian historical microdata. Lisa Dillon is professor of historical demography and Principal Investigator associated with the Programme de recherches en démographie historique (PRDH), Département de Démographie, Université de Montréal. Her research interests include aging, the historical demography of families, and the discourse and politics of populations. Dillon has published in The History of the Family: An International Quarterly and Historical Methods, and is author of a new manuscript on the construction and experience of old age in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. Chad Gaffield is professor of history at the University of Ottawa, where he holds a University Research Chair. In 2004 the Royal Society of Canada awarded him the J.B. Tyrrell Medal for his contributions to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada including computer applications and collaborative research initiatives. Gaffield is currently leading the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure project in collaboration with scholars across Canada. Danielle Gauvreau is professor of sociology at Concordia University. A specialist in the history of the Quebec population, she is the author of Québec, une ville et sa population au temps de la Nouvelle-France and, with Diane Gervais and Peter Gossage, of a new monograph on the Quebec fertility transition, forthcoming in 2007. Peter Gossage is professor of history at Université de Sherbrooke. His research focuses on family, population, and private life in Quebec between 1840 and 1960. He is the author of Families in Transition: Industry and Population in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe (1999) and, with Diane Gervais and Danielle Gauvreau, of a new monograph on the Quebec fertility transition, forthcoming in 2007.

Contributors xiii

Ole Heggen, a cartographer in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, fashioned the maps that appear in this volume. A musician, sculptor, and well-known newspaper cartoonist, he is currently readying a selection of his political cartoons for book publication. Annalee Lepp is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Victoria. She has published in the fields of Canadian gender, legal, and family history as well as contemporary transnational labour migration, trafficking in persons, and human rights. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Dis/membering the Family: Marital Breakdown, Domestic Conflict, and Family Violence in Ontario, 1830–1920. Lynne Marks teaches Canadian history at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (1996). She has also published various articles on women and education, gender and religion, and social welfare. Larry McCann is a professor of geography at the University of Victoria. In 2001 he was awarded the Massey Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for his various contributions to the interpretation of Canada’s regional, urban, and historical geography. For the Canadian Families Project he examined the social geography of family life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Montreal and Toronto and guided the cartographic analysis of family geographies. Eric W. Sager is professor of history at the University of Victoria. His research interests have included maritime history, labour history, and family history. He is co-author with Peter Baskerville of Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (1998). Kenneth Sylvester is an assistant research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research interests include agricultural and environmental history, family history, and rural social history. He is the author of The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870–1940 (2001) and ‘Immigrant Parents, Ethnic Children, and Family Formation in the Early Prairie West,’ Canadian Historical Review (2003).

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HOUSEHOLD COUNTS: CANADIAN HOUSEHOLDS AND FAMILIES IN 1901

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Introduction eric w. sager and peter baskerville

The chapters in this book are linked by a shared goal: to trace the contours of family as a dynamic and adaptive social grouping and cultural construct in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. The authors are members of the Canadian Families Project, who have created a computerized national sample of individual-level information from the 1901 census of Canada.1 The census is an indispensable source of evidence on the Canadian population in the past. Census takers attempted to interview members of all Canadian families or households and to find answers to long series of questions. The completed enumerators’ schedules are the only social surveys that attempt to cover the entire Canadian population in the half-century after Confederation. All of the papers in this volume make use of the 1901 census, some more intensively than others. We have not burdened this volume with much of the technical information on our sample of Schedule 1 (the ‘return of living persons’) and Schedule 2 (the property enumeration). Briefly, our database contains a 5 per cent random sample of dwellings, stratified by microfilm reel, from 129 reels of microfilm containing the 5,371,315 persons recorded by census takers. All persons in each sampled dwelling were entered. There are 50,943 dwellings and 265,286 persons in the sample, and all information was entered for each person sampled. Readers who need to know more about the implications of the sampling procedure, and the results to be obtained from specific enumerators’ questions, should see our special issue of Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (Fall 2000). The intellectual challenges and opportunities posed by historical censuses have expanded since the five-year mandate of the Canadian Families Project (1996–2001), for we were one among many parallel initiatives.

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In the United States, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is transforming the history of the American family. The international IPUMS is the next step: census information from many countries is being integrated, so that demographic and family patterns may be tracked over broad geographic dimensions.2 Family history will burst through the confines of nation state, and the geopolitical unit ‘nation’ will be only one variable in the analysis of change over space and time. The computer files created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, containing comprehensive 100 per cent coverage of the 1880/1 censuses of the United Kindom, the United States, and Canada, have been made available to researchers. These extraordinary databases, containing information on over eighty million persons, will burst the geographic barriers in another direction by allowing comparative analyses of much smaller geographic units than are permitted by random samples.3 Canadian scholarship will benefit from related projects, now under way, some with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project (CCRI) is creating national-level anonymized samples of individuals and households from the Canadian censuses from 1911 to 1951. A research group at the University of Guelph is constructing a national sample from the 1891 census. A sample of the 1851 census is being created by a group at the University of Montreal, and a sample from the first federal Canadian census, that of 1871, already exists. It will ultimately be possible to employ these historical census samples in a fully integrated fashion, and to use them in conjunction with the public-use samples created by Statistics Canada from the 1971 and subsequent censuses.4 The result will be the largest integrated source of information ever compiled on Canadian peoples in the past, and it too will be capable of integration with the international IPUMS. Over the space of a few decades the historical social sciences in Canada will be opened to new forms of international collaboration, to new transnational sources on family and population, and to analytical frameworks that transcend previous spatial and temporal limits. While acknowledging the uniquely comprehensive scope of censuses, we remember that they are constructions of the national population created by individuals and groups within the state.5 Routinely generated information in official sources is never a transparent window into a past social reality. Censuses are surveys, the results of personal interviews with large numbers of people who spoke on behalf of their families, answering questions framed by census officers working (in the case of the 1901

Introduction 5

census) within the Canadian Department of Agriculture. The enumerators’ forms are the record of a multitude of dialogues, a long series of questions and answers in which class, race, gender, language, and other influences guided the conversations. It is a mistake even to see the questions as determined by the state or state officials alone, because the questions had multiple origins.6 We may use the census to draw tentative conclusions about people and society in the past, but we do so most convincingly when we put the census dialogues in the context of their creation. The information has the great advantage that it is self-reporting by individuals speaking on behalf of their families or households; they spoke, however, in conditions that they did not alone create. The chapters in the present volume are part of the Canadian Families Project’s contribution to both family history and to the widening intellectual exploration of historical censuses. Both fields of inquiry are international in scope, and so it is also our hope that we may expand the connections between Canadian historical writing and the growing bodies of writing in many countries on family and on censuses. We hope that the connections will be reciprocal, for scholars outside Canada will have much to learn from the contributions of Canadian scholars to the history of families. Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest, especially in studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we can now read studies of the family economy, courtship and marriage, children, motherhood, fatherhood, schooling, divorce, the elderly, family and the welfare state, immigrant families, and domestic space, to name only a few themes of recent English Canadian research.7 The strong tradition of demographic history in Quebec remains a foundation for studies of family, fertility, social and economic change, and the long-term historical conditions of francophonie in North America.8 We decided to begin the book with chapters on the general demographic context, and to proceed, in no order of priority, to chapters on family geography, on the social history of specific groups, and on the cultural context of the 1901 census enumeration. Despite the impressive work of the last few decades, we still know far too little about the structure and composition of families and households over time, and any discussion of such matters must begin with the demographic context of family formation. Stacie Burke, anthropologist and demographer, sets the context in part 1 of this volume by comparing households between 1901 and 1991. She offers an approach to the tricky problem of classifying household types across such a span of time. ‘Family,’ however defined, cannot be equated with co-residence, but of course it mattered

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who lived with whom: co-residence is itself a relationship of fundamental social and cultural importance, and the shift away from a ‘culture of household’ is one of the major transitions of the twentieth century. The geographic diversity that Burke observes in 1901 is reinforced by Peter Gossage and Danielle Gauvreau: underpinning the process of family formation was diversity in fertility patterns and, at a deeper level, a diversity of ‘demographic, economic, social, and cultural logics.’ The national benchmarks provided by the census sample have displayed hitherto unsuspected regional and local variations. The geographers McCann, Buck, and Heggen offer another perspective on diversity, while also pointing to some remarkable similarities across space, in their cartographic snapshots of national ‘family geographies.’ In the diversity of its formation, the dynamic and adaptive microsocial unit of family challenges national-level modelling. Part 2 shifts the unit of analysis from the national to the urban level. Observing family as fluid and adaptive, its shape and meaning shifting even over an individual’s life course, complicates the discussion of family change and larger social processes. Family historians, demographers, and geographers have long since rejected the association of industrialization with nuclear-family households, and even any simple connection between rural-urban shifts and family change. Yet McCann, Buck, and Heggen point to many similarities of family structures and adaptive responses – including family size, type, and work strategies – across Canadian cities and towns with a population greater than 2500. In a country in which early industrialization was also associated with territorial expansion as well as urbanization and substantial in- and outmigration, the twelve figures of their chapter point to the emergence of an integrated urban system. Kenneth Sylvester explores patterns of rural-urban migration in Canada at the turn of the century and suggests that only certain members of rural families were attracted to the cities, and, moreover, provocatively concludes that until urban housing stock expanded significantly in the mid-twentieth century, emigration from ‘rural life remained modest.’ He is able to offer this conclusion because, thanks to the 1901 census, historians can now fit property and home ownership into rural-urban comparisons of household complexity. Finally, via a set of maps focused exclusively on Canada’s largest metropolis, Montreal, in 1901, McCann, Buck, and Heggen present data in cartographic form – ethnicity and location and family size, boarding and lodging, inner city and suburban comparisons – that invite the generation of hypotheses for understand-

Introduction 7

ing better ‘the character and spatial structure of family life’ in Montreal and other Canadian cities and regions. Part 3 looks more intensively at differences within as well as across families, with particular focus on age. Gordon Darroch examines coresidence by asking basic questions about when children did and did not live in the homes of their parents. Anne of Green Gables, the child living with non-kin in a non-natal household, was not alone; she and her kind defied contemporary norms of an idealized nuclear family, and worked against the assumed familial norms of liberal culture. Further complicating the Protestant and liberal cultural strategy were the many children of single parents, here examined for the first time at the national level by Bettina Bradbury. The history of children living with one parent, and the history of lone parenting, is a long one: there are many traditional families, and among them are single-parent families. And did movement through the life course mean the separation of elders and children, or did it mean stable co-residence in extended families? Using both Canadian and U.S. censuses, Lisa Dillon explodes any simple notions about ‘old age’ as a discrete stage in the life course. Once again we are compelled to acknowledge a diversity of experience that is not easily reconciled with idealized notions of the nuclear family. The discussion of working-class standards of living at the turn of the century need no longer rest on incomplete estimates of individual workers’ wages. The 1901 census contains a national-level survey of employee earnings, and allows us, as Eric Sager shows, to discuss earnings of a family or household and the varying contributions of different family wage earners. Inequalities in earnings were far more extreme than in our own time, and so extreme as to be fundamental to all divisions within and between social classes. Sager’s findings invite comparisons to the cartographic evidence presented by McCann, Buck, and Heggen in part 2. The census is not only for specialists in family history and demography; a social survey of such breadth offers questions and answers for historians of religion, gender, race, ethnicity, class, region, and many other subjects. As Lynne Marks shows, by asking people to state their religious affiliation, Canadian census takers bequeathed a rich opportunity to historians of Canada, an opportunity not available to historians of the United States. What were the historical roots and meaning of secularization? Were British Columbians ‘less religious’ than other Canadians, and how are we to understand this form of British Columbian ‘exceptionalism’? Peter Baskerville demonstrates the power of the cen-

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sus when used together with other historical records. In Baskerville’s essay the microhistorical subject (one occupation, midwifery, in a single town) sheds light on wider issues of interest to historians of family, medicine, professionalization, and gender. Census taking has never failed to generate controversy in Canada, because the census was part of state-directed processes of social engineering, nation building, and the construction of identity. Often the smaller groups, sometimes described as ‘marginal,’ occupied centre stage. In her painstaking recovery of Canadians who told enumerators that they were divorced, Annalee Lepp demonstrates again how essential are the individual-level microdata in allowing us to deconstruct the official story told in published tables, and reminds us how deeply the census was influenced by idealized norms of family. Language, learned and transmitted across generations through family, was a key to both individual and collective identity, and as Chad Gaffield argues, the addition of language questions in the 1901 census complicated rather than simplified the question of individual and ancestral identity. Readers particularly interested in the process of census taking, the census definitions of family and household, and issues arising from the dialogue between enumerators and subjects, may wish to read these chapters in part 5 first. The census was a snapshot, a recording of information about individuals and households at a moment in time, just over a hundred years ago. The snapshot, however, does not leave its subjects frozen in space and time. Instead we see people on the move, transitions through the life course, and variations across space. Although (as Stacie Burke points out) the nuclear-family household was the most common type of household in the country as a whole, the frequency of that household form is of little interest. Family – which is not the same as household, of course9 – was not a singular form or structure at all; rather, it was a fluid microsocial community, often but not always involving co-residents, through which people lived and moved. And they moved into and out of different families and households through the life course: the census snapshot tells us that one in every ten Canadians was a lodger or boarder; but a much larger proportion would have been lodgers at some time during their lives, and many more still would have co-resided with lodgers or boarders.10 Each of the papers in this volume contributes to this image of family and household as fluid and diverse social spaces. The image is in part the result of our repeated focus on the individual rather than the household

Introduction 9

as the unit of analysis: we do not begin with a shared taxonomy of household types, and then ask what percentage of households exhibited certain characteristics; rather, when different household formations are relevant (as, for instance, in Sylvester, table 5.1), we ask what percentage of individuals resided in specific households. Whatever other advantages of this approach there may be, the method offers a much more sensitive measure of change from the perspective of those who experienced the change – individuals, not a reified ‘household.’ From this perspective we consider the lives of individuals within families from birth to old age. Family birthing strategies are put into social/ economic contexts (Baskerville). We begin to see (in Burke’s paper) how individuals moved through different forms of co-resident community as they aged. Children moved between households and often out of their parental homes (Darroch). Children lived with mother only, father only, two parents, or no parent (Bradbury). As they aged, the elderly experienced thresholds and transitions that were more varied than those experienced by elders in Canada today (Dillon). Individuals moved between rural and urban locations, and reproduced complex households in both environments, although for different reasons (Sylvester). The material well-being of individuals varied as they passed through stages or ‘cycles’ in the evolution of their family (Sager). As Steven Ruggles has argued, the individual is not the only unit of measurement appropriate for the study of households: ‘the best unit of measurement depends on the particular problem under study.’11 Whatever the unit of measurement or analytical category, we believe that perceiving families and households as fluid and transitional microsocial communities is an essential first step in the task of connecting family to the specific conditions of change in the Canadian context. Family and household formation occurred as many ethno-religious groups arrived at different times in a peculiarly extended and variegated geography.12 In this context the historian’s lens will necessarily shift from the national benchmark to the microhistorical unit, whether place or individual, and back again. The remarkable plasticity of family and household is also of critical importance to our understanding of the political ideology of nation building in Canada and Canadian culture in the ‘age of anxiety.’ The nuclear-family household, in the normative constructions of AngloProtestant reformers, was fundamental to social and moral stability. In reality, however, family was unstable in form and in its internal dynamics: it was a many-headed hydra, reproducing alarming new shapes even as

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reformers and the state struggled to contain it within normative forms. Aboriginal peoples were not the only ones to maintain kinship forms and co-residence groupings that defied the categories applied by the census taker and the Indian agent; some immigrant groups brought family and co-residence arrangements that appeared very different from the idealized nuclear family, where biological offspring and their heterosexual, married parents co-resided in a tight, harmonious unit. As Ruth Sandwell has pointed out, it is easier to see in the historical record the normative constructs of reformers or agents of the state than to find sympathetic accounts of the inarticulate individuals and families whose behaviours the reformers sought to correct.13 Yet those individuals and families are there to be seen, as we read against the grain of official discourse and categorizing. The relations between society’s small social groupings and the world of which they were part, and the internal relations of family and household, may yield to the historian’s gaze. Therefore, let us look for individuals in their families and households, where they are to be found in greatest number. Recorded in thousands of conversations between census takers and family members, they identify themselves by several marks of person and identity, and they tell us one of the most important conditions of their everyday lives – who lived with whom.

NOTES 1 For previous work by members of the Canadian Families Project see in particular the special issues of three journals: History of the Family: An International Quarterly 4, 4 (1999); Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 33, 4 (2000); and Journal of Family History 26, 2 (April 2001). 2 For information on this initiative consult the Minnesota Population Center’s website: http://www.ipums.umn.edu/. 3 For further information on the 1880/1 censuses see the North Atlantic Population Project’s website: http://www.nappdata.org/, and see http:// www.irdh.umontreal.ca/imag/. 4 For information on the CCRI see the project’s website: http://www.canada .uottawa.ca/ccri/index_eng.html. For information on the Guelph initiative see http://www.uoguelph.ca/history/census/index.htm. For information on the 1871 census sample see http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/major/ canpumf.htm#1871.

Introduction 11 5 There are many works on the politics of censuses, and these include Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto, 2001); Margo J. Anderson and Stephen E. Feinberg, Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (New York, 1999); Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, 1988); and D.V. Glass, Numbering the People: The EighteenthCentury Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Franborough, 1973). See also http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/ arts/cdn/imag/biblio/imagbibl.html, which covers relevant journal publications up to circa 2000. 6 For one example of this interaction see Eric Sager and Peter Baskerville, ‘The First National Unemployment Survey: Unemployment and the Canadian Census of 1891,’ Labour/Le Travail 35 (March, 1989). 7 For a recent review of the literature see Cynthia Comacchio, ‘“The History of Us”: Social Science, History, and the Relations of Family in Canada,’ Labour/Le Travail 46 (Fall 2000), 167–220. A sample of the many books must include Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto, 1993); Peter Baskerville and Eric W. Sager, Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada (Toronto, 1998); Kenneth M. Sylvester, The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870–1940 (Toronto, 2001); Peter Gossage, Families in Transition: Industry and Population in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe (Montreal and Kingston, 1999); W. Peter Ward, Courtship, Love and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Montreal, 1990); Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Waterloo, ON, 2000); Neil Sutherland, Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television (Toronto, 1997); Cynthia Comacchio, Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children, 1900–1940 (Montreal, 1993); Katherine Arnup, Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in TwentiethCentury Canada (Toronto, 1994); Robert Rutherdale, ‘Fatherhood and the Social Construction of Memory: Breadwinning and Male Parenting on a Job Frontier, 1945–1966,’ in Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld, eds., Gender and History in Canada (Toronto, 1996), 357–75; Chad Gaffield, Language, Schooling, and Cultural Conflict: The Origins of the French-Language Controversy in Ontario (Montreal and Kingston, 1987); Jean Barman and Mona Gleason, eds., Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia (Calgary, 2003); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto, 1999); James G. Snell, In the Shadow of the Law: Divorce in Canada, 1900–1939 (Toronto, 1991); James G. Snell, The

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Citizen’s Wage: The State and the Elderly in Canada, 1900–1951 (Toronto, 1996); Edgar-André Montigny, Foisted Upon the Government? State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada (Montreal and Kingston, 1997); Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada (Toronto, 2000); Royden Loewen, Family, Church, and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850–1930 (Toronto, 1993); W. Peter Ward, A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver, 1999); Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, 1996); and Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau eds., Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston, 2004). 8 Among the many works relating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are Denyse Baillargeon, Making Do: Women, Family and Home in Montreal during the Great Depression (Waterloo, ON: 1999); Denyse Baillargeon, Un Québec en mal d’enfants: La médicalisation de la maternité, 1910–1970 (Montreal, 2004); Gérard Bouchard, Quelques arpents d’Amérique: Population, économie, famille au Saguenay, 1838–1971 (Montreal, 1996); Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (Toronto, 1993); Chantal Collard, Une famille, un village, une nation: La parenté dans Charlevoix, 1900–1960 (Montreal, 1999); Nadia F. Eid and Micheline Dumont, Maitresses du Maison, Maitresses d’école: Femmes, familles et éducation dans l’histoire du Québec (Montreal, 1983); Peter Gossage, Families in Transition: Industry and Population in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe (Montreal and Kingston, 1999); Jacques Henripin, La Métamorphose de la population canadienne (Montreal, 2003); Denise Lemieux and Michelle Comeau, Le movement familial au Québec, 1960–1990: Un politique et des services pour les familles (Sainte-Foy, 2002); Andrée Levesque, Making and Breaking the Rules: Women in Quebec, 1919–1939 (Toronto, 1994); Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, Les femmes au tournant du siecle, 1880–1940: Ages de vie, maternité et quotidien (Quebec City, 1992); J.I. Little, Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1882 (Montreal and Kingston, 1991); Marie-Paule Malouin, Le mouvement familial au Québec: Les débuts, 1937–1965 (Montreal, 1998); Dominique Marshall, Aux origins sociale de l’état-providence: Familles québécoises, obligation scolaire et allocations familiales, 1940–1955 (Montreal, 1998); Françoise Noel, Family Life and Sociability in Upper and Lower Canada, 1780–1870: A View from Diaries and Family Correspondence (Montreal, 2003); and Martine Tremblay, Le marriage dans la vallée du Haute-Richelieu au XXe siècle: Ritualité et distinction sociale (Sainte-Foy, 2001). We thank Peter Gossage for his assistance.

Introduction 13 9 Unless otherwise stated, in this volume the household means the co-resident group: those sharing a dwelling place and having the same dwelling number in column 1 of the manuscript census. We respect the decision of our authors to use categories and definitions that are appropriate to their specific questions and analytical purposes. It would have been inappropriate to impose a single definition of ‘family’ on all contributors; in any case, the co-resident group is an essential starting point to all analyses. 10 Peter Baskerville, ‘Familiar Strangers: Urban Families with Boarders, Canada, 1901,’ Social Science History 25, 3 (2001), 331–46. 11 Steven Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America (Madison, WI, 1987), 147. 12 The interaction between newcomers and aboriginal peoples, whose kinship and household patterns were very different from those of Europeans, did not end with the fur-trade era, and future historians may find evidence of great value in Canada’s census microdata (a subject that the Canadian Families Project bequeaths to qualified ethnohistorians). See, however, Laura Peers and Jennifer Brown, ‘“There Is No End to Relationships among the Indians”: Ojibway Families and Kinship in Historical Perspective,’ History of the Family: An International Quarterly 4, 4 (1999), 529–55; and Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Historical Perspective (Vancouver, 1980). 13 R.W. Sandwell, ‘The Limits of Liberalism: The Liberal Reconnaissance and the History of the Family in Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review 81, 4 (2000), 447.

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PART ONE Family Demography: Canada, 1901

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1 Transitions in Household and Family Structure: Canada in 1901 and 1991 stacie d.a. burke

In 1901, a census enumerator working in rural Ontario called upon the Trussler household. David Trussler, a never-married 40-year-old farmer, reported that there were six individuals, other than himself, living in his ten-room house. Two of these occupants, William and John Trussler, were listed as boarders, although presumably there was some sort of familial relationship with the household head. William was a 50-year-old never-married retired farmer and John a 37-year-old married carpenter (although his wife was not enumerated and, presumably, not present). There were also three servants in the household: 33-year-old Henry Dietz, 21-year-old Henry Kaehler, and 25-year-old Emma Wagner, all never married. The only person in the household who did not have an occupation was 4-year-old Ethel Wagner, most likely Emma’s daughter. An eclectic mix of individuals, neither a nuclear family nor an extended family, and yet a common variation on household structure observed in the 1901 census. Depending on the context of a study, analyses of household and family structure can reveal demographic, economic, and culturally driven propensities or aversions to living with kin, with strangers, or alone. The problem, of course, is in finding sources to undertake such a study and accepting some inherent difficulties. According to American historian Steven Ruggles, ‘families and households are slippery little devils’ that tend to change over time and challenge attempts at classification.1 Most large-scale investigations into household and family structure rely on the government census as a principal source of information. Census returns are notable for their richness in detail on many aspects of household and family living, although the data are cross-sectional in nature and can only reflect household structure at one static point in time.

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Despite potential caveats, a large body of recent research has challenged some enduring and embellished misconceptions about family life in history.2 In particular, the notion of the prevailing extended family and its replacement, under the weight of industrialization, with households favouring a nuclear family structure has come under increased scrutiny. According to Ruggles, it is unfortunate that ‘a new myth has replaced the old one. It is now commonly believed that American and English family structure has always been overwhelmingly nuclear.’3 Instead, he argues against a continuum type of household and family change in favour of a more flexible model of potential time- and placespecific peaks and troughs in the frequencies of extended and nuclear family structures. The lesson, of course, is that family and household structure is dynamic and potentially adaptive, not a prevailing, static, and unchanging concept, and it requires a solid base of temporally and spatially comparative study. This chapter proceeds to contextualize household and family life in turn-of-the-century Canada. Perhaps one way in which to understand the past is by comparing it with what we know about household and family structure in the present. The current study evaluates the extent of household and family structural change that surfaced between the 1901 and 1991 national censuses, two census points marking the beginning and end of the twentieth century. A very different issue to address, of course, is why household and family structure may have changed over time. Since the present inquiry is based only on census returns, the answers lie far beyond the scope of this paper. It is well understood that mortality, migration, fertility, and marriage behaviour, all potential demographic factors impinging on living arrangements, as well the social/cultural perceptions and economic realities of household and family structure can change radically over time. Not surprisingly, in the ninety-year interval separating these two censuses, Canada experienced a remarkable transformation in many of these areas. Mid- to late-twentieth-century Canadian demographics has seen one particularly important shift – a general population aging brought about by substantial reductions in mortality and fertility. In Canada, as elsewhere, the turn of the century continued to be remarkable for high mortality burdens, particularly from infectious diseases such as respiratory tuberculosis. Over time, with the increasingly successful improvements to medical therapeutics, there was a shift away from the devastating effects of acute infectious disease to chronic diseases that typically mani-

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

19

fest later in the life cycle. Canadian male and female life expectancy at birth for the period 1920 to 1922 is estimated at 58.8 and 60.6 years, respectively, increasing to 75.4 and 81.3 years for 1994 to 1996.4 With respect to family sizes, Gauvreau and Gossage have found that ‘by 1901, each province was experiencing, in its own way and on its own timetable, the Western fertility transition,’5 which tended to reduce completed family size. This trend became more exaggerated over time, resulting in marked decreases in the number of children born in Canada.6 Migration has always been an important element to the settling and development of Canada. As a result, 1991 Canada is not simply a larger nation than in 1901, but also a more ethnically diverse population. Any shift in the social-cultural structure of Canada’s population can have a significant impact on preferences in the process of family and household formation, as reflected in the 1991 census data. In 1901 Canada was still largely rural, and farming continued to attract the largest proportion of labourers; larger urban centres, including Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, offered more industrial and commercial alternatives to the traditional farming economy. While farming still represents an important aspect of 1991 Canada, many more Canadians now find employment outside of the farming sector. While a minority of women worked in 1901, women’s employment has seen large-scale increases, fuelled not only by economic need, but also a reduction in the socially and culturally related restrictions to women’s work. Not only have employment dynamics changed between 1901 and 1991, but also the physical size of Canada and the degree to which the fringe areas of 1901 Canada have been settled and developed. This is an ongoing trend as growing population burdens continue to push for development outside of more traditional settlement areas. In 1901 Canada comprised seven provinces and two territories (Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia, the Territories,7 and the Unorganized Territories8). By 1991 Canada comprised ten provinces and two territories (which, by 1999, had become ten provinces and three territories with the creation of Nunavut). As a result, some of the data presented for provinces and territories in 1991 Canada find no direct comparison in the 1901 data. A number of recent studies have considered the dynamic nature of household and family structure in twentieth-century Canada. The period in and around the Second World War (1940–50) has been targeted as a time of ‘tremendous social, economic and demographic change,

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one particular aspect of which was an alteration in living arrangements.’9 Two general trends have evolved and gained momentum since this transitional period: the greater tendency for individuals to establish independent households (as reflected in increasing household headship rates);10 and, according to Wargon, ‘a growing emphasis on privacy in the living arrangements of families and individuals.’11 Though there is no absolute certainty as to what drove this change in household and family dynamics, myriad reasonable possibilities have been offered as potential factors in explaining the ability of families and individuals to achieve privacy in their living arrangements.12 The assumption, of course, is that privacy is, indeed, the twentieth-century ideal.13 Economic and structural factors, such as higher disposable income and an increasing housing supply boosted considerably by the development of apartment complexes and condominiums,14 would certainly facilitate both access to and the availability of separate households. There are other factors, such as the demographic reality of a population, that can exert more of a neutral effect. Wister and Burch uncovered a negative relationship linking fertility and living alone, such that the fewer children a woman has, for example, the more likely it is that she will live alone.15 Whatever the desire for living arrangements in older adult life, the opportunities will either be constrained or facilitated by decisions made earlier in adult life with respect to family formation. In her comprehensive review of possible factors impinging on the desires of Canadians to live alone, Wargon highlights several important social/cultural factors such as government financial assistance, not needing to contribute to the running of the parental household, and the delay of marriage or its avoidance altogether.16 Often many of these factors interact in daily life, and the challenge, thus far, has been to parse out the relative effects of what factor, if any, ranks as more important.17 Materials and Measures In order to investigate the nature of household and family structures in past and present Canada, this study relies on two principal sources of data – the national censuses of 1901 and 1991. Detailed, individual-level samples of both the 1901 and 1991 censuses were available in an electronic format, the former a product of the Canadian Families Project (CFP) and the latter a public use microdata file (PUMF) from Statistics Canada.18 As opposed to relying on published census data, these datasets are inherently more flexible, both with respect to the way in which data

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

21

are coded and presented and for the potential application of multivariate statistical techniques in data analyses. This investigation into household structure in early-twentieth-century Canada is made possible by the 5 per cent sample of the 1901 Census of Canada created by the Canadian Families Project. For the purposes of the current study, dwellings with two or more households, households with more than thirty individuals (which were mainly institutional), and the unorganized territories have been removed from analysis.19 With these exclusions in place, the working sample for 1901 includes some 44,313 households. Data for 1991 are derived from Statistics Canada’s ‘individual’ PUMF, a microdata file that represents a 2 per cent sample of the population of Canada (n = 809,654 individuals). In this file, each sampled individual represents a household. One issue of potential concern that emerged in comparing these two population samples surrounded the actual construction of the samples themselves. The 1901 database, for example, was created through cluster sampling techniques, meaning that all individuals in a sampled dwelling were entered into the database. The 1991 public use file, by contrast, was created through a random sampling of all individuals captured in the 1991 census. In order to offset any potential biases resulting from diverging sampling strategies, for the purpose of this study most analyses were structured around only the household head. As a result, and particularly important for 1901, each household is represented only once (by the household head) in the analysis and not by all members of that household (so that, for example, nuclear families do not exact a heavier weight on the results simply by virtue of the greater number of individuals in those households). Classifying Households and Families the Statistics Canada Way There are always classification difficulties that tend to emerge when comparing census returns for two different points in history. Depending on what census questions were asked, how they were framed, and what response categories were available to those enumerated, the ability to compare research questions over time can be severely limited or only undertaken with myriad qualifications, usually described in footnotes. The current investigation is no exception. Since the 1901 census was computerized on an ‘as is’ basis, that is, without any recoding of the information, and because the sample is structured around dwellings and households on the nominative level, it is the more flexible of the two

22

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census files. The 1991 census is the limiting census, in the sense that the 1901 comparisons must be structured around the data available from the 1991 PUMF and how those data have been presented. Since the most central feature of this study is, of course, households and families, attention was first paid to how households and families were defined in the 1991 census sample. A ‘census family’ consisted of three possible variants: (1) a husband and wife living together without children, (2) a husband and wife living together with unmarried children, and (3) a single parent living with his/her unmarried children. Children cease to be considered members of their parents’ census family upon the day of their own marriages, even if those marriages later result in separation or divorce. For the 1991 census, the Government of Canada employed a thirteen-fold household structure typology to classify the living arrangements of Canadians. Since this coding included specific categories assigned to households with common-law couples, a variation on marital status not recognized in 1901, common-law couples have been merged with married couples in the 1991 household typology.20 This typology represents a critical underpinning to the current paper and, therefore, deserves some detailed attention before proceeding further. Nine different types of household structure have been employed in the current analysis. Broadly speaking, seven of these variants on household structure include a census family with or without additional persons. ‘Additional persons’ are not considered members of the household census family, though they may, in fact, have some familial tie with the census family. The two remaining household structures are, essentially, non-census family households. For illustrative purposes, examples of each of the nine household structures are provided from the 1901 census as they are defined. Household Type 1 represents the husband/ wife (or spousal) household. In a typical example from 1901 Canada, we find Henry Sangster, 56 years of age, and his wife Emma, 52, who have established their household in rural British Columbia. Henry is a miner, working on his own account, and Emma maintains the household. Although her husband migrated to BC from his birthplace in Ontario, Emma immigrated from the United States when she was 21 years of age. A Type 2 household is slightly more complex, including the husband/ wife couple as well as additional persons. Felix and Alice Shaw established a household in urban Ontario. While Felix, 58 years of age, worked as a merchant, his wife Alice, 31, did not report any employment to the census enumerator. Also in this household is Florence Murray, an

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

23

unmarried 23-year-old domestic whose occupation is listed as housemaid. Felix Shaw’s two older sisters, Elizabeth Bell, 62 years of age, and Nancy Hare, 60, both widows, also live in the Shaw household. Because Florence, Elizabeth, and Nancy are not members of the census family in this household and do not among themselves constitute a census family, they are all considered ‘additional persons.’ Household Type 3 is the typical nuclear family, including a husband, a wife, and their unmarried children. The Larkin household in rural Prince Edward Island provides a good example of the large farming family. By 45 and 35 years of age, respectively, David and Bridget Larkin had eight children. Their eldest son, Ambrose, 18 years of age, helped his father with the farm and is identified in the census as a farm labourer. The younger children, Coletta, 17 years, John, 15 years, Mary, 14 years, Lizzie, 12 years, and twins Hemmor and Clara, 7 years, were all attending school. Young William, 3 years, was still at home. In all, the Larkin family farmed 245 acres of land and had 5 barns. A slight variation on the nuclear family, as described by the Type 3 households, is the Type 4 household, where the nuclear family takes in additional persons. Michoh and Mary Lucko, 35 and 25 years of age respectively, both immigrated to Manitoba from Galacia in 1898. At the time the 1901 census was taken, they had an infant daughter, Mary, born in Manitoba. Also in their household was Wesley Warkow, a 14-year-old domestic, who probably immigrated with them, as he was also from Galicia and immigrated in 1898. Some three years after landing in Canada, Michoh Lucko owned eighty acres of land, one barn, and a tworoom dwelling in Manitoba. Single-parent families are classified by household types 5 and 6. Type 5 includes a single parent and his/her unmarried children. Mary Ferguson, a 31-year-old widow living in Nova Scotia, became the sole provider for her six children upon the death of her husband. Of her children, Alexander, 11 years of age, John, 10 years, Peter, 8 years, Mabel, 6 years, Colon Norman, 5 years, and 1-year-old Frank, Mabel was the only one attending school. The family lived in rural Nova Scotia in a five-room house on fifty acres of land. Mary Ferguson did not list any occupation or income at the time the census was taken, instead indicating that they were living on her ‘own means.’ The Type 6 household identifies single-parent families with additional persons. In New Brunswick, for example, we find William Shadick, a 48year-old widowed mariner, living with his sons Frederick, 19 years, and Lestock, 13 years, his daughter Randa, 16 years, and his mother Abagale

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Shadick, an 83-year-old widow. Besides William, no other household member is employed, though Lestock is the only one of his children attending school. In his work, William makes three hundred dollars per annum, and the household shares a six-room house in urban New Brunswick. Multiple-family households are defined under Type 7, and are indicated when two or more census families share the same household. The Bouchard family of rural Quebec provides an excellent example of the multiple-family household. Eugene Bouchard, never married and 24 years of age, heads a household of ten people sharing an eight-room dwelling. Eugene, his father (70-year-old Dionce Bouchard), his mother (66-year-old Adele Bouchard), and his unmarried 19-year-old sister Alma all constitute one census family; Eugene’s married brother, 30-year-old Georges Bouchard, heads the second census family in this multi-family household. Georges is married to 22-year-old Alice and they have 1 son, 2-year-old Raoul, and 3 daughters – Janette, 5 years of age, Marie, 4, and Juliett, 1 year of age. Both Eugene and Georges farm the 425 acres that presumably once belonged to their father, Dionce, before his unmarried son assumed headship of the household. Multiple-family households may or may not include additional persons, but no distinguishing is made in the original Statistics Canada household typology. Both Type 8 and Type 9 households are the exceptions in the sense that they are the only household types that do not contain census families. Essentially, these are non-family households. Type 8 indicates the lone-individual household. Clara Lebarre was a 61-year-old widow living in urban Ontario. With her earnings of one hundred and forty dollars per annum as a music teacher, she leased a five-room house and lived alone. Type 9 households identify cases where two or more noncensus family persons occupy the same household. Though there are multiple persons in the household, none of them can be grouped together as a census family. In Manitoba, Robert Stoeward, a never married 50-year-old man, shared a four-room house with his two never married sisters, Dora, 52 years of age, and Sarah, 53 years of age. All three had immigrated in 1885 from Ireland. Though siblings and never married, this grouping would not be considered a family unless at least one parent was living with them. Robert was a farmer and owned 160 acres of land and 5 barns. It is likely, given their age, that none of the Stoeward siblings in this household would have ever married. In another example from the Territories, Frank Klassen, a 25-year-old proprietor, and Jacob Fisher, a 23-year-old domestic employee, shared a two-room

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

25

household. Frank Klassen earned five hundred dollars per annum and owned 480 acres of land. Jacob Fisher was his stable man. As these examples demonstrate, the ‘non-family’ classification applies to any grouping of individuals who fall outside of the definition of ‘census family,’ and can include, for example, co-resident siblings and widowed parents living with widowed children. While there are many advantages to using this classification scheme, including the fact that it not only isolates household structure, but also specifically identifies nuclear and single-parent families, there are also some disadvantages. Joy Parr articulates the problem with this type of research most succinctly: A large number of studies have been written which deal with childhood and family through the window of co-residence. But in many ways they leave begging the most important questions about family behaviour ... Family members, particularly in early industrial cities, seem to have been highly dependent upon one another for material and moral support even when they did not share the same roof.21

This critique of structural analyses suggests that the focus on the household misses the larger kin network through which households may have been bound. The Statistics Canada household structure definitions used in the present study go one step further, however, and even underplay the presence of extended family members in the household. So, for example, while Type 4 households include a nuclear family and additional people, it is difficult to identify who those additional persons are in relation to the nuclear family. They may, in fact, be unrelated persons, though they may also be extended family members, such as the mother or father of the household head and, therefore, the grandparent of the children in the nuclear family. This is, perhaps, the most disappointing aspect of the classification scheme employed in the current analysis. While this misgiving can be, to some extent, explored in the 1901 census, the more truncated information provided in the 1991 PUMF does not allow us to look past the ‘additional person’ identifier with any degree of ease (see also Sylvester’s data on living with non-kin in appendix A of chapter 5). A second issue that deserves some attention before proceeding is that of household fluidity. Census data allow for examinations into household structure at a fixed point in time with a representative group of individuals. In essence, a single census is a cross-sectional survey that

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Stacie D.A. Burke

75 & over 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 under 5

single married widowed

age

N = 223,489 S.R. = 105.5

8

6 male

4

2

0 per cent

2

4

6 female

8

Figure 1.1 Population structure of Canada, 1901

does not allow us to track individuals over time, as they pass through defining events in the life course. According to Hareven, the life-course paradigm is essential in understanding how individuals timed and sequenced their transitions through different household structures within different historical contexts.22 Despite these caveats, the census does provide a starting point. The 1901/1991 comparison is both novel and informative, allowing us to understand how Canadians were living at two distinct points in time. The Nature of Canada’s Population Since the significant demographic forces of migration, mortality, and fertility can determine who is available in the population to aggregate into households, it is important to consider the underlying population structure of 1901 and 1991 Canada. Figure 1.1 displays the characteristic wide-based triangle or tree-shaped pattern defining the population of 1901 Canada. With high levels of fertility (the wide base) and high levels of mortality (the marked tapering of the distribution from base to point), turn-of-the-century Canada was defined by a ‘young’ population distribution. With a mean age at first marriage of about 25 years of age among females and 28 among males,23 the majority of Canada’s young

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991 75 & over 70–74 65–69 60–64 55–59 50–54 45–49 40–44 35–39 30–34 25–29 20–24 15–19 10–14 5–9 under 5

27

single married separated/divorced widowed

age

N = 809,601 S.R. = 97.2

8

6 male

4

2

0 per cent

2

4

6 female

8

Figure 1.2 Population structure of Canada, 1991

adults delayed family building until well into adulthood. At the fringes of these averages, the earliest signs of entry into the marriage pool occur at 15 to 19 years of age for women and at 20 to 24 years of age for men. Under the weight of heavy mortality burdens evident in the early twentieth century, the first signs of women and men becoming widowed does not follow far behind, with the proportion of widows and widowers gradually increasing by each adult age group. It is evident from figure 1.1 that women were more likely than men to become a surviving spouse in marriages destroyed by death, and that they were more likely to experience this event earlier in life. The large proportion of children under 15 years of age and the vastly truncated proportion of adults over the age of 65 raise specific questions regarding the potential nature, requirements, and burdens placed on household structure at the turn of the century. Not unexpectedly, the population structure depicted in figure 1.2 for 1991 Canada presents a radically different demographic picture. Following in the wake of the demographic transition, with the lowering of both fertility and mortality levels, a stationary population structure is plainly evident. Gone is the abundance of children in 1901 Canada and, in their stead, we find a larger proportion of adults over 65 years of age; as a result, childhood dependency has diminished for young and middleaged adults, only to be replaced by heightened elderly dependency. The

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distribution of marital status suggests that marriage continues to be delayed well into adulthood for the majority of the population. According to Ram, ‘after reaching an historic low in the 1950s and 1960s, the mean age at first marriage rebounded to the highest ever recorded level in 1995 – 29.0 years for men and 27.1 years for women.’24 Separation and divorce now exist alongside widowhood in terminating marriages prematurely among Canada’s adults. Widowhood, however, still remains a more significant burden for women than men, as wives continue to outlive their partners in relatively larger numbers. The aging of Canada and, more generally, North America, is well understood and investigated, at both the demographic and social/policy levels.25 The question raised in this paper, of course, is how the heightened demographic presence of the elderly has impacted the living arrangements of Canadians relative to 1901, when the concern was largely how to house a very large proportion of children. The greater numbers of elderly by the 1990s did not increase the probability that elders would co-reside with children (see table 9.12 in Lisa Dillon’s essay in this volume). The Changing Nature of Household and Family Structure What was the most common household structure in turn-of-the-century Canada? With tabulations based on household heads, the nuclear family household (Type 3) was, by far, the most predominant household structure, accounting for some 47.4 per cent of households (see table 1.1). With an additional 15.7 per cent of households being Type 4, that is, including a nuclear family with additional persons, some 63 per cent of all Canadian households had a nuclear family lying at their core in 1901. A further 12.1 per cent of households were made up of a husband/wife census family, 8.2 per cent of which were husband/wife households (Type 1), while the other 3.9 per cent were husband/wife/additional persons households (Type 2). Single-parent households represented another 10.2 per cent of households; the majority of these (6.9 per cent) were single-parent/child(ren) households (Type 5), with the remaining 3.3 per cent accounted for by households with additional persons (Type 6). Multiple census family households, with and without additional people, represented only 4.9 per cent of Canada’s 1901 households. In sum, therefore, just over 9 out of every 10 households in this sample had a Statistics Canada–defined ‘census family’ lying at its core, with or without additional people. In the remaining non-family households, some 5.2 per cent and 4.5 per cent of Canadian households were made up of

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

29

Table 1.1 Frequencies of household type by marital status of the household head, Canada, 1901 (percentages) Marital status Household type

Total

Never married

Married

Widowed

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

8.2 3.9 47.4 15.7 6.9 3.3 4.9 5.2 4.5

– 1.1 1.8 1.4 11.8 7.9 1.6 37.7 36.8

10.1 4.7 58.4 18.8 1.0 0.5 5.0 0.8 0.6

– 0.5 – 3.0 47.9 20.9 6.1 13.1 8.4

F2 = 45477.939, 16df, p < .001

either individuals living alone (Type 8) or two or more non-family persons living together (Type 9), respectively. It is obvious that the census family was the underlying feature linking the majority of households in turn-of-the-century Canada, whether one was indeed a member of that family or simply living in the same household as a family. An examination of the distribution of household type by the marital status of the household head reveals some important differences (table 1.1). Married household heads were most likely to head nuclear family households (Type 3), nuclear family plus additional persons households (Type 4), and husband/wife households (Type 1). Widowed household heads, by contrast, were most likely to head single-parent households (Type 5) and single-parent plus additional persons households (Type 6), or to be living alone (Type 8). While never-married or single household heads were most likely to be living alone (Type 8) or with other nonfamily persons (Type 9), there was also a large proportion of them heading single-parent households (Type 5). The explanation for this unexpected finding emerged during the household coding stage, when it became apparent that, in some cases, unmarried sons and daughters assumed the headship of a household that contained their widowed parent and, in most cases, other unmarried and for the most part, younger, siblings. Further analyses suggest that there are some important gender differences in household structures among unmarried household heads – unmarried male heads were more likely to have been living alone (Type 8), while unmarried female heads tended towards non-family house-

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holds with other people (Type 9). Married males are significantly more likely to be heading nuclear family households with or without additional persons, while married female heads are more likely to be in single-parent households with or without additional persons. It is uncertain, at this point, whether these women are actually separated from their husbands (akin to a divorce when divorces were not common). It is known, however, that if their husbands were only temporarily absent from the household they would have been captured by the de jure nature of the census anyway (in such a census people are enumerated in their normal or habitual place of residence).26 This feature of the census also bears its own implications, since men’s work away from home in the resource economy often led to more de facto Type 5 families than the statistics indicate. Men who were enumerated as heading nuclear households could be ‘temporarily absent’ more often than they were actually present and heading the household, leaving their wives to run what were, for all intents and purposes, single-parent households. As a result, though the actual number of married women heading single-parent households is small relative to the number of single-parent families headed by widowed individuals, the real number could have been much higher had the de jure nature of the census not been in place. With this caveat, the statistics indicate that single-parent households were most commonly headed by widows and widowers in 1901 Canada. Relative to 1901, there is a rather marked tendency in 1991 not to have additional non-family persons in the household, as evidenced by the low proportions of Type 2, Type 4, and Type 6 households contributing to the overall frequencies of household types (table 1.2). In 1991 the most common household structure continues to be the nuclear family household (Type 3), though the proportions of husband/wife-only households (Type 1) and lone-individual households (Type 8) have increased markedly. The heightened tendency to live alone reduces the frequency of the family-centred household from just over nine out of ten households in 1901 Canada to just over seven out of ten in 1991 Canada. While about 10 per cent of households in 1901 consisted of single-parent families (Types 5 and 6 combined), in 1991 the figure was 9 per cent. An examination of the marital status of 1991 household heads by household type differs importantly from that of 1901 with the inclusion of the ‘divorced and separated’ category (table 1.2). Some 42 per cent of divorced and separated household heads were maintaining singleparent households (Types 5 and 6). More often, however, they were found to be living alone (49.7 per cent of divorced and separated

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

31

Table 1.2 Frequencies of household type by marital status of the household head, Canada, 1991 (percentages) Marital status Household type

Total

Never married

Married

Divorced/ separated

Widowed

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

23.5 1.6 34.6 2.9 7.4 1.6 1.1 22.6 4.7

– 0.3 – 0.1 9.5 2.1 0.1 66.3 21.6

36.5 2.2 53.7 4.3 0.3 0.4 1.5 0.6 0.4

– 0.3 – 0.2 36.3 6.0 0.6 49.7 7.0

– 0.5 – 0.8 17.2 3.3 0.6 71.2 6.3

F2 = 318923.57, 24df, p < .001

household heads) or, less commonly, with other non-family individuals (7 per cent). While the majority of widowed heads were in single-parent households in 1901, in 1991 the largest proportion (71.2 per cent) was living alone.27 Even in 1991, however, the death of a spouse could produce single-parent households. According to Gee, a relatively high proportion of Canadian women still ‘experiences widowhood before the first child leaves home.’28 Married heads were still most commonly located in nuclear family (Type 3) and husband/wife (Type 1) households. As in 1901, never-married heads remain more likely to be located in lone-individual (Type 8) or non-family (Type 9) households. Unlike 1901, however, with the stigma of parenting outside of marriage presumably reduced, the remaining never-married individuals heading singleparent households are probably themselves never-married parents, rather than children heading their widowed parents’ households. Overall, several important differences can be noted in the frequency of household types in 1901 and 1991 Canada. First, there has been a remarkable increase in the proportion of Type 1 (husband/wife) households in 1991 Canada. Two possible reasons are offered to account for this increase in spousal households: (1) there is probably greater acceptance for couples to remain voluntarily childless, such that marriage no longer necessarily entails childbearing as it did for many cultures and religions historically; (2) the exclusive husband/wife household is a natural latter stage to the progression of marriage and childbearing that occurs after children have reached maturity and left the parental household. By contrast, in 1901 it is likely that at least one of the partners

32

Stacie D.A. Burke

would have passed away either before or not long after this stage in the family household. Second, there has been a clear reduction between 1901 and 1991 in the tendency towards taking ‘others’ (non-family) into the census family household. Finally, perhaps what is most remarkable about 1991 is the high proportion of individuals ‘living unto themselves’ or completely alone. Whether opportunity, necessity, or personal/cultural desire to maintain an independent household has fuelled this tendency, it was clearly not a possibility for the majority of early-twentieth-century Canadians. The increased diversity in household types visible for 1991 means that, relatively speaking, the family (whether spousal, nuclear, or single-parent) was more central in defining the daily lives of 1901 Canadian households. A Culture of Household Sharing It is clear from the preceding analysis that 1901 households were much more open to admitting additional persons into their midst. The question is, of course, who were these people that lived alongside census families in 1901, but not in 1991? While the census sample of 1901 allows us to answer this question (using the ‘relationship to head’ variable), no such comparison is possible with 1991 owing to the manner in which relationship to head is coded.29 Arguing this caveat may be somewhat of a moot point anyway, since the majority of 1991 households did not actually contain ‘additional persons,’ at least not relative to households in 1901. Figures 1.3 through 1.6 focus on each of the four household types for which ‘additional persons’ could be identified in 1901: Type 2 (husband/wife with additional persons), Type 4 (nuclear family with additional persons), Type 6 (single-parent household with additional persons), and Type 9 (non-family household).30 In all household types, relatives accounted for the largest single group contributing additional persons to a household. Among husband/wife households (Type 2), relatives accounted for some 39 per cent of the additional persons, followed by lodgers and boarders (35.4%), employees (23.4%), and others (2.2%) (see figure 1.3). From within the relatives group, brothers and sisters were the most common additional persons living with the husband/wife census family, followed by either fathers or mothers,31 nephews and nieces, grandchildren, and other relatives. These additional persons may have been related to either the head of the household or the spouse of the household head. It is clear that despite the relatively low propor-

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991 Categories

33

Breakdown of relatives

lodgers 35.4%

7.6% other 22.0% nephew/niece 15.0% grandchild relatives 39.0%

32.1% brother/sister

23.3% father/mother employees 23.4%

other 2.2% N = 4,502

Figure 1.3 Frequencies of additional people, household Type 2, Canada, 1901

tion of true multiple-family households (Type 7) in 1901 Canada, kin networks were important in household composition. Reliance on such networks while sharing households may have worked to meet the needs of the core census family, the kin-related additional persons, or both. While relatives may (or may not) have contributed to the census family income, there is no question that the lodgers and boarders taken in as additional persons did so. According to Hareven, middle-aged and older couples in urban America who took in boarders and lodgers benefited from both supplemental income as well as sociability, while ‘in younger families, the income from boarders contributed to the payment of the mortgage and, in some cases, enabled the wife to stay out of the labor force.’32 The distribution of additional persons living in nuclear family households (Type 4) is depicted in figure 1.4. Once again, relatives represented the largest group, accounting for just over 37 per cent of additional persons. In this case, however, it was most common for either the father or the mother of the head/spouse to be living with the nuclear family. Brothers and sisters represented the next largest group of additional persons, while the remainder consisted of grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and other relatives. Unlike the husband/wife household, domestic and non-domestic employees were the next largest group of additional persons, contributing just under 35 per cent to the total number of additional persons in Type 4 households. While the employee contri-

34

Stacie D.A. Burke Categories lodgers 26.1%

Breakdown of relatives

10.5% other 10.5% nephew/niece 14.8% grandchild relatives 37.2%

29.9% brother/sister 34.4% father/mother

employees 34.9%

other 1.8%

N = 38,695

Figure 1.4 Frequencies of additional people, household Type 4, Canada, 1901

butions to running the household may have been highly desirable or perhaps essential, there may have been less room in the nuclear family for lodgers and boarders, as they constituted only 26 per cent of the pool of additional persons. Out of all the household types including additional persons, the presence of relatives was most strongly marked in single-parent households (Type 6), where just under 50 per cent of additional persons were relatives of the household head (see figure 1.5). Of these, brothers and sisters were the most common, followed in frequency by fathers or mothers, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and other relatives. Lodgers and boarders also play an important role in the single-parent household economy, contributing some 30 per cent of additional persons in these households. Employees were noticeably less common (just under 20 per cent), despite the fact that their service would seem to have been most valuable if single parents were attempting to meet both the financial and day-to-day needs of younger children. The final household type considered here, Type 9, could basically be considered to consist entirely of additional persons, since it is a noncensus family household structure. Non-family does not imply nonrelative, however, as just under 40 per cent of persons living in such households were related to the household head (figure 1.6). By far the majority of such households included co-resident siblings in a ‘nonfamily’ household. Other relatives, in order of frequency, included nephews and nieces of the head, other relatives, fathers, mothers, or daughters

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991 Categories

35

Breakdown of relatives

lodgers 30.1%

6.1% other 14.4% nephew/niece 18.0% grandchild relatives 48.7%

37.2% brother/sister 24.3% father/mother

employees 19.8%

other

N = 6,057

Figure 1.5 Frequencies of additional people, household Type 6, Canada, 1901

Categories

Breakdown of relatives

lodgers 36.8%

5.9% other 13.1% nephew/niece 3.9% grandchild relatives 39.8%

employees 16.5%

73.1% brother/sister

4.0% father/mother/daughter other 6.9%

N = 5,074

Figure 1.6 Frequencies of additional people, household Type 9, Canada, 1901

who were either married or widowed (thereby removing them from the census family relationship with their parents), and grandchildren. Lodgers and boarders were also a common presence in Type 9 households, accounting for some 37 per cent of additional persons. Employees were the least common in the non-family household. In general, then, how does this examination of additional persons contribute to our understanding of households and families in 1901 Canada? Perhaps the most important point to emphasize is that, despite

36

Stacie D.A. Burke

the fact that they might not be census family members, the majority of the additional persons living in census family and even non-census family households were, in fact, in some way related to their host census families. Whether such individuals contributed directly to the household income, whether they provided services in the daily running of the household, or whether the additional persons themselves needed the support of the census family (as in the case, for example, of elderly individuals), those families that did not live alone tended most often to open their doors to other relatives when they did include additional persons. (Darroch makes a similar point in his discussion of ‘residence away from home’ in this volume.) Alternatively, of course, the additional person may have headed the household, providing a home for a census family. The importance of relatives aside, census families were also quite likely to share their homes with lodgers and boarders in 1901 Canada (see also Darroch, this volume, table 7.3). In some cases these individuals could have indeed been strangers to the family, in other cases it is clear (through sharing the same surname, for example) that some lodgers and boarders may have in some way been related to the family. According to Baskerville and Sager, lodgers and boarders represented an important additional source of income to the census family, provided the family had the space in the household to accommodate these additional persons.33 It probably would not be such a stretch to suggest that a stronger social and cultural acceptance of the merits of lodging and boarding was present in 1901 Canada, an acceptance that, despite financial benefits, has simply not persisted over time. The late-twentiethcentury ideal of privacy, perhaps best embodied by the notion of ‘cocooning’ from the outside world, seems to have discouraged the presence of outsiders in the family household, despite the financial gains that would otherwise accrue. The culture of household sharing apparent in 1901 also extended to domestic and non-domestic employees who took up residence in their employer’s households, something that is also not as commonly practised today. Geography and the Household Structure A question that remains to be answered is how much regional variation existed and exists today in the distribution of household types. In general, all of 1901 Canada’s provinces and the Territories (for the most part analogous to Alberta and Saskatchewan today) favoured the nuclear

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

37

Table 1.3 Frequency of household types by province and territory, Canadian household heads, 1901 (percentages) Household type BC Terr. MB ON QC NB NS PEI

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

9.6 9.2 6.1 8.6 8.7 6.7 6.6 5.4

5.1 3.0 3.5 4.3 3.5 3.5 4.1 3.1

31.5 44.2 44.3 46.6 51.7 48.5 45.1 46.7

12.3 14.2 20.8 15.8 14.5 17.4 17.0 14.7

2.9 5.5 4.7 7.9 6.1 6.8 8.3 10.0

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.7 2.6 3.4 4.7 4.8

2.9 2.3 3.2 4.2 5.8 6.6 6.0 6.5

16.3 13.4 10.0 4.6 3.9 3.4 3.8 3.3

17.4 6.0 4.4 4.2 3.2 3.7 4.5 5.4

F2 = 2155.160, 56df, p < .001

family (Type 3) and the nuclear family with additional persons (Type 4), though there are some interesting regional differences in the remaining household types (see table 1.3 and see McCann, Buck, and Heggen, this volume, chapter 3). With all that is known of the structural peculiarities of turn-of-the-century British Columbia, particularly high levels of immigration resulting in a highly skewed sex ratio and a relative abundance of unmarried men, it is not unexpected to find a significant excess of loneindividual and non-family households (on the contrasts between BC and other provinces see also table 2.1 in Gossage and Gauvreau, and appendix A in Sylvester, this volume). Heading eastward, the proportion of lone-individual households remains elevated among those living in both the Territories and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba, which is more remarkable for its association with the nuclear family with additional persons – quite possibly the result of non-family farm labourers living in farm family households. Deviating from the patterns evident in western settlement, Ontario is characterized by an excess of single-parent households, of both the Type 5 and Type 6 variety, while Quebec has the highest proportion of nuclear family (Type 3) households relative to any other province or the Territories. Further east, the Atlantic provinces are responsible for the strongest contributions to the overall frequency of multiple-family households in 1901 Canada. Along with Ontario, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island also display elevated proportions of single-family households, possibly created, at least in the latter two provinces, as a result of risky male labour in what were predominantly mining and marine economies. In 1991 – bearing in mind that all provinces, more or less, conform to

38

Stacie D.A. Burke

Table 1.4 Frequency of household types by province and territory, Canadian household heads, 1991 (percentages) Household type Y&NT* BC AB SK MB ON QC NB NS PEI NF

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

15.7 26.1 23.2 24.5 23.9 23.6 22.6 23.0 23.1 21.6 18.5

1.5 1.7 1.5 1.3 1.2 1.6 1.4 1.8 2.2 2.0 1.8

35.0 29.9 35.2 34.4 32.5 34.9 35.1 39.0 35.8 38.1 47.8

6.6 3.1 2.8 2.1 2.4 3.3 2.1 3.2 3.2 3.2 6.0

7.7 6.3 7.2 6.7 7.4 7.1 8.4 7.5 7.5 8.0 7.6

3.4 1.6 1.7 1.3 1.5 1.6 1.4 1.8 1.8 2.1 2.1

2.2 1.5 0.9 0.4 0.8 1.5 0.6 1.0 0.8 0.5 2.1

20.4 24.6 21.9 25.1 25.9 21.5 24.1 18.2 20.8 19.3 10.8

7.4 5.2 5.6 4.0 4.4 4.8 4.3 4.3 4.9 5.3 3.3

F2 = 2964.162, 80df, p < .001 *Yukon and Northwest Territories combined

the basic preference for nuclear family (Type 3), husband/wife family (Type 1), and lone-individual (Type 8) households – there are some interesting regional differences that emerge once again (table 1.4). Households in the Yukon and Northwest Territories are more likely to include additional persons in both nuclear family households (Type 4) and single-parent households (Type 6) relative to the national distribution; an excess of multiple-family and non-family households is also evident. British Columbia is perhaps most striking for its excess of husband/wife (Type 1) households – since the Type 1 household tends to be quite frequent among older (post-childbearing) couples, it is likely that this excess is a by-product of the western-bound retirement-related migration typical of Victoria and Vancouver.34 While Alberta displays a deficiency in lone-individual households, neighbouring Saskatchewan and Manitoba show an excess of the Type 8 household relative to the national distribution. Ontario may have had an excess of single-parent households (Type 5) in 1901, but Quebec shows the highest proportion in 1991. Among the Atlantic provinces, while New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island all indicate significant excesses of nuclear family households (Type 3) and deficiencies of lone-individual households (Type 8), Newfoundland clearly stands alone. Newfoundland matches the extremes evident in the Yukon and Territories, minus the influence of lone-individual households. Newfoundland is characterized, instead, by a very high proportion of nuclear family households,

Household and Family Structure, 1901 and 1991

39

both with and without additional persons; both husband/wife (Type 1) and lone-individual (Type 8) households are significantly underrepresented in this province. Research by Trovato and Halli suggests that the Atlantic provinces share a regional subculture that favours ‘strong familistic orientations.’35 Households Through the Life Course: A Census Cross-Section Despite the fact that the census is a cross-sectional source of data that does not allow investigators to track individuals as they age, it can, nevertheless, yield important insights into the changing nature of household structure through the life course. Figures 1.7 through 1.10 present the results of a cross-tabulation according to where individuals were living by specific age intervals, gender, and census year. These results present a point-in-time estimate of household structure across the lifespan but do not address the issue of fluidity in movements between different households over time. Unfortunately, this type of question cannot be answered with the current data. For the most part, there are striking similarities in the patterning of household structure among both males and females in 1901 Canada (figures 1.7 and 1.8, respectively). Upon first glance, the overall predominance of the nuclear family structure is readily perceptible. As infants and young children, girls and boys are most likely to be living in a nuclear family (Type 3) or, to a lesser extent, a nuclear family with additional persons (Type 4) and multiple family households (Type 7). Soon after, there is an apparent growth in the number of children and adolescents living in single-parent households, most often caused, in 1901, by the early death of one parent. As expected, the overall number of individuals living in husband/wife (Type 1) and husband/wife/additional person (Type 2) households is low, although the proportion tends to increase as individuals become older. Also expectedly low is the number of individuals living either alone (Type 8) or in non-family households (Type 9), though males tend to maintain a more consistent pattern of Type 8 households over the adult years; comparatively more females are living in single-parent households (both Types 5 and 6) in a pattern that becomes readily apparent later in the life course. Several other features are also evident in figures 1.7 and 1.8. Beginning in the 15 to 19 age group, there is a distinct ‘transitional pinch’ noticeable in the frequency of nuclear family households. While it is obvious among both males and females, the pinch is slightly more

9 8

80%

7 6

60%

5

40%

4

3

20%

2 1

0% = 30 below

>= 20 to = 20 to = 10 to = 10 to