Canadian Social History

American pediatrician whose work changed child and family dynamics in the 1950s and 1960s. His most well known book, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sought to address the concerns about juvenile delinquency during the 1950s. Families whose parenting skills had been severely undermined by the drive for conformity during the 1950s, turned to Spock’s book for advise and reassurance.

Juvenile delinquency refers to antisocial or illegal behavior by children or adolescents. In Canada, juvenile delinquency became tied to social and moral concerns after World War II.

Social commentators worried that hanging out at seedy cafes or in street gangs would lead youth to disorderly behaviour, crime, or “sexual delinquency.”

The deviant behaviour of teenagers threatened the “ideal society” of the 1950s, a society that desired stability and traditional after the upheaval of World War II.

Introduction

What’s does the term “feudal” mean?  In its classic sense feudalism was both a military and an economic system, with peasants as serfs to landowners and owing them military as well as economic loyalty. By the seventeenth century, the military aspect of feudalism had disappear, however, the economic aspects thrived in France and were transported to the New World. What this meant is that land was not owned outright but was subject to a series of social and economic regulations. The crown, which owned the land, granted a landholder, or seigneur, a significant tract of land. In return, the seigneur had to find families to farm parts of the land. Habitants had responsibilities to the seigneur, as well as the government, but were protected from arbitrary rent increases. As such, landholding during the French Regime was a complex system of rights and obligations.

Historiography

Francis Parkman, American historian during the nineteenth century, argued that New France was a place where democracy, Protestantism, and farming were thwarted by feudalism.

Cole Harris, a geographer, instead argues that although the seigneurial system’s structure of duties and obligations seemed oppressive, in reality feudalism was irrelevant to the general social and economic development of the colony.

Allan Greer argues that New France society was feudal because the way society was hierarchically structured. The system’s purpose was to pay for society’s superstructure of office holders and gentry.

Theories

Social/political/economic as well as geographical theories to support the evidence about whether New France was feudal.

Controversies

Historians have disagreed over what makes a “feudal” society. Is it rigid and undemocratic? Did New France society actually outgrow “feudalism” and start developing a different type of society? Or did “feudalism” exist to support politico-socio-economic society?

Sources and methods

Historians have looked at the development of farming in New France, and the availability of land. Historians have also analyzed social structure, and the attempts to rise up the social ladder.

Events and incidents

The marriage of Marie-Louise Cruchon – illustrates the complex character of society in New France. The marriage was essentially an alliance that helped both partners survive the pioneering difficulties of New France. It was a marriage rooted in socio-economic survival.

Conclusion

Was New France “feudal”? Yes, and no. Structurally yes. But the peoples of New France began to reshape “Feudal” society into arguably a more capitalist free market ideology based on the need for colonial socio-economic survival.

Introduction

Sharpening of class differences (the class interests of both the buyers and sellers of wage labour) occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Increase number of strikes, as Canada witnessed labour conflict from coast to coast.  But who were the wage workers and how were they organized?

How did industrialization change the Canadian working class?

Historiography

The historiography has tended to focus on skilled workers who belonged to trade unions. This labour elite enjoyed higher status, more job security, and greater income than unskilled. The trade unions that they were associated to grew out the defensive struggle to preserve skilled workers’ autonomy within the work place, and their place at the top of the working class.

Craig Heron notes that skilled workers, “recognized their exalted status over helpers and labourers.”

However, the majority of wage workers were unskilled. These unskilled workers lacked specialized skills, received lower wages, and more likely influenced by seasonal fluctuations of work.

Significantly, skilled workers tended to be white, males, of mostly British ethnic origin.

Women and ethnic or racial minorities such as Eastern Europeans and Chinese had little place in trade union movement.

Theories

Historians looking for examples of class consciousness have tended to focus on those most likely, the skilled workers.

Controversies

Who represented the working class? How representative were skilled workers? What does the experience of unskilled workers tell us about labour conflict during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Sources and methods

Increase number of strikes

Worksongs – “There Is Power in the Union”

Events and incidents

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies – establishment of one Big Union. Why was there a need for one Big Union?

Conclusion

Industrialization transformed the Canadian working class. Historians should perceive the working class as fragmented by skill, gender, race and ethnicity. Yet the Industrial Workers of the World sought to override this fragmentation by establishing one “Big Union” that would unite all of labour against capital. Although the Wobblies ultimately failed, they popularized the idea of the “grand industrial union” and the “general strike,” ideas that would be revitalized after World War I.

Introduction

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Canada witnessed the transition from industrialism to the age of industry. In the age of industry, capital and labour relations became strained, as industrial expansion transformed the Canadian workplace. Skilled workers were displaced, new immigrants joined the workforce, and business and government bureaucracies became feminized. At the end of World War I, social tensions between capital and labour reached a tipping point. On May 15, 1919, 30,000 workers in Winnipeg walked off the job – the Winnipeg General Strike had begun.

Historiography

Historians have recently placed the Winnipeg General Strike within a larger context of labour unrest from 1917 to 1925. As Craig Heron notes, the statistics on strikes and union membership suggest that long-established divisions within the trade union movement were giving way to a “remarkable spirit of working-class unity and class consciousness.”

Theories

Why? Because of the stresses of World War I. Serious erosion of real wages after 1917 and the sense that the working-class had been asked to make an unfair contribution to the war effort.

The workers’ revolt was a critique of industrial capitalism in Canada.

Steven Penfold article on class and gender.

Controversies

The revolt quickly faded when prosperity collapsed in mid-1920.

Economic reasons – labour stronger when economy stronger.

Business countered with labour management, company pension and health plans.

Old divisions within working-class. Skilled workers undermined by mass unionization.

Sources and methods

American leaders of United Mine Workers of America failed to support radical leadership of Cape Breton miners.

Events and incidents

Winnipeg General Strikes

Increase in strikes and union membership

Conclusion

Consciousness of class topped racial, gender factors post World War I. However, make-up of Canadian working-class is class, race, and gender.

The “Eskimo Problem” emerged in the 1950s. The Canadian government introduced a policy to remove Inuit people to unsettled Arctic islands. The idea behind the policy was to allow the Inuit to re-establish self-sufficient “traditional” societies away from the insidious influences of Euro-Canadians.

The removal of the Inuit reflected the immense faith that non-Aboriginal Canadians shared in the ability of experts to solve problems such as poverty and disease through social engineering.

The “Eskimo Problem” was defined at a conference on Eskimo Affairs held on 19-20 May, 1952. The “Eskimo Problem” was defined as having three components: an unstable economy, poor health, and a growing dependence on government benefits.

See article by Alan Rudolph Marcus, Relocating Eden: The Image and Politics of Inuit Exile in the Canadian Arctic

Leonard Marsh was the director of a social research programme at McGill University, when appointed director of the Committee on Post-War Reconstruction in 1941. In March 1943, the Report on Social Security in Canada was published with Marsh as its principal author.

Marsh argued that all Canadians “found work, remained healthy, and were properly fed, housed, and educated.” To achieve these goals it urged that the state take an active role in managing the economy and in providing minimum levels of social security.

John Maynard Keynes was a Cambridge economist whose writings provided a scientific analysis of economic cycles and showed how these economic cycles could be manipulated. The unemployed were not moral failures; rather, unemployment resulted from impersonal forces at work in the economy, forces that could be countered by state action.

Keynes argued for more government, rather than less. To inflate a depressed economy, Keynes argued that government needed to increase public investment.

Keynes’ ideas, although not embraced during the 193os, became widely accepted after the Second World War.

Francis Parkman was an American historian who lived during the nineteenth century. He viewed democracy, the separation of church and state, and capitalism, including private land ownership, as the essential components of an ideal society. Parkman studied New France, commenting that the society was far from ideal, a place where democracy, Protestantism, an farming were thwarted by feudalism, the Church, and the military.

Although Parkman’s view of New France feudalism has been discounted, his work on feudalism has shaped the historiography on New France.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Wobblies were a radical union organization. In comparison to trade unions, the Wobblies aimed to organize all workers in an industry, skilled and unskilled, native and immigrant, men and women. Wobbly theorists believed that industrial unions were eventually to give way to one “grand” or “big” union, in order to unite against capital.

Although the economic downturn of 1913-1915 and World War I eroded Wobbly strength, however, their history testifies to the tension created by industrialization in Canada, and to the very different ways that various elements within the working class responded to such tensions. The Wobblies popularized the idea of the “grand industrial union” and the “general strike,” both of which would guide Canadian workers-skilled and unskilled-in their protest against social conditions at the end of World War I.