La fécondité des Québécoises, 1870–1970 : d’une exception à l’autre (review)

This important study is the outcome of painstaking collaborative research by an interdisciplinary team of three Quebec scholars: historical demographer Danielle Gauvreau, ethnologist Diane Gervais, and family historian Peter Gossage. Building upon and bringing together their earlier findings, published in scholarly journals and anthologies over the past decade, the authors demonstrate how the central fact of Quebec social history for the century beginning in 1870 is the striking (frappante) decline in fertility. The decline is readily measured in the number of children per average family, which was effectively halved during that time, from six to three. Put simply, as their subtitle indicates, the authors track the path of fertility changes in Quebec ‘from one extreme to the other.’ Yet this was, of course, anything but a simple process.

The authors capably support their argument that the decline was in evidence by the closing quarter of the nineteenth century, a nearcentury before its forceful manifestation during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. As also witnessed in the other provinces and among the Western allies, the Great War’s tremendous toll of young men turned Quebec toward an avid pro-natalism encapsulated in the notorious revanche des berceaux crusade of Père Louis Lalande (1918). By the interwar years, the earlier ‘celebration’ of large families had mutated into an exhortation that emphasized the failure of duty, primarily feminine, signified by family limitation. As Gossage argues in a fascinating chapter on the familist discourses prevailing in popular, medical, women’s, nationalist, and clerical publications – the latter two often the same – the tone shifted to reflect the heightened anxieties of the clerico-nationalist elite about la survivance more than the realities of Québécois family life. Thus the decline was incremental, but nonetheless real, through the early twentieth century, culminating in the province’s attainment of the lowest birth rate in the nation by the period’s end, a status that has persisted.

Those readers familiar with earlier publications derived from this project will see the team’s findings carefully contextualized, reinforced, and synthesized in this study. Applying their particular disciplinary skills to advantage, the authors individually and collectively examine statistical data, official reports, and oral testimonies, as well as public discourses, the last with particular attention to the lesser-known pre-1920s ideas. The book’s structure deftly interweaves the essential quantitative material with the equally important, but more challenging to arrive at, personal, testimonial, human evidence that permits the historical actors themselves to come forward in a story about the most private aspects of private life. The opening chapter is a succinct outline of the history and theory of population studies, une documentation vaste et variée, to be sure; all the more credit is due to the authors for outlining the key ideas and players so clearly. In addition to the public discourses covered in the second chapter, two chapters (3 and 4) analyze census and other population data, focusing on the decennial censuses of 1871 and 1901, and culminating with the Second World War, vers le point de non-retour, as the authors describe the situation at mid-cenutry. Chapters 5 and 6 are informed by some hundred interviews with clergy, doctors, and the ‘ordinary’ couples who started families between 1930 and 1970, years of sweeping socioeconomic change in the Western world that had specific cultural and political repercussions for francophone Catholic Quebec. The tumultuous 1960s, during which the province underwent its Quiet Revolution, receive their own treatment in the closing chapter; Here we find discussion of the fundamental shifts in sexual behaviour entailed by the Pill; the inquiétude on the part of Catholics, clergy, and regular practitioners alike, regarding the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae; and the Trudeau initiatives to remove the state from ‘the bedrooms of the nation,’ which closed out the decade. What followed was a veritable cri d’alarme in the face...