A Silent Revolution? Gender and Wealth in English Canada 1860–1930 (review)

When my grandmother died in 1999, we found several share certificates for Canadian mining companies that she had bought in the 1920s while single and working in Toronto. The companies were long gone and the shares worthless, but to me it was interesting that my conservative grandmother, who made sure never to exceed bank deposit insurance thresholds, had ever been speculating with penny stocks. According to Peter Baskerville’s book, A Silent Revolution? Gender and Wealth in English Canada 1860–1930, this would have not been unusual behavior, for by the 1920s Canadian urban women were buying stock and participating in the financial markets at a much greater degree than historians have heretofore appreciated.

Baskerville aims to situate and evaluate the place and space of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian women as economic actors, paying close attention to prevailing laws, discourse, ideology, and behavior. His analysis is undergirded by a solid foundation based on quantitative evidence—census data, wills, mortgage and chattel records, municipal tax assessment records—and qualitative sources—prescriptive literature and commentaries on women’s proper behavior drawn from newspapers, magazines, novels, parliamentary debates, and private correspondence. He also provides a wonderful example of methodological description, with 92 pages of appendices, tables, and notes that detail the challenges of reconstructing a balanced social history from sources that are as often incomplete as they are gender-biased.

The argument itself is compelling and rather unexpected: that married women’s property laws (MWPLs) were crucial to Canadian women becoming “active and in many ways indistinguishable from men as economic and financial players in the emerging liberal society of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada” (p. 221). MWPLs were enacted in England and English-speaking North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. Initially, they were passed to allow abandoned women to prevent estranged husbands from making claims on their property, but later were extended to give all married women the right to acquire, manage, and dispose of real and personal property. Scholars have argued that these laws were not entirely, or even primarily, for the benefit of married women, but carried benefits for creditors and men as well. Baskerville argues that all women, married and not, were the ultimate beneficiaries.

Baskerville revises the familiar binary separate sphere paradigm that sees the public/productive world of men as distinct from the private/ consumptive world of women; rather, he emphasizes “the symbiotic nature of production and consumption” (p. 13) and shows the roles of women at the convergence of both. These convergences are studied through a well-organized and coherent series of essays on topics related to women and wealth in all aspects—inheritance, bequeathing, producing, investing, borrowing, and lending—without ignoring men. Driving most of the studies is the experiences of women and men in two different cities: Victoria (British Columbia) and Hamilton (Ontario). These choices allow urban comparisons on the basis of different economic structures, investment opportunities, demographic characteristics, and trajectories of economic development in regional and national context. The book is explicitly on the urban experience and that of Canada outside Quebec (unlike many other books avoiding Quebec, this author has a good reason for it as Quebec’s civil code did not permit MWPLs).

What insights does he uncover? First, that women’s wealth increased over the period of the study, and while it remained on average lower than men overall, below the top strata of the rich (who were mostly men), women were close to if not the equal of men as potential economic/financial actors. Women also had access to most of the investment opportunities that men did, but sometimes acted differently; for example, women were often the more aggressive investors (buying risky things like stocks), especially into the 1920s. They were sometimes more likely to invest in...