Foisted upon the Government?: State Responsibilities, Family Obligations, and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario (review)

Montigny brings a historian’s perspective to the current North American debate concerning relations between the state, families, and the aged. In this succinctly argued monograph, he points to the similarities in government rhetoric in Ontario, Canada, during the 1990s to that which existed in the 1890s. During both eras, he suggests, the state’s anxiety about fiscal restraint led it to depict the aged in a false manner that allowed the government to rely on families for their care while cutting social-welfare costs. Montigny, in common with many recent writers about the aged in the United States, seeks to dispel the “myth” of old-age dependency, the notions that families did not, and do not, carry their fair share of care for the elderly, and that the late twentieth century is somehow unique in its concern for an increasingly aging population. ¹ Montigny concludes that now, as well as 100 years ago, government policy—not uncaring families or an excessive number of helpless elderly—is and was responsible for problems in caring for the dependent among Ontario’s aged population.

Montigny bases his analysis on a careful reading of such qualitative sources as government reports, municipal records, newspapers, and institutional case files, as well as on a less careful use of nominal-level census data. One of the more important contentions in the book is the claim that “the destitute among [the elderly] were a small minority (29).” Drawing on much recent work in the United States and Britain on this subject, Montigny bases his measurement of dependency, or destitution—the terms seem interchangeable in this book—on the number of aged people who lived in another person’s home. Montigny expresses this population as a percentage of all people in the examined communities in 1851, 1891, and 1901 (46–47). But expressing the aged non-heads of family as a percentage of all aged is a more direct way to appreciate the numbers of dependents. When one does so, one finds that elderly dependents varied from 29 to 51 percent of the total elderly during these time periods. It is surely hard to see these figures as “a small minority.”

Montigny thinks that this measurement of dependency probably exaggerates the number of dependent aged. Perhaps, but it also excludes consideration of aged household heads who lived, increasingly in this time period, with an unmarried daughter who worked outside the home. In such cases, who was dependent on whom? Montigny is aware that dependency and agency could coexist in the lived reality of an aged individual. He goes to some trouble to explore such related measurements as income, employment (although he inexplicably ignores the months-employed variable in the 1901 census), and sickness, but he does not link such information to position in the household. Thus, readers lose an opportunity to penetrate beyond the either/or dichotomy set up by his, and the general literature’s, use of household position as the primary determinant of dependency. All too often Montigny has recourse instead to vague quantitative terms like “vast majority” and to creative instancing in order to demonstrate that the aged were generally able to look after themselves (curiously, however, one of his examples is that of an upper-class aged woman looking after her completely dependent, aged husband) (52, 60–61)!

Despite definitional concerns and a rather unsure use of quantitative material, Montigny’s book deserves a wide readership. His arguments concerning how governments manipulate(d) and create(d) false images of an elderly population in crisis in order to buttress an ailing economy are persuasive and deserve to be known outside academe.