A Silent Revolution?: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860-1930 (review)

As the punctuation of its title suggests, the massive empirical contribution that this book makes raises some questions. If, as Baskerville clearly shows, many women (rich, poor, and middling) owned and managed property in various ways throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, why did the sexist simplicities of separate spheres ideology have so long a lifespan? If women's ownership and control of wealth grew, varying by kind, somewhere between threefold and sixfold between 1860 and 1930, how could images of their unsuitability for business have continued to hold any power? Why, in the 1960s and 1970s, did it seem important and necessary to point out as "non-traditional" the accomplishments of women in business, when in 1901, a much greater percentage of working women were either self-employed or employers than was the case even in 1996, after much feminist ferment? In short, the big question behind this book is "how do changes in social being affect (or fail to affect) social ideology?"

One answer to this question was the foundation of a certain kind of social history, and Baskerville is one of Canada's most important practitioners of the genre. This is the social history that, faced with the silence of the past majority, refused to treat the unpublished ideas and values of the masses as unknowable. Instead, with great diligence, imagination, and skill, Baskerville and others have used data that was gathered for governance and business purposes as a means to find out things about those voiceless many. In A Silent Revolution?, Baskerville investigates correlations between gender, social location, and behavior such as investing, bequeathing, trading, borrowing, and lending, and creatively (but carefully) infers from those correlations new information about the range of possibility and constraint in women's business lives. That range was much wider than the doctrine of separate spheres stipulated.

This methodological orientation is sceptical about discursive sources as material for historical social description. Baskerville proceeds from the belief that the statistical analysis of social and economic data (originally collected for other purposes) allows him to see patterns of behavior that contemporaries did not notice. If this belief is right, then statistical analysis allows him to show us social change that was underway before contemporaries noticed it. And that means, he is showing us in retrospect the changing balance of forces in everyday life that ultimately altered consciousness and political power. Thus, in A Silent Revolution?, Baskerville meticulously and thoroughly investigates the business dealings of a very large and carefully chosen sample of Canadian urban women, observes their increasing wealth and autonomous business activity, and draws a conclusion about the significance of this material change for political life. "In the aggregate," he concludes, "[these women's] many public acts of competency in the fields of finance and business set the stage for reform in the public arena of politics."(247)

There is a risk that this approach might seem naively structuralist. But, more than in some of his earlier works (Unwilling Idlers, for example), Baskerville is willing to acknowledge that categorical characterizations of ideology as either the product of social relations (or a mystifying screen hiding the workings of history) are unwise. However, he does expect us to try to see the past without ideological blinders. Some historians may be sceptical about whether that is possible, and instead prefer to praise Baskerville for the fruitful results of his particular ideological orientation. Nowhere else in the North American literature on this period will readers find as deep and developed a description of such fundamental elements in family and community life as small scale borrowing and lending, and the management of savings through investments of various kinds. These kinds of capitalist activities, carried on at a modest level by a broad swath of North Americans, were crucial to household economies as well as to "the economy." Without his conviction (deeply ideological...