Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario's Great Depression (review)

The 1930s stand out as the only period so far in which capitalism experienced a genuinely system-endangering crisis. Besides immense poverty and misery, the near-total collapse of the world economic order spawned social unrest, labour strife, and dramatic changes in thinking about politics and economics. It also led large numbers of men and women in Canada and elsewhere to conclude that other, sometimes dramatically different, modes of social and economic organization were necessary, a conviction that gave rise to, or greatly strengthened support for, political movements on the left and the right. The tumultuousness of the decade has made it a popular period of study among Canadian social, labour, economic, and political historians, as well as popular historians such as Pierre Berton and James Gray. State policy, economic developments, experiences of privation, and protest movements among working people are, of course, important. Lara Campbell argues that they were important elements in a much larger story, and that in Canada most of the tale has yet to be told. Many men and women were not On-to-Ottawa trekkers, were never part of a socialist or labour organization, nor joined an organized resistance movement of any variety. Missing from many histories are the diverse strategies men, women, and children pursued as they struggled to survive on meagre funds from day to day, and the plethora of ways (for example, through writing letters, making statements in court, through negotiating relief and social service bureaucracies) men and women registered their discontent with prevailing conditions. Campbell helps to flesh out our understanding of these aspects of the Depression years through a case study of (mostly urban) Ontario. The book draws on an impressive array of sources, including the records of social service organizations, government departments, Premiers' papers, court case files, newspapers, memoirs, family papers, novels, plays, and oral histories. Through a careful analysis of this material, Campbell does four main things. She examines the realities with which men and women dealt. She explores an array of sometimes conflicting and/or contradictory strategies women, men, and children pursued as employment income declined or disappeared. She considers the traumatic consequences that persistent unemployment had for men whose masculinity was integrally connected with their role as family providers. Finally, she explores ways in which differently situated actors experienced and made demands on the state through appeals to the category of citizenship. Campbell convincingly argues that ideals of citizenship and of the rights of citizens were at the centre of a deeply patriarchal cultural repertoire, and that the definitions of gender vested in those ideals shaped responses to emerging realities during the Depression. Her study, then, explores how, even though there were a wide range of reactions to the Depression, ultimately that multiplicity of responses reinforced a patriarchal order.

As a social history of policy Campbell's work is insightful. It also in many ways corroborates and brings together the findings of scholars working on earlier and later periods. Capitalism is a volatile order which has tended toward social polarization and crisis (albeit rarely system-endangering crisis) from early in its history. As such scholars as Alvin Finkel and Mariana Valverde have pointed out, in the 19th and early 20th centuries men and women often embraced ideals of "respectable citizenship." They have also pointed out that this discursive category was invested with mutually-determining notions of race and gender that informed responses to social polarization and the results of exploitation. Moreover, Nancy Christie, Margaret Little, Ann Porter and others who focus on welfare state formation after World War II have also argued convincingly that the same notions were central to the formal state agencies and services that emerged in a later period. Campbell shows that gender and race shaped policy and protest in the Depression years also. One of the real contributions of this work, however, is that it explores the ways in which the unprecedented collapse of the Depression years helped to transform a disparate collection of ad...