Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family and Unemployment in Ontario’s Great Depression by Lara Campbell (review)

In the opening pages of Respectable Citizens, Mary Cleeson tells readers why individual and family stories matter: ‘History books will tell of the hunger marches and strikes, but how will our descendants find out about our everyday lives?’ In this well-written and thoroughly researched monograph, Lara Campbell builds from the memories and experiences of women like Cleeson to tell a story of her own – a story that connects the daily lives of Ontarians with government policy, individual and collective protest, as well as shifting and intransigent cultural ideals to give dimension to our understandings of citizenship and the role of gender in the development of welfare state policy. She argues that Ontarians like Cleeson played ‘an important role in the transition to the postwar liberal welfare state’ in Canada.

Campbell uses an impressive array of sources, including the records of social service organizations and government departments, observations of social workers, judges, and probation officers from family and criminal courts, newspapers, novels, plays, recipes, oral histories, and premiers’ records. Weaving these sources into a comprehensive narrative is no small achievement and Campbell does an elegant job.

The historiographical contributions of Respectable Citizens are significant. The earliest historiography on the 1930s focused on the nature of the economic collapse, government responses or non-responses, and the consequences of these shifts for unemployed males. The social history of this period was practically non-existent, particularly when it came to the history of women and families. Respectable Citizens offers much to challenge these oversights. In chapter 4, Campbell focuses on the home, its mortar and bricks, its structure a powerful symbol of respectability and status for working- and middle-class citizens. When unemployment threatened the ‘sanctity of the home,’ Ontarians went to great lengths to protect it. Women made alliances with social workers against husbands who refused to take relief or were spending money recklessly on alcohol or gambling. In letters to premiers, men connected masculinity and hard work with citizenship to argue for relief rights for homeowners. When homes were lost, as many were in these years, the psychological and physical wounds were tremendous. In his memoir Lloyd Dennis describes his family’s eviction as ‘an explosion’ that destroyed it. Ontarians living in rural regions suffered equally. In his letter to Premier Henry, C.J. Blacknall explains, ‘A few farmers passed out of this life with a rope around their neck last year in their barns.’ Why, asks another letter writer, do banks have the power to do this to hard-working men? Campbell also expands our understanding of the history of the welfare state by connecting the perspectives and experiences of welfare recipients to a history written primarily from the institutional perspective. In doing so, she challenges several myths about the 1930s generation. The final chapter of Respectable Citizens challenges understandings of this period as one of limited protest and this generation of Canadians as highly individualistic and unwilling to ask for government support as we learn about the rich and complex ways Ontarians fought to make the state accountable to them. In fact, women and men articulated rights that pointed to a reciprocal relationship between the state and its citizens. In return for fulfilling their obligations, which as Campbell shows us were shaped by Britishness, maternalism, and the breadwinner ideal, women and men believed the state owed them support well beyond the paltry levels of relief offered well into the economic crisis.

In Respectable Citizens, Mary Cleeson would find much to celebrate. By sharing her story, as well as the stories of other men and women told through letters, case files, editorials, and interviews, Campbell provides us with an important window on the 1930s, one that takes us inside the walls of domestic space and the hearts and minds of Ontarians, reminding us of the complex ways that home, workplace, and state are entwined and challenging us to abandon simplistic notions of citizenship...