Making Do: Women, Family and Home in Montreal during the Great Depression (review)

“That’s how it was in those days,” recalled a Montreal woman about her experience during the Great Depression. “We got along with very little, because we had to, to tell the truthwhen you don’t have any money then you don’t worry about it, eh?” (170). This quote illuminates the major finding of Denyse Baillargeon’s study and hints at the richness and interpretative possibilities of the oral interviews she conducted for it. To investigate and understand how working-class families survived the Depression, Baillargeon interviewed thirty French Canadian, and therefore Catholic, women who were married, housewives, and residents of working-class districts in Montreal in the years between 1929 and 1939. Although most interested in the impact of the economic crisis on women’s domestic labor and the family economy, she also queried her respondents about their childhood, youth, work experience, dating, marriage, sexuality, and motherhood. By placing the 1930s within the context of the women’s lives and life cycles, Baillargeon concludes that “the Great Depression did not have a particularly catastrophic effect on their work in the home, or...on their standard of living” (168).

Faced with poverty and economic insecurity from childhood on, these women drew and expanded upon familiar strategies to manage during the Depression years. Already they bought inexpensive cuts of meat to cook for their families and made the Sunday roast last for an entire week; now they purchased meat directly from the abattoir rather than the local grocery and used more sausage, minced meat, and even horsemeat. They sewed more clothing, cut back on the time they used electricity and gas, and postponed the purchase of appliances. Such activities, Baillargeon reminds us, demonstrate that women’s unpaid domestic labor—cooking, cleaning, budgeting, shopping, childcare—is work and is essential to the economic maintenance of the family. Over half of her informants also worked for pay during the 1930s, taking jobs outside the home and taking in boarders, laundry, and needlework.

According to Baillargeon, a unique contribution to Canadian studies of the Depression is her discovery that family planning and family networks were among the important strategies utilized by the women she interviewed. Citing finances, the wife’s domestic workload, and the desire to devote more attention and resources to each child, more than half of the women and their husbands used contraception to limit the size of their families. Baillargeon finds this “astonishing” (89), given the Catholic Church’s formal prohibition of contraception, and suggests that women in this era were less submissive to Church teachings than is commonly thought. She also carefully documents the mutual aid—food, housing, loans—provided by extended families during the economic crisis. For the unemployed, in particular, such traditional sources of support, often overlooked by other historians of the period, supplemented inadequate direct and work relief payments from the state and proved crucial to a family’s survival.

What is most valuable, and frustrating, about Baillargeon’s study is the way she presents the historical information gathered from her oral interviews. By generously quoting from the interviews, she beautifully conveys the texture of everyday life for working-class housewives just prior to and during the Great Depression. Yet, by placing biographical material in an appendix and not assigning pseudonyms in the text, it is difficult to get a sense of the women as individual storytellers or how interview excerpts fit into a larger life story. Moreover, too often Baillargeon fails to offer critical comment and interpretation or explore contradictions and silences in the recollections. What does it mean that the women said they took little notice of social and political events in this period of crisis? or that one woman remembered “rebelling” against the family economy as a girl and others recalled getting “discouraged” with or “mad” at unemployed husbands during the Depression (39, 151)? Baillargeon does not tell us.

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