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440 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 what was being hidden and by whom? In a related vein, situating the notion of hidden worlds within a discussion of scholars= analyses of the usefulness and limitations of distinctions of public and private would have furthered the theoretical goals of the book. This said, Loewen demonstrates that attention to the narratives of everyday life, together with analysis of wider economic and social patterns, is a necessary tool for the study of communal societies B societies that are often known more by official doctrine and counter-cultural stances than by the intimate and social workings of their members= lives. (PAMELA E. KLASSEN) Betsy Beattie. Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1870B1930 McGill-Queen=s University Press 2000. xii, 176. $65.00, $24.95 The latest contribution to a growing body of literature on the history of single working women, Betsy Beattie=s book, Obligation and Opportunity, is a welcome and important addition to the field. This slim volume, which focuses on a single, albeit favoured, destination for Maritime out-migrants, provides a perceptive and compelling critique of the approach scholars have taken to the study of a phenomenon that continues to plague the Maritime provinces. Having pointed out that >the core of historical literature on Maritime out-migration, constrained by a narrow focus on regional economic decline, offers an inadequate, male-centred explanation of the phenomenon,= Beattie, through the medium of an intelligently conceived case study, invites readers to consider how the use of gender as a category of analysis might reshape our understanding of out-migration from the Maritime provinces during the 1870B1930 period. Choosing to retain the old economically based periodization even as she questions its applicability in determining women=s out-migration, Beattie focuses on two distinct generations of women. Considering the 1880 migrants as the >vanguard,= she has traced their collective and sometimes individual stories through newspapers, family papers, family memories, and routinely generated statistical sources, weaving these together with secondary sources into a seamless narrative. In tracing the second generation of migrants B the women who left their Maritime homes in search of >Eldorado= in the early years of the twentieth century B Beattie found her own >Eldorado= in the >outpouring of stories, letters, memoirs, diaries, photographs, and personal interviews= she received from >sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and some of the women migrants themselves= in response to strategically placed newspaper inquiries. In combination with statistical and newspaper sources, Beattie uses these to develop a richly textured analysis of this second generation. The generational divide emerges clearly, supported by both the statistics humanities 441 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 and the oral testimony. Driven by family >obligation,= the first generation, largely farm girls, travelled an often lonely road to Boston, where the majority became domestic servants, working hard, spending little, and sending a significant proportion of their earnings home to their parents. Drawn by individual >opportunity,= the second generation, also largely farm girls, followed in the footsteps of that earlier vanguard of mothers, aunts, and cousins, pursuing freedom and self-interest, rejecting domestic service in favour of a broader range of choices. This is a compelling argument, although, interestingly enough, while the proportion of migrants working as domestic servants declined significantly between 1880 (65 per cent) and 1910 (15 per cent), the actual numbers changed very little, falling from 2428 in 1880 to 2286 in 1910. As good books usually do, this one stimulates the reader to rethink commonly held assumptions. Is it possible that, by using the periodization which she calls into question in the introduction, Beattie actually creates an inherent bias? While it is true that large scale out-migration did begin in the 1870s and 1880s, diaries and correspondence collections dating from an earlier period provide suggestive evidence that the movement of young Maritimers back and forth across the line may have been a different phenomenon , one that traced its roots back to the Loyalist migration. Maritimers had friends and family on both sides of the line. The ready accessibility of Boston in the days of the sailing...

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