The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870–1940 by Kenneth Michael Sylvester (review)

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 ship meant that the migrants of the 1870s were scarcely in the vanguard. They, too, were following in the footsteps of women who had gone before. Such considerations do not detract from the significance of this fine study. Obligation and Opportunity is a model of its kind, which, by its very clarity of analysis and presentation, invites replication. Beattie=s careful analysis, which integrates primary and secondary sources, draws on oral history and census statistics, superimposing a qualitatively derived human face on an essentially quantitative analysis. Her cogently developed challenge to a >male-centred explanation= of out-migration has implications for the history of migration, for the history of women=s work, for the history of women=s changing roles in the family, and for the history of the nature of women=s experience in borderlands regions. And it is a >good read=! (GAIL G. CAMPBELL) Kenneth Michael Sylvester. The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870B1940 University of Toronto Press. xii, 280. $24.95 With the publication of The Limits of Rural Capitalism, prairie history has become considerably more interesting and much more challenging. Kenneth Michael Sylvester has taken to heart the insights of a generation of 442 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 rural historians who have studied frontiers of settlement from western Massachusetts, to Quebec, to nineteenth-century Ontario, and sought to locate prairie agriculture in the broader process of the development of rural capitalism. Rather than assume the existence of markets and farmers= essential commercial orientation, he examines the slow, and incomplete, integration of rural folk into the web of capitalist social relations. The stage is the rural municipality of Montcalm, in the Red River valley near the United States border. The players are largely Québécois families who made their way to Manitoba by way of New England textile towns. As such, they had experienced both the transformations of the Quebec countryside that had frustrated their familial goals, and intense wage labour in one of the industrial heartlands of the era. In Manitoba they hoped to find a new world where, as Sylvester cogently argues, they would be free from the constraints that land hunger had placed on old inheritance patterns and that the wage relationship had put on their independence, kinship, culture, and (one could add) dignity. Family-based agriculture, of course, persisted, but with increasing exposure to the vagaries of the marketplace. The world of larger farms, increased wheat exports, mortgage borrowing, and monied exchange promised to preserve family agriculture, but at the same time undermined it. The problems of family succession had...