Pigs, Cows, Boarders, and …: Brothels, Taverns, and the Household Economy in Nineteenth-Century Montreal

Introduction

It is a privilege to honour Bettina Bradbury as she is about to retire from York University to pursue other interests and new projects. Bettina has had a significant impact on Québec and Canadian history, making connections between work, women, the household, and the economy where none at first glance had seemed apparent.¹ She is well known for her meticulous study of the household economy during industrialization, integrating the publications of international scholars from the United States, Europe, and Oceania, and arguing that the magnitude of economic change was writ large on women’s work, family roles, and subsistence strategies. Consulting a wide range of historical sources such as parish records, census returns, notarial documents, Royal Commission reports, government records, institutional documents, and historical maps, Bettina treats the household and its members with compassion and details its inner workings to provide insights into and meanings of nineteenth-century working-class experiences. In her celebrated 1984 article, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival among Montreal Families, 1861–91,” Bettina explores how people lived partially by using diverse local resources to keep pigs and cows, take in boarders, grow gardens, and so much more.² By locating crucial links between the family, the household economy, workplace struggles, and industrialization, she demonstrates a range of strategies that the working class implemented in confronting and resisting capitalist society.

In her 1993 award-winning monograph, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal,³ Bettina establishes that women’s non-waged and informal work was vital to the household economy, turning wages into subsistence. Their revenue-generating and revenue-saving activities were crucial to the integrity, standard of living, and overall comfort of those who inhabited the household. In doing so, Bettina makes women’s work visible, demonstrates its diversity and complexity, and reveals that the realities of daily life were at odds with prevailing discourses about what labouring women were suppose to be doing. Historians, she counsels, must expand their gaze beyond the workplace or factory floor to women’s unpaid labour, workers’ households, and their families.

Her second monograph, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal,⁴ has all of the hallmarks of Working Families and so much more. It integrates many of the more recent developments in the concept of the household economy by historians such as Ellen Ross, Catherine Hall, and Leonore Davidoff interested in culture, identity, representation, and religion. Bettina depicts a more complete sense of widowhood in her employment of biography illustrating intricate details of women’s lives and situating them transnationally.⁵ Again, we see her extensive and effective use of sources as she traces the lives of wives in their journeys from marriage to widowhood. Bettina explores widowhood not only from discursive and legal frames, but also from the perspective of women’s lived experiences. Thus the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes apparent.

Bettina’s concept of the household economy has informed some of my own work on sex commerce in early nineteenth-century Montreal, specifically residential prostitution. I plan to apply this concept to a new project on women and taverns. Perhaps the article title so frequently associated with Bettina ought to be expanded to include “Pigs, Cows, Boarders, Sex, and Drink.”

The “Home-Brothel”

Let me begin with sex. Historians have usually constructed prostitution within a context of women isolated from their families, friends, and communities. Consequently, histories of the family and of sex commerce have often given the impression that they are irreconcilable. Bettina brings the two literatures together in her monograph, Working Families; she argues that widows incorporated an array of remunerative activities into their households that for some included prostitution in order to carry out their family responsibilities while earning much needed cash.⁶ In my forthcoming book, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal,⁷ I have applied Bettina’s concept of the household economy to determine how and under what circumstances women integrated prostitution into their homes.

Like Bettina...