Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction (review)

Magda Fahrni has provided a most welcome addition to the literature on post–Second World War Canada. Fahrni's book, focusing on Montreal in the 1940s, makes a distinctive contribution through its emphasis on the activities of households. Fahrni argues that postwar reconstruction was not simply a policy imposed from the top by the federal government, but one also constructed 'down on the ground,' where households played a central role. As the title 'household politics' indicates, Fahrni contends that not only were visions of family critical to postwar reconstruction, but so too were the activities and politics both within and with respect to households. 'Household politics' from this perspective involved 'both the renegotiation of roles within the household ... and more particularly, the placing of household issues in the public sphere and on the formal political agenda.'

Fahrni first examines social welfare provisions, documenting, for example, how the new federal benefits (including veterans' benefits and family allowances) affected the lives of individuals and families. One of Fahrni's central contentions, however, is that private agencies, voluntary associations, and religious organizations continued to play an important role, providing supplementary aid, and actively working to implement their own vision of reconstruction. A chapter on 'sustaining soldiers, veterans and their families' examines relationships between soldiers and their families, including efforts to reconstruct the family unit itself in the postwar period. While the family was viewed as an 'agent of postwar healing,' achieving the desired domestic harmony and social stability required considerable intervention on the part of both the state and institutions of civil society. This theme is further elaborated on in a chapter focusing on a group of 105 Catholic, working-class couples who participated in a mass marriage in Montreal's Delorimier Stadium in 1939 and whose lives were followed, over a fifteen-year period, by the Ligue ouvrière catholique. This chapter again demonstrates attempts to shape postwar family life; this time focusing on one particular Catholic association as it asserted its own version of postwar reconstruction, one that insisted upon the importance of family and religion, and upon the specific experiences of French-Canadian families. The final two chapters examine the demands of married women and the claims of fathers as they attempted to improve the conditions under which their families lived. The former took the form of consumer activism. In the latter case, Fahrni focuses on the Squatters' Movement of 1946–47 and the teachers' strike of 1949 to illustrate fathers' attempts to improve both housing and their children's education.

Through these chapters Fahrni begins to peel back the outer layer to see the complex inner workings, uncertainties, tensions, and drama that constituted the postwar era. The book challenges conventional views in a number of respects. While much of the literature emphasizes a postwar 'consensus,' and postwar social welfare as primarily a matter of state intervention, the picture Fahrni presents is one of a complex process involving not only the sometimes conflicting approaches of the federal, provincial, and local governments, but also private welfare providers, voluntary associations, church groups, and households. This was a period not so much of relative prosperity and 'high consumption' as of overcrowded housing and considerable deprivation. Further, the household relations Fahrni describes are themselves multifaceted and complex, involving infidelities and marital tensions, postwar hopes, marriages, and efforts to construct better lives. Institutions such as the family come across not as particularly 'natural,' but as feasible only with considerable intervention on the part of various bodies. While Fahrni emphasizes a contested process of reconstruction, what also comes through is a sense of active creation in which various forces, institutions, political, social, and familial groups participated and played their part. Viewed from the perspective of the current era of market forces and individual self-interest as driving forces, the notion of active reconstruction itself, and the extent to which a range of individuals, groups, and organizations actively participated in it – even if in conflicting ways – is striking. Overall Fahrni has provided a much more...