The Gender of Breadwinners : : Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 / / Joy Parr.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Parr, Joy,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (314 p.)

This is a story of two Ontario towns, Hanover and Paris, that grew in many parallel ways. They were about the same size, and both were primarily one-industry towns. But Hanover was a furniture-manufacturing centre; most of its workers were men, drawn from a community of ethnic German artisans and agriculturalists. In Paris the biggest employer was the textile industry; most of its wage earners were women, assisted in emigration from England by their Canadian employer.Joy Parr considers the impacy of these fundamental differences from a feminist perspective in her study of the towns' industrial, domestic, and community life. She combines interviews of women and men of the towns with analyses of a wide range of documents: records of the firms from which their families worked, newspapers, tax records, paintings, photographs, and government documents.Two surprising and contrasting narratives emerge. The effects of gender identities upon both women's and men's workplace experience and of economic roles upon familial relationships are starkly apparent.Extending through seventy crucial years, these closely textured case studies challenge conventional views about the distinctiveness of gender and class roles. They reconfigure the social and economic change accompanying the rise of industry. They insistently transcend the reflexive dichtomies drawn between womena dn men, public and privae, wage and non-wage work. They investigate industrial structure, technological change, domesticity, militance, and perceptions of personal power and worth, simultaneously as products of gender and class identities, recast through community sensibilities.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART ONE -- Chapter One. Gender, culture, and labour recruitment -- Chapter Two. The politics of protection -- Chapter Three. When is knitting women's work? -- Chapter Four. Domesticity and mill families -- Chapter Five. Womanly militance, neighbourly wrath -- PART TWO -- Chapter Six. As Christ the carpenter -- Chapter Seven. Manliness, craftsmanship, and scientific management -- Chapter Eight. For men and girls: the politics and experience of gendered wage work -- Chapter Nine. Single fellows and family men -- Chapter Ten. Union men -- Conclusion -- Note on method -- Notes -- Picture credits -- Select bibliography -- Index