Gossage uses a family-reconstitution method, drawing on local parish registers and manuscript-census schedules, to focus on marriage, household organization, and family size in this context of social and economic change. Family formation was profoundly affected as couples adjusted to the new urban, industrial setting. Gossage demonstrates that demographic behaviour was increasingly differentiated by social class, with distinct marriage and fertility patterns emerging among bourgeois and proletarian families. Bourgeois women who married in the 1860s, for example, were already limiting family size, a crucial shift that did not occur in working-class families until almost a generation later. Families in Transition demonstrates the extent to which stereotypes about family life in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution need to be revisited. Far from being passive, static, uniformly prolific, and constrained by religious and cultural perspectives, Saint-Hyacinthe families responded quickly to the changing realities of the day, reinventing marriage patterns and domestic arrangements to fit the new industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century.
In this sense they were truly families in transition.
- ISBN10 0773518479
- ISBN13 9780773518476
- Publish Date 1 September 1999 (first published 1 January 1999)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country CA
- Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 344
- Language English