Ann Duffy

Family Finances: Fragility, Class, and Gender

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE OF many Canadian families is clearly intertwined with the economy and its labor market. The on going impact even on family structures—postponed marriage, decreased family size, adult children in the home—is readily apparent. The pressures of income insecurity, youth unemployment, surging home and educational costs, to name a few, now frame many familial experiences. Here, drawing on our interviews with industrial workers in southern Ontario between 2008 and 2014, we underscore three features of this emergent social reality. First, increasing evidence documents that growing financial pressures are dramatically undermining the quality of many family lives. Second, families’ abilities to respond to economic pressures do not neatly correspond with traditional class analysis which focuses on a divide between more secure middle-class families and more vulnerable working-class families and would benefit from an analysis in terms of economic fragility. Third, the impact of these financial and emotional pressures on families has a significant gendered dimension.