Eric W. Sager

The Canadian Families Project and the 1901 Census

he Canadian Families Project (CFP) is a five-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and T Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and by five participating universities. The research team includes fourteen scholars, three of whom are postdoctoral fellows, as well as several graduate students and two computer programmers.’ Disciplines represented include anthropology, demography, geography, history, and sociology. These simple facts are essential for those who wish to know something about the CFP’s national sample of the 1901 census of Canada. In its conception and its content, the database bears the imprint of its Canadian provenance in the 1990s. When the project was conceived in the early 1990s, SSHRCC did not fund the creation of databases or research tools; it did (and still does) fund major collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects under its Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI) program. Our national sample of the 1901 census was created, therefore, as part of an interdisciplinary research project on family in Canada. To this extent our national sample of the 1901 cencus differs in its origins from most public use microdata samples (PUMS) created from historical censuses in the United States, and from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) created by the Minnesota Historical Census Project (Ruggles and Menard 1995; Sobek and Ruggles 1999). The articles in this issue are, therefore, explorations by scholars from several disciplines, each of whom has a specific research agenda connected to the study of family in Canada. Canada has seen a number of large projects in which historians have worked with scholars from other disciplines. In the field of family history, however, major collaborative projects have not appeared outside the Province of Quebec, where there is a long tradition of team research in the study of population and family.* The CFP is the first collaborative research project that focuses on the history of families in Canada as a whole. We propose to revisit family not as a singular or unchanging social unit but as a dynamic set of associations varying with time, region, class, gender, and other historical conditions of Canadian experience. We hope to set our findings in the context of the wider international literature, and it follows that we are interested in the relationship between family and the sweeping changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. Given our sensitivity to the plurality of family and household, and given the heterogeneity of the Canadian cultural mosaic, it is unlikely that we shall find a specifically Canadian type of family or household at any time in our past. For historians as much as for the makers of constitutions, the Canadian geopolitical entity remains a problematic and fragile analytical unit. We wish nevertheless to move beyond the microhistorical and regional focus of Canadian family history, to seek commonalities and patterns of family reproduction that may transcend the boundaries of both region and nation-state. In Canada, however, we can never escape the preoccupation with local and regional contexts, and the sensitivity of Canadian scholarship to place and region may be one of its conspicuous strengths. The results may allow us, and those who follow us, to reconnect the local and the regional to new transnational models in ways such as those suggested by GCrard Bouchard (1994, 1996). A key obstacle to creative synthesis and to comparative analysis is the absence of source materials capable of supporting transregional conclusions. Before the CFP created its sample of the 1901 census, there existed only one machine-readable national sample of a historic census (the census of 187 1, when Canada had only four provinces). The nominal information from decennial censuses since 191 1 is closed (although an intense lobbying effort intended to reconcile privacy concerns with controlled access to these censuses is under way). The public use samples created from national censuses by the federal statistical agency, Statistics Canada, commence only in 1961. The CFP’s sample of the 1901 census is intended to initiate the task of filling an

National Data on Working-Class Earnings: The 1901 Census of Canada

istorians of Canada now possess a unique source for the study of working-class earnings in the periH od of industrialization. Beginning in 1901, the census of Canada asked all employees to state their earnings from their occupation or trade, as well as earnings from any secondary occupation (Baskerville and Sager 1995). The national sample of the 1901 census created by the Canadian Families Project (CFP) contains the most comprehensive data on annual earnings of working people in Canada before the middle of the twentieth century.’ Such data at the national level are extremely rare for any country in this time period. Census takers in the United States did not ask people to report wage and salary income until 1940 (Sobek 199 1, 1995). The first complete census of incomes of any population may have been the Australian War Census of 1915 (Soltow 1972; Thomas 1991). Certainly the Canadian Census Office in the Department of Agriculture believed that their data were unique: when they published the earnings and occupation data in the Census and Statistics Bulletin (hereinafter the Bulletin) in 1907 they claimed that “the figures published in the tables show for the first time in any country what the facts are for every kind of occupation as regards the number and sex of the employed, their working time and their earnings, and employers and employees may now make comparative studies along many lines” (Canada 1907, xxiv).* Even making allowances for underenumeration, particularly of working women, the Canadian census affords a rare opportunity to h d y annual earnings, occupations, and labor markets at the beginning of the twentieth century. The data have enormous potential but must be used cautiously, with a full understanding of their limitations. One clear limitation is that the data relate to earnings from wages and salaries, not incomes. For most employees, earnings may be synonymous with income, but we cannot always assume this to be the case. In addition to wage earnings, income includes money or its equivalent from other sources such as property, investments, or pensions. Certain employees, such as professional people, may have had such nonwaged income, but the census does not tell us. It is very likely that rental and investment income was positively correlated with annual earnings. It follows that earnings distributions in 1901 and income distributions in late twentiethcentury Canada are not strictly comparable, and the former will certainly understate the real incomes disparities. It need hardly be added that wealth distribution, a subject widely studied in Canada through property assessment and probate data, was independent of the earnings distribution. The most critical limitation is that earnings information was gathered consistently for employees only. The headings on the Schedule 1 enumeration form indicate the focus that was intended.

Introduction: The Canadian Families Project

The articles in this issue are the work of members of the Canadian Families Project (CFP), a collaborative project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Although six articles cannot reflect the full range of the research being carried out by a team of fourteen scholars, they reveal something of the scope and diversity of our multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach to the history of families and households in Canada. We began in 1996 with a shared belief that the historical study of family in Canada required new empirical foundations, a more concentrated application of methods already applied by historians in other countries, and a team effort. We began with a shared interest in seeing what would happen when different disciplines—history, geography, sociology, anthropology—were brought to bear upon shared sources, a single geopolitical space, and the same time period (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). We shared an interest in breaking down barriers between cultural historians who used textual sources, social scientists who applied quantitative methods to routinely generated information, and historical geographers who mapped the spatial contours of family and household. We shared a belief that the impressive Canadian work on family and household could be better connected to the international scholarly literature in the field. Many of us shared an interest in informing public debates on family at a time when politicians and pundits often appeal to the past, invoking family forms and family values alleged to be traditional. Much of the project’s intellectual energy has focused on a shared database: we began by creating a national sample of individuals and households from the census enumeration of 1901. A national sample would afford a new perspective on regional patterns within Canada and allow comparisons with wider North American patterns. Before the CFP created its sample of the 1901 census, there existed only one machine-readable national sample of a historic census (the census of 1871, when Canada had only four provinces). The nominal information from decennial censuses of 1911 and since is closed, although an intense lobbying effort intended to reconcile pri-

Unemployment, living standards, and the working-class family in urban Canada in 1901

This article addresses a problem faced by many historians of living standards: what was the effect of unemployment on the real incomes of working-class families during industrialization? The 1901 Census of Canada offers a rare opportunity to answer this question, and to measure both unemployment and living standards while taking into account the contributions of all family wage-earners. The conclusion is that average weekly or monthly wages were more important than work duration in determining the living standards of poor families.

The Maritime History Group and the History of Seafaring Labour

THE ARCHIVE OF THE Maritime History Group contains materials indispensable to the study of Newfoundland, the North Atlantic fisheries, and the merchant shipping of the British Empire. The archive is also a rich treasure for labour historians. British merchant shipping legislation, reflecting the concern of the British state to maintain a healthy merchant marine, required unusually thorough documentary accounts of the industry and its labour force. After 1867 the Dominion of Canada continued to apply most of this legislation. For no other industry in British or Canadian history do we possess such complete information on the labour force and the workplace during the transition from pre-industrial craft to large-scale capitalist production. Most of the records for this industry are contained, either in the original or on microfilm, in the archive which Keith Matthews and his colleagues assembled at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Research note: The Canadian families project

The note describes the structure of the Canadian Families Project, its goals, the Canadian census sources the Project is incorporating into its data base, and the goals of the Project in light of previous work on the history of the family in Canada and internationally. The Project is collaborative, but it is also intended to be relational, in the sense that each subtheme researchers are exploring—space, class, gender, discourse, and others — feeds back into all others.

Women and Work in Hamilton, Ontario: A Case Study and a Research Challenge

This article tests two hypotheses about the labour force participation of women in Hamilton in 1911: first, that single women took paid jobs to compensate for lack of jobs or low earnings among male kin; second, that the need for labour in their households discouraged single women from entering the labour force. These hypotheses are tested by using the entire population of Hamilton, as recorded in the 1911 census. Neither hypothesis receives strong confirmation. The tentative conclusion is that non-material motives were likely to be highly significant in the movement of women into paid labour in this period. This article uses only a small fraction of the sources available on the subject of women and work in Canada, and new empirical riches offer unprecedented opportunities for historians interested in women and work.

Family history in canada: An Introduction

Contemporary debates about “family crisis” has led to a resurgence of interest in family history in Canada. The field builds on the strong tradition of demographic history in Quebec, and on historical sociology, historical geography, ethnohistory, and recent developments in cultural history. Recent projects in both Quebec and English Canada have accepted the challenge of international comparative analysis.

Reviews of Eric W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914

Eric Sagers Seafaring Labour is an extremely important analysis of merchant seamen aboard the fleets of Atlantic Canada during the age of sail. The purpose of my comments, however, is not to present a comprehensive review of the books strengths and weaknesses but rather to focus on one specific aspect of the study. I want to suggest some ways in which Sagers analysis of shipmasters (not the centrepiece of his book by any means, but a group about whom he provides useful insights) can be recast to reflect a somewhat different interpretation of command at sea. My purpose here is to argue that we cannot treat captains as though they were frozen in time and had no connection with either their pre-command careers or the full range of nineteenth century seafaring experiences. I recognize of course that Sager is interested only in masters who fit his hypothesis: paternal, fraternal coastal or small vessel captains contrasted with managerial, aloof deep-sea, large-vessel masters. This distinction seems especially artificial when we realize that a master often moved back and forth from one size or type of vessel to another, and that his behaviour could be just as ruthless on the more intimate vessels as on the larger impersonal ones. Moreover, the professional, certificated master not only moved from one size of vessel to another, combining experience in Sagers floating workshop, proto-factory and even steam-powered factory, but also frequently interspersed voyages as master with those as mate. Sagers approach also involves the omission of telling evidence.

Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914

Sager argues that sailors were not misfits or outcasts but were divorced from society only by virtue of their occupation. The wooden ships were small communities at sea, fragments of normal society where workers lived, struggled, and often died. With the coming of the age of steam, the sailor became part of a new division of labour and a new social hierarchy at sea. Sager shows that the sailor was as integral to the transition to industrial capitalism as any land worker.