Magda Fahrni

Counting the Costs of Living: Gender, Citizenship, and a Politics of Prices in 1940s Montreal

A concern with prices and a politics centred on purchasing figured prominently in Canada’s urban centres in the 1940s. This article explores the ways in which Montreal women drew on a sense of economic citizenship cultivated over the war years to organize around consumer issues in the immediate postwar period. The federal government had encouraged a wartime consumer consciousness as part of its efforts on the home front. Rationing, price controls, recycling, and the black market increased popular awareness of the availability and distribution of goods. After the war, continued government controls, consumers’ groups, and labour newspapers encouraged both middle- and working-class families to maintain their interest in prices, standards, and consumer choice. Montrealers, grown accustomed to the equity of rationing and concerned about the rising cost of living, demanded the ability to purchase household necessities at affordable prices as one of the rights of economic citizenship. This politics of prices was gendered. In cities across the country, women used their intimate knowledge of their household finances to demand better social welfare measures and a reasonable cost of living in the context of the Second World War and postwar reconstruction. This article explores the grocer and butcher boycotts of 1947–48, and the battle to secure the legalization of margarine as a cheaper substitute for butter, as two examples of a politics of prices in 1940s Montreal. These campaigns illustrate the ways in which gender configured the public and the political in these years; indeed, they throw into question the utility of distinctions between the private and the public.