Negotiating Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality, Canadian History to
1967, and Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Osc

Unlike in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the drab coat of
history consisted primarily of politics and war, history’s
contemporary dress assumes many colours and is cut according to the
decided fashions of our own time. Historians in the developed world are
interested in a vast array of topics that are often subsumed under the
categories of social and cultural history, but the idea of identities
has recently emerged as a means to provide greater coherence to
historical topics that might otherwise appear as disparate.

The 11 essays organized into four sections in this new scholarly
collection about Montreal’s social history ostensibly take negotiating
identities during the 19th- and early 20th centuries as their organizing
theme, but the idea is so thin at points as to be invisible. The first
section of the book deals with homes and homelessness, and has chapters
on gender and itineracy, homeless sailors, and a shelter for unemployed
men, but strangely, no entries on those homes in which the majority of
people were raised and where their formative identities developed. The
first year of widowhood and deaths within the prominent McCord family
constitute two entries in the second section, and they are followed by
three chapters on elite women’s education, Jewish women’s
anti-delinquency work, and forming and contesting identities among
university students. The last section ostensibly concerns selling and
consumption, but it focuses on shopkeeping families and women smokers in
the city.

This volume is primarily a collection of articles on Montreal social
history that has been squeezed into the costume of identity studies to
appeal to contemporary scholarly tastes. The editors try hard but
ultimately fail to signify the importance of negotiating identities.
They tell us that the book is not only about private and public but also
about those intermediate spaces where identities of gender, class,
religion, age, and nation were negotiated. After all the buzzwords are
put aside, this book represents a series of valuable academic
contributions to our understanding of aspects of Montreal’s social
development.