Making Do: Women, Family and Home in Montreal During the Great Depression

Dominique Marshall is an associate professor of history at Carleton
University in Ottawa.

Thirty interviews with women who were young brides during the Great
Depression and dwelled in a workers’ ward of Montreal constitute the
raw material of Making Do. This collective biography presents the past
at the scale and at the rhythm of individuals, an approach that
facilitates increased understanding of the interconnections between
phenomena better known in their general expressions. Attention to
personal destinies is also an antidote to any static understanding of
professional, local, or domestic structures, since in one decade the
same husbands change too often to be placed definitely in a precise
category. This perspective enables diachronic questions for which oral
history has few equivalents; the transmission of domestic knowledge, for
instance, was often interrupted, as many women left their parents’
home before having received a proper introduction to cooking or sewing,
only to learn later—either from a mother-in-law or a neighbor, or
independently. Baillargeon also conveys original findings about the
influence of large transformations on single actors; housewives who
adopted the most systematic schedules in their domestic chores were
those who had already worked in a factory.

The author’s most important discovery is that for the poorest women,
who had just entered the most demanding phase of the family life cycle,
the Depression did not have a dramatic impact.

Workers’ dwellings appear as working spaces, and as meeting places
between public and private demands. Baillargeon introduces housewives
well-engaged in relations with public institutions of welfare. More
generally, she underlines the oppressive nature of the domestic ideology
coming from higher classes at the same time as she uncovers many
instances of control conducted from below, by neighbors and members of
the same family. Similarly, her attention to the nature of the relation
between husbands and wives reveals instances of the complexity of their
respective status that go beyond her own thesis of husbands’
domination.

The translation of this book, which was well received when it was
published in French in 1991, will be welcomed by anglophone readers
interested not only in the history of working-class women but also in
the history of the popular and political cultures of 20th-century
Canada.