Families in Transition: Industry and Population in Nineteenth-Century Saint-Hyacinthe

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

Families in Transition offers an analysis of the local dimension of two
general processes—the transition to industrial capitalism, and the
demographic transition—on the social life of the Quebec city of
Saint-Hyacinthe. Revealing aspects of these processes visible only
through the details of everyday life, the book follows a classic pattern
of socioeconomic monographs, from information about the geographical and
economic settings, to a study of aspects of family life following the
steps of the life cycle. The work is based on the cases of 900 couples
from different classes reconstituted according to the methods of
historical demography. Censuses, parish registers, religious archives,
and directories have been used to build a wide database.

This patient work generally “provides further support to what [are]
now …well established thesis” among social and economic historians.
However, on the question of fertility decline, the author’s
conclusions offer an original contribution to the historiography of the
demographic transition. In a unique study of the city’s reproductive
patterns, he found that bourgeois women as well as working-class couples
controlled their fertility (and more so among the more permanently
employed), while agricultural families do not seem to have limited their
offspring.

Gossage is mainly concerned with “the fundamental role of material
factors”; he insists on their influence on the emergence of a “new,
socially differentiated pattern of marriage” and on how class colored
the residential patterns of kinship solidarity. (The fact that some
phenomena, such as the calendar of marriages, remained untouched showed
the continuous influence of priests.) If the main meaning of industrial
capitalism for families was its creation of their dependency on a wage
economy, the impact was also felt in other ways: the urban environment,
for instance, was responsible for a remarkably high rate of infant
mortality.

Gossage is attentive to the specificity of the place—a regional
centre for trade, a centre for railway transportation, and an industrial
centre (with an emphasis on the production of leather and wool goods)
whose manpower was multiplied by 12 over the three decades in question.
The surroundings are described evocatively, with an array of maps,
pictures, and written accounts of the physical appearance of stalls,
roads, and stores.

This book will naturally interest students of the region, but it may
also serve as a model for its methodological rigor, the large scope of
the investigation, the narrative strategy, and the use of family files
for illustrations and discussions at the level of personal decisions.