Obligation and Opportunity: Single Maritime Women in Boston, 1879-1930

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

Out-migration from the Maritime provinces, which lost more than 500,000
people between 1870 and 1930, has emerged as a subject of lively
scholarly debate in the ongoing effort to understand regional
underdevelopment. Statistics reveal that women figured prominently in
the exodus, but this book is the first effort to focus on the reasons
why they left and the impact that their departure had on the Maritime
economy.

Beattie roots her analysis in the larger literature of women’s
history and migration studies. By teasing information from interviews,
diaries, letters, newspapers, and censuses, she shows that the
out-migration of single women was part of the rural to urban movement of
peoples throughout the Western world in this period, first as part of a
family strategy to secure much-needed cash in the new industrial economy
and later as an effort by daughters to exercise independence. Because
Boston, more than any Canadian city, served as the metropolis for the
Maritimes, it drew the largest number of the female migrants.

By exploring the experiences of domestics, clerks, nurses,
seamstresses, and prostitutes, Beattie builds a comprehensive profile of
her subjects. The many personal stories that are sprinkled throughout
the monograph breath life into what might otherwise have been a dry
statistical analysis of the ages, origins, occupations, and living
arrangements of the young Maritime women who chose to move to Boston.
Beattie concludes that the loss of these women probably did not, as some
scholars have suggested, undermine the Maritime economy, a finding that
points to the need to reevaluate the current scholarly wisdom on the
failure of the region to develop a metropolis that could compete with
the attraction of Boston for young women seeking employment. These and
other issues in the complicated subject of Maritime underdevelopment
will no doubt continue to be debated for a long time to come, but not
without reference to this exceptionally well-researched and splendidly
organized study.