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COPYRIGHT 2006 Becker Associates
Abstract
As newcomers to Montreal, young single, working women were often subject to low salaries, poor housing options, and unknown dangers--both real and imagined--of a big city. This article considers the Julia Drummond Residence as a place of intersection for two groups of women: the middle-class volunteers who ran the residence and the young, single working women who lived there. While meeting a need in society by providing shelter and food for women earning small salaries, the women running the residence were just as concerned with shaping the femininity and moral fibre of the residents. The practices and ideology of these women, who used the language of reform and renewal, resembled closely those of social reformers of the previous generation, echoing judgment of femininity based on understandings of race, class, religion, and sexuality. This article explores what it was like to live at the residence, how some women found the residence a "home away from home" while others were less comfortable in the unfamiliar and seemingly cold middle-class institution. Positioning themselves as independent citizens of Montreal, at a time when affordable housing became increasingly available, many young, single women asserted their freedom and independence in the years following the Second World War by challenging the regulations imposed on them, and, in so doing, rejected the structured femininity offered to them by institutions such as the Julia Drummond Residence.
Resume
Les jeunes femmes celibataires, recemment arrivees a Montreal, etaient frequemment assujetties a de mauvais salaires, a des conditions de logement deplorables et a une foule de dangers inconnus, reels et imagine, de la grande ville. Cet article examine la residence Julia Drummond comme lieu d'echanges entre deux groupes de femmes--les benevoles de classe moyenne qui assurent le fonctionne-ment de la residence, et les jeunes femmes celibataires qui y vivent. Bien que repondant a un besoin societal en offrant logis et nourriture a des femmes gagnant de petits salaires, les gerantes de la residence s'interessent tout autant a faconner la feminite et la moralite des residentes. Ancres dans un langage de reforme et de renouveau, les pratiques et l'ideologie de ces femmes ressemblent de pres a celles des reformateurs sociaux de la generation anterieure, faisant appel a une comprehension de la feminite basee sur leur vision de la race, de la classe sociale, de la religion et de la sexualite. Cet article relate la vie a la residence et la facon dont certaines femmes y trouvent un second chez-soi, tandis que d'autres se sentent moins a l'aise a l'interieur des murs d'une institution inconnue et de classe moyenne. Se positionnant comme citoyennes independantes de Montreal, et grace a la disponibilite de logements aborda-bles, plusieurs jeunes femmes celibataires affirment leur liberte et leur independance durant les annees qui suivent la deuxieme guerre mondiale en defiant les regles qui leur sont imposees et, ce faisant, rejettent la feminite structuree qui leur est offerte par des institutions tels la residence Julia Drummond.
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Before making out your application for residence in the Julia Drummond Residence we should like you to appreciate that this house came into being for the purpose of providing a home for girls coming to the city to work for the first time. (1)
In May 1971, after nearly fifty years of service, the Julia Drummond Residence in Montreal closed its doors. This is the story of the residence, from its origin as a vision of Anglican social reformers, through the middle years of its success, to the final years of its struggles and eventual closing. As newcomers to Montreal, young, single, working women were often subject to low salaries, poor housing options, and unknown dangers, both real and imagined, of a big city. This article considers the Julia Drummond Residence as a place of intersection for two groups of women--the middle-class volunteers who ran the residence and the young working women who lived there. While the residence met a need in society by providing shelter and food for women earning small salaries, it also served to regulate and promote a type of femininity as defined by middle-class reformers of English-speaking Montreal. This paper examines how the two groups interacted in the context of the residence and how class, gender, ethnicity, and religion shaped their experiences. The women who managed the residence were as concerned with moulding the residents into "proper women" as they were in giving the young women a place to live. Using rules, staff members, and space, the residence association regulated the activities and productivity of the residents, thus guiding them towards its vision of successful womanhood. This article also describes the transformations and modifications that took place in the postwar years, highlighting the effect that changing ideas of gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity had on the women living at and running the residence.
The papers of the Julia Drummond Residence are housed at the Archives of the Anglican Church, Diocese of Montreal. The fond is not exhaustive. What remains, including meeting minutes, promotional materials, photographs, and some correspondence, is enough to get a glimpse of life at the JDR, but there are many gaps. Some can be filled by outside sources such as newspapers, private papers, and the archives of similar organizations. A growing body of secondary literature complements this effort as well. Women's entrance into the paid work force was first explored by labour historians concerned with women as workers. Historians such as Joan Sangster, Linda Kealey, and Bettina Bradbury examined the impact of women on the workplace, with particular attention to their role in unionization and the family economy. Kathy Peiss's watershed work Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York turned our attention to the experiences of single women outside of work through an examination of their leisure activities, arguing that recreation was both a liberating and Americanizing experience. Joanne Meyerowitz and Carolyn Strange further extended this field, revealing the city as a dangerous but exciting place for young, unattached women. In La norme et les deviantes: des femmes au Quebec pendant l'entre-deux-guerres, Andree Levesque surveyed the ways women in Quebec challenged the roles assigned to them by the middle and upper classes. Those who shaped la norme are brought to light in Mariana Valverde's foundational The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1880-1920, which further revealed the ideologies and methodologies of the social reform movement through an examination of the discourse of social reformers. This article builds on these foundational studies of the social reform movement and considers how the work of reformers continued beyond the traditional periodization offered by historians of social reform. (2)
Housing the Single Woman in Montreal during the 1920s
During and after the First World War, single women arriving in Montreal to work were faced with the enormous challenge of finding suitable housing. As the largest city in Canada, Montreal had its areas of wealth, beauty, and order, but the presence of slums could hardly be denied. While the middle class could reside in safe and sanitary neighbourhoods, much of the working class was confined to unsafe and unsanitary living conditions. Inadequate living conditions, poor health, and unemployment plagued Montreal's working class partially as a result of the extreme population growth at the turn of the century. The city had a population of approximately 267,730 in 1901. (3) By 1921 the population was 618,000, and by 1929 the population was reported at one million. (4) The housing situation could not keep pace with the speed of in-migration, causing a decline in living conditions, especially noticeable among the working class. As the middle- and upper-class families moved "up the hill," many single-family dwellings were remodelled as rental spaces, making rooms smaller, darker, and more crowded. Low family incomes, absentee landlords, the shortage of materials during the First World War, and the city's failure to adapt effectively further contributed to the slum-like conditions prevalent in working-class neighbourhoods. (5)
The migration of working women to urban centres at the outbreak of the Great War further transformed the city's demographics. By 1916, extreme shortages in the workforce were evident, and as a result many women and children were employed in Montreal. By the end of the war, a new type of woman was arriving in the city known as the "business girl." According to the 1921 census, 10 per cent of Montreal's population was young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. (6) Nearly half of this group was listed in the category of wage earner. (7) As Kate Boyer has noted in her study of clerical work in early twentieth-century Montreal, "office work was the fasted growing sector of employment for women, accounting for the third largest percentage of women in paid employment by 1921, after factory work and domestic service." (8)
Young women who were employed in Montreal, as elsewhere in Canada, were hard pressed to make a living wage. Although Terry Copp, in his Anatomy of Poverty: The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal, 1897-1929, struggled to discover accurate statistics regarding wages during the 1920s, he produced some worthwhile findings. (9) His estimation, for a woman of twenty years or more, was that she made $682.00 per annum prior to the economic downturn of 1929, working out to $13.11 per week, while a man of the same age made $1321.00 per year, or $25.40 per week. Women under twenty years of age were reported to be earning $423.00 per year during the same time, working out to $8.13 per week, versus $497.00 per year or $9.55 per week earned by men under the age of twenty. (10) In 1928, the Women's Minimum Wage Commission estimated that a single woman needed between $10.85 and $19.81 a week in order to survive in Montreal, including an allowance of $7.00 per week for rent, $11.50 per month for clothing, $11.00 per month for personal items, and daily streetcar fare. (11) A single, working woman in Montreal in the 1920s, therefore, was faced not only with the challenge of earning enough money to get by, she was also confronted with a desperate housing situation.
As single women became more visible in the city as a result of the increase of "business" jobs for women between 1900 and 1930, social reformers became concerned about the respectability and morality of these women. The "business girl" was considered to be a new and different type of working woman. Their positions were deemed to be...
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