“Due Attention Has Been Paid to All Rules”: Women, Tavern Licences, and Social Regulation in Montreal, 1840-1860

Taverns and inns were centres of neighbourhood life, places for travellers seeking meals, drink, and accommodation and commercial and domestic spaces where keepers and their families earned a living and that they called home. Women figured largely in public houses as patrons, servants, family members, and publicans in their own right. The article focuses on a sample of 90 female publicans who held tavern licences from 1840 to 1860, arguing that keeping these establishments afforded them distinct levels of economic independence and power. It considers broadly those characteristics that constituted ideal female keepers in mid-nineteenth-century Montreal and how they maintained a respectable status precisely at a moment when alcohol consumption and associated licensed and unlicensed commercial sites were coming increasing under scrutiny by temperance advocates, authorities of the criminal justice system, and elites. To retain their licences, female keepers had to negotiate the landmines of respectability by following licensing regulations, maintaining a reputable demeanour, and regulating the public house’s culture and clientele. Les tavernes et les auberges étaient des lieux où la vie de quartier battait son plein, des endroits où les voyageurs trouvaient à manger, à boire et à se loger, des aires commerciales et domestiques où les tenanciers et leur famille gagnaient leur vie et qu’ils considéraient comme leur chez eux. Les femmes étaient très présentes dans ces établissements, soit comme clientes, servantes, membres de la famille ou patronnes de plein droit. L’article porte sur un échantillon de 90 tenancières qui détenaient un permis de taverne de 1840 à 1860. Le fait qu’elles tenaient ces établissements leur procurait des niveaux d’indépendance et de pouvoir économiques appréciables, selon l’auteure. Celle-ci se penche en gros sur les caractéristiques qui en faisaient des tenancières idéales dans la Montréal du milieu du XIX e siècle et sur la façon dont elles préservaient leur respectabilité, précisément à un moment où la consommation d’alcool et les établissements commerciaux – avec ou sans permis – où elle avait lieu étaient de plus en plus surveillés de près par les apôtres de la tempérance, les autorités du système de justice criminelle et les élites. Pour conserver leur permis et préserver leur respectabilité, les tenancières devaient donc observer la réglementation sur les permis, conserver leur bonne réputation et régir la culture et la clientèle de l’établissement

Regulating Public Space in Early-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: Vagrancy Laws and Gender in a Colonial Context

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Montreal’s justices of the peace designed police regulations regarding vagrancy to include licensed begging as a form of social welfare for the respectable poor. Vagrant men and women deemed unworthy of state-sanctioned begging were apprehended and punished in the House of Correction or Common Gaol. City magistrates provided an opportunity for proper objects of charity to solicit alms while permitting some homeless vagrants, often women, to solicit shelter in prison. Women were economically dependent on male earnings, and single women were thus vulnerable to destitution. Gender was crucial to vagrancy laws, which acted as a form of moral regulation and had a concomitant impact on the lives of female vagrants. Men posed at least two threats: a moral one by their refusal to work and their perceived rejection of bourgeois notions of industry, sobriety, and discipline, and a physical threat exemplified by their potential for violence. In the wake of the Rebellions, harsh new laws thus reflected not only the British colonial views of dangerous Canadiens, but also the new bourgeois ideology that envisioned an orderly public space.À la fin du XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle, les juges de paix de Montréal ont formulé des règlements policiers sur le vagabondage afin de faire de la mendicité autorisée une forme d’assistance sociale pour le pauvre respectable. Les vagabonds, hommes et femmes, jugés indignes de pratiquer la mendicité sanctionnée par l’État, étaient appréhendés et punis dans la maison de correction ou la prison commune. Les magistrats de la ville permettaient aux mendiants en règle de quémander tout en permettant à certains vagabonds, souvent des femmes, de demander l’asile en prison. Les femmes dépendaient économiquement des hommes et les femmes seules étaient donc vulnérables au dénuement. Le sexe jouait un rôle crucial dans les lois sur le vagabondage, qui servaient de forme d’ordre moral et avaient un impact concomitant sur la vie des vagabondes. Les hommes faisaient planer au moins deux menaces : l’une, morale, à cause de leur refus de travailler et de leur rejet perçu des notions bourgeoises d’industrie, de sobriété et de discipline, et l’autre, physique, exemplifiée par leur violence potentielle. Dans le sillage des rébellions, les nouvelles lois, sévères, témoignaient donc non seulement du point de vue colonial qu’avaient les Britanniques des dangereux Canadiens, mais également de la nouvelle idéologie bourgeoise, disciple d’une place publique ordonnée

Architecture, Religion, and Tuberculosis in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec

This paper explores the architecture of the Mount Sinai Sanatorium in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts (Qc) to disentangle the role of religion in the treatment of tuberculosis. In particular, we analyze the design of Mount Sinai, the jewel in the crown of Jewish philanthropy in Montreal, in relation to that of the nearby Laurentian Sanatorium. While Mount Sinai offered free treatment to the poor in a stunning, Art Deco building of 1930, the Protestant hospital had by then served paying patients for more than two decades in a purposefully home-like, Tudor-revival setting. Using architectural historian Bernard Herman's concept of embedded landscapes, we show how the two hospitals differed in terms of their relationship to site, access, and, most importantly, to city, knowledge, and community. Architects Scopes & Feustmann, who designed the Laurentian hospital, operated an office at Saranac Lake, New York, America's premier destination for consumptives. The qualifications of Mount Sinai architects Spence & Goodman, however, derived from their experience with Jewish institutions in Montreal. Following Herman's approach to architecture through movement and context, how did notions of medical therapy and Judaism intersect in the plans of Mount Sinai?Cet article explore l’architecture du ‘Mount Sinai Sanatorium’ situé à Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts (Qc) dans le but d’éclaircir le rôle de la religion dans le traitement de la tuberculose. Plus particulièrement, nous offrons une analyse du design de cet édifice, le joyau de la philanthropie juive montréalaise, en relation avec le ‘Laurentian Sanatorium’ situé à proximité. Alors que le ‘Mount Sinai’ offre des traitements gratuits pour les pauvres dans un étonnant édifice Art déco des années 1930, l’hôpital protestant pourvoit dès 1908 des services à ses clients payants dans un décor de résurgence Tudor, conçu comme un second ‘chez-soi’. Empruntant à l’historien de l’architecture Bernard Herman le concept d’embedded landscapes, nous démontrons en quoi les deux hôpitaux diffèrent dans leur rapport au site, à l’accès, et, plus substantiellement, à la ville, à la connaissance et à la communauté. Les architectes Scopes et Feustmann, qui ont conçu le ‘Laurentian’, opéraient un bureau à Sarnac Lake, New York, première destination américaine pour les tuberculeux. Les qualifications des architectes du ‘Mount Sinai’, Spence et Goodman, dérivent en contrepartie de leur expérience avec des institutions juives montréalaises. À partir de l’approche de l’architecture de Herman, nous nous interrogeons sur la place de la thérapie médicale et du judaïsme dans les plans du ‘Mount Sinai’

Cadets, Curfews, and Compulsory Schooling: Mobilizing Anglophone Children in WWII Quebec

The early 1940s constituted an important moment for youth in Quebec as social policy brought childhood and adolescence into sharper focus and the regulation of young people’s behaviour expanded in the name of the wartime emergency. Measures for the mobilization and discipline of children were fuelled by images of absent fathers, working mothers, and latch-key children, combined with the dramatically rising juvenile delinquency rate. Legislation mandating compulsory schooling and a curfew for juveniles permitted the state and its agencies to train and constrain children and youth at a moment when parental guidance and surveillance were ostensibly at their lowest point. Protestant schools directed coercive strategies and protective measures at school-age children in an exaggerated effort to create good children and patriotic citizens.Le début des années 1940 a été un moment charnière de la jeunesse du Québec, car la politique sociale fit alors une plus grande place à l’enfance et à l’adolescence et la réglementation du comportement juvénile fut élargie au nom de l’urgence de guerre. Les mesures visant à mobiliser et à discipliner les enfants s’alimentaient aux images de pères absents, de mères ouvrières et d’enfants à la clé combinées à une hausse spectaculaire du taux de délinquance juvénile. Les lois décrétant la fréquentation scolaire obligatoire et un couvre-feu pour les enfants permirent à l’État et à ses organisme de former les enfants et les jeunes et de les assujettir à sa volonté à un moment où l’encadrement et la surveillance des parents atteignirent ostensiblement un creux. Les écoles protestantes adoptèrent des stratégies de coercition et des mesures de protection destinées aux enfants d’âge scolaire dans un effort exagéré pour élever de bons enfants et cultiver le patriotisme

Mapping work in early twentieth-century montreal: A rabbi, a neighbourhood, and a community

Rabbi Simon Glazer’s 1909 daily journal provides a window onto his role as an orthodox rabbi of a largely Yiddish-speaking immigrant community, his interactions with Jewish newcomers, the range of tasks he performed to augment the inadequate stipends he received from a consortium of five city synagogues where he was chief rabbi, and the ways in which Jewish newcomers sought to become economically independent. Using a multidisciplinary methodology, including Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS), Glazer’s journal offers a new lens through which to view and map the social geography of this community. Our study contributes to a growing body of literature on immigrant settlement, which has shown that such clustering encouraged economic independence and social mobility. Characterized by a high degree of diversity in ethnicity and commerce, the St. Lawrence Boulevard corridor was an ideal location for Jewish newcomers to set down roots. We argue that the community served as a springboard for social mobility and that Simon Glazer played an important role at a critical moment in its early development. It was on its way to becoming one of Canada’s most significant Jewish communities. Over the eleven years that he worked in Montreal (1907-18), Glazer carved out a vital place for himself in the city’s Jewish immigrant community and honed skills that would serve him well when he returned to the United States

“Unless she gives better satisfaction”: Teachers, Protestant Education, and Community in Rural Quebec, Lochaber and Gore District, 1863-1945

This study explores the complex relationships from 1863 to 1945 between the Board of School Trustees of Lochaber and Gore, its teachers, and parents, to reveal how these different parties influenced, resisted, and consented to changes in local schooling. Thus, the analysis moves away from a social control model which has dominated the literature on schooling in Quebec to reveal the local dynamics at work in the community. The Protestants of Lochaber and Gore were a microcosm of the larger Protestant community in Quebec. All of the problems associated with rural education in poor regions across Quebec, such as teacher transiency, widespread poverty and a modest tax base, the primitive nature of one-room schoolhouses, and conflict between the seasonal demands of agriculture and school time, existed here. This investigation is based on historical documents from the Archives of the Western Quebec School Board in addition to newspaper accounts and local histories.Cette étude explore les relations complexes existant entre les maîtres, les parents et les commissaires d’école des cantons de Lochaber et de Gore, afin de montrer comment ces différents acteurs participèrent, résistèrent et consentirent aux changements scolaires dans leur localité. Ainsi, l’analyse se dissocie du modèle de contrôle social qui a dominé l’historiographie de la scolarisation au Québec pour mettre en lumière le jeu des dynamiques locales. Les protestants de Lochaber et de Gore furent un microcosme de la communauté protestante du Québec. Tous les problèmes reliés à l’éducation dans les régions rurales pauvres de l’ensemble du Québec s’y retrouvaient : le caractère éphémère des maîtres, la pauvreté généralisée et le bas taux de taxes foncières, le caractère primitif des écoles à une seule classe et le conflit entre les exigences saisonnières de l’agriculture et l’école. Cette recherche, qui porte sur la période 1863-1945, s’appuie sur les documents tirés des Archives du Western Quebec School Board ainsi que sur les journaux et les monographies locales

"She must not stir out of a darkened room": The Redpath Mansion Mystery

This paper accounts for private life in a prominent Gilded-Age Montreal bourgeois household as revealed in the sudden glare of publicity generated by a violent double shooting. We show how the tragic deaths of a mother and her son re-enforced fragile class connections between propriety and wealth, family relations and family image. Drawing on diaries, photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as published novels and poetry, we argue that the family deployed architecture, both the spaces of its own home and public monumental architecture in the city, to follow the dictates of a paradoxical imperative: intimacy had to be openly displayed, family private matters enacted in public rituals. The surviving family quickly began a series of manoeuvers designed to make secret the public event, and re-inscribe the deaths within class norms of decorum and conduct. The house itself, we claim, as a material object, figures in the complex interplay of inter-connected social relationships, behaviours and narratives that produce bourgeois respectability. Résumé Cet article relate la vie privée dans une éminente maison bourgeoise de l’âge d’or de Montréal, telle qu’elle s’est révélée sous l’éclairage brutal de la publicité occasionnée par une violente fusillade. Nous y montrons comment les morts tragiques d’une mère et de son fils ont renforcé de fragiles connexions de classe entre la propriété et la richesse, les relations familiales et l’image de la famille. En se basant sur des journaux intimes, des photographies et des articles de journaux, ainsi que sur des romans et des poésies publiés, nous avançons l’idée que la famille exposait l’architecture, autant les espaces de son propre foyer que l’architecture monumentale publique de la ville, pour se plier aux diktats d’un impératif paradoxal : l’intimité devait être ouvertement montrée, les problèmes familiaux privés joués dans des rituels publics. Les survivants de la famille ont rapidement entamé une série de manœuvres pour réduire au secret l’évènement public et pour réinscrire les personnes décédées au sein de normes de classe, de décorum et de conduite. Nous avançons que la maison elle-même, en tant qu’objet matériel, est présente dans le jeu complexe des relations sociales interconnectées, des comportements et des récits qui produisent la respectabilité bourgeoise

Tuberculosis in Town: Mobility of Patients in Montreal, 1925–1950

In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the ideal management of tuberculosis called for confinement and immobilization of the patient over a span of one or more years. At the same time, North American cities were being redeveloped in ways that promoted great personal mobility. From a compilation of 300 cases of tuberculosis patients in Montreal, the authors explore the contradictory pressures on urban working people, the resistance they mounted, and the coping strategies their families used to maintain much-needed mobility. Professionals' prescriptions for isolation and immobilization were undermined by a scarcity of resources for public action, producing a gulf between the ideals of modern public health and the realities of urban life. Durant le deuxième quart du XXe siècle, la gestion idéale de la tuberculose exigeait l’immobilisation du malade pendant un an ou plus. En même temps, les villes nordaméricaines vivaient des changements majeurs axés sur une augmentation importante de la mobilité personnelle. Dans un ensemble de 300 cas d’étude montréalais, les auteurs observent les pressions contradictoires exercées sur les tuberculeux, ainsi que la résistance qu’ils pouvaient leur opposer et les manoeuvres que leurs familles pouvaient faire pour défendre une mobilité nécessaire à leur survie. Les demandes des médecins en matière d’isolement et d’immobilisation se butaient à un manque de ressources, produisant un gouffre entre les idéaux de la santé publique moderne et la réalité urbaine

“Proper Objects of This Institution”: Working Families, Children, and the British & Canadian School

Established in 1822 “for the education of the children of the labouring class,” Montreal’s British and Canadian School Society enabled working families of various ethnic backgrounds to have their children receive free schooling in a non-denominational setting. Located at the edge of the old town in a purpose-built structure, the British and Canadian School figured prominently within the array of early educational establishments studied by Bruce Curtis, Andrée Dufour, and others. In the wake of the rebellions in Lower Canada and the resulting separation of institutions along religious lines, the school became increasingly identified with the Protestant community and in 1866 was formally incorporated into the city’s emerging Protestant school system. Despite this apparent loss of its non-denominational character, the school continued to attract substantial numbers of children from Catholic and Jewish families, the latter resulting from an agreement between the synagogues and the school board. The school also retained its particular attraction for working-class families, who appear to have applied regularly with some determination to see their children exposed to learning even if only for short periods. A Registry of Admissions to the British and Canadian School from the mid-1870s reveals a pattern whereby schooling formed part of long-term strategy within the working class family economy; as such, it sheds light on the work of historians such as Bettina Bradbury and Terry Copp. The Registry also permits analysis of the school population by gender, ethnicity, age, place of residence, and academic competence

Clinical Description of a Completed Outbreak of SARS in Vietnam, February–May, 2003

We investigated the clinical manifestations and course of all probable severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patients in the Vietnam outbreak. Probable SARS cases were defined by using the revised World Health Organization criteria. We systematically reviewed medical records and undertook descriptive statistical analyses. All 62 patients were hospitalized. On admission, the most prominent symptoms were malaise (82.3%) and fever (79.0%). Cough, chest pain, and shortness of breath were present in approximately one quarter of the patients; 79.0% had lymphopenia; 40.3% had thrombocytopenia; 19.4% had leukopenia; and 75.8% showed changes on chest radiograph. Fever developed on the first day of illness onset, and both respiratory symptoms and radiographic changes occurred on day 4. On average, maximal radiographic changes were observed on day 10, and fevers subsided by day 13. Symptoms on admission were nonspecific, although fever, malaise, and lymphopenia were common. The complications of SARS included invasive intubation and ventilation (11.3%) and death (9.7%)