Sandwell, R. W.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 509barriers between vulnerable members of society and those who were determinedto exploit them.The protective impulse, while still of some value in the context of the family, oftenhad disastrous consequences for women in the workplace. In her article Janet Guild-ford shows how supposed gender attributes  womens special relationship withyoung children  rather than training, skills, and dedication were used to justify thefeminization of teaching (though not education administration) in nineteenth-centuryHalifax, with the result that female teachers had difficulty arguing for equality insalary and promotions. Similarly, the female factory workers in turn-of-the-centuryHalifax described by Sharon Myers came to accept the position that their participationin the paid labour force was only a brief episode in their life course, not a conditionthat justified solidarity and protest for more equitable treatment. Such protest, thoughmuted, was not entirely lacking. As Gwendolyn Davies reveals in the books closingarticle, a few spirited Maritime women took up their pens to challenge the worstabuses of separate spheres ideology. The writings of such women as Mary ElizaHerbert, Margaret Marshall Saunders, Maria Amelia Fytche, and Sophia AlmonHensley, she argues, were not a feminist call to arms but an act of negotiation,knitting the separate sphere to the public one in an alliance that claimed social goodas much as womens rights as part of their intention (p. 235). Not surprisingly,feminist notions of the social good in the Maritimes were strongly influenced byseparate spheres ideology which had taken such firm root in the region.As the editors note in their introduction, there is much in the history of Maritimewomen that still needs to be explored. The lack of attention to Aboriginal andAcadian women, they acknowledge, is regrettable. There is also a bias in contenttoward Nova Scotia that reflects the graduate school networks of the editors. Lessexplicable is the lack of an index and a bibliography that would have alerted readersto published sources on Maritime women whose voices are absent from this volume.Margaret ConradAcadia UniversityRoyden K. Loewen  Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in theOld and the New Worlds, 1850–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1993. Pp. 370.In recent years numerous studies have been published documenting the complexityand diversity of Canadas rural populations. The best of these are, arguably, themicro-histories. Studies such as Allen Greers or Jack Littles of Quebec com-munities, or Rusty Bittermanns of Middle River, Nova Scotia, contribute a levelof analysis that has disrupted easy generalizations about culture, society, and theprocess of change in rural Canada. More than simply giving us a close-up view one piece of the jigsaw puzzle  of national history, these micro-histories providea different kind of historical generalization and analysis. As a recently publishedreader on social theory puts it, the minutiae of daily life revealed by micro-history510 Histoire sociale / Social Historyare less the superior realities that some populist social historians would like themto be, than the necessary ground to which the big and abstract questions of domina-tion and subordination, power and resistance have been chased (Nicholas Dirkset al., eds., Culture, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory,Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 17).Royden Loewens Family, Church and Market provides us with a formidableexample of how the study of one group of people can speak to much wider ques-tions about the complex interstices by which economic, political, and culturalstructures are resolved at the level of family and the community. On one level, thishistory of Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites measures the transition of a rural, ethnic,and religious community from a traditional land-based society in Russia to a social-ly fragmented, urban-centred, and commercially oriented group situated in NorthAmerica three generations later. With its attention to the details of how changeoccurred, however, Family, Church and Market dismantles any simplistic dualities,either between traditional and modern life often associated with immigration historyor between household- and market-based economies that have supplied the econ-omic and cultural measures of modernization.The complexity that Loewen brings to our understanding of change is wellestablished with his treatment of the traditional old-world society from which theMennonites migrated to North America. Here was no undifferentiated and unchang-ing peasantry; instead, his detailed study of Kleine Gemeinde households andcommunity in Russia reveals a population embroiled in disputes with each other andwith a larger society increasingly influenced by the growth of international capital.Hoping to find a more secure land base upon which to preserve their economy,religion, and culture, the entire community moved from Moloschna to Borosenkoin 1864. By the early 1870s, however, it was clear that continued economic pressureon arable land, as well as political pressure on their traditional way of life, dictatedfurther strategic changes to their society. In 1874, 170 Kleine Gemeinde Mennonitefamilies, comprising about 900 people, left New Russia and migrated to NorthAmerica, setting up ethnic enclaves in two areas, one near Steinbach, Manitoba,and one near Jansen, Nebraska.Crises in land availability, shifting international and local markets, changes inlines of communication and transportation, religious disagreements, and the growthof urban centres eventually contributed to the increasing fragmentation of bothNorth American Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite communities in the twentieth century.Family, Church and Market, however, traces the complex mix of confrontation,adaptation, and negotiation that worked to bolster community solidarity and reli-gious commitment throughout the nineteenth century. Strange alliances betweentraditional values and modern behaviours were often created in the process.This was particularly evident in the economic adjustments that the communitiesmade to their new environments. Loewen argues that it was the Kleine Gemeindesdesire to maintain the stable, household- and land-based economy central to theirtraditional way of life that made them excel at economic adaptation. Thus an ethosurging separation from worldly concerns and the primacy of the household economytranslated, in the economic context of the mid-nineteenth century, into a rapid andComptes rendus / Book Reviews 511decisive response to thehighly competitive nature of industrial capitalism (p. 51).In Borosenko, Manitoba, and Nebraska the Kleine Gemeinde sold commoditiesinto an international market, acquired new farm technologies, hired wage labour andborrowed money(p. 30). Specific policies affecting land transmission, economicconditions affecting the viability of the family farm, and community decisions abouthow to maintain social boundaries created different responses to change in theAmerican and Canadian communities, however, undermining any simplistic conclu-sions about cultural change in the melting pot versus the cultural mosaic.What was it that the Kleine Gemeinde communities were changing to protect?Religious affiliation seems to provide the defining traditionalist characteristic ofthe Mennonite experience for many historians. As Loewen points out, however,religion was not a static form of tradition that broke down when new social andeconomic forces arose, but rather provided the platform from which communitymembers developed new strategies to consolidate visions of continuity (p. 51).The Mennonites faith in Gods will was essential in creating the social boundariesthat defined the community; negotiations concerning these boundaries provideparticular insight into the processes of cultural resistance and adaptation. Thesenegotiations were, nevertheless, worked out within a context that was often hierar-chical and non-egalitarian and was becoming, by the turn of the century, too inflex-ible to accommodate changes that grew out of increasing urbanization and theensuing community fragmentation.Loewen knits the rich personal sources created by this highly literate populationtogether with a wide reading of cultural theory to reach beyond an institutional orpolitical history of Mennonite religion. Although religion played a key role withinthe community, Loewen argues that the central institution of social order andcommon identity in the community was not religion, but, as in many agrariansocieties throughout the world, the family: family ties were the focus of daily life,providing each member of society with a distinguishing identity and comprising thevery fabric of the village (p. 32).The wealth of detail in letters, diaries, and memoirs written by communitymembers is usefully employed not only to fill in the gaps about day-to-dayactivities, but also to provide an indication of the central productive, reproductive,and cultural role that Loewen accords women in this rural economy and society.Although some would question the separate spheres model Loewen uses to examinethe disparities in power and authority between men and women, the inclusion ofwomen at the centre of economic and cultural concerns provides a forum forunderstanding the ways in which the family and the economy were intimatelyrelated in the changing rural economies of the nineteenth century.The decline of the Kleine Gemeinde in the twentieth century can ultimately befound, Loewen concludes, not in the rise of market values or increased individual-ism per se, but in the decreasing ability of Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites to supporttheir families on the land. It was only after families moved off the farm, away fromtheir land-based, kin-centred economic and social organizations, that the Mennoniteidentity and culture began to crumble before the increasingly individualistic andcommercial structures of North American society.512 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryBy directing our attention to the everyday lives of a small group of people in onearea over three generations, this book succeeds not only in informing us about theKleine Gemeinde, but also in challenging our understanding of the rate, direction,process, and location of change in rural Canada.R. W. SandwellSimon Fraser UniversityGilles Gougeon, dir.  Histoire du nationalisme québécois : entrevues avec septspécialistes, Montréal, VLB Éditeur et SRC, 1993, 171 p.On ne peut rester indifférent devant ce livre. Les « nationalistes » y retrouveront lespensées peu originales révélées au secondaire, au CEGEP, peut-être au premiercycle. Un lecteur qui a tendance à douter un peu de linterprétation whig de lévolu-tion du sentiment nationaliste québécois trouvera sans doute dans cet ouvrage dequoi rager. De chapitre en chapitre, le nationalisme avance toujours, gagne ensagesse, délaisse de vilains préjugés, doute rarement de lui-même, se raffermitautour dune pensée qui veut rallier le peuple autour dun nationalisme « territorialet linguistique ».Cet ouvrage nest pas un livre dhistoire et, même sil fait appel des professeursduniversité, il séloigne considérablement de la rigueur scientifique à laquelle onest en droit de sattendre des historiens et politicologues. Il sagit plutôt ici de latranscription dune série de sept entrevues avec sept « spécialistes » qui fut diffuséesur les ondes de Radio-Canada en janvier 1992. Au fil des entrevues sont retracéesles grands moments de lhistoire du Québec, depuis les premières découvertesjusquà la révolution tranquille. Puisquil sagit dune histoire du nationalisme, lessavants (Robert Lahaise, Jean-Paul Bernard, Réal Bélanger, Pierre Trepanier,Richard Desrosiers, Robert Comeau, Louis Balthazar) sont priés de se pencher surlévolution de ce phénomène dans lhistoire.Le présentateur Gilles Gougeon insiste sur le fait que les spécialistes interviewésne font pas tous la même analyse et ne tirent pas tous les mêmes conclusions desfaits historiques quils décrivent (p. 8). Or, il ne tente pas de faire ressortir lesdivergences. En fait, les spécialistes se ressemblent tous : ce sont tous des profes-seurs masculins, francophones et « nationalistes » qui enseignent tous dans desuniversités du Québec, et appartiennent à la même génération. Leur vue densembleest la même, sauf quelques nuances que seuls les historiens avertis connaissent,mais qui ne ressortent pas du texte. Monsieur Gougeon avertit aussi ses lecteurs que« les textes que nous publions ici sont exempts de ces opinions et engagementspolitiques ».Le nationalisme qui y est présenté est amorphe. On parle de nationalisme, d« af-firmation nationale », de survivance, de sentiment « canadien-français », de sen-timent « québécois ». Ce nationalisme évolue dans lhistoire : partant dune identitéforgée dans lancien régime, il prend forme au lendemain de la conquête et sex-prime par le biais du Parti patriote qui, au dire du spécialiste interviewé « res-

Royden K. Loewen — Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850–1930

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Royden K. Loewen — Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, 1850–1930

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)