Remoralizing families? Family regulation and state formation in British Columbia, 1862-1940.

This thesis contributes to scholarly debates over the enactment and effect of age, gender, and kin-based property rights during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis focuses on three distinct waves of reform, involving homestead, married women's property, intestacy, and maintenance legislation. Similar 'waves' of legislation have been documented throughout North America. This thesis brings new evidence to the discussion of legislative intentions and regulatory effects. In doing so, it challenges current conceptualizations of regulatory relationships, an issue of some importance to those interested in matters of governance and legislative efficacy. The evidence collected during this investigation raises several questions respecting current theories of legislative formulation. Current theories hold that family property rights were altered during this period for two reasons: as part of a liberal drive to increase individual rights; and as a result of 'the state's' interest in protecting reproduction from economic volatility. The evidence renders each of these interpretations problematic: first, while women's individual rights were expanded, men faced increasingly overt regulation; and second, with respect to 'the state's' interest in reproduction, this thesis challenges the reification of a neutral, transhistorical state. The evidence reveals self-interested legislative factions with overlapping and contradictory regulatory agendas. In response, this investigation tests 'state formation' theory as a means of understanding legislative formulation and regulatory relationships, commenting on both the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. This thesis also brings new evidence to two areas of interest to students of legislative implementation: the nature of judicial construction, and the value of cases for understanding regulatory relationships. Studies of the married women's property acts, both in the United States and Canada, have revealed that the judiciary interpreted the statutes conservatively, inhibiting full realization of the legislation's equal-rights potential. This thesis revisits the issue, scrutinizing legislative intentions and exploring the doctrines of judicial construction, resulting in the reinterpretation of both legislative intent and judicial behaviour. The second debate surrounding legislative implementation revolves around an emerging sense of the inherent limitations of cases as source material. Both social and legal historians have commented on the narrow scope of case files for the exploration of regulatory relationships. What happens outside the courtroom is of great concern, and case files reveal only a 'slice' of human experience. Moreover, within legal history, several commentators have noted that published cases differ significantly from the vast majority of unpublished cases. This thesis contributes to the understanding of regulation both within and outside the courtroom, employing published and unpublished cases, bureaucratic correspondence and quantitative studies.

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