[Making Do: Women, Family & Home in Montreal during the Great Depression]

Denyse Baillargeon (Yvonne Klein, trans.)Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1999; 246 pp.Reviewed by Lesley D. HarmanDepartment of SociologyKing's CollegeThe University of Western OntarioLondon, OntarioHow do families experience hardship? War, famine, environmental disaster and economic downturn periodically defined in all societies. In the recent memory of Canadians, the Great Depression stands as a benchmark against which survivors and their descendants compared since. In Making Do, historian Denyse Baillargeon weaves a skillfully crafted tapestry of the lives of 30 women who lived through the Great Depression. Through a combination of the oral histories of the women interviewed and archival research, the author provides an excellent opportunity for an understanding of relative poverty and hardship, challenging the reader to view the Depression through the eyes of those who lived it rather than those who are now its beneficiaries.This book, which is a translation of a revised version of Baillargeon's dissertation, is based on 30 interviews which were conducted between 1986 and 1987. The sample was comprised of women who had lived in Montreal during the Depression who had been married at the beginning of the 1930s. The interviews included questions about childhood, education, work, courtship, marriage, motherhood, family as well as community and state relations as they were experienced within a particular normative and moral climate, defined in large part by traditional gender roles within Roman Catholic Quebec. Baillargeon conveys a nonjudgmental view of the lives of these women, although through the rear-view mirror of history many today would be dismayed at the level of acceptance that these women had of their lot in life. Today, when Canadian women think of their futures there is a prevalent ideology of choice: choice in whether or not they will work, whether or not they will pursue an education, whether and whom they will marry, whether and when they will children. Most believe that they will a chance at a good life, defined by today's standards; many are led to believe they can have it all. What struck me most about the stories of these women was a relative absence of any of this type of sentiment about their lives, both as girls growing up looking toward the future, and as older women reflecting back on their hard lives. As one woman said, We lived on hope (p. 150).Yet the concept of relative poverty helps us to understand that hardship has different meaning depending on one's expectations. Baillargeon wisely observes that the informants judged the impact of the Depression on their work and how they lived goes back to their previous experience of life (p. 169). The use of stories and the organization of the book both aid in demonstrating this. Baillargeon details the female cycle in a chronological way throughout the book. This makes for ease of readability, and the reader may feel by the end of the book as if she actually knows some of these women.The experience of growing up female in early twentieth-century Quebec was universally one of being prepared to be a wife and mother. There was an unquestioned double standard through which, as one informant put it, Little boys were like little kings. Very few homes made the boys work. They couldn't be touched. If there was something to be done, the girls did it. The boys worked for money -- delivering groceries (p. 42). The average number of children of their families of origin was six, and all of these families were poor. This family poverty made it necessary that young girls be taken out of school early, either to stay home to help with the younger siblings or go out to work as early as possible, often in the exploited role of a domestic. Preferred jobs included factory work, sales, clerical work and teaching. Most girls handed over their pay packets to their parents and were able to save or spend little of their own earnings. …

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