Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus)

Nancy Christie, ed. Households of Faith: Family, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, 381 pp. This collection of essays addresses changing relationships among family, community, and church (Protestant and Roman Catholic) over eighteenth to twentieth centuries. editor, in her substantial introduction and conclusion, sees volume as part of on-going historical scholarship that corrects an emphasis in women's history on development of separate spheres in nineteenth century, with men disassociated from domestic sphere. Rather, she notes, families in this period must be seen as characterized by patriarchal domesticity, with patriarch providing a central role in family, as the principal conduit between family, church, and community. (p. 10) Both church and state saw male family head as essential to development of an ordered and Christian society until well into twentieth century. There are eleven essays included in collection, dealing with a variety of settings and ethnic groups. Under section The Age of Patriarchy, Ollivier Hubert describes importance of mass as a communal and family activity in rural Quebec well into nineteenth century, despite theological changes that emphasized individual's private relationship to faith. J.I. Little outlines views on marriage and parenthood of Reverend James Reid, a Quebec Anglican cleric of early 1800s, who saw father's active moral authority in family as essential to producing properly socialized children. second section is Popular Religion and Family Strategies. Hannah Lane looks at Protestant Church memberships in nineteenth century St Stephen, New Brunswick. She finds that memberships changed frequently and that these changes usually represented family based strategies. Christine Hudon traces histories of groups of French-Canadian Protestants in Quebec between 1850 and 1901. Clusters of Francophone Protestants tended to be interrelated families, illustrating importance of family in process of conversion. But during same period, chains of related families followed each other into Eastern Townships, regardless of Protestant or Catholic status, indicating that conversion to Protestantism did not sever ties to kin who remained Catholic. third essay, by Susan Neylan, examines conflicting missionary and Tsimshian interpretations of family norms and of what conversion to Christianity really meant, in 1857-1896 period. Tsimshian were not simply colonized by Christianisat ion, but rather incorporated and interpreted Christianity within their own cultural perspective. Gender, Social Change, and Language of Domesticity, which includes four essays, more directly addresses issues described in editor's introduction. essays all illustrate widespread importance of religious affiliation in eras often characterized by historians as increasingly secularised. They also show women's participation in public sphere through church organizations. Enrico Cumbo shows that meaning of religiosity among male and female southern Italian immigrants of 1900-1940 was quite different. …

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