Under reconstruction: The family and public in postwar Montréal, 1944–1949

This dissertation approaches post-Second World War reconstruction from the ground up. Using Montréal as a case study, it explores the place of family in postwar reconstruction efforts. In particular, it focuses on the political economy of family life. Canadians took promises of social security and ‘Freedom from Want’ seriously in the wake of the war. Each chapter in this dissertation examines a different aspect of attempts by working- and middle-class Montréalers (French- and English-speaking, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish) to realize their visions of family. Consumer activism, strikes, and calls for social welfare measures all demonstrated their determination to secure freedom from want.

The state was an important target in all of these campaigns. Postwar Montréalers, like citizens elsewhere in Canada, were developing new senses of entitlement and were expanding their visions of citizenship to include social and economic, as well as political, rights. Struggles to achieve a fuller citizenship involved pushing at the boundaries of ‘the public’ in order to increase the range of public provisions, the number of people who would have access to these provisions, and the number and kind of claims that could be made in public. Montréalers made family matters public in an attempt to legitimate demands for new kinds of citizenship rights. Their efforts suggest that boundaries between the private and the public in the past were both fluid and permeable.

Amid demands for a broader and more accessible public, however, appeals for privacy persisted. There was some resistance to an expanding public, and to the specific ways in which the public was expanding. In particular, some Montréalers resisted a ‘public sphere’ dominated by Ottawa. Federal-provincial conflict was one of the factors that contributed to the defeat, by the 1950s, of some of the far-reaching proposals for social change that had emerged in the years of war and reconstruction. Throughout, this dissertation considers the relative distinctiveness of Montréal and of the province of Quebec, and the ways in which this shaped campaigns for freedom from want.