A Silent Revolution?: Gender and Wealth in English Canada, 1860-1930

by Peter Baskerville

Overview

A Silent Revolution? explores how urban women managed wealth at a time when they were thought to have little independence - including economic - and shows that women were in fact important players in the world of capital.

Peter Baskerville situates women in their immediate gendered and familial environments as well as within broader legal, financial, spatial, temporal, and historiographical contexts. He analyses women's probates, wills, land ownership, holdings of real and chattel mortgages, investment in stocks and bonds, and self employment, revealing that women controlled wealth to an extent similar to that of most men and invested and managed wealth in increasingly similar, and in some cases more aggressive, ways.

Traditional historiography has highlighted women's fight to acquire cultural and political rights during this period, but it is less well known that women acquired and exercised many economic rights as well. In doing so they put pressure on men to reconceptualize the notion of middle class and women's proper place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773574458
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	07/21/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

One of Canada's leading business social scientists, Peter Baskerville is professor of history, University of Victoria, in-coming chair of Modern Western Canadian History, University of Alberta, and the author of several books, including, with Eric Sager,

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

1 Gender, Wealth, and Investment: Victoria and Hamilton, 1869-1931 17

2 Inheriting and Bequeathing: Women and Men in Victoria and Hamilton, 1880-1930 55

3 The Gender of Shareholders: Investment in Banking and Insurance Stocks in Ontario, 1860-1911 76

4 The "fountain-head of all production": Land and Gender in Victoria and Hamilton, 1881-1901 93

5 Stretching the Liberal State: Legal Regimes, Gender, and Mortgage Markets in Victoria and Hamilton, 1881-1921 122

6 Gender, Credit, and Consumption: The Market for Chattels in Victoria, 1861-1902 163

7 Canadian Urban Women in Business 190

8 "A Retail Dry Goods Merchant on My Own Separate Account": Gender and Family Enterprise in Urban Canada at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 222

Conclusion 236

Appendices

1 The Gendered Nature of Sources for the Calculation of Property Ownership Trends 251

2 The Construction of Tables 4.7 to 4.10 254

3 Property Ownership by Relation to Means of Production: Women in Urban Canada, 1901 256

4 Women and the Business of Philanthropy: The Case of Victoria 258

Tables 263

Notes 307

Bibliography 345

Index 369