Les agences sociales à Montréal, 1932-1971

The author examines the evolution of the practices of social service agencies in Montreal in the middle of the twentieth century. She explores the context in which social services and social assistance were reorganized in the Jewish and English Protestant communities prior to the Depression of the 1930s, and the subsequent reorganization city's Catholic agencies, all but one of them French-Canadian. She discusses the proliferation of these agencies, their various approaches and the different viewpoints of their directors, including the tensions these provoked. Although she points out that more information is needed before a definite conclusion can be reached, the analysis suggests that during the 1930s, as during the key years of the 1970s, the Jewish and Anglophone communities of Montreal managed to obtain assurance from the provincial government that the objectives of the Francophone Québécois state would not call into question the primacy of the ethno-linguistic and denominational structures these communities had created.

Études d’histoire religieuse

Vol. 66

69-88

2000

fr