Manliness, Goodness and God: Poverty, Gender and Social Reform in English-Speaking Montreal, 1890-1929

An exploration of the intersections between gender and poverty in social reform efforts within Montreal's English-speaking Protestant community between 1890 and 1929. The author argues that as methods of social reform shifted over the 40-year period under review, so did the ways in which poverty and gender intersected. Nineteenth-century evangelicals located poverty in individual men's abdication of their proper roles as breadwinners, and believed that only by conversion and reintegration into an idealized web of domesticity could such men be lifted out of their economic circumstances. As Montreal Protestant churches began to adopt principles of the social gospel movement in the early 20th century, the focus shifted from reforming individual men to men and boys as a group as a way to alleviate poverty. The First World War and the mandate of the Canadian Patriotic Fund to aid dependents of servicemen shifted the locus of poverty from men to women. In this new association of poverty and women, the author argues that poverty became feminized and sexualized as a moral disease of "loose" women.

Master's Thesis

Queen's University

Kingston, ON

1998

iv-145p.

en