Re-focus on Women in an Industrial Revolution : Montreal 1848–1903

The author points out that the Canadian metropolis, like other big cities of Europe and North America, attracted more women than men, and textbook accounts of its fast-growth phase between 1842–1901 record women's increasing presence in factory labour and the contemporary concerns about their health, exploitation, abuse, and 'morality'. The author notes that successive stages of the industrial revolution are often defined by transitions from horsepower to waterpower, steampower, and the electric motor; and the timing in Montreal is consistent with other North American cities. The author argues that the reorganization of production that we still think of as the harnessing of the steam engine, entailed a continual repartitioning by gender, as well as rearrangement of spaces, concentrating workers in large factories, in cities of unprecedented size, and under wider and deeper structures of corporate management. Using Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) mapping of gender, the author examines the profound contradictions of social life in Montreal.

The Routledge Companion to Spatial History

London, England

Routledge

2018

12-34

en

0-367-73537-7