Family Diversity
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Summer 2010 Vol. 40 no. 2 for Families About Families Transition Family Diversity The Vanier Institute of the Family transition summer 2010 • 1 Editor’s Note n July 1st, the implications of current Donors Support VIF’s Work Canadians come trends for families and for The Vanier Institute of the Family gratefully acknowledges all those who together in back policy and programs. support our work of promoting the well-being of Canada’s families. Oyards, parks, and concert The following is a sneak halls to celebrate what it peak at some of the content Individual Donors means to be Canadian. Each from the opening segments Ingrid Connidis Barbara Heather sheila munro ernest Craik seamus Henry David Northcott celebration is unique - the of Families Count. We start sue edelman Carolyn Ho susan Palijan music, the food and the with a précis of Professor Joan Fidler Burrows Barbara Kohl David Pearson chatter an emblem of the Eric Sager’s compelling Jean Fournier Donna Lero Douglas Perry rich diversity that defines look at the evolution of Carol Fraser Judith mappin Aron spector Jim Gannon shelagh m’Gonigle Gail Watson our communities and our ‘family’ in Canada. Using a collective identity as a nation. chronological map, Dr. Sager This diversity is similarly outlines the socio-cultural reflected in the varied ways and political terrain upon in which Canadians come which the meaning and Transition summer 2010 Vol.40, no.2 together – and apart - as practice of family has shifted. Verna Bruce families. For over 40 years, In his words, “…family is President the Vanier Institute of the always a historical construct. Jean T. Fournier Editorial contributions and comments are Family has monitored This is true for individuals, Executive Committee Chair welcome. Material for publication is subject Clarence Lochhead to editing. Contact: trends in family structure, and it is equally true for Jenni Tipper, Editor Transition Executive Director Telephone 613-228-8500 formation and function. an entire society or nation. Jenni Tipper Email: [email protected] Perspective, in this context, Everything about family in Editor The contents of Transition may be reprinted is VIF’s most valuable asset. Canada today is shaped by Lucie Legault or used on radio or television without Distribution Clerk permission, howevere, a credit is requested. By establishing a focal our remembered past, our If in print, please send a copy to VIF. lens on the relationships social memory.” Transition is published quarterly by the Vanier Institute of the Family (VIF) for Transition was founded in 1970 and responsibilities that This illuminating piece distribution to its members. To become a ISSn0049-4429 member, or to find out more about VIF, Charitable reg. # 10816 8337 rr0001 comprise ‘family’, the is followed by a series please see page 14 for contact information. PUBLICaTIOnS MaIL agrEEMEnT nO. Insitutue has been able to of statistical snapshots 0040006500 To report a change of address, send your rETUrn UnDELIVEraBLE draw important lines of excerpted directly from old Transition address label, with your new CanaDIan aDDrESSES to understanding between the part 1 that reflect the broad address, to Vanier Institute of the Family. CIrCULaTIOn DEParTMEnT See page 14 for contact. 94 CEnTrEPOInTE DrIVE lived experiences of families range of family diversity OTTaWa, OnTarIO K2g6B1 and the ever-changing world in Canada. Findings from Email: [email protected] of present-day Canada. sections II and III will be This issue of Transition highlighted in the September brings Canada’s diversity issue of Transition to coincide Contents to light with key findings with the launch of VIF’s new from the soon-to-be-released web-site and with the print Family and social Memory: Why History Matters fourth Edition of Profiling publication of Families Count. Eric Sager . .1 Canada’s Families (now It is my hope you will Families Count iV - Family Diversity titled, Families Count). First agree that Families Count Vanier Institute of the Family . 5 published in 1994, this will make a valuable, flagship publication presents highly relevant and serious a comprehensive, reliable contribution to how we statistical portrait of families understand and support in Canada. Best characterized Canada’s families in all that as a databook, Families Count they are. has been divided into three parts: 1) Family Diversity; 2) Jenni Tipper, Editor Family Economic Security; The Vision of the Vanier Intitute of the Family is to make families as important 3) Family and Community to the life of Canadian society as they are to the lives of individual Canadians Life. Each section offers Design anD Production: PhD CrEative - Peter handley r.g.D. thoughtful commentary on Family and Social Memory: Why History Matters by Eric Sager amily” is one of the most Let me suggest another level of Consider the meaning of family complex and fascinating meaning. Family is what we remem- in the world of Frances Stewart of words in the English ber it to be. We all think we know Upper Canada in the 1830s. She “Flanguage. The word can be applied to what a family is, because we were all describes the work of her daughters, social groups of many shapes and sizes. brought up in families of some type. all under the age of 16. When a person has a baby, they are and how easily is becomes ought! We anna Maria is the general “starting a family.” When a sports team know what family ought to be, overseer of the household has a high degree of cohesion and especially if ours was conflicted or concerns, who makes all the solidarity, its members declare it to be a absent. Every individual’s under- preserves and pickles, cakes, etc. family. When a nation is united, it is a standing of family is shaped by his or She also has the care of Johnny, happy family; if part of the nation her past. It follows that family is the third boy, who is now over threatens to separate, it is contemplating always a historical construct. This is five years old…. Ellen mends all a divorce. as these examples suggest, true for individuals, and it is equally the stockings for the little boys “family” is never just a social unit; it is true for an entire society or nation. and repairs their clothes. She has also an ideal, or a symbolic construct, Everything about family in Canada the care of george in particular and the word is the bearer of values today is shaped by our remembered who is three; besides this she is embedded in the context of its use. past, our social memory. manager and caretaker of the The Vanier Institute of the Family transition summer 2010 • 1 poultry. In spring she sometimes their teen-aged offspring attends to the sowing followed them, especially when they and raising of plants lived in the growing urban centres. The and nurseries of young family was still an economic unit, but Every individual’s apple trees. Bessie is in charge of it was shrinking in size, and its mem- Charlie, the infant, she is always bers no longer worked beside each understanding of busy and can make most of her other on the same tract of land. Behav- own underclothes and knits. iour changed, especially in towns or family is shaped For these youth, as for the people cities where mobility and social contact of new France a century before, there expanded. Young people were meeting by his or her past. is no individual identity, no personal- and choosing their marriage partners, It follows that ity, apart from one’s membership in a often outside the networks and prefer- family, with all the labour and duties ences of parents, although usually with family is always entailed in such membership. This parental consent. family is a patriarchal economic The memory of the farm family a historical co-operative dedicated to survival and endured, however, and gave birth to to the inheritance of a patrimony that an ideal – a multi-generational, construct. would help secure the next generation harmonious family in which each in their own families. member was devoted to the welfare of During the last half of the 19th all. This ideal collided with the new century, the foundations of this type of realities, and the first great family rural family-household began to erode. “crisis” was born. Some feared that the Compulsory schooling, beginning in family was dying. Ontario in the 1870s and gradually Churches, moral reformers and the adopted by other provinces, took Canadian state embarked on a crusade children under the age of 12 out of the to save marriage, children and family. home and gradually limited their role aboriginal peoples were told to as family workers. Manufacturing and abandon their kin networks and retailing slowly replaced home-based longhouses, and to live like European production. Fathers, more often than families. In 1890, the federal govern- mothers, took wage-paid jobs and ment made polygamy a criminal 2 • transition summer 2010 The Vanier Institute of the Family offence. as historian Sarah Carter the population. The co-resident family household was the breadwinner. he argues, Canada’s nation-building was transformed: it became a “nuclear went into the world of work to earn a strategies included the imposition of family” of parents and their own “family wage.” The wife-mother was a monogamous heterosexual marriage as children, living in a new kind of homemaker, the bearer of children, and the basis of family formation. In privacy, usually without servants or the manager of the domestic domain. Quebec, the Catholic Church, aware lodgers or other non-kin. The result Women took paid jobs, but usually that marital fertility was declining, was a new “familialism” – a culture when they were young and single, or if strengthened its pro-natalist family that celebrated an idealized family they were widows.