Contexts of Singleness
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EVERYDAY ATHENAS: STRATEGIES OF SURVIVAL AND IDENTITY FOR EVER-SINGLE WOMEN IN BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1880-1930 BY Jenéa Tallentire A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA August 2006 © Jenéa Tallentire, 2006 Abstract This study of single women in the British Columbia context reveals the importance of marital status as a distinct category of analysis for women’s lives. Marital status fractures the gender of women into identities that are deeply structured by relations of power and privilege, creating some fundamental separations between the married woman and the never-married (‘ever-single’) woman. By taking marital status into account, we can learn more about the historical intersections between women, gender, and society. By setting the heterosexual dyad aside, we can delve more fully into the varied life-sustaining relationships that women forged, especially with other women. We can more thoroughly reconstruct the social contexts of feminist ideas, and the roots of a female citizenship based on a direct rather than deflected relationship to the nation. We can also trace the nascence of an ‘individual’ female subjectivity based in self-reverence rather than self-effacement. And we can decentre the conjugal family, especially the heterosexual dyad, as the essential unit of the Canadian past and the only legitimate site for women’s sexuality. The ‘borderlands’ of British Columbia before the Second World War are an excellent place to examine the lives and identities of ever-single women, given the astonishing number of (ever-)single women present in unique demographic and economic conditions that would seem to militate against singleness. This project looks at four themes: survival, status, relationships, and identity. Material conditions of income and household composition offer us some of the strategies of survival single women employed. Looking at the discursive boundaries of certain social groups emphasizes the centrality of single women to (all levels of) society and the leadership that single women bring to both crafting and policing the borders of status groups. The patterns of relationships that ever-single women built and their voices on being single offer important models for thinking through women’s affective lives that do not privilege the heterosexual dyad. And the emplacement of the ever-single woman as ‘outside heterosexuality’ suggests some ways though the bind of the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy in thinking about women’s lives and especially the hybrid nature of their autobiographical voices. ii Table of Contents Abstract ...........................................................................................ii Tables.............................................................................................iv Figures.............................................................................................v Acknowledgements........................................................................vi One: Contexts of singleness ............................................................1 The image of the single woman .......................................................................................... 3 Marital status as a category of analysis ............................................................................ 17 Contexts for the single woman in Canadian history and historiography ........................... 20 Singleness on the borderlands ......................................................................................... 28 Two: Conditions of singleness ......................................................38 Importing single newcomer women .................................................................................. 39 Tracing the urban single woman: Victoria 1901................................................................ 40 Beyond the census: ever-single women ........................................................................... 70 The class of single women................................................................................................ 76 Three: Making it in Vancouver: Respectability, status, and the single woman...........................................................................................86 High Society and the single woman.................................................................................. 91 Sporting women of the demimonde ................................................................................ 102 Securing femininity.......................................................................................................... 116 Respectability, status, and social survival....................................................................... 127 Four: Emotional geographies ......................................................132 Reading for relationships ................................................................................................ 135 Narratives of singleness.................................................................................................. 141 Emotional geographies ................................................................................................... 155 Multiple intimacies........................................................................................................... 174 Five: Eccentric subjects...............................................................176 Mapping the eccentric subject ........................................................................................ 181 ‘Truth,’ voice, and self-image .......................................................................................... 185 Heroic narratives............................................................................................................. 193 Maps of the ever-single life on the borderlands .............................................................. 212 Conclusions: Pandora’s box........................................................216 Ever-single women on the borderlands .......................................................................... 217 Opening Pandora’s box .................................................................................................. 225 Bibliography................................................................................228 Archival sources.............................................................................................................. 228 Published primary documents......................................................................................... 230 Secondary sources ......................................................................................................... 232 Recommended reading................................................................................................... 243 Appendix A - Tables ...................................................................246 Appendix B – Methods ...............................................................250 Finding single women ..................................................................................................... 250 Subsistence threshold (300.00) calculation .................................................................... 256 iii Tables Table 1: Women, comparative Victoria, BC, and Canada, 1881 .......................................... 31 Table 2: Women, comparative Victoria, BC, and Canada, 1901 .......................................... 31 Table 3: Women over 30, Victoria, 1881-1901 ..................................................................... 44 Table 4: Reporting of occupations by women in Athenas sample ........................................ 44 Table 5: Occupations reported in Athenas sample, by category .......................................... 47 Table 6: Comparison: Distribution of women by leading occupational groups, Canada 1901 & Single women 30 and older, Victoria 1901 ................................................................ 48 Table 7: Proportion of single women over 30 in domestic service, 1901 Victoria................. 49 Table 8: Earnings, Athenas sample...................................................................................... 50 Table 9: Top 15 individual occupations reporting income plus 'Retired/Not Given/Unknown,' ranked by highest median income ................................................................................ 51 Table 10: Top 15 individual occupations reporting income plus 'Retired/Not Given/Unknown,' ranked by highest income reported............................................................................... 52 Table 11: Relationship to head of household, Athenas sample............................................ 53 Table 12: 'Living with kin,' Athenas sample .......................................................................... 54 Table 13: Single people over 30, relationship to head of household, 1901 Victoria ............. 56 Table 14: Place of birth, Athenas sample ............................................................................. 63 Table 15: ‘Colour,’ Athenas sample...................................................................................... 64 Table 16: Race (descent)a, Athenas sample ........................................................................ 64 Table A: Women 15 years and over, Canada, 1891-1931.................................................. 246 Table