Working lives and simple pleasures
Subtitle: sngle, employed women in a depression-era city, 1929--1939.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 312
Description: "Working Lives and Simple Pleasures" examines the experiences of single, employed women in Depression-era Toronto. Though women were major players in the Toronto's social and economic landscape, their stories have thus far remained largely unexplored in Canadian histories of the thirties. Rather, historians have portrayed the Depression as a time defined by the unemployment of men. This has not only side-lined women's history in this period but skewed their representation as either long-suffering domestic drudges (in popular memory and popular history) or, in the limited feminist historiography, as targets of abuse for stealing men's jobs.By drawing on former working women's memories of the 1930s and by examining traditional sources in social and cultural history (census data, newspaper advertisements, and radio programs), this study uncovers the Depression as a period in which family, work, and leisure were sources of women's oppression and exploitation, as well as the basis of emotional support, self-expression, and danger. In their families and places of employment, single, breadwinning females shouldered important economic responsibilities, but in these spaces they also found fellowship, experienced insecurity, and enjoyed freedom. Further, this project highlights how women in different class, religious, familial, racial, and ethnic locations found different ways to negotiate the trials of life in the 1930s. The experiences of individual women are crucial to our understanding of the Depression for they attest to the ways in which privilege and disadvantage, individual identities and desires, and unique contexts shaped women's lives.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3771.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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