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Description
Before the advent of state-financed social services, poor relief in Quebec was private and sectarian. In Montreal a group of conservative, bourgeois women played a significant role by establishing institutions for destitute women and children. Their Benevolent Design explores how gender shaped the challenges inherent in their benevolent project.
"The subject of institutionalized 'care' for children is not only historically important: it is an issue of our times. Their Benevolent Design is excellent social history that documents the activities and institutional apparatus of poverty relief at a key moment in Montreal's history. Harvey examines two important private charities founded and led by women, convincingly arguing that they provided essential (but not unproblematic) services for the city's desperate women and children, that they were sites of gender and class identity formation, and that they were a means by which elite conservative women shaped Montreal history." Tamara Myers, University of British Columbia and author of Youth Squad: Policing Children in the Twentieth Century
Janice Harvey is a retired professor, now scholar in residence at Dawson College and a member of the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales in Montreal.