“It was a Hard Life”:Class and Gender in the Work and Family Rhythms of a Railway Town, 1920‑1950
Abstract Most social histories of the working class have focussed on women's or men's experience alone. However, while studies of working-class women have often been sensitive to the way in which class and gender relationships are constructed and reconstructed simultaneously, histories of working-class men have been largely gender-blind. In an attempt to provide a more comprehensive understanding of gender-based divisions in the working-class experience this study examines the relationship between male and female work worlds in the railway ward of Barrie, Ontario between 1920 and 1950. Based primarily on oral history, this paper argues that the class and gender conditions and relations of the period set limits to what was available and possible for the men and women of the railway ward. In most families, husbands were breadwinners and wives were full-time homemakers. This pattern was the response of railroad families to the constraints created by the gender division of wage work, railway labour rhythms, the prevailing conditions of reproductive labour, and the ideology of patriarchy. None the less, railroaders and their wives also made choices within the limitations of their lives. These choices had different implications for the men and women of the community. The strategies men and women adopted for survival and well-being also began to change over the period, both altering as well as being changed by the constraints they faced. As conditions changed, concepts of masculinity and femininity which informed their strategies began to shift — but not dramatically. The experience of the railway community revealed that the construction of gender identities was a complex and contradictory process. Indeed, the historical literature on the social construction of gender has really only began to grapple with the many dimensions which comprised that process.