THE URBAN EXPERIENCEOutcomes:

*Students will be able to research and analyze the changing social and economic nature of Victorian Canada as portrayed in the literature of the time.

*Students will be able to show how technology was affecting Canada both in a rural and urban setting.

*Students will demonstrate an understanding of the manner in which industrialization and urbanization transformed Canada.

The Urban Experience:

There has always been urban areas of Canada since the Europeans settled. However, with the raise of the modern industrial city, the U.S. and Canada entered an urban age.

By World War I, 40% of Canada’s population was urban; and by 1921, the census showed that more Canadians lived in urban centers than in rural areas.

The Urban Experience:

Pros Jobs More jobs for women Ability to live in an area

where political changes were actually made.

People did not need to have means of transportation because of public transportation.

Services like electricity, water, and sewers.

Easier access to medical services.

Cons Overcrowding Corruption Social disorder Lack of municipal

services Water quality Transportation Poverty Disease Crime Inefficient government

The Urban explosion in the U.S began in the 1850s and reached its peak between 1880 and 1900.

New York – 2 mil./ 1880 to 3.5/1900

Chicago – 440 000 to 1.7 mil.

Philadelphia – 847 000 to 1.3 mil.

The urban explosion hit Canada in 1860 first in the Atlantic region.

Halifax, Saint John, and St. John’s – 25 000 to 50 000.

After 1880 Montreal emerged as Canada's first national transportation metropolis. Toronto followed with its rich agricultural and resource hinterland.

America Canada

Drought and the Great Depression in 1929-30 brought an end to this era of urban expansion, both in the Prairies and elsewhere.

Life In The Cities

New buildings, new services, and new amenities cause profound changes in Canadian society, and more importantly, and the everyday lives of Canadians.

Cities drew people into the urban areas by boasting of railroad stations, modern convinces such as eclectic lights and water.

Montreal – Bank of Montreal and Canadian Pacific Railway

Changing Face Of The City

The trolley revolutionized urban transportation.

Cities started to be divided by a network of rail lines into definable residential districts, rich and poor.

Houses, shops, businesses followed the transit lines from the centre of the city. Land prices sharply increased in urban areas.

Street Lighting:

Street lighting provided an important indicator of the relative economic status of city districts.

Lights was installed first in the central commercial areas and then on the streets servicing homes of the well-to-do.

Lighting was poor in most residential sections. Downtown in the poorer districts behind the great stores and hotel the light was poor or non-existent.

Problems In The Cities:

Overcrowding

Corruption

Social disorder

Lack of municipal services

Water quality

Transportation

Poverty

Disease

Crime

Inefficient government

Canada’s new industrial cities, particularly Montreal, Hamilton, and Toronto, like many in N.A. at the time, could be grimy, smoky, and unpleasant places to live. “Industrial smoke” from the factory chimneys, a 1915 report noted:

“…disfigures buildings, impairs of health of the population, renders the whole city filthy, destroys any beautify with which it may naturally be endowed and tends, therefore, to make it a squalid and undesirable place of residence.”

HOUSEING CONDITIONS:

Every major city had its affluent residential districts, where “captains of industry” lived in ornate villas with well-kept grounds on tree-lined avenues.

Montreal – “Golden Mile” or “the city above the hill”.

Every major city also had poor-house districts most had disgraceful housing that were over crowed that were bursting with recent immigrants.

Montreal – “the city below the hill.”

Residential Districts: Poor-Housing Districts:

The Cost Of Living:

City dwellers experienced inflation and periodic recessions accompanied by unemployment, and they faced a massive influx of immigrant labor competing for jobs, housing, and municipal services.

1900-1921 the wages in Toronto’s skilled workers rose steadily.

1916 the wages of workers were so low that children 14-15 had to leave school to help provide for the family.

Rents for housing were so exorbitant in Toronto and Montreal that family could not afford the rent without having to sub-let parts of their houses.

Public Health And Sanitation:

Urban areas like Toronto has issues with inadequate water-supply and sewage-disposal systems.

In 1906 14% of water samples in Toronto were found to be infects. However, the city did nothing to change the water conditions for over four years. One of the major causes of this infected water was the fact that the city was pumped raw sewage into the Toronto Bay which was just a short distance from the city’s water intake.

Contaminated Milk – It was responsible for the city’s high infant mortality tae.

The Urban Progressive Movement: Canada was looking to the south and

saw all the problems the U.S. urban areas were having and they wanted to avoid those problems. In the 1880s and 1890s Canada began the Urban Progressive Movement.

The Urban Progressive Movement: The Urban Progressive Movement was

created out from fear of excessive industrialization and massive overcrowding. These things created social problems like poverty, crime, disease, prostitution and all other sorts of miseries that the U.S. was experiencing.

The Urban Progressive Movement: The Urban Progressive Movement

reached its peek during the great war, and as wave of social regeneration swept across Canada. However, its legacy is the host of civic services and municipal institutions still in existence today in urban areas.

Women’s Reform:

As Canadian society became more urban and industrialized, the separation of the workplace from the home became increasingly evident, as did the distinction between the public, or “work”, sphere and the private sphere of the home.

The majority of women were confined to working at the home at household task. Although by the late nineteenth century Canadian women were entering the workforce.

Women Reform:The idealization of women’s role failed to take account of a number of factors that made it impossible to realize.

Every woman was financially dependent on a male breadwinner.

Every male was able to earn enough to support his family.

This over looked single, widowed, and divorced women.

Married women combined household duties with other takes to supplement the family income.

Idea: Reality:

Women’s Reform:

Women had long been active in charitable institutions that dealt with social problems. Growing dissatisfaction with their role in the private sphere led many to an increased awareness of and involvement with issues.

People who openly criticized women for their activism were met with two major arguments: “Maternal” or “Social” Feminism “Equal Rights” or “Equality”

Two Arguments For Feminism: Maternal Feminism:

women’s special experience in caring for their families should be extended to responsibility for establishing order in society; and, unless women had the vote, social conditions would not be improved and society reformed.

Equal Rights: This argument was based on a concept of simple justice: women were human begins, endowed with the same abilities as men. Yet men only, and elected only by men, made decisions for women.

The Urban Suffrage Movement:

By The late nineteenth century, when Canadian women’s suffrage societies were first being founded, the social conditions that produced the N.A. urban reform movement – industrialism, urban congestion, city slums – were much in evidence.

Canada’s first suffrage societies, to a greater degree than their American counterparts, emerged as part of a broad reform movement encompassing temperance, child welfare, public health, and other social issues.

Canadian suffragists used “equal rights” and “maternal” feminist arguments in equal measure to promote their causes.

The First Suffrage Groups:

Toronto Women’s Suffrage Association 1877

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 1890s Nova Scotia New Brunswick Manitoba

The National Council of Women of Canada 1893

These groups were promoting woman’s right to vote, professions to be open to women, and universities

allowing women to attend.

The First Breakthroughs:

Two developments with quite contradictory effects seemed to push the campaign into action in 1910: Canadian women adopted British Suffragettes tactics o f

hunger strikes and public marches. These attracted lots of attention.

More suffrage groups were springing up all over Canada. In Toronto alone in 1916 there were over 8 suffrage associations.

Many suffragists believed that men had proven themselves unfit to make decisions for society's welfare and that public life needed an application of maternal skills to clean up the ills of urban society, but they did recognize that women’s primary duty lay within the home.

The militant tactics of the U.S. and British suffragettes had little appeal in Canada; only a handful of more radical feminist were in favor of such strategies.

In keeping with the country’s reputed character, the Canadian suffragists generally waged war via petitions, stagds mock parliaments, sponsored plays, arranged exhibits, and sold postcards.

One of the most effective reform weapons was the Manitoba mock parliament, staged in 1914, and the Winnipeg Political Equality League, in which women legislators debated the merits of extending the franchise to men and turned all the usual arguments on end.

The Enfranchisement of Women:

Manitoba 1916

Sask. 1916

Alberta 1916

Ontario 1917

B.C. 1917

N.S 1918

N.B. 1919

P.E.I. 1922

Women’s suffrage owed as much to WWI as it did to the determined efforts of the suffrage campaigners.

Canada’s entry into the conflict in 1914 opened up new opportunities for women in voluntary patriotic services out side of the home and employment in the booming munitions industry.

During the war, Canadian women demonstrated the organizing skills and expertise they had acquired in their suffrage and reform organizations.

Grudgingly, Canadian men came to recognize the nation’s debt to its women.

By the end of 1900 reformers came to place more emphasis on concrete structural changes, such as the achievement of women’s suffrage, the modernization of municipal government, the establishment of improved health and welfare services, stricter controls on housing development, and even the take over of municipal utilities.

Public Health And Social Welfare:

Improvements:

Vaccination Programs

Water Supply

Sewage Disposal

Milk Processing

Nursing Programs

Dental Schools

Medical examinations

Public health regulations were passed in many cities after 1880 to deal with the problems of disease control, contaminated food, sanitation, and substandard housing.

Still it wasn’t enough, in 1919 a report was released saying that over half of the students in school still suffered from “physical defects”.

Public Health And Social Welfare:

Moral Reform Stamping out juvenile crime, intemperance, immorality,

and civic corruption.

Social Welfare and Housing Reform: Rapid urban growth overloaded the system of charitable

and church organization that were the main resources for people. Examples of social welfare: Asylums City Playgrounds Food Inspection

Little to no improvement on the house reform. There was inadequate, low-cost rental housing for the working classes.

French Canadian’s And Women’s Rights:

In 1919. women won the right to a sea in the House of Commons.

However, in Quebec the women’s movement was not again ground like in other provinces. Government insisted that female enfranchisement would prove disastrous for the traditional Roman Catholic, French-Canadian way of life – disrupting homes, destroying marriage ties, lowering birth rates, and weakening both parental authority and public respect for women.

For another 22 years these arguments continued to frustrate Quebec women in their struggle for the provincial vote. They received the right to vote finally in 1940.

Urban Reform And Illusions of Progress:

Canada’s first phase of urban reform arose in the 1880s, peaked in the years after 1900, and gradually declined in the 1920s.

Like its American counterpart, the Canadian movement aroused public interest but did not always translate reform ideas into genuine social and economic improvements.

Most municipal reformers focused narrowly on administrative changes and did not sure the social and economic problems that accompanied the urban industrial revolution.

The basic features of the modern Canadian city Mass transit systems Public utilities Official plans Civic boards and commissions Range of social services.

These features took shape in the years 1880-1920. Only four decades later, the main achievements of this first ware of reform would come under attack from a new generation of urban reforms.