Social space and family reproduction among Quebec city leather workers in 1911

This article discusses family reproduction among a very specific occupational group, Quebec City leather workers at the turn of the twentieth century, in order to historicize and contextualize the dynamics of family reproduction in North America at a time of rapid urbanization and industrialization. It draws on the social history of fertility to go beyond the traditional dichotomy between materialist and cultural interpretations of demographic change. We assume that the family wage economy was rooted in people’s experience of working and living together, and reflected norms and ways of seeing that were based on the lived experiences. In particular, we mobilize the “communication communities” and kin network approaches. But we add a spatial dimension: using a dataset that links geocoded 1911 census microdata to Quebec marriage records, we undertake a household-level analysis of the social space inhabited by these families. We focus on the location of households within the city and the geographic proximity between families, on social relationships within specific subgroups, and on kinship. The results of our micro-study stretches the customary boundaries on inquiry of fertility behaviours and provide a better understanding of the complex interconnections between modes of production and reproduction strategies.