Abstract

As newcomers to Montreal, young single, working women were often subject to low salaries, poor housing options, and unknown dangers—both real and imagined—of a big city. This article considers the Julia Drummond Residence as a place of intersection for two groups of women: the middle-class volunteers who ran the residence and the young, single working women who lived there. While meeting a need in society by providing shelter and food for women earning small salaries, the women running the residence were just as concerned with shaping the femininity and moral fibre of the residents. The practices and ideology of these women, who used the language of reform and renewal, resembled closely those of social reformers of the previous generation, echoing judgment of femininity based on understandings of race, class, religion, and sexuality. This article explores what it was like to live at the residence, how some women found the residence a “home away from home” while others were less comfortable in the unfamiliar and seemingly cold middle-class institution. Positioning themselves as independent citizens of Montreal, at a time when affordable housing became increasingly available, many young, single women asserted their freedom and independence in the years following the Second World War by challenging the regulations imposed on them, and, in so doing, rejected the structured femininity offered to them by institutions such as the Julia Drummond Residence.

Abstract

This article is about the representations of villégiature (summer resorts) in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century. In the context of urbanization and industrialization of this period, villégiature is analyzed in connection with the search for nature and the desire to break away from the urban rhythm through holidays. The study of Montreal’s newspapers, from 1895 to 1910, shows that despite the wish to leave the city and its negative aspects (pollution, stress), city-dwellers end up replicating many urban traits in the country. This reveals some contradictions. The idealization of a rural nature comes with the desire to modify the countryside to make it prettier and more comfortable, based on holidaymakers’ criteria and needs. The excitement about holidays and free time comes with a fear of vacuity and the organization of timetables similar to the organized rhythm of urban life. Villégiature then appear as a sign of turbulent times and help to understand the influence of urban and industrial changes on urban mentality.

Abstract

There is a complex relationship between the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede (Stampede) and the City of Calgary. On the one hand, the Stampede depends on the municipal government for its very existence. On the other, its arm’s-length structure and success in attracting power and influence lend an independence more typical of a private corporation. Since both agree on the value of the Stampede to the City, relations between the two have been far more co-operative than strained. However, in the two instances of public controversy over decisions made by both, the City has allowed the Stampede to take the burden of blame, with the result that the public’s image of the Stampede has blurred its aura of independence has been enhanced.

Abstract

There has been an outburst of scholarship on world and global cities in recent years, though cities under the guise of political entities—that is, municipal urban governments— have not been considered by this literature as having a relevant degree of agency in the process of interconnection that has been named globalisation. While they are both agents and subjects of this process, their part has been neglected or considered under a very limited chronological angle. This article offers an approach to the “municipal web” that has developed between and about municipal urban governments in the modern era. This web includes municipal governments, municipal officials and technicians as well as scholars, experts and lay reformers; intergovernmental organizations, domestic and transnational non governmental organisations as well as sections of national or infra national governments; firms as well as non profit groups. The article pays special attention to those who weaved this web and the material they used, to the items that travelled through this web of municipal interchange. It insists on the importance of studying current interconnections among and about cities in the historical perspective.