Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: The Interwar Years

Françoise Noël explores the social context of Canada's most famous family to show how family ritual and communal events structured everyday life between the wars.

An extensive series of interviews with local residents and a reconstruction of local news and events as chronicled in The Nugget newspaper, among other sources, allow Noël to bring to life the daily routines and celebrations that were a part of family life in rural and urban settings from Mattawa to North Bay. Family life was not lived in isolation, and she also reveals the rich community life that developed in shared social spaces like schools and churches, and through community groups. What people did for fun may have been frivolous but it was not trivial: accounts of shared leisure activities, popular sports, and community festivals such as Old Home Week provide important insights into the structure and value of community life.

While the question of relations between French-speaking, English-speaking, and other Canadians and immigrants has often been analysed in terms of conflicts, Noël shows the extent to which such communities lived side by side in relative harmony during the inter-war years, although such harmony was often achieved by minimizing the extent of inter-community interaction. Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario provides a detailed perspective on family and community life outside the larger Canadian urban centres that have been the focus of much previous scholarly study.