Publisher's Synopsis
During the interwar period of 1919-1939, Quebec was a strongly patriarchal society where men in the church, in politics and in medicine maintained a traditional norm of social and sexual standards that all women were expected to abide by. Some middle- and upper-class women in the media and religious communities were complicit in this vision by upholding the "ideal" as the norm and by tending to those "deviants" who failed to meet the society's expectations. Their elite voices, however, were expressing a norm that did not always correspond to reality.;This book examines the norm, how it developed and was maintained, and how it was applied to a popular understanding of motherhood and sexuality. Professor Levesque then turns to those women - chiefly of the working class - who have left traces in the historical record of their transgressions from the norm. Women of the middle and upper classes had the means to hide better their sexual activity through contraception, and when that failed they could afford safer abortions or more discreet birth. Deviance from the norm included the rejection of motherhood, (abortion, infanticide, abandonment), pregnancy and birth outside marriage, and prostitution.;From the pulpit and the drawing rooms to brothels and hospitals for unwed mothers, the author examines the underside of a staid and repressive society. She concludes: "during these 20 years, women who had been defined as deviant remained attached to their adopted behaviour, which was far more accepted than anyone would have dared to admit. They were deviant, but only in relation to a norm upheld to stave off a modernism that threatened to swallow up a Quebec based on long-established social and sexual roles".
