Family and Kinship

Apart from the less assimilated minority groups that have come to Canada from the United States (the religious communities, the blacks, the native peoples), the bulk of American immigrants to Canada have operated in terms of the modern nuclear family, with most patterns well within the normal range of behaviour for the larger Canadian and American societies. Occasionally the American-born have anticipated Canadian social trends, but on the whole they have not distinguished themselves in any significant way from the larger society. On the other hand, they have often been quite different from other immigrant groups to Canada. Throughout Canadian history, Americans have been far more likely than other immigrant groups (including the British-born) to immigrate to Canada in family units rather than as single males or females. As might be expected, this fact has meant that the male-female ratio among the American-born has always been better balanced than that of other immigrant groups, although more males than females immigrated from the United States before 1920. Interestingly, more American-born females moved to urban areas than American-born males, but this tendency was not as great as that of Canadian women as a whole, who were always drawn to the cities by economic opportunity.

Before the 1920s the vast bulk of American immigrants to Canada were farmers, committed to the concept of the independent yeoman owning and operating his own family farm. The pronoun “his” is employed deliberately, since the family farm was run on a patriarchal basis: decisions were normally taken by the male head of the household and inheritance passed if possible to the sons, whose labour was so essential to keep the farm going. The family farm was a North American institution based on a gender division of labour and the deferral of expectations. Farmers needed marriage in order to provide children, preferably sons, who would serve as an unpaid labour force. Sons were kept on the farm by promises of future inheritance, and those who could not be offered an inheritance moved on to establish new farms on vacant land. This dynamic was the heart of the westward expansion of the North American frontier. Women cared for the children and engaged in much of the lighter farm labour, such as tending the kitchen garden or the smaller livestock. On many western farms women were able to enjoy their own small income from their share of the farm operation, but in the larger sense they were at the mercy of their husbands. Most farm women had no share of the ownership of the farm, and they were not part of official Canadian employment statistics since they did not technically hold jobs. Women in several western provinces, many of them of American origin, fought to establish the wife’s equal right to family property with very limited success. Despite the frequent argument that western women, as “equal partners in pioneering conditions,” were able to gain more recognition for their contributions than their eastern counterparts, tendencies toward equality seldom extended into the economic sphere, especially in terms of landholding and inheritance. The absence of rural opportunity outside marriage for females helps account for their movement to the cities.

Although American patterns of family and kinship were generally indistinguishable from those of the larger Canadian society, there were a few differences. Americans before 1968 came from a society in which divorce was more common and more acceptable. Americans have also been less likely than members of almost any other national group to marry within it, thus further undermining the already limited nature of their cultural distinctiveness. Probably the most obvious (if undocumentable) characteristic of the bulk of the American-born in Canada has been a commitment to the values of individualism.