James G. Snell – författare

Although we inevitably grow old, the social, cultural, and economic characteristics associated with aging are neither natural nor inevitable. James Snell brings a historian’s perspective to the problems of aging and the discourse that surrounds it, a discourse that affects both public policy and the way we think about older people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the elderly were coming to be thought of as a distinct group in society, whose members were inherently weak, sick, and dependent. Poorhouses were slowly being converted to old age homes, and new laws tried to force families to support their elderly parents. The state would supply only limited assistance to those who needed it. The Old Age Pension program, initiated in Canada in 1927, began to change society’s approach to the elderly. Over time individual pensioners learned to manipulate the program to their best advantage and, as a group, they began to assert their common interests, forming the first ‘grey lobby’ to pressure state bureaucrats and politicians to improve both policy and practice. The economic troubles of the 1930s and the early war years reinforced new views of the state as well as a culture of entitlement among the elderly and their families, and many other groups. By mid-century the redefinition of old age was reflected in state policies that offered the elderly new status as ‘senior citizens’ and provided them with new forms of support – particularly universal pensions and health care – captured in the phrase ‘a citizen’s wage.’

The sanctity of marriage and family life was vvirtually beyond question in the eyes of Canadian society during the early part of the twentieth century. Powerful elements within society had created these values and worked hard to maintain them. Assumptions about the family helped to shape the political, social, economic, and legal structures of Canada. The divoce laws served to maintain the status quo in familial values and gender-based attitudes, enforcing official standards of morality, family structure, and sexual conduct. James G. Snell examines the divorce laws of this period and the efforts of those who contronted the social pressures and challenged the divorce system. In view of the considerable authority of the divorce environment and the broad social support of the stus quo, their efforts are striking. An increasingly assertive group of Canadians, particularly women, defied the social taboos regarding divorce, claiming priority for their own marital needs. They manipulated the Canadian divorce process, taking advantage of existing loopholes in some instances and creating others when necessary. They insisted on the primacy of their own marital problems and in doing so resisted the immediate authority of the divorce environment while at the same time seeking the sanction of that authority. This was true not only for thuse using the formal divorce system, but also for many who resorted to informal processes of divorce.These 'pioneer' divorces led the way in creating a modern Canadian divorce system, based on consensual dissolution of marriage and relying on the courts less for arbitration between contending parties than for endorsement of a privately determined pact.