Cette conférence est donnée en anglais mais les questions de l’auditoire pourront être posées en français.
Women’s history has demonstrated the importance of using an integrated approach to study women’s lives that not only combines data from a wide variety of sources but also cautions us against placing too much weight upon elite discourses without considering everyday experiences, practices, and resistance. My presentation explores how women, work, and daily life intersected in two studies: women who marketed sex; and secondly, on female keepers of taverns and inns. By consulting multiple sources such as judicial documents, parish records, census returns, notarial sources, institutional records, government documents, and newspapers, I show how this data allows me to ask new questions about their lives as prostitutes and as publicans and to unearth features of daily life ! previously little explored. Such data also permits me to examine the complex junctures between women and kin, friends, neighbours, clients, as well as civic and moral authorities in a period when Montreal was undergoing significant transformation with respect to work, demography, and social geography as well as in attitudes and laws governing social regulation and enforcement. These historical sources serve as windows onto friendship, acts of kindness and solidarity or moments of sadness, joy, fear, rage, and aggression. And, they demonstrate how women negotiated public space, relationships in their neighbourhoods, the landmines of respectability, and efforts to regulate their sexuality.