Social and Cultural Change: Demographics, Education, Religion, Women, Labour and Culture
This cross-cutting domain rewards you for connecting demographics, education, religion, women's roles, labour and culture to the political narrative rather than listing them.
Demographics
New France and rural Québec had high fertility, reinforced by the Church and the parish economy. The birth rate fell from the late 19th century, collapsed in the 1960s (the pill, secularization, urbanization), and Québec now has one of Canada's lowest fertility rates, offset by immigration and an aging population. Montreal dominates urban growth by the mid-19th century; rural exodus peaks between 1900 and 1930.
Education
- 1867: education is provincial (s.93); confessional Catholic and Protestant school commissions.
- 1943: compulsory schooling to age 14, a late reform under Godbout.
- 1964–68: Ministry of Education, CEGEPs, Université du Québec.
- 1998: school boards deconfessionalized and reorganized on linguistic lines.
Religion
The Church runs schools, hospitals, charities and parishes; ultramontane and clerical nationalism peak between 1840 and 1930. Practice collapses in the 1960s; the 2008 Bouchard–Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation shows the new debate over secularism.
Women
- 1940: provincial suffrage (Thérèse Casgrain, Idola Saint-Jean).
- 1964: Bill 16 gives married women legal capacity.
- 1973: Conseil du statut de la femme; 1975: Québec Charter of Rights.
- 1980s–90s: pay equity (1996) and low-cost daycare (1997); female labour participation rises sharply after 1970.
Labour
Craft unions → Catholic CTCC (1921) and AFL affiliates → Rand formula (1944) → Asbestos (1949) → 1972 Common Front, with jailed union leaders → 1980s concession bargaining.
Culture
Maria Chapdelaine (1914), Refus global (1948), the chansonniers and téléromans of the 1950s–60s, the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, NFB cinema, and a literature of identity from Gabrielle Roy to Michel Tremblay.
Worked example
A parish register shows baptisms falling from 45 per 1,000 in 1951 to 15 per 1,000 in 1971. Reasoning: this is a rate, not a count; check the denominators; correlate with urbanization, women's education and the pill; do not infer belief directly from baptism, since practice and social convention both matter.
Traps
- Saying Québec women voted provincially in 1918.
- Dating compulsory schooling to Confederation rather than 1943.
- Treating Refus global (1948) as a Quiet Revolution text - it anticipates it.
- Using "secularization" loosely: institutions, practice and law changed at different speeds.