‘From This Common Collaboration’: Married Women and Economic Enterprise in Quebec Under the British Regime C. 1763-1820

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article draws on evidence from the voluminous criminal and civil legal archives of Quebec between 1760 and 1820 to present the dynamic economic activity of married women in an expanding colonial economy. This stands as an alternative to histories which have seen women’s entrepreneurship confined to single women or widows. It argues that despite the hybridity that developed between British and French legal systems, which some historians have argued confined women to traditional roles, this colonial society was characterised by a dual-income model of the household, where married women were strategically able to utilise their roles within the marital economy to carve out relatively independent existences as entrepreneurs, enmeshed in ligaments of credit and debt.