Abstract
Two recent volumes from Canada's leading scholarly presses represent the possible futures of rural history as practiced in Canada: Edward J. Hedican, After the Famine. The Irish Family Farm in Eastern Ontario, 1851–1881 and Catherine Anne Wilson, Being Neighbours. Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960. Each has implications both direct and indirect for the way that the field of family history deals with central Canadian culture as it moved swiftly from being virtually a contact culture to a fully articulated and dominant capitalistic European society. Yet, when placed side by side, the most recent works of these two scholars could almost come from different planets. The authors have a good deal in common and this needs to be pointed out. A brief discussion on their commonalities is useful, for it forms a plinth that makes it easier to see the dimensions of their divergence.
Each author has previously done significant historical work. E. J. Hedican, a historical ethnographer with a special interest in the Canadian north, published The Ogoki River Guides: Emergent Leadership among the Northern Ojibwa (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), a monograph on Ogoki River Guides among the Ojibwa and an expansion and revision of his 1978 McGill University doctoral thesis. He subsequently wrote three books of memoir and of methodological reflection. C. A. Wilson, previous to her present volume, published two works that relate to the usually ignored practice of tenancy as one of the tactics adopted in the early stages of New World settlement. Wilson's Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799–1871 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009) is a historiographical depth charge. It is a strong argument for recognizing that the alleged North-American pattern of quick acquisition of freehold farms in the settlement period was not universal; indeed, it may not even have been predominant. This argument is still not fully assimilated into the social and economic history of the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century. Its publication placed Wilson among the leaders of the new rural history of the twenty-first century.
Both authors have personal interests in their subject—in the best sense. Hedican focuses his study on Admaston Township in Renfrew County, Ontario in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. He is understandably possessive of “my own family of Irish immigrants, that of Catherine and Edward Hedican of Admaston Township; there were thirteen children” (p. 192). Hedican reports that his interest in his own family history began with his discovery in a book of wills for the Church of Ireland diocese of Dublin of Hedican, Bernard, pensioner, Chelsea Hospital and Quebec, Canada, 1835. As Hedican alludes, “from that point on I was hooked” (p. xii). He was particularly taken with the first North American in his own genealogy, Edward Hedican and his family. A native of County Kerry, this (the first) Edward was in Renfrew County, Upper Canada in 1851. One of his sons—another Edward Hedican—moved to North Dakota in 1885 and purchased land recently captured from the Dakota Sioux, and then having sold this speculative investment, moved on to Ashland, Wisconsin. There, serving as a police officer, he was shot in a firefight with an outlaw known as “the New Orleans kid.” “Stalwart Ed Hedican,” as a contemporary newspaper called him, died of his gunshot wounds (pp. 27–28).
In a similar, but less dramatic, familial fashion, C. A. Wilson's present study is warmed and to a fair degree informed by her own encounter with the diary her great-great-great grandmother kept between 1884 and 1887. Wilson shares how she “never experienced the past in such an intimate way. My historical imagination was sparked” (p. xiii). This inspiration led directly to the subject of her present monumental study of rural communal cooperative work.
Significantly, both authors were years ahead of the policy directives of the present Ontario government that incentive engaging undergraduates in academic research. Hedican used upper-level undergraduates to transcribe census records and to collate the relevant scholarly literature. Their work was individually acknowledged in an article concerning the 1861 and 1871 enumerations of Admaston Township, and in the present book. Similarly, Wilson engaged senior undergraduates and some graduate students to locate and copy primary and secondary sources. These individuals are explicitly recognized.
Thus: significant background commonality between the work of the two authors, but that is where the similarity ends.
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Catherine A. Wilson's book is a masterclass on how to do reflective and innovative rural history. The “bee” is a term that in the present day is often used in a twee sense, a romantic repainting of inter-family relations that seem to emanate from a Currier and Ives print. Wilson will have none of that. She is definitively clear in establishing the social and economic nature of reciprocal work arrangements between congeries of rural family; bees made hard labor easier, and as a communal phenomenon reduced rural isolation and social anomie.
The data set upon which Wilson makes her observations and arguments—the Rural Diary Archive—is in itself a major achievement. Wilson set about to collect as many informative diaries from rural Ontario as possible, and for this book, she has over one hundred rural diarists’ work. These were collected through an unusual and very successful set of discussions with the community groups, nonacademic historians, and of course through conventional archival sources. These documents provide an entry into a whole spectrum of topics in the history of rural Ontario, of which bees are the best place to start. Since 2015, when she created the website of the Diary Archives, volunteers have transcribed myriad texts and these are freely available. This is a “virtuous circle.” The public has provided their family treasures and the material, in turn, is shared with a larger public. And, in this book Wilson shows what can be done in the academic realm with a close and respectful reading of these diaries.
What, in this context, is a diary? The meaning is specific to time and place. These are not the diaries of twentieth or twenty-first-century individual soul-searchers: nor the “journals” so beloved of creative writing programs as the fodder for short stories and long-form public confessions, diatribes, or contagious melancholy. These diaries are defined just the way the diarists themselves did: the bare bones chronicling of important events in the lives of rural Ontario persons: in this case farmers, mostly from 1830 to the early twentieth century. Even today, anybody who has lived for a time in rural Ontario knows that their farm neighbors frequently keep an outline chronology of things that count: big weather events, the high points of local auction sales, money owed for vet bills, and so on. At present these are often recorded on computer notes, not in the sturdy binding of farm journals, but the instinct for recording non-recurring and notable agricultural facts remains; it was much stronger in the Victorian era and early twentieth century. The diaries are an insight into rural life that is almost completely unpolluted by preening. These are individual or familial records that were kept for the aid of personal and private memory: folks did not write farm diaries while looking over their shoulder at what posterity might think.
Wilson has provided 100-plus substantial items for the diary archive that are the evidentiary foundation for her present study of cooperative labor exchange in rural Ontario. These she reads both with a hard eye and with a soft. The hard eye provides the reader with the identity of each writer and with eight variables: among them location, lifespan, period of dairying, ethnicity, and religion (pp. 272–284). To accurately track down that much micro-historical data in itself is remarkable. This is not a random selection of anything—micro-historical studies rarely are: they are, instead, a statistical universe of their own and one interrogates it as such. It is fair to say that even if Wilson had never written a word derivative from these sources, the creation of such a public cultural asset still would be remarkable.
Wilson's other gaze, the soft reading of this material, is compelling. “Farm diaries are defined as those written by men and women of any age living on a farm” (298n35), and that is both a modest and a clear operational definition in collecting these artifacts. But Wilson also understands that such writings constitute “a pliable literary genre” (p. 12). Taken together, they have a rhythmic plainness, founded on the familiarities of farm life (the weather, recent work projects, and home visitors); they are expressed in clean vernacular language (no cursing), frequently in full sentences, but often in phrase and fragments that efficiently carry information while leaving out the subject of the sentence, who often was the diary writer and did not need to be identified. The diaries also were account books, recording harvests and livestock production, annual preserving of vegetables, meats, and treasured sweets, anything important but not diurnal recurrences.
There is a chronicle of family life within each of these documents. As Wilson shows, they must be read in the first instance with respectful gentleness. If one jumps into them with an agenda based on social, economic, or gender ideology, your own footprints will stamp out much of their meaning. The diaries do indeed bear analysis on ideological fronts, but that is a later exercise after one has gained an intuitive feel about how they each work, and how they relate to data gained from external sources (tax records, censuses of production, land records, newspapers, and books of rural advice). 1 After a substantial immersion in this singular genre, one becomes able to read them (as a skilfull reader would read any conventional literary text) for “submerged narratives [that] are not visible on the first reading but emerge upon subsequent readings” (300n58). Taken together, the present work demonstrates the existence over a long period of time of a trust resource that enabled networks of rural Ontario families to do collectively what they could not do separately.
In organizing her presentation and analysis of the micro-historical details of bees that number into the thousands, Wilson does not present an “Ideal Type”. She has some sharp generalizations and comments on theory, but she is too carefully aware of the multiple forms bees assume and of the constantly changing nature of this form of social reciprocity to freeze it into some sort of cultural stabile.
That is excellent scholarly practice. Yet, what one is apt to miss in a purely academic reading of this book is the sheer fascination of being shown the evolution of a form of social adaptation that is ignored in the most historical discussion of central Canada. Bees began with frontier agriculture in the years after the Napoleonic Wars. The first generation of land scraping was replaced with mixed agriculture, and subsequently followed the shifting demands of mixed farming until bees gradually tapered to near-extinction in the era of specialized agriculture after mid-twentieth century. And what a variety they were! There were in the initial period of the inter-family exchange of labor, bees for log burning to clear the land, and bees to raise the rough timber to form the early cabins. As mixed farming became predominant in Ontario—meaning several different crops and animals coming from the same farm—bees among neighbors multiplied the efficiency of each farm, but without undercutting the individuality of each family unit. By pooling labor for short periods a lot more got done for everybody. Thus, Wilson shows us sheep-shearing bees, dung bees (spreading manure manually before the invention of the manure spreader), quilting bees, hauling bees (multiple teams of horses required), and the crown jewels of reciprocal collective labor, threshing bees, and the once-in-a-lifetime bee to raise one of the splendidly crafted timber frame barns that in the late Victorian era and the early twentieth century replaced the original log structures. The reader takes all this in, the ingenuity, the social negotiations, and the sheer hard graft behind every bee. Assimilating all this is made easier by Wilson's selection of engravings and photographs. Still, it is Wilson's prose that carries the weight. She intertwines hard data analysis with some lovely, quietly tempered descriptions.
As a balance wheel in her presentation of the watch-like complexity of arrangements behind each bee, Wilson has an important chapter on bees gone wrong. Horrendous accidents occurred. For example, what an early threshing machine could do to the human body does not bear visualization. And, especially in the early period of land clearing, violence between hard men, competing with each other in shows of masculinity, frequently yielded violence and sometimes death. Even as mixed farming became dominant and a certain level of education and religious restraint intervened (Wilson instances Methodism), there was always the danger that personal grievances would be prosecuted at a collective work site. My impression in reading this chapter is that Wilson is accurate in portraying in a non-statistical fashion the degree of serious maiming that occurred in what would today be classified as “industrial accidents.” She has tallied over one hundred serious accidents and recognizes that in an era before such things were officially classified there were more. Also, she found “many fights and seventeen cases of manslaughter or murder that occurred at bees in Ontario between 1820 and 1940,” and she is aware of undercounting of “other incidents [that] were quietly resolved or went unrecorded” (p. 214). I wonder about the ambient issue that may have continually undercut the trust relationship that made bees possible: the atmosphere of apprehension that had to emanate from the inevitable presence of heavy-labor bees of the neighborhood knuckle-draggers.
One of the great things about employing diaries as a documentation of bees as a form of inter-family relationships is that they are account books, informal, and thus responsive to each family's situation. They are a splendid historical record because the diary writers were setting things down as history—in the sense that in the case of bees, the diarists recorded who had contributed how much to a given bee, how much everything had cost, and thus what one owed to whom, and vice versa. The cost of some contributions was valued in money, but mostly these were in “man-days,” the concept Wilson adopts from the ethnological literature on Continental French agricultural cooperation. As an analytic term, it covers both men and women. The writers of diaries simply wrote down verbal descriptions as a guide to later “squaring” of accounts. As for physical goods contributed to a bee—say, a side of mutton—these items were usually recorded in a few words as everybody knew what they were.
Throughout her study, Wilson is aware of the several points of tension inherent in the bee as a system of communal engagement. Some of these are mentioned in the final section of this review. Here, the centrality of the needs for a balance of exchange between families must be underscored. These often were complex, sometimes involving more than a score of participant families and always demanding a lot of trust. The trust relationship was an unwritten contract that “if I work for you, you will return the favour and not harm me or my property” (pp. 237–238.) Trust, yes, but one kept accounts.
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Edward J. Hedican's After the Famine. The Irish Family Farm in Eastern Ontario, 1851–1881 is a different product entirely. Less a book than an assemblage, it repeats the material of three substantial articles that Hedican published in the 2000s with the research aid of his undergraduate students. 2 These are padded out with some interesting opinions on a variety of subjects, by a junior-encyclopedia explanation of what various crops are (“Wheat is the main food of the western hemisphere; it grows best in cool, temperate climates with soil fertility” [p. 85] and so on for several pages on wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, and peas), and by shards of reflection on the practices of twentieth-century anthropologists and ethnographers. In a peripatetic concluding chapter Hedican provides “lessons about anthropology and history,” some of which are nothing if not Thomistic. “[S]ome may be disappointed to discover, after reading this book, that I can offer no definitive answer to the question about what determines the family size, other than to say that each family's circumstance reveals the choices that the members of families make” (p. 189). Thus, “As far as the world's families are concerned, there is no scientific basis for assuming teleological ends other than those that fulfil the practical purposes of its members” (p. 192).
Metaphysics aside, the examinable portion of this book is found in Hedican's use of micro-history as its evidentiary spine. Unlike C. A. Wilson's multisource engagement in micro-history, Hedican for systematic data has only the mid-century Ontario/Canadian censuses. The strip mining of these is a fairly simple, if time-consuming, task as the original data are easily available. Once transcriptions are made, questions can be asked. In the case of Admaston Township in Renfrew County, there is little anecdotal third-party information—a bit of local history writing, some newspaper references, but not much else. Hence, the crucial matter is to treat the parchment-thin census information carefully. Above all, one has to be careful not to break it into useless fragments by assaulting it with constructs and definitions that the original data cannot bear. Paradoxically, at the level of interpretation, micro-history with its small data sets is harder to do well than big-data projects. So, without being perfectionist, we need to look at the definitions, logic, and data-processing of micro-history projects with a particular sensitivity to the delicacy of such projects and the cumulative danger that a sequence of missteps, even small ones, poses to the overall work. Without in any way denying the good intentions and energy of the present author we need to do an audit of his methods, a checklist of small things that need to be done right if the study, taken as a whole, is to bear the weight of larger theoretical interpretations.
Here many questions arise. First, who in the world are “the Irish” in this book? There are dicta such as “the Irish family farm of eastern Ontario was a malleable entity moving inexorably through the course of time” (p. 106), but who counts as being Irish? Hedican's method is to invoke a seemingly clear taxonomy in analyzing Admaston Township: “two groups, Irish and non-Irish, with Irish meaning all individuals born in Ireland and their first-generation off-spring” (p. 116). This sounds sensible, but how does one sort out the offspring? The census of 1851 (the context in which Hedican gives his definition of “Irish” that apparently runs through 1851, 1861, and 1871) provides information on the heads of household and the individuals in that household: children, grandchildren, domestic servants, hired help, and, in a few cases, cousins from the old country. The children can be reasonably called Irish if both parents are Irish-born. But what about, for example, an English-Irish marriage? Or the union of a Canadian-born person and an Irish-born one? Hedican does not explain what he does with such cases and that is seriously detrimental. Further, if (as seems likely) he simply plunked some, or all, of the mixed marriages into the “Irish family” box, then his basic data set is polluted. Given that the entire book revolves around accepting a gnomic and unverifiable definition of “Irish families” in Admaston Township, the project arguably was foredoomed.
That the author may have been aware of this possibility is hinted by a signal occlusion, one that a knowledgeable micro-historian/ethnographer would not make by accident: the 1871 census is well known for including data on the ethnicity of each individual. This was a self-definition item determined by what each individual told the enumerator about their national origin (the ethnicity concept of the time), and what adults said about their children. At a minimum, Hedican could have run the data for 1871 on the self-definition of the ethnicity of individuals in his study against the data yielded by his own ascription of ethnicity to those same individuals. Thus, a check on the validity of his methods would have taken place and if (for example) his projection of ethnic identity onto the 1871 Admaston population needed correction, then it would also have needed correction for 1861 and for 1851 for which there are only place-of-birth data. There is no mention in Hedican's analysis of the ethnicity question in the 1871 census. Much less is there any embrace of the salutary practice of letting individuals define being “Irish” for themselves—rather than by arbitrary external criteria to which in individual cases only the author of this study is privy.
Second, Hedican focuses on family size as the litmus indicator of the cultural and economic evolution of the Irish in Admaston Township and it is the key dependent variable in his big-theory exposition of the larger social evolution of the Irish in central Canada. He takes three photographs of family size in his Admaston community, 1851, 1861, and 1871. The flaw is that he just tots up the number of kids and parents in a household as of those three moments. The dynamics of family structure at a collective level require something quite different: namely knowledge of completed family size. Anything else confuses the age structure of the study group with the issue of marital fecundity. Otherwise, in a small-number data set, such as Admaston, the apparent family size is easily swung by the age structure of the married couples who moved in—newly married and no children, or in their thirties with several. So, in fact, in this situation the apparent size of a given family is often merely a proxy for length-of-marriage.
Third, the selling point of his entire study is Hedican's assertion (it borders on a literary conceit) that he is dealing with the adaptation in family structure of post-Famine Irish migrants. “This book, then, is the story of how the Irish who fled the Great Famine managed to cope in their new country, feeding their families and making a new life for themselves under mostly harsh and marginal conditions” (p. 8). Here his 1851 data set is crucial. He analyzes in detail thirty families. He asserts that “the population structure of Admaston Township in 1851 is largely a reflection of the family composition of Irish emigrants who arrived from Ireland in the two or three years during and immediately after the Famine” (p. 129). That would mean the migrants arrived in Canada between 1847 and 1851, inclusive. Fair enough: except there are no direct probative data that indicate this is the case. Nor, given that nature of the extant shipping and Canadian immigration records, can there be direct information on his “sample.” To his credit, Hedican has a creative workaround in that he dates the time of migration to Canada through the birth ages of children in his Irish families and where they were born. It would have been helpful if he gave us actual numbers of cases behind his assertion that his township indeed was infilled with post-Famine Irish. And, why not consider the possibility that a fair body of Irish settlers in 1851 had arrived by the mid-1840s, before the famine in the homeland? The irony here is that Hedican must have been aware that pre-Famine Irish migration of all sorts (laborers, farmers, domestic servants, soldiers, and government officials) was real; he should have been especially cognizant of this: after all, he foregrounds in his preface Bernard Hedican, who was in Canada as a British soldier at least a decade before the Famine.
Fourth, Hedican in his analysis of the Admaston census makes the sensible decision “to dispense with the term ‘family,’ except under very restricted circumstances, and replace it with the term ‘household’” (p. 110). This follows from the variable nature of the work of local enumerators and thus of the difficulty of determining in a household who is a family member and who is not (pp. 110, 165). That is an admirable decision, clear and concise. Mind you, it calls into question the foundational premise of this book, that the Admaston microdata provides trustworthy new data about the Irish-Canadian family farm: now, for Hedican, the family apparently is no longer operationally definable.
Fifth, as one scratches to find something that is trustworthy, one is pleased to find interesting material on the production level of various crops that is analyzed at the level of the household. And at the same level, Hedican cross-ruffs household size with the size of farms. It looks good. Alas, the censuses for 1851, 1861, and 1871 did not report a matter relating to farm size that studies of later years have shown is necessary: these censuses did not break out holdings one acre and less. The reason this is crucial is that such holdings often were independent households: shanties for laborers, workshops for farriers and blacksmiths, rudimentary shops, and the occasional log house held by a married couple who worked as laborers and domestic servants as they saved for their own farm. By necessity, Hedican has to include the number of persons on these small holdings within the household that owned or rented the larger parcel that surrounded the tiny holdings. Obviously, this to some (unknown) degree inflates the number of persons tallied within each household (and, certainly, significantly increases the figures for average farm size.) Such augmentation of the average size of households reinforces the parallel augmentation that occurred with the apparently liberal definition of “Irish” to children of ethnically mixed marriages. Taken together, these data blips made the size of the “Irish family” larger on paper than it was in reality.
Finally to the extent that there is a narrative in Admaston's history, it is based on his belief that the “Irish farmers of Admaston township in the mid-nineteenth century could be regarded as comprising a ‘peasant’ society.” This is because “Irish farmers of eastern Ontario during the time” relied “primarily on subsistence produce” (p. 34). Thus, Hedican's implied thread of development over time is the evolution by Irish-born farmers in eastern Ontario from peasant arrangements in mid-century to a mostly market farming economy by the last quarter of the century. This narrative is chimerical.
Note here that Hedican is dealing with a frontier situation. Admaston in the Ottawa River Valley was one of the last farmable locals in Ontario to be settled. Most of the land was on the Shield; it had no first-class land (by soil type); it had the shortest growing season of any farmable region in Ontario, and that is why it was one of the very last places in central and eastern Ontario to be settled in the Victorian era. What was happening in Admaston from the early 1840s onward was not in substance different from what had taken place in better situations markedly earlier. As in the more propitious southern Ontario locales, the frontier generation of course built their own shelters, provided almost all their own food, and self-made many of their domestic utensils and small farm tools. These all were subsistence societies in their first years, but they were in no sense peasant societies—and, no, there was no Irish peasant society in Admaston. In fact, there was nothing that can be identified and verified as the “Irish family” as an independent cultural entity imported from the Old County. Instead, there was an economy based on the economic conquest of land as the first stage of settler colonial occupation. For most persons, whatever their ethnicity, subsistence farming and the family organization to permit the conquest of “empty” land was a necessary stage on the way to modest prosperity.
Here there is a simple test. It provides one of those instances where an absence of discussion in a study tells much more than the author wishes. The test is this: given that about half the population of Admaston Township was “Irish” (allegedly in a form of peasant organization apparently imported from the Old County) then how does that moiety compare with the half that was not Irish? If they are quite similar on basic metrics, then either there are multiple peasant societies in the Ottawa Valley (English peasantry, Scottish peasantry, etc.) or we are dealing with a commonality of adaptation to first-generation frontier subsistence farming. The silence here is deafening. Not only does Hedican not engage in Admaston Township the obvious comparison between Irish and non-Irish metrics—family size, household size, farm size, production data—but he elides any potential comparisons so that even a forensic accountant would be challenged to break them out of his analysis. The only place I can find an explicit comparison between Irish and non-Irish units is in three tables on age and gender in 1861 and 1871 in his 2006 article (pp. 321–322); and the “non-Irish” information is erased in the presentation of the same matters in his later monograph (pp. 131, 132, and 139). As for the pivotal enumeration of 1851, the non-Irish rate no attention at all.
No marks for guessing why. To repeat: there is no evidence in this entire volume that there is such a thing as the Irish Farm Family in Victorian Canada. Undeniably, Irish-born men and women lived in mid-century Ontario and had children and made a living, often in hard circumstances. But until proved otherwise by evidence that is replicable by someone other than its own author, the default position is that Irish migrants to the raw frontier acted in the same way as did the Scots, English, and so on. The demography of rural families in the moving frontier of nineteenth-century Ontario is an important historical matter: the more so as awareness of the societal ramifications of “pioneer” settler colonialism becomes requisite. It is worth getting right.
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Microhistory when done well—meaning evidentiarily strong and conceptually clear—has the power to raise consciousness of major historical issues that stretch across jurisdictions and cultures, often transnationally. Catherine Anne Wilson's exemplary study documents at the coal-face level a series of conditional and transitory equilibria at the family level that feeds into some big societal issues. In the several forms of bees, the simultaneous negotiation and enforcement of the equivalent of treaties between several families for cooperative labor exchange were as complicated as, say the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815. Each of these inter-family treaties was a balance of trust, reciprocity, self-interest, and communal good, always perched on a thin edge of breaking down. Yet, according to Wilson's rich archive, some of these treaties lasted for fully two generations.
The behavioral economics of small enterprises can be usefully informed historically by observing the way that bees produced results that fit the classical economic model, but without direct calculation toward that end. Specifically, Wilson's southern Ontario database establishes that family farms (“mixed farms”) instinctively achieved by cooperation something akin to “increasing returns above scale” but without penciling it all out. They may have looked like a sprawl, but bees were efficient. One of the characteristics that yielded this multiplication of results was something that the farmers understood without needing an abacus: that some folks were skilled at one thing and others at another. So, whenever the task made it possible, participants contributed what they did best, a microeconomic parallel to the theory of comparative advantage in international trade.
Inevitably, the question arises of how the mixture of individual profit and communal good plays into one of the major fascinations of Canadian historians, the apparent dominance of the liberal state? Here, Wilson's tart response bears notice. “This book shows the complexity of farm families’ relationship with the liberal order and weakens any simple narrative of rural life that purports that individualism replaced older communitarian ways.” She continues, “It shows that after 1900, when liberalism had established a strong foothold, families with mixed farms still participated in cooperative labour” (p. 20), and, she might have added, continued to do so well into the twentieth century.
As for gender theory, here too bees complicate the picture. There were bees that only included women (food processing, canning, and sewing); others that were only male (early log burning to clear land); and still others that engaged both men and women, but in completely separate roles (threshing bees with the men doing heavy manual labor and women producing a harvest feast). All of them, Wilson argues, yielded “participatory empowerment […] in a moral community where they learn, think, and work together at specific sites and for a particular task, and, in the process, steward the land and each other” (pp. 274–275). That granted, Wilson is careful to avoid romanticizing the work product, and this is especially relevant to quilts, which in the 1980s became almost votive objects for gender historians. Wilson suggests that by valorizing these objects, almost as icons, enthusiasts have focused on the physical artifact at the cost of losing the human identity of the quilters and erasing the context of the quilt in the web of the rural family economy. And, in opposition to the lazy stereotyping of male–female differences in rural Ontario she observes: “Contrary to notions of women as communal and men as individualistic, men actually participated in cooperative work more frequently and for a wider variety of tasks than women” (pp. 265–266). Granted, there are explanations for this difference stemming from the nature of the mixed family farm, but the explanation does not make the observation go away. Instead, it serves to remind family historians of the great overarching virtue of high-quality micro-historical studies such as this one: that the richness of true coal-face detail, tightly documented, prevents the theoretical from obscuring the actual—and keeps the abstract from occluding the concrete.