Retirement in Turn-of-the-Century Canada

Lisa Dillon, Brian Gratton, and Jon Moen. "Retirement at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Canadian Perspective." Canadian Historical Review 91 (2010): 27-59.

I'll preface this review with some frank remarks (which should go some way toward explaining my feelings below). I dislike statistics. I don't do demographic history or quantitative history (as Dillon does admirably, at Université de Montreal). I've avoided quant analysis of any kind since I meandered through a graduate social research seminar on the subject several years ago. And, as a historian (even at the grad student level), frankly one doesn't have to worry about it on anything like a day-to-day basis.

But the articles do crop up, and this is an example of one appearing in a relatively high-level (at least in Canada) history journal. It exposes some of the strengths and weaknesses of a high-level, top-down demographic approach -- and in doing so it also gives us tantalizingly few insights into the nature of retirement in Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The authors are responding to a puzzle in the historiography: the nature of retirement, which began to swell in the late 19th century. This is sooner than one might expect, given that the state social welfare programs which support aging populations, like public pension programs, didn't appear until decades later. Historians like Kenneth Bryden have argued that this is the result of an "ageist" alienation of seniors from the industrialized economy; others, including Gratton in some of his previous work (in America), argued that rising incomes meant a larger number of people could stow away enough money not to have to work themselves to death.

There's another problem, though: what exactly does "retired" mean? This is the central problem tackled in this article. A detailed examination of the Canadian 1901 census reveals a number of intriguing facets of retirement in 1900. For one thing, a very large number of people are likely to report both an occupation, and the fact that they are retired (the 1901 census was the first one which allowed people to do both, and many older men did).

Unfortunately, having finished the piece, I was still left wanting more. This is a necessary building block for a study of retirement more generally, and it raises some important points to be aware of in terms of how people might have thought about retirement in Canada in 1901. Ultimately, though, it actually tells us less than one might hope. Having completed the article, I was left as I was to begin with, unconvinced (though prepared to reconsider) that an analysis of large-scale quantitative projects like the census, and the methods which went into preparing them, can explain to us what people in 1900 thought retirement might be, and why, more importantly, they decided to retire. What this does begin to tell us is how many people retired, and what sorts of broad characteristics they were most likely to have.