Domesticating parks and mastering playgrounds : sexuality, power and place in Montreal, 1870-1930

• Main Author: Schmidt, Sarah (Sarah Trainor), 1971-
• Other Authors: Morton, Suzanne (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1996
• Subjects: Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association > History.; Parks > Québec (Province) > Montréal > History.; Playgrounds > Québec (Province) > Montréal > History.; Montréal (Québec) > Social life and customs > History.
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26758

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Montreal witnessed the proliferation of parks and playgrounds. Products of urban capitalist development, these deeply ideological spaces, inscribed with different gender, class, ethnic, and sexual meanings, are the subject of this thesis. Moving from the scenic park to the neighbourhood park to the playground, this study examines the relationship among the power to construct a space, the values inscribed in it, and a system of regulation designed to either bar the less powerful or eject those who challenged these values. It links the uneven development of parks and playgrounds in Montreal to the unequal power of the different classes and ethnic groups. It connects the construction of parks as domestic enclaves for families generally and women specifically to the function of parks, places to uphold female propriety, respectable (hetero)sexuality, and bourgeois domesticity. It traces how those who embodied social unrest, economic disorder, and sexual chaos (the drinking man, the vagabond, and the "promiscuous" young working woman) were subject to a policy of exclusion. It charts the process by which the proponents for playgrounds, the elite anglophone organization the Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association, manipulated play space as a means to curb male vices and contain male heterosexual urges, as well as train working-class boys to be good citizens and obedient workers in the (Anglo-Saxon) nation. This thesis is a history of how the powerful architects of these gendered spaces helped construct the norm and justified the punishment of the deviant.