{"id":864,"date":"2015-10-05T03:01:09","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T03:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=864"},"modified":"2019-07-12T23:12:30","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T23:12:30","slug":"7-2-social-reform","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation\/chapter\/7-2-social-reform\/","title":{"raw":"7.2 Social Reform","rendered":"7.2 Social Reform"},"content":{"raw":"Victorian-era industrialization created conditions that called out for reform. Child-labour, sexual abuse, poverty-level pay, filthy workplaces, and slum neighbourhoods were made visible by two things: urbanization from the 1860s through to the 1920s (which brought more observers and commentators within reach of factory life) and the new investigative role of the state (in the form of Royal Commissions of Enquiry, for example). Certainly there was poverty and abuse in rural Canada, but fewer observers there to catch it and comment on it, let alone act against it.\u00a0Factory-life problems became public problems.\r\n\r\nThe combination of science and urbanization \u2014 elements that were at the heart of industrialization \u2014 was key to the identification and relief of social and political liabilities. The rise of Darwinian thought and the relatively new concept of\u00a0 evolution transformed the public\u2019s\u00a0understanding of biology and the engines of change. The [pb_glossary id=\"7594\"]germ theory[\/pb_glossary] of infection was just gaining ground as the Dominion of Canada took its first steps, so the possibility of employing strategies to avoid epidemics was increasingly well-understood. The cities were, in this context, laboratories in which social and health experiments were going to occur.\r\n\r\nWhat is more, the idea of \u201csociety\u201d was undergoing profound change. The mid- and late-19th century witnessed the rise of the scientific study of society. Sociology, political theory, and psychology are young and dynamic fields in this era, led by powerhouse thinkers like Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Karl Marx (1818-1893), Frederick Engels (1820-1895), \u00c9mile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). This phenomenon\u00a0\u2014 increased curiosity about how society works and how it might be changed systematically\u00a0\u2014 was itself made possible by the rise of the secular state. That is, by the arrival of forms of government in which the Church stood well to one side, while government (Christian, but not subservient to the clergy) was both appropriating and being handed responsibility for more and more of the social environment.\r\n\r\nInto this mix stepped the new middle-classes. Professionals and merchants, they were \u2014 almost by definition \u2014 urban. Their ranks included the well-educated, the literate, and the people who would be tasked with dealing with outbreaks of illness (physicians), ignorance (teachers), political scandal (journalists), infrastructural disaster (engineers), and moral turpitude (the clergy). As a new spokes-class, the bourgeoisie \u2014 men and women alike \u2014 were increasingly connected to international movements and ideas. They were able to exploit their own rising importance in Canadian cities to launch programs aimed at eradicating, or at least mitigating, the worst effects of modernity.\r\n\r\nWhat distinguishes this generation of reformers from the religious reformers of earlier generations is their shared concentration on social <\/b>change. The [pb_glossary id=\"7595\"]social reformers[\/pb_glossary] of the post-Confederation era were less concerned with individual improvement and redemption than they were with achieving urgent, collective, society-wide change. Meeting this goal would, they believed, create an environment in which individual betterment\u00a0was more likely to occur. Save society and then save the individual; ignore society and watch it crumble and take the individual with it.\r\n
\r\n\r\nAmong the most vulnerable populations in the 19th and early 20th century were the elderly. Historian of institutionalization Megan Davies (York University) describes eldercare in the far west.\r\n