Why Gender Landlord/Tenant Relations?

Robert C. H. Sweeny, Université du Québec à Montreal & Memorial University of Newfoundland

We tend to think of landlord tenant relations as being primarily socio-economic, perhaps even exploitative, but are there grounds to think of them being gendered relations as well? A tentative answer in the affirmative is provided by an analysis of the first complete linkage of a large city's ownership records with the decennial census detailing who their tenants were. Montreal City Council published a 1,340 page listing of who owned the city in 1903 which the H-GIS project Montréal, l'avenir du passé (MAP) transformed into a Q-GIS application. MAP has just completed linking 99.7% of the 51,000 households in the 1901 census to their specific lot in this application. In an overwhelmingly tenant city, where less than 6% of households were simple homeowners, women owned a quarter of all rental units. Preliminary analysis of the social and gender characteristics of these landladies' tenants reveals striking differences with those of the city's landlords. Of perhaps greatest significance is that close to half of the one in eight households headed by a woman in 1901 had a landlady rather than a landlord. Notable differences along lines of ethnicity and the highly charged question of over-crowding are also clearly visible. This richly descriptive evidence does not allow us to explain these differences, but it certainly raises important questions that merit close consideration as we develop our research strategies in urban history.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 134. Urban Economics