Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction : interrogating the conjugal family / Nancy Christie -- Broken families -- 1. Gender, family, and mutual assistance in New France : widows, widowers, and orphans in eighteenth-century Quebec / Josette Brun -- 2. "painful dependence" : female begging letters and the familial economy of obligation / Nancy Christie -- 3. Itineraries of marriage and widowhood in nineteenth-century Montreal / Bettina Bradbury -- 4. Marginal by definition? : stepchildren in Quebec, 1866-1920 / Peter Gossage -- Bachelors and spinsters -- 5. invention of the margin as an invention of the family : the case of rural Quebec in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Ollivier Hubert -- 6. peddler's tale : radical religion and family marginality in the journal of Ralph Merry, 1804-1863 / J. I. Little -- 7. "Old maidism itself" : spinsterhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and life-writing texts from maritime Canada / Gwendolyn Davies -- 8. Matthews and Marillas : bachelors and spinsters in Prince Edward Island in 1881 / Michele Stairs -- Institutions and marginality -- 9. lunatic fringe : families, madness, and institutional confinement in Victorian Ontario / James Moran, David Wright and Mat Savelli -- 10. Orphans in Quebec : on the margins of which family? / Denyse Baillargeon -- 11. Nova Scotia and its unmarried mothers, 1945-1975 Suzanne Morton -- 12. Grizzled old men and lonely widows : constructing the single elderly as a social problem in Canada's welfare state, 1945-1967 / James Struthers -- Conclusion : the family as pathology : psychology, social science, and history construct the nuclear family, 1945-1980 / Michael Gauvreau.