My heart has a strange courage : challenging the female life-course in Depression-era Halifax

Abstract

Encouraged by recent trends in social history, this thesis analyzes the clandestine diary of Bessie Melvin Wamboldt, written in Halifax from 1932 to 1936. This micro-historical exploration contributes a first person perspective to our understanding of the lived experience of Canadian women during the 1930s. Through an interdisciplinary examination of this diary and its historical, social and cultural contexts, this thesis seeks to understand what it meant, in multiple and contradictory ways, to be a never married, adult woman in Depression era Halifax.

Conditions of modernity and the coercive pressure of a mass consumer culture challenged young women of Bessie Wamboldt's generation to make behavioral choices that would determine their success or failure to fulfill their 'biological' destiny as sweethearts, wives and mothers. Bessie's creative navigation of the female life course during the 1930s, through the device of her diary, shows her response to historical forces that shaped her experience.