The Montreal Sheltering Home: Registering Architecture, Gender, and Class in Montreal, 1870-1910

This dissertation explores a single artifact to contribute an architectural history of women’s poor relief institutions in Montreal, Quebec: the Montreal Sheltering Home register. What does a focused study of a register reveal about women and architecture in nineteenth-century Montreal? What does the register suggest about how different classes engaged with, perceived, and experienced architecture? In contrast to traditional architectural histories that investigate the designs of prominent architects or typologies, this study contends that narrative, grounded by data from the register and animated by building plans, elevations, sections, site plans, and photographs, contributes a sharpened image of women's social, spatial, and material worlds during this period. I study a network of buildings that emerges from the register, as well as relationships among indigent women, charitable women, architects, and doctors that flowed through this network.

This approach presents the register as a critical intervention into the architectural history of Montreal at three scales. Aggregating paths between places frequently visited by, and therefore important to, serving-class women links together buildings that have never been studied as a network. At the scale of the building, I engage narratives from the register to explore how women of various classes encountered and experienced railway stations, women’s shelters, hospitals, prisons, and bourgeois homes. At the scale of the individual, the register allows me to follow a woman’s path, from her birthplace and through the network of poor relief.

Bio: Laura O’Brien is a PhD Candidate at the Peter Fu School of Architecture in Montreal, Quebec. Her research interests include gender, sexuality and space; nineteenth-century urbanism; and feminist research methodologies. She has been living in Stockholm, Sweden since 2020.