After the boss: Discourses of working-class empowerment in Marysville, New Brunswick, 1920--1954

The history of Marysville, New Brunswick, one of the industrial communities that emerged as a centre of textile production during the industrialization of the Maritimes, is often associated with Alexander "Boss" Gibson (1819-1913), who founded and opened the cotton mill in 1885. There has been less attention to the history of the mill after its takeover by Canadian Cottons in 1908 or to the history of the working-class community that surrounded the mill. This study examines working-class life in Marysville from the 1920s to the 1950s with a view to understanding the relationship of conditional dependency that existed in the single-industry community. The focus is on the manner in which members of the working class constructed understandings that allowed them to affect circumstances and exercise personal agency. Using a methodology inspired in part by the work of Michel Foucault and Alessandro Portelli, the study draws upon oral history sources to consider the place of such issues as school, neighbourhood, church, family, gender, workplace, sport, municipal politics and trade unionism in this process. The findings provide insights into the structure of working class culture in the Maritimes and confirm E.P Thompson's axiom that "the working class made itself as much as it was made". In a community steeped in the history of its paternalistic founder, this is a study of the discourses of empowerment in a working-class community.