Your search

Canadian women's history, though relatively new in the history of the profession, is now considered by some to be passé, past its prime, out of touch with the realities of the postmodern world of the 1990s. In fact, there is also a new interpretation of the historical evolution of Canadian women's history emerging, which situates women's history in the one dimensional past, gender history in the three dimensional future. ...[W]e need to re-examine the Canadian women's history which was actually written over the last twenty years as well as the current direction of gender history, then assess the theoretical and political underpinnings of both. We may actually find more overlapping continuities, similarities and problems. --Introduction than stark contrasts and oppositions.

This thesis examines the role of women in Canadian socialist parties from the 1920's to the post-World War II period, by focusing on women involved in the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the primary manifestations of organized socialism during these years. Concentrating on two regions, Ontario and the West, the thesis explores three major themes: the distinct role women played within each Party, the Party's view of the woman question, and the construction of women's committees within each Party. The thesis explains why women were drawn to the socialist movement, assesses the successes and failures of each Party's program for women's equality, and suggests how and when feminist and socialist ideas intersected within the Canadian Left. The written history of the Canadian Left has largely neglected socialists' views of the woman question and women's role in the CPC and CCF. Although 'women were concentrated in less powerful positions, they did play an important, and distinctive, role in the making of Canadian socialism. Moreover, attention to women's social and economic inequality was a concern of Canadian socialists. Between 1920 and 1950, however, women's emancipation was never a priority for socialists. This thesis explains some of the reasons, both internal and external to the movement, for the secondary status of the woman question. Because the CCF and CPC emerged from different ideological traditions, their views of the woman question varied, and this thesis contrasts the two Parties' definition of women's issues and their commitment to women's emancipation. At the same time, there were some similarities between the two Parties, such as their attempts to link women's maternal and domestic roles with their political consciousness. The thesis also suggests ways on which socialists' ideas resembled the earlier ideology of womanhood and reform termed 'maternal feminism' and how their ideas, shaped by a different class perspective and social context, differed from the earlier feminists.

The article reviews the book, "A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change," by E. Sylvia Pankhurst, edited with an introduction by Katherine Connelly,.

In 1971, the word "Texpack" became a flashpoint of political attention, debate, and anger for labour activists across Canada. Many mobilized to support strikers at Texpack's small textile firm in Brantford, Ontario, though some trade unionists from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) turned their backs on the independent Canadian union, the Canadian Textile and Chemical Workers Union (CTCU), leading the strike. The significance of Texpack lay not simply in this stark manifestation of schisms within the house of labour, but rather in the strike's central role as a touchstone for political debates concerning economic and Left nationalism, and what kind of unions best served Canadian workers. This article explores the strike as a microcosm of broader political struggles of the period, particularly questions of nationalism and internationalism of unions. --From introduction

Canadian women on the political left in the first half of the twentieth century fought with varying degrees of commitment for women's rights. Women's dreams of equality were in part a vision of economic and class equality, though they also represented profound desires for equality with men - both within their own parties and in the larger society. In both the Communist Party of Canada and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a male-dominated leadership seldom embraced women's causes wholeheartedly or as a doctrinal priority. So-called women's issues, whether birth control, consumer issues, or equal pay, usually took second place to an emphasis on the general needs of workers or farmers. Nonetheless, many women continued to promote their feminist causes through the socialist movement, in the hope that, eventually, the socialist New Jerusalem would see their dreams of equality fulfilled. In Dreams of Equality, Joan Sangster chronicles in fascinating detail the first tentative stages of a politically aware women's movement in Canada, from the time of women's suffrage to the 1950's when the CPC went into decline and the CCF began to experience the changes that would evolve into the New Democratic Party a decade later. --Publisher's description. Originally published: Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989. Contents: Preface --Theory and practice: early Canadian socialists explore the woman question -- The Communist Party of Canada confronts the woman question -- Red revolutionaries and pink tea pacifists: communist and socialist women in the early 1930's -- Militant mothering: women in the early CCF -- More militant mothering: communist women during the popular front -- From working for war to prices and peace: communist women during the 1940's -- The CCF confronts the woman question -- Conclusion: women and the party question.

The article reviews the book, "Women and the politics of class," by Joanna Brenner.

Between 1920 and 1960 wage-earning women in factories and offices experienced dramatic shifts in their employment conditions, the result of both the Depression and the expansion of work opportunities during the Second World War. Earning Respect examines the lives of white and blue-collar women workers in Peterborough during this period and notes the emerging changes in their work lives, as working daughters gradually became working mothers. Joan Sangster focuses in particular on four large workplaces, examining the gendered division of labour, women's work culture, and the forces that encouraged women's accommodation and resistance on the job. She also connects women's wage work to their social and familial lives and to the larger community context, exploring wage-earning women's 'identities,' their attempts to cope with economic and family crises, the gendered definitions of working-class respectability, and the nature of paternalism in a small Ontario manufacturing city. Sangster draws upon oral histories as well as archival research as she traces the construction of class and gender relations in 'small town' industrialized Ontario in the mid-twentieth century. She uses this local study to explore key themes and theoretical debate in contemporary women's and working-class history. --Publisher's description

For one hundred years women fashioned different dreams of equality, autonomy, and dignity; yet what is Canadian feminism? In Demanding Equality, Joan Sangster explores feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s.She broadens our definition of feminism, and – recognizing that its political, cultural, and social dimensions are entangled – builds a picture of a heterogeneous movement often characterized by fierce internal debates. This comprehensive rear-view look at feminism in all its political guises encourages a wider public conversation about what Canadian feminism has been, is, and should be. --Publisher's description. Contents: Spreading the word of women's emancipation -- The origins of socialist and labour feminism -- Women, democracy, and suffrage -- Reform feminism and women's right to work -- Agrarian, labour, and socialist feminism after the Frist World War -- Feminism and the party question -- Feminism, war, and peace -- Feminism in a Cold War climate -- Liberating feminism -- Feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s -- Afterword: Feminist challenges of the 1990s and beyond.

Introduces and summarizes the five articles presented for the roundtable that was convened on the 50th anniversary of the founding of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Takes note of the various themes explored, including labour feminism.

In the 1970s, women in Toronto created the Waitresses Action Committee to protest the introduction of a "differential" or lower minimum wage for wait staff serving alcohol. Their campaign was part of their broader feminist critique of women's exploitation and the gendered and sexualized nature of waitressing. Influenced by their origins in the Wages for Housework campaign, they stressed the linkages between women's unpaid work in the home and the workplace. Their campaign eschewed worksite organizing for an occupational mobilization outside of the established unions; they used petitions, publicity, and alliances with sympathizers to try to stop the rollback in their wages. They were successful in mobilizing support but not in altering the government's decision. Nonetheless, their spirited campaign publicized new feminist perspectives on women's gendered and sexualized labour, and it contributed to the ongoing labour feminist project of enhancing working-class women's equality, dignity, and economic autonomy. An analysis of their mobilization also helps to enrich and complicate our understanding of labour and socialist feminism in this period.

This collection of essays focuses on the experiences of women as poliutical activists in twentieth-century Canada, both in the mainstream of party politics and in groups outside the mainstream. The latter include women in the socialist and labour movements, the farm and peace movements, and women active in variouss ethnic communities. Expanding the notion of politics, the authors highlight the widespread naturee of women's activism - particularly at the local level - and challenge the easy formulation that women were primarily interest in the vote and lost interest in politics when they acquired it. Some of the essays suggest that even the suffrage campaign has been misrepresented as solely a middle-class movement. Women evolved their own styles of political pparticipation shaped by local contexts, class, culture, family, and life cycle. Women often organized at the community level, and worked both in combination with men and in women-only settings. Contributors to the volume explore women's involvement in organizations from the political left to right, and women's efforts to shape Canada's political priorities and activities. Politically minded women often found that their best outless for commitment and service was through women's organizations, which addressed their needs and provided a base for effective action. --Publisher's description

This paper traces the rise and fall in Ontario of the Workers Educational Association (WEA), a voluntary association whose main purpose was to organize inexpensive, non-credit night classes taught by university professors for the working class. The Association was an offshoot of the British WEA. ln Ontario the main impetus for establishing an Association in 1918 came from members of Toronto's intellectual elite. One of their aims was to teach labour people "responsible behaviour" at a time when the labour movement seemed to be gaining influence and becoming more radical. Working-class people within the WEA proved less malleable than the academics had hoped, and the Association soon became a workers' organization, largely controlled by some of its working-class members. It offered many liberal arts courses and, in the late 1930s and 1940s, developed innovative labour education and research programmes which proved of lasting benefit to the labour movement. Although continually threatened by the University of Toronto administration, the WEA failed in the 1950s because certain labour leaders, using Cold War tactics, opposed a labour educational institution that they could not control.

Interpretations of Aboriginal women's work have shifted over time, but they have been absolutely central to First Nations women's experiences of colonialism. Yet, in both women's history and Aboriginal history, there has been a "mystification" of Indigenous women's labor, because it was often defined as nonproductive or marginal within capitalist economies; wage work was particularly neglected (Littlefield and Knack 1999: 4). Yet, by studying women's labor in its multiple forms (paid, unpaid, voluntary, ceremonial, commodity production), and in multiple contexts (bush, urban, reserve or reservation), we can gain immense insight into how colonialism was structured, experienced, negotiated, and resisted by women at the level of daily life. By perusing past academic writing on Aboriginal women and work, this paper explores some of the intellectual, political, and social influences that have shaped understandings of Aboriginal women's labor in Canada and the United States, asking what insights we have gained, what questions we need to answer, and what contradictions we still face in our research. Arguably, we need a dialogue that crosses disciplines and theoretical approaches, with perspectives and traditions from Aboriginal history, feminist theory, and labor studies informing and challenging each other. There are transnational trends and shared perspectives in Aboriginal women's history that cross the 49th parallel; however, we also need to identify how and why national and regional histories and interpretations diverge. Still, one transnational commonality highlighted in this paper is the close connection between politics and research, between the present and the past: the questions posed by scholars have been stimulated and inspired by Aboriginal thought and organizing, and Aboriginal politics have benefited from scholarly research. Although research may still be difficult and contested terrain in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations (Smith 1999; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997), there is hope that scholarly dialogue might contribute productively to decolonization. --From Introduction

Abstracts of papers from no. 86, Fall 2020.

From mining to sex work and from the classroom to the docks, violence has always been a part of work. This collection of essays highlights the many different forms and expressions of violence that have arisen under capitalism in the last two hundred years, as well as how historians of working-class life and labour have understood violence. The editors draw together diverse case studies, integrating analysis of class, age, gender, sexuality, and race into the scholarship. Essays span the United States and Canadian border, exploring gender violence, sexual harassment, the violent kidnapping of union organizers, the violence of inadequate health and safety protections, the culture of violence in state institutions, the mythology of working-class violence, and the changing nature of violence in extractive industries. The Violence of Work theorizes and historicizes violence as an integral part of working life, making it possible to understand the full scope and causes of workplace violence over time. --Publisher's description, Contents: Introduction: Accounting for violence / Jeremy Milloy -- The perils of sex work in Montreal: seeking security and justice in the face of violence, 1810-1842 / Mary Anne Poutanen -- The rules of discipline: workers and the culture of violence in progressive-era reform schools / James Schmidt -- The "new solution": anti-labour kidnapping, D.B. McKay, and the legacy of the second Seminole War / Chad Pearson -- Billy Gohl: labour, violence, and myth in the early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest / Aaron Goings -- Slow violence and hidden injuries: the work of strip mining in the American west / Ryan Driskell Tate -- The murder of Lori Dupont : violence, harassment, and occupational health and safety in Ontarion / Sarah Jessup -- "By the nuimbers" : workers' compensation and the (further) conventionalization of workplace violence / Robert Storey -- Gender violence in the hospitality industry: panic buttons, pants, and protest / Emily E. LB. Twarog.

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canadaand the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts fromthe1940s to the1970s.Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentationof the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants,but the legacyof earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.

This article uses a case study of a highly publicized 1970 controversy over Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ flight attendant uniforms—specifically, a switch from mini to midi skirt—as a case study in business-labor relations concerning the regulation of women workers’ bodily appearance. Using company and union records and employing a historical, materialist, and feminist analysis, we trace how notions of aesthetic and emotional labor changed over time in relation to the political economy, gender ideologies, and the agency of workers themselves. The flight attendants’ reluctance to challenge the airline’s sexist advertising indicated how both accommodation and resistance were intertwined in complex ways in the workplace. Their acceptance of more “thigh in the sky” had much to do with a highly regulated and disciplined workplace, an entrenched division of labor on the airplane, and gendered notions of beauty and glamour in the industry, including women’s strategic use of beauty on the job to their own advantage.

Drawing on engaging case studies, Essays in History of Canadian Law brings the law to life. The contributors to this collection provide rich historical and social context for each case, unravelling the process of legal decision-making and explaining the impact of the law on the people involved in legal disputes. Examining the law not simply as legislation and institutions, but as discourse, practice, symbols, rhetoric, and language, the chapters show the law as both oppressive and constraining and as a point of contention and means of resistance. This collection presents new approaches and concerns, as well as re-examinations of existing themes with new evidence and modes of storytelling. Contributors cover many thematic areas, from criminal to labour, civil, administrative, and human rights law, spanning English and French Canada, and ranging from the mid-eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. The legal cases vary from precedent-setting cases to lesser-known ones, from those driven by one woman’s quest for personal justice to others in which state actors dominate. Bringing to light how the people embroiled in these cases interacted with the legal system, the book reveals the ramifications of a legal system characterized by multiple layers of inequality. -- Publisher's description

Editorial on three conferences held in 2018-19 that examined the past, present and future of the study of working-class history.

This text is a collection of classic and contemporary articles exploring the nature of work in Canadian history from the late eighteenth century to the current day. Class relations and labour form the core of the volume, but attention will also be paid to the state and its relations with workers both formal and informal. The volume is designed as a core text for classes in Canadian labour/working-class history, taught out of history and labour studies departments. --Publisher's description