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Aboriginal women have a long history of paid labour in Canada, yet there is little scholarly writing examining their work experiences. Using enfranchisement case files for the Ontario Indian agencies of Parry Sound and Manitowaning, supplemented by oral histories from the Tyendinaga Mohawks, this article explores the work lives of Anishinabe and Mohawk women in the 1920s and 1930s. Aboriginal women's economic roles involved a continuum of labour ranging from non-cash-oriented subsistence production to commercially-oriented farming, handicraft production, and berry-picking, to wage labour in the capitalist economy. In response to increasing economic hardship on the reserves, First Nations men and women turned increasingly to off-reserve wage labour. While men around Georgian Bay had access to seasonal jobs in lumbering, sawmilling, transportation, and tourism, women faced much more limited employment opportunities in the area. Some responded by moving to towns and cities to work. Further south, the Mohawk women of Tyendinaga could take domestic service jobs and commute from the reserve, or they could move to larger cities to work. For both groups of women, as for women in general, domestic labour was the most common occupation. The Tyendinaga women also had considerable involvement in manufacturing and migrant farm labour. A few women from both groups were able to finish high school and obtain clerical jobs, which offered better pay and shorter hours. Aboriginal women's occupational distributions were similar to those of other women in the labour force, especially working-class, immigrant, and racialized women. Contrary to today's persistent media images of Aboriginal unemployment, their records and reminiscences reveal lifetimes of hard work, self-support, and self-respect.
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“the 18 women and two men attending a course called History of Women in Canada” at the University of Toronto, wrote a Globe and Mail reporter in spring 1976,“could hardly wait to comment on their own experiences when instructor Sylvia Van Kirk introduced the subject of women’s rights in Canada.” The journalist, Constance Mungall, went on to describe the course—a new third-year seminar being offered by the (now defunct) interdisciplinary studies department at the University of Toronto—and the class (“After the vote: Did it make any difference?”) she had just observed. Sylvia had promoted discussion in the seminar by noting that “in the 1930s suffragette Nellie McClung had said the place of women in dating is ‘to wait… wait… wait’” and then asking if they thought it was still true today. Various students jumped in with their opinion and “the consensus was that it’s still the same and it’s hypocritical.” Mungall had attended the class as the course was nearing its end. By then, the seminar had covered a series of topics that would become standard fare for survey courses in Canadian women’s history, including Native women in the fur trade (a topic that, of course, Sylvia’s own research had helped make possible), white settler pioneers, and women in education, medicine, waged work, and moral and political reform movements. But these were also early days for women’s history and Sylvia was drawing on limited resources—still convincing people of the value of the field—and introducing little known historical female. --Introduction
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