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The increased participation of women in the labour force was one of the most significant changes to Canadian social life during the quarter century after the close of the Second World War. Transforming Labour offers one of the first critical assessments of women's paid labour in this era, a period when more and more women, particularly those with families, were going 'out to work'. Using case studies from across Canada, Joan Sangster explores a range of themes, including women's experiences within unions, Aboriginal women's changing patterns of work, and the challenges faced by immigrant women. By charting women's own efforts to ameliorate their work lives as well as factors that re-shaped the labour force, Sangster challenges the commonplace perception of this era as one of conformity, domesticity for women, and feminist inactivity. Working women's collective grievances fuelled their desire for change, culminating in challenges to the status quo in the 1960s, when they voiced their discontent, calling for a new world of work and better opportunities for themselves and their daughters. --Publisher's description

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 this book, 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. 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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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

This volume presents the inaugural issue and articles from The Woman Worker, the official newspaper of the Canadian Federation of Women's Labor Leagues, during its 1926 to 1929 run. Edited by prominent Communist Party of Canada leader Florence Custance, The Woman Worker's objective was to "champion the Protection of Womanhood, and the cause of the Workers generally." In this collection, Hobbs and Sangster have provided an introductory chapter examining the evolution The Woman Worker, its editor Florence Custance, the Communist-led Women's Labor Leagues, and, more generally, the socio-economic and political context of the mid to late 1920s. Each chapter includes an introduction and suggestions for further reading. Chapters include women and wage work, protective legislation, feminism and social reform, peace and war, women and the sex trade, marriage, the family and domestic labour, and the local Women's Labor Leagues at work. --Publisher's description