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The article reviews the book, "California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party," Dorothy Ray Healy and Maurice Isserman.

In 1963, the Ontario Government established a Women's Bureau within the Department of Labour to do research, public relations work, and policy development relating to working women in the province. This article examines the early evolution of the Women's Bureau from 1963 to 1970 assessing the reasons for its establishment and the successes and failures of its early programs designed to aid working women. The Bureau urged the government to consider anti-discrimination legislation, and in 1970 it helped to develop new legislation designed to enhance women's equality by legalizing maternity leave, banning discrimination based on marital status, and abolishing job posting by sex. Drawing on recent debates about the state and employment policy, particularly those looking at the relationship between feminist and labour activists and the state, this article asks whose interests the Bureau represented, and whether or not this state-initiated legislation designed to enhance gender equality was effective, either in the short or long term.

This article uses a case study of an Ontario factory manufacturing clocks and watches to explore the way in which industrial paternalism was used as an industrial relations strategy by both management and workers. Paternalism, in this case an amalgam of 19th-century traditional paternalism and 20th-century welfare capitalism, was premised on unequal economic relations, and on the ideological hegemony of management, but it was also and more importantly a negotiated process in which workers participated in order to secure better working conditions and wages, respect, and dignity.

This article reviews the book, "A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1914," by Elizabeth Roberts.

This article analyzes the causes and significance of the 1907 Toronto Bell Telephone strike, which aroused considerable public sympathy and resulted in a Royal Commission. The author discusses the attitudes of the Bell Telephone Company, the government (especially Mackenzie King), middle class opinion and organized labour towards these women workers. She also examines some of the reasons for the operators' failure to make substantial gains or organize into a union, despite their militant effort to fight wage cutbacks and an increase in hours.

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 paper analyzes the Communist Party of Canada's view of the woman question, the role women played in the party, and the party's successes and failures in its attempts to organize working-class women. The Communist Party's view of the woman question was shaped by the advice of the USSR and the Communist International, as well as by the party's social base and the political understanding of its own membership. The Communist Party's Women's Department helped to create a new national organization for women, the Women's Labor Leagues, which, led by Florence Custance, experienced substantial growth in the 1920s. The Communist Party gave more attention to women's inequality than had previous socialist parties, although it failed to live up to its stated aims to organize working-class women and encourage women's participation in the revolutionary movement.

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.

A century of women's work history in Australia and Canada reveals both similarities and contrasts. Women workers in both countries have faced persistent occupational segregation and lower pay, justified by the "family wage" ideal of a male breadwinner and the accompanying perception of women's paid labour as secondary, less skilled and transient. While Canada's female labour force has historically demonstrated a significant proportion of immigrants from countries other than England, Australia's female labour force contained fewer immigrants but revealed a visible minority of Aboriginals who have demonstrated labour militancy in several well-known disputes in this century. Perhaps the most striking differences between the two countries, however, relate to the extent of the Australian state's involvement in wage tribunals and in the compulsory arbitration system, both of which have given women improved wages and "a floor of protection." By contrast, state intervention in Canada was minimal until well into the 20th century when minimum wage laws were passed during and after World War I. Despite these differences there are areas of similarity, particularly in this century as women workers tended to mobilize at roughly the same time, not only in unions and work places but also in neighbourhoods, ethnic communities, rural areas and to some extent in labour and left wing political groups. Modern feminist movements in both countries have waged some successful campaigns to change not only government views and agendas, but also those of trade unions. Thus, while Australian women have perhaps been more successful at "playing the state" depending on the government in power, both groups of women are increasingly faced with the challenge of government retreat from egalitarian policies under the onslaught of a right-wing, corporatist agenda.