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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

This article examines the proliferation of beauty contests sponsored by the union movement after World War II, as a means of exploring the contradictions of the Fordist accord for women workers, and also feminist scholarship on beauty and the body. Beauty contests were articulations of labor pride and identity; they reflected the popular culture of the post-war period, labor's search for respectability, and labor's attempts to entice women into the movement by appealing to women's culture. A few contests even offered more subversive meanings of beauty by celebrating the `queen of the picket line.' However, most labor beauty contests promoted competitive individualism, consumption, and images of passive femininity that kept women marginalized on the sidelines of the labor movements. Le Bal des Midinettes, sponsored by the ILGWU, was an excellent example of these contradictions, espousing both faith in the Cinderella myth and a sense of French Canadian working-class pride. While theories stressing identity, agency, and subjectivity offer some insights into beauty contests, feminist-materialist analyses of commodification, exploitation, and ideology remain essential to our understanding of their meaning for, and impact on women workers in this period.

The article reviews the book, "The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America," by Dorothy Sue Cobble.

The article offers information on the interrelationship between ethnicity, gender and class in Canadian communism in the period 1922-1930. Ethnicity is stated to have been a contested and complex relationship in the Canadian Communist Party, whereas the Ukrainian section of the party is stated to have been numerically strong. The interrelationship between ethnicity, gender and class is examined by analyzing the content of the Canadian Ukrainian newspaper "Robitnytsia." Emphasis is given on the debate concerning women's equality and the role of women in social movement published in the newspaper.

In the turbulent 1960s Canadians debated foreign control of the Canadian economy and Canada’s relations with the United States. The Canadian section of the United Auto Workers (UAW) also struggled with these questions as it faced a number of government policies designed to bolster the auto industry and solve balance of payments difficulties, culminating in the 1965 Canada-United States Auto motive Products Trade Agreement (auto pact). The auto pact rationalized the Canadian Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) production into their parent corporations and by 1970 the Canadian industry was fully integrated into a continental system of North American automobile manufacturing. The Canadian UAW played an ineffectual role in shaping this transformation, one which rekindled and exacerbated conflict within the membership and between militant locals and the union’s leadership. Nonetheless, by the end of the decade, the union had become a strong advocate of the new continental auto regime, a reflection of the increased employment and production resulting from the changes. The essay explains the issues the union faced in this period and some of the long-term consequences which the continentalization of the auto industry had on the union.

The article reviews the book, "Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920," by Lara Vapnek.

This paper explores the writing of women's labour history in Canada over the last thirty years. Three interconnected forces have shaped the contours of this intellectual production: the course of feminist, Left, and labour organizing; trends in international social theory; and directions in Canadian historiography. Feminist challenges to the initially 'masculinist' shape of working-class history, along with more recent calls to integrate race and ethnicity as categories of analysis, have produced important shifts in the overall narrative of Canadian working-class history and in the dominant paradigms used to examine labour. As a result, gender has been more effectively, though certainly not completely, integrated into our analysis of class formation. More recent post-structuralist theoretical trends, along with the decline of the Left and labour militancy, have called into question some fundamental suppositions of women's and working-class history, creating an unsettled and uncertain future for a feminist and materialist exposition of class formation in Canada.

This article historicizes the making of a fur coat in post-1940 Canada, exploring the social relationships and forms of labour that made the fur coat possible: skinning, sewing, and selling. Focusing especially on women's labour, the author examines the significance of Aboriginal women's work, often unwaged, and seldom recognized in many fur-trade sources, as well as the way in which racial constructions of Aboriginal women intersected with the appropriation of their labour. The wage labour of women in a manufacturing sector dominated by eastern European Jewish immigrants, and by a masculine hierarchy of skill, as well as working women's protests and unionization, are also examined, as is retail selling labour in large and small stores. An exploration of these forms of labour, with a focus on gender, provides insights into discussions about the body and working-class history. While many feminist works have emphasized the cultural and discursive in their explorations of fur, the author argues for a theoretical perspective that fuses a feminist critique of race and gender hierarchies with a materialist understanding of labour, class, and alienation. While embracing a feminist scepticism about the existence of a “natural” body, she argues for the need to avoid the dematerialized body of much postmodern theory in explorations of the body and working-class history.

Since the 1960s, if not before, oral history and working-class history have been a dynamic duo, complimenting and overlapping, but also challenging and questioning each other. Both lay and professional historians have been in the forefront of efforts to recuperate, interpret, and preserve the oral histories of working-class individuals and communities across the globe. They created written histories, archival collections, museum exhibits, and community projects that gave workers, their families, and their communities -- those who were less likely to leave archival and written sources for posterity -- a new voice, and a new place in history. Working-class oral history has also encompassed far more than recovery and preservation. Labour historians have enriched the field of oral history by addressing questions about method, theory, and approach, by offering critical reflections on our assumptions and expectations about oral history practice. Oral history has similarly enriched the field of working-class history, posing new questions, challenging existing interpretations, and encouraging the diversification of the themes and subjects we study. In recognition of this dynamic relationship, and the ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between oral and working-class history, Oral History Forum commissioned this special issue. --Introduction

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

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.

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.

Pays homage to the union organizer and labor leader, Madeleine Parent.

On 4 June 1999, Madeline Parent was awarded an honorary doctorate at Trent University in recognition of her outstanding work in the trade union and feminist movements. Joan Sangster, Chair of Women's Studies, introduces Parent and offers a tribute to her historic contributions to improving the lives of workers and women in Canada.

Provides a critical appreciation of the television series, "Bomb Girls," as a pedagogical tool and as Canadian historical fiction in the context of American-dominated culture industry. Concludes that while the series is limited in its understanding of class relations, it nonetheless is of value for students to consider the relationship between mass media, representation and working women.

The article reviews the book, "On Gender, Labor and Inequality," by Ruth Milkman.

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,.

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

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.

Explores the evolution of a new women's labour history in the post-1960s era, with attention to the similarities and differences characterizing scholarship in Britain, Canada and the United States. The debates the field animated, and how these shifted over time as the political and intellectual context changed, are critically and comparatively examined. By tracing the movement of ideas, themes and inspiration across borders, one can gain a better understanding of the transnational creation of a feminist labour history.