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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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