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Ideology determines how one experiences the world, shapes beliefs and expectations. Ideology is rooted in the structural dynamics of the social formation within which it exists. The articulation of the ideological with the economic structure can become problematic at certain points in time. This thesis uses a structural analysis to explore how changes in the economy have affected women in the Canadian labour force and how these changes related to the ideology surrounding women's work. Integral to this thesis is an analysis of how the State, through its labour policy, its government publications, and so on, does at times mediate between the economic situation and the dominant ideology as reflected in the popular media. This ideology is manifested through the institutional structure of the State as it influences both labour policy and the media.+ This thesis presents empirical data on the changes that took place in Canada between 1931 and 1956 in the ideology surrounding women's work. We take articles appearing in popular magazines and government publication of the era to be manifestations of the dominant ideology. We analyze materials in Maclean's, Chatelaine, Saturday Night, and the National Home Monthly. We analyzed government publications relating to labour policy; focussing on the Labour Gazette, and several reports and publications of government committees. The thesis begins with a theoretical outline. We discuss the concept of ideology and consider its role in the reproduction of class relations, the concept of a reserve army of labour, and finally, a brief summary of the concepts outlined above. We conclude the first chapter with a discussion of the methodologies used in our qualitative and quantitative analyses. The second, third and fourth chapters use qualitative analyses of periodicals to trace the articulation of the ideoloeical with the economic. Specific references are made to the media, to labour policy and to changes in the economy. These chapters deal with three distinct time periods -- with the Depression, with the World War Two years, and the period 1946 to 1956. In Chapter 5 we present a quantitative content analysis of selected magazines over the three periods. Our analyses of variations in the frequency of publications of articles relating to women's work and their activities both inside and outside the home confirm the shifts in emphasis over the period 1931 to 1956 that emerge from the earlier quantitative analyses. However, while the content and tone of articles does change with time, as is revealed in the qualitative analysis, the majority of articles have always related to traditionally domestic and feminine concerns. The data show an increasing professionalization of the housewife role. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of ideology in determining what is defined as women's work, and the importance of the control of women's labour market participation to the maintenance of the existing capitalist economic order.

The Mine Workers' Union of Canada was a trade union, centred in the coal fields of the Province of Alberta, which existed between the years 1925 and 1936, and included a membership of between 2,000 and 4,900 mine workers during that period. The formation of the union came about as a result of the break-up of District 18 of the United Mine Workers of America in 1924-1925. From the onset, its leadership was composed of differing elements, from conservatives who opposed the U.M.W. of A. for nationalistic reasons, to members of the Communist Party. The M.W.U.C. was one of the founding members of the All Canadian Congress of labour in 1927, and its President, Frank Wheatley, was a Vice-President of the Congress, until his ouster from the miners' union in 1930. miners' union in 1930. Early in that year the Communists, led by Harvey Murphy, began a drive to have the M.W.U.C. disaffiliate from the A.C.C.L., and join the new revolutionary trade union central, the Workers' Unity League. They were apparently successful, for in May of 1931, the union's membership voted by a 73% margin to affiliate with the W.U.L. Later that year the Communist Party of Canada was outlawed and the M.W.U.C. itself was declared to be an "unlawful association" in the courts. Anti-communist and anti-union sentiments on the part of employers led to long and bitter strikes, the most important of which took place in the Crows' Nest Pass in 1932. Finally, after six years of intense struggle on both the industrial and political fronts, the Workers Unity League was disbanded by the Communist Party. In June of 1936, the membership of the Mine Workers' Union of Canada voted to return to the U.M.W. of A. and the union passed into history.

The problem to be investigated in this study centres on discovering how urban conflict first emerges as a visible force. Those circumstances which led to the outbreak of open conflict in Winnipeg will be examined to test four competitive social conflict theories. Each theory establishes a series of assumptions about how conflict will emerge. The substantive implicatjons of these assumptions will be compared with the available information on the actual conditions evident at the moment of the emergence of the strike. Through this comparison, this jnvestigation will determjne which theory or theories best describes how the incident of urban confljct actualiy emerged to produce the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. This research has concentrated on urban conflict, rather than rural conflict, because the urban culture more accurately reflects the structural make-up of our society. In Canada, over l6 million people live in cities. That represents 76.1% of the total population of Canada, and this figure is rising by 2.9% per annum. Thus, with an increasing majority of our population residing in urban centres, the problems of urban living and its resultant conflicts, have become an increasingly salient feature of the composition of Canadian society. This investigation will be performed by centering specifically on urban unrest, rather than analyzing turmoi1 at a regiona1 or national level. Canadian history has had few examples of wide-scale conflict. Most forms of insurgence within Canada have been limited to either a single industry or a single city. This may be because Canadian cities are isolated from each other, and extend across the country in a series of pockets located along its southern border. This separation may have made it difficult, in the past, to transport issues to other communities. As telecommunications had greatly improved the linkages between urban centres by l919, this may explain why some sympathy for the Winnipeg General Strike was expressed jn other cities by means of minor sympathy strikes, although there was little long term unified protest outside the city itself. Therefore, limited by Canadian experience, this work will confine itself to the emergence of conflict within an urban centre.

Contents: Chapter 4, Militancy in the Canadian Civil Service, 1918-1920 -- Chapter 5, The Response to Classification and Reorganization -- Chapter 6, The Ascendancy of the "Service Ethic." [Only these chapters are available from the website.]