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This interdisciplinary dissertation aims to develop social and political theory capable of understanding social class as a structured process and relationship mediated by gender, race and other social relations and taking place in time and specific socio-material contexts, in order to analyse working classes as historical formations. It also aims to use this perspective and the existing body of historical scholarship to conduct a theoretically-rigorous study of the remaking of the Canadian working class in the 1940s. Arguing that recent theoretical work on class formation is inadequate, the dissertation critically appropriates ideas drawn from classical and contemporary scholarship to outline a theory of working classes as historical formations. An account of how dominant classes exercise power in capitalist societies is a necessary complement to this theory; the overview developed theorizes the existence of capitalist rule in differentiated forms and as inherently, but not primarily, ideological. From this perspective, the dissertation analyses the remaking of the Canadian working class in the paid workplace, community and household spheres in the 1940s. It argues that between 1941 and 1947 a broad but uneven process of class recomposition took place, focussing on such issues as the character of struggles in this period, their participants, their organizations and ideologies in order to illuminate the dynamics of change in working-class formations. In the course of struggle, both the working-class formation and capitalist rule were altered in important ways. The new formation that stabilized in the late 1940s featured improved living standards and greater unity against capital at the most elementary level. It was also shaped in important respects by a particular configuration of racist, sexist and heterosexist social relations. Unions changed from within and without, becoming generally committed to a responsible and bureaucratic practice. The CCF became the undisputed party of the English-Canadian workers' movement, weakening and marginalizing political radicalism. Although it is misleading to interpret this as working-class incorporation, working-class capacities to change society had been constrained and undermined in new ways, in part as a result of the very reforms workers wrested from employers and state power.
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As global politics realized a fundamental realignment with the end of the Second World War, the Canadian state desired the formation ofa national consensus over its newly developed Cold War policies. It set about this task through the use of anti-communist rhetoric to facilitate a repressive and intolerant atmosphere where dissent of state policies could be identified as subversive and dangerous. In promulgating this Cold War ideology, Ottawa was wary of the illiberal approach that characterized American McCarthyism. Rather, Ottawa adopted a strategy of "privatizing" its anti-communism through the use of extra-state actors. By "farming" out its repressive activities, Ottawa could portray itself as a neutral defender of liberal values, while at the same time facilitating a climate of repression that would further its policy aims. Attendant to this, the extra-state actors used this state facilitated framework in order to advance their own interests and agendas. This strategy was starkly illustrated by the USWA raids against IUMMSW Local 598 in 1962. The interests of the state, the Catholic Church, CLC, and USWA coalesced around the elimination of Mine Mill local 598 as a representative of miners in northern Ontario. The Catholic Church sought the elimination of a progressive secularizing force in the Sudbury community that threatened the Church's institutional reproduction. For Steel, the acquisition of over 17,000 dues-paying members and the elimination ofIUMMSW as a competitor in the membership rich northern Ontario mining communities. While the state prospered from the virulent anti-communist environment and the elimination of a potentially militant union from control over the largest source of nickel in the non-Communist world. Thus the boundaries demarcating the state from civil society are less clear than some would have us believe. The USWA/Mine Mill events illustrate the nuance in the relationship between the state and private actors in the mobilization of ideological hegemony.
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My dissertation addresses representations of the young women of Vancouver's working class, who, in the first part of the twentieth century, became touchstones for judgements on city life, work, and morality. Young, single, wage-earning women were something new and troubling to the middleclass administrators and social critics of the time. While the city's numerous single working men, with their overcrowded dwellings and tendencies to unionize, were considered somewhat disorderly, the necessity of their presence was never questioned. "Working girls,"on the other hand, seemed to embody all that was unnerving and unnatural about modern times: the disintegration of the family, the independence of women, and the promiscuity of city life. These kinds of anxieties were not unique to Vancouver: the issue of wage-earning women was deemed a "social problem" in various western cities. But Vancouver's singular geopolitical situation meant that these anxieties were exacerbated and amplified in distinct and curious ways. In 1922, for instance, a law was passed "for the protection of women and girls" which prohibited white women from working alongside Asian men. What combination of racism, paternalism, and moral panic gave rise to such legislation? And how did the women react to being controlled and judged by such assumptions? Rather than viewing the problems of wage-earning women as coextensive with those of working men - problems of wages, working conditions, and workers' rights - social administrators and reformers focussed largely on the moral implications of women's entrance into the workplace, particularly insofar as it represented a break from traditional Victorian ideals of domestic femininity. Denied the recognition afforded male workers as members of the labour force and economic agents, working women suffered various disadvantages in the workplace, their wages barely enough to survive on, and their rights as workers ignored by employers and union leaders alike. The tendency in historical accounts of Canada to overlook or underestimate the importance of women's work is undoubtedly in part due to the ideological disinclination to see or to represent women as workers rather than as wives and mothers. This is why my analysis focusses on the politics of gender and representation, for it is through representational conventions that women were pressured to embody a traditional domestic role, and likewise it is through a representational agenda that women were denied recognition as valuable workers.