Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies in Canada and Québec, 1966–76

Minds of Our Own

MINDS OF OUR OWN

edited by

Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton,

Margrit Eichler, Francine Descarries

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

The editors wish gratefully to acknowledge the assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A SSHRC Strategic Research Grant, made under the former Women and Change Program, facilitated a portion of the work on this book, as did monies from the Department of English, Faculty of Arts (Busteed Foundation), and Vice-President Research at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton.

Proceeds from all royalties will go to support the work of advancing women’s equality—with men, and with one another—through donation to an equity-seeking group such as the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women/Institute canadien de recherches sur les femmes (CRIAW/ICREF), or to projects reclaiming the history of the recent women’s movement.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Minds of our own : inventing feminist scholarship and women’s studies in Canada and Quebec, 1966–76 / Wendy Robbins … [et al.], editors.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55458-037-8

1. Women’s studies—Canada—History. 2. Women scholars—Canada—History. 3. Feminism and education—Canada. 4. Discrimination in higher education—Canada.I. Robbins, Wendy, 1948–

HQ1453.m56 2008                 305.4071'171                  C2007-906850-2

Cover image: Promethean Dreams (2005), handwoven tapestry, 16.5 × 21, by Linda Wallace, from the collection of the artist. Cover design by David Drummond. Text design by C. Bonas-Taylor.

© 2008 Wendy Robbins, Meg Luxton, Margrit Eichler, and Francine Descarries.

Women’s Studies and the Trajectory of Women in Academe, by Annette Kolodny, copyright © in USA 2007 by Annette Kolodny. All rights reserved.

The poem you fit into me from Power Politics copyright © 1971 Margaret Atwood. Reproduced with the permission of House of Anansi Press.

This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

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Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Contents

PREFACE

CHANGING TIMES

Women’s Organizations (before 1960)

Women’s Changing Social Position

The Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s

Women in Post-Secondary Education

Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies

ESSAYS

Clara Thomas Creating a Tradition of Canadian Women Writers and Feminist Literary Criticism

Marguerite Andersen Mother Was Not a Person, So I Became a Feminist

Helen Levine with Faith Schneider Fanning Fires: Women’s Studies in a School of Social Work

Marie-Andrée Bertrand Feminism: A Critical Theory of Knowledge 61

Dorothy E. Smith Women’s Studies: A Personal Story

Anita Caron Contributing to the Establishment of Women’s Studies and Gender Relations

Jill Ker Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship

Margaret Gillett Midwife to the Birth of Women’s Studies at McGill

Maïr Verthuy How the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University Grew from Unlikely Beginnings 95

Alison Prentice Moments in the Making of a Feminist Historian

Micheline Dumont Doing Feminist Studies Without Knowing It

Frieda Johles Forman A Matrix of Creativity

Deborah Gorham Transforming the Academy and the World

Leslie Marshall Reminiscences of a Male Supporter of the Movement Towards Women’s Liberation and Social Equality

Greta Hofmann Nemiroff You Just Had to Be There

Sandra Pyke The Second Wave: A Personal Voyage

Vanaja Dhruvarajan A Lifetime of Struggles to Belong

Nadia Fahmy-Eid Once Upon a Time There Was the Feminist Movement … and Then There Was Feminist Studies

Rosalind Sydie, Patricia Prestwich, and Dallas Cullen Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta

Annette Kolodny Women’s Studies and the Trajectory of Women in Academe

Andrea Lebowitz, Honoree Newcombe, and Meredith M. Kimball Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, 1966–76: A Dialogue

Linda Christiansen-Ruffman Nascent, Incipient, Embryonic, and Ceremonial Women’s Studies

Margrit Eichler To Challenge the World

Danielle Juteau From Male and Female Roles to Sex and Gender Relations: A Scientific and Political Trajectory

Lorna Marsden Second Wave Breaks on the Shore of U of T

Jill Vickers Surviving Political Science … and Loving It

Kay Armatage Blood on the Chapel Floor: Adventures in Women’s Studies

Donna E. Smyth Genesis of a Journal

Marylee Stephenson The Saga 237

Meredith M. Kimball Coming of Age with Women’s Studies

Pat Armstrong Doing Women’s Studies

Joan McFarland Pioneer in Feminist Political Economy: Overcoming the Disjuncture

Terry Crowley Women’s Studies at Guelph

Meg Luxton Women’s Studies: Oppression and Liberation in the University

Susan Sherwin Reflections on Teaching and Writing Feminist Philosophy in the 1970s

Maureen Baker From Marginalized to Establishment: Doing Feminist Sociology in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Wendy Robbins To Ring True and Stand for Something

Linda Briskin Socialist Feminist and Activist Educator

Christine Overall My Path to Feminist Philosophy, 1970–76

Ceta Ramkhalawansingh Women’s Sight: Looking Backwards into Women’s Studies in Toronto 311

PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS: SOME REFLECTIONS

The Patriarchal Context

Countervailing Social Movements

Intersections of Gender, Racialization, Class, and Sexual Orientation

Inventing a New Scholarship and New Structures

Disciplinarity and/or Interdisciplinarity

Student–Teacher Relations

Personal Impacts

Interesting Times

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Alphabetical List of Authors

Appendix B: List of Authors by Discipline

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

CUMULATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

LIKE WOMEN’S STUDIES, this book has multiple origins and includes many voices. It is the result of the confluence of three research streams springing from a common source: a passionate commitment to documenting women’s lives and the development of feminism across Canada, and to ensuring that the historical record includes as many perspectives as possible.

The book brings together three distinct projects. Wendy Robbins, at her home, at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), and nationally in the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), was closely monitoring the situation of women in Canadian universities and was actively involved in various campaigns to improve women’s status. She read The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 30 Founding Mothers (2000), a collection of autobiographical essays edited by Florence Howe; the American collection, she recognized, might serve as a wake-up call to founding mothers of Women’s Studies programs across Canada, for our stories, too, are in need of integration, analysis, and articulation (Robbins 2001). Her commitment to this project was confirmed at the annual meeting of coordinators of women’s studies at Dalhousie University in the spring of 2002, where the notion of creating a comparable Canadian collection was generally welcomed as an excellent idea. By then, Wendy had started to supervise an undergraduate student at UNB, Laurie McLaughlan, in the compilation of A Chronology of the Development of Women’s Studies in Canada, which they posted on the PAR-L website for comments and corrections. Entries were written in either English or French, and many of the items concerning Québec were contributed by Francine Descarries. Inspired by the enthusiasm evoked by her various initiatives, Wendy delved further into the development of women’s studies during her subsequent year as visiting scholar at the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

Another project started with discussions between Margrit Eichler and Meg Luxton, both directors of women’s studies programs in Toronto at the time. Recognizing that some of the leading activists involved in setting up women’s studies were past retirement, they decided to interview them to make sure that their stories would not be forgotten. They were impressed by the depth of knowledge and the complexity of the issues revealed by the interviews. They were also struck by the contrast between the accounts presented by the pioneers and the assumptions widespread among students and younger faculty about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and specifically about the origins of women’s studies.

Too often, it was claimed, women’s studies failed to deal with issues of class inequality, racialization and racism, and other forms of oppression and domination. Noting that much of the material published about that period came from the United States and that too often American accounts were accepted as valid for Canada as well, Eichler and Luxton wondered what sources junior colleagues and students could draw on for the history of the women’s movement and women’s studies in Canada. They also wondered whether younger women would be able to imagine the difficult intellectual, social, and political circumstances under which the early pioneers conducted their work.

They decided to start documenting the beginnings of women’s studies in Canada. As a first step, they organized a workshop with a number of other feminist scholars who had been involved in women’s studies early on to consult them on how to approach this issue. The results of this part of the undertaking are reported in Atlantis (Eichler and Luxton 2006), and the present book owes its genesis in considerable measure to the impetus provided by this consultation.

It quickly became apparent that for the project, whatever form it took, to meet its objective of tracing the origins and early development of women’s studies in Canada, a significant place needed to be accorded to the evolution of feminist studies and the experiences of francophone feminists in Québec, in order to understand the particular social and political nexus in which these studies were conceived. For Francine Descarries, it was self-evident that she would participate in such a venture. She was convinced of the importance of documenting women’s history, particularly after having completed, with colleagues at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), a major project on the history of Montréal women (Darsigny et al. 1994). She agreed to join in, not only to assure the visibility of the Québec experience and to draw attention to its similarities and its distinctiveness, but also because she recognized that collecting first-person narratives by pioneers of Québec feminist studies is part of a much-needed process to remedy the paucity of archival resources on this subject. As feminist historian Nadia Fahmy-Eid wrote to the editors, "This concerns studies which, in Québec as in the rest of Canada, have not always left clear tracks in institutional archives, and which thus risk being more and more difficult to retrace in the future. In these circumstances, the labour of recording falls on the first generation, a labour which becomes un devoir de mémoire (a duty to remember) when we think of the generations—of women and of men—who will follow us."

In the fall of 2004, the four editors decided to join forces to produce a book on the first decade of women’s studies, from 1966 to 1976—that is, from the founding of the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC) through to the end of the academic year that included the final months of International Women’s Year. We set this as the cut-off date since, we reasoned, International Women’s Year in 1975 marked a turning point: by then, women’s consciousness-raising and political organizing had begun to have a widespread public impact, and a decade of scholarship had produced new resources for classrooms. Using, among other sources, the Canadian Newsletter of Research on Women, we identified those who had taught courses in these early years. We sent out an open call for papers on PAR-L and other feminist listservs, in individual emails and letters, and in some cases by telephone.

We invited people who were involved in developing feminist scholarship and/or creating women’s studies in universities in Canada up to and including the academic year 1975–76, the earliest pioneers, to send us short papers addressing some or all of the following questions:

1. What brought you into feminist studies, personally and professionally?

2. Who were your allies or mentors?

3. What were the major challenges you faced—personal, intellectual, institutional, political?

4. What was the scholarship you challenged?

5. What helped you mount the challenge?

6. What were the central issues debated?

7. What do you think the major impact of feminism on scholarship has been?

8. What feminist organizations or other relevant political groups were you associated with at the time?

9. What did your early involvement in the field lead to? What are you doing now?

10. Which feminist authors, at the outset, influenced your theoretical position or orientation and your feminist praxis?

11. Which feminist authors or theorists today are the most important in your understanding of feminism as a mode of thought and of action?

12. How were issues of anti-capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, class, racialization, sexual orientation, and ability dealt with in the early period?

The response was far beyond our expectations. Rather than the two dozen essays we had anticipated, we ended up with more than forty. Some people decided to collaborate, and many submissions were initially longer than the 2,500 words we had requested. Evidently, these were stories that wanted to be told.

The essays, written in the first person, tell stories of personal engagement in the creation of feminist scholarship and women’s studies, and they also provide nuanced observations and commentaries on the complexities of the times. Thus they are an important form of testimony, and they challenge some of the current preconceptions about feminist academics of the 1970s. Each of the stories is different, none is complete, but together they provide the background for an analysis of the emergence of women’s studies as a new way of understanding women, men, and society.

Clearly, not all the people who are amongst the earliest pioneers are to be found in this collection. Some people whose stories we would have valued were not able to make a contribution because of illness or competing commitments; and, sadly, some of the early founding mothers have passed away. Some institutions that mounted early feminist courses are not included because no one responded to our call for papers. Others who are also to be counted amongst the founders of feminist scholarship in many disciplines and at many more institutions did not mount their courses or programs prior to the academic year 1975–76 and thus do not fit within the parameters of this book. We are aware that some very important experiences are not included in this volume because they fall outside our time limits. All this and much more will constitute very interesting material for further studies. We hope that this collection will stimulate others so that one day we will be able to map out the full progress of women’s studies and the field’s branching out into gender studies, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and more.

The book can be read in several different ways. While the essays speak for themselves, we have provided a contextualizing essay by way of introduction to the sixties and seventies, with some reference also to the evolution of feminism in Canada and Québec. It need not be read first. We have presented the essays next, in roughly chronological order, by the age of the author (in the case of multiple authors, we took the oldest one for our ordering). The birth dates range from 1919 to 1951—spanning two generations— but everyone is a pioneer. Chronological age and academic age are, of course, not the same; some people who were born earlier came to women’s studies later than others who were born later. Nevertheless, chronological age is important because it locates people within a socio-political structure. The social context within which women lived in Canada changed considerably over the past half century, and age made a difference in the degree to which women were affected by various sexist social structures. Timing, or academic age, is also very important. Whether a person started teaching women’s studies in 1970 or in 1975, for instance, made a difference. By 1975, new means of communication were in place, some important books had been published, and several important conferences had been held. Some of our authors were actually students of other authors.

Another way of reading the essays, rather than chronologically by author, is by discipline. To facilitate these alternatives, we provide an alphabetical list of the authors’ names in appendix A and a list of the authors’ disciplinary affiliations in appendix B. Because people move from institution to institution and from province to province, we have not included a list by university or by region. The final chapter, Personal and Intellectual Revolutions: Some Reflections, highlights recurring themes or motifs that weave the essays’ narrative threads, however loosely, together. Along with the index, it provides a thematic entry to the collection. Thus, material can be found arranged in roughly chronological order, alphabetically by author, by discipline, or by thematic grouping. There are many ways of reading the book, including simply starting with the people you are most interested in.

The essays are based on memories, and memories, as we know, change with time and circumstances. Many entries describe vivid memories of events etched forever in the minds of those who lived through them. This includes examples of atrocious sexism, which many of the writers experienced. For all, participation in inventing women’s studies was a life-transforming experience, with extraordinary highs and lows. We offer this anthology of memoirs as a contribution to the ongoing story of feminism in Canada, and we hope that it will stimulate others to reflect on our collective past.

A word about us, the editors. Three of us, Margrit, Meg, and Wendy, have contributed individual essays of our own. Francine’s pioneering research into women’s pink-collar work and her teaching started just after our 1976 limit. We come from three different disciplinary backgrounds (sociology, anthropology, English)—in four universities (UQAM, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto [OISE/UT], York, UNB), located in three provinces (Québec, Ontario, New Brunswick). We include one allophone immigrant (Margrit), one francophone (Francine), and two anglophones (Meg and Wendy); we live in a variety of household and family configurations. Although we share certain things in common, being White academic women, for example, we often do not see eye to eye. Again, we consider this a strength rather than a weakness, for each of us has learned from the others while making the compromises and adjustments necessary in any genuinely collaborative feminist project. We all contributed in different but equivalent ways to the book. We wondered in what order to present ourselves in the list of editors, and finally decided to reverse the hegemony of an ascending alphabetical order by using a descending alphabetical order.

Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all the contributors for sharing their stories with us; to the many people—colleagues, family, and friends—who have generously offered us encouragement and assistance with many facets of our work and our lives; to Katherine Side, who has the distinction of being the first woman to graduate with a free-standing PhD in women’s studies in Canada and who provided helpful comments on an early draft of our contextualizing essay; to Nicole Kennedy, who translated the essays written originally in French; to Bill Schipper and James MacKenzie, who tracked down countless hard-to-verify references; and especially to the two graduate students who worked assiduously with us on the bibliography, statistics, and copy-editing, transforming painstaking technical work into a labour of love—Victoria Kannen, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE/UT, and Vicky Simpson, Department of English, UNB.

Changing Times

In 1965 in Canada there were few women’s organizations, no women’s bookstores (because there were almost no books about women), and no women’s studies courses in schools and universities.

—Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail (1988, 5)

ONE OF THE ENDEARING features of the stories told about feminist scholarship in the period between 1965 and 1976 is how many claim to be the first. There are many first women’s studies courses, and the point is that each claim is largely correct. The women curious about what we now call feminist scholarship and eager to teach it, the students critical of the formal knowledge available to them who pressured faculty to offer alternative courses, the activists from women’s liberation keen to bring their politics into the classroom—all were for the most part isolated, alone, or with small groups of friends or colleagues, struggling with few resources in the face of resistant institutions and sometimes fierce opposition. There were no antecedents, no institutional structures, no organizations, no journals, few books, and, of course, no mentors. There was no field—just a desire to correct this situation that was prejudicial, and still is, to half of humankind. As each person designed a course, fought to get it offered (challenging university structures to get formal approval, funding, faculty, an institutional location, and scholarly legitimacy), and celebrated its first appearance, each was inventing a first.

With hindsight, we can now see how many firsts there were. The essays we have collected document many turning points in the ongoing story of women, formal knowledge creation, and post-secondary education in Canada and Québec, and they also offer us compelling insights into both the people and the climate that produced them. In order to put the experiences described by the essays into context, we outline here some of the main features of that climate.¹

Women’s Organizations (before 1960)

Feminist scholarship and women’s studies developed as the academic wing of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and are an integral part of the feminism of that period.²In the years leading up to the 1966 founding of the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC,) many women in Canada and Québec, as well as internationally, were engaged in a wide range of efforts to bring women together, to obtain citizenship and educational rights, to provide services, to protect their rights as workers, and to improve their everyday lives. Some of these women’s groups dated back to the nineteenth-century women’s movement: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (1874), the National Council of Women (1893), and the National Council of Jewish Women (1897). Many more groups were formed in the first half of the twentieth century: the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste (1907), the Montréal Suffrage Association (1912), les Cercles des fermières (1915), the Federated Women’s Institutes (1919), the Canadian Federation of University Women (1919), le Comité provincial pour le suffrage féminin (1920), the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women (1930), and the Canadian Negro Women’s Association (1951). While the Second World War years gave women some new opportunities, especially in the paid labour force, the 1950s was a decade of strong reaction against feminism, women’s equality, and women’s participation in the paid labour force—the strongest opposition probably coming from the leaders of Catholic Québec. However, women and their organizations, including socialist women such as Idola St-Jean, an activist in the Québec suffrage movement of the 1930s and 1940s,³ and union leaders, such as Yvette Charpentier, Madeleine Parent, Léa Roback, Grace Hartman, and Evelyn Armstrong, all worked for women’s rights (Collectif Clio 1992; Luxton 2001b).

Politically, women’s groups ranged from deeply conservative to socialist, but all of them brought women together and provided opportunities for them to develop collective knowledge about their experiences, sharpen their political skills, and create strategies to advance their concerns. Some of these groups were national branches of international organizations; through those ties, they were actively involved in international activities and organizations, particularly the United Nations (un) and its Status of Women Commission. As representatives to un committees with formal participatory status, they both influenced debates there and brought back home new ideas and international connections. In Canada and Québec, women met to discuss their own concerns; to develop demands of their governments, their communities, and their workplaces; and to strategize about how to make progress. For them and their allies, democracy meant equal rights, equal access for women and men, and greater social justice. These women and their organizations focussed public attention on women and many sustained a women’s rights perspective, laying a foundation for the mobilizations to come. Their political sophistication and their experiences of working collectively contributed to the emergence of social conditions favourable to the resurgence of the women’s movement in the mid-1960s.

Women’s Changing Social Position

The generation that came of age during or just after the Second World War, and their daughters of the baby boom generation, lived through major changes in the position of women in Canada and Québec. The typical experiences of women in terms of education, sexuality, marriage, parenting, employment, and citizenship meant that, by the 1970s, women’s lives and the options available to them started to be increasingly different from those of previous generations and their ways of life more diverse (Jones, Mars-den, and Tepperman 1990). However, it is always important to distinguish between measures based on statistical surveys that show national trends and the actual variations within the population.⁴ For example, statistics for the Canadian population show that there was a steady increase through the twentieth century in women’s paid labour force participation. However, in Québec, as in Canada as a whole, women’s participation declined after the war—from 26.9% and 31.0% respectively in 1944, to 20.5% and 21.9% in 1947—rising again to the 1944 rate only in 1965 for Québec and in 1968 for Canada (Travail Canada 1973; Women’s Bureau 1973). Throughout the period, Black women had much higher paid labour force participation rates than the national average, and Aboriginal women continued to have much lower rates. While respecting major differences within and among specific groups of women, here we sketch some of the overall trends in women’s changing social position that contributed to the re-emergence of the activist women’s movement in the 1960s, and with it the development of feminist scholarship and women’s studies.

Changing Demographics

In the 1960s, the population in Canada and Québec was predominantly White and of Euro–North American descent. Other sectors of the population, subject to discrimination on the basis of language, national origin, religion, and race, tended to be clustered in small communities or urban neighbourhoods across the country. Aboriginal peoples were a small minority, mostly isolated in rural and remote areas, although increasing numbers lived in urban centres (Bourgeault 1983). Various immigrant populations formed and settled according to the changing immigration laws, existing labour markets, and legal and social regulations. In the late 1960s, the federal government changed the laws in order to encourage greater numbers of immigrants and thus meet growing labour demands (Simmons 1990). As a result, waves of new immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia arrived, settling primarily in the major cities. They brought their own political traditions and new political mobilizing energy, especially around issues of immigration, citizenship rights, and anti-racism (Stasiulis 1997). Their presence both strengthened the women’s movement and posed serious challenges to existing women’s politics just at the moment that the women’s movement was going through major changes, significantly in response to changing patterns of work and family life for most women (Carty 1993).

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, there was a substantial increase in the numbers of women getting married. At the same time, the age at which they both married and had children dropped, resulting in the baby boom. The majority of women married and lived as married women for most of their adult lives. Most also had children. For the large majority of them, no love life, sexuality, or maternity was realistically possible outside of marriage, and having children was essential to marriage. Children born out of wedlock were identified as illegitimate children, bâtard (bastard) in French—a concept that, fortunately, no longer carries any meaning. They were legally discriminated against and were mostly given up for adoption, a social status that was often marginal and shameful.

However, after 1957, the Canadian birth rate decreased as women had fewer children and stopped child-bearing at an earlier age than previous generations had. By 1971, the average number of births was 16.8 per 1,000 of the total population. The average number of children per family decreased from 1.9 in 1961 to 1.7 in 1971, even though women in rural communities and most Native women maintained higher rates (Statistics Canada 1977, 171). During 1961–71 the birth rate in Québec dropped by almost half to become the lowest in the country—after Québec’s renowned revanche des berceaux (revenge of the cradle)—dropping during this period from 26.6 to 15.3 per 1,000 (Institut de la statistique du Québec 2007a).

The adoption of the Divorce Act in 1968, Canada’s first unified divorce law, made it easier for couples in all provinces and territories to be released from the constraints of an unsatisfactory union. Divorce was possible on two grounds: matrimonial offences or marriage breakdown. However, the grounds for establishing the latter were still quite restrictive: a person could petition for divorce if the couple lived separately and apart for at least three years, or five years when the deserting party petitioned for divorce (Eichler 1988, 360). Before the liberalization of the law, it is estimated that one marriage out of ten was likely to end in a matrimonial dissolution (Descarries and Corbeil 1989). Following its adoption, the annual rate of divorce multiplied more than five times between 1968 and 1980, increasing from 54.8 to 280 per 100,000 inhabitants (Dumas and Péron 1992), whereas it is estimated that one out of three couples that got married in 1975 in Québec are now divorced (Institut de la statistique du Québec 2007b).

Another important change was that women’s life-expectancy rates increased more than men’s, rising from 63 years for men and 66 years for women in 1940–42, to 69 and 76 in 1970–72 (Statistics Canada 2000). As a result, growing numbers of women were single and were without child-care responsibilities for longer periods. Between 1966 and 1971, for example, the total number of households in Canada increased by 17%; the number of households of single, never married people increased by 92% (Statistics Canada 1977, 169). There was a major building boom in apartment construction (Miron 1985, 7.18, table 7.3.2), which was a response to such changes, and in turn also made such arrangements possible. As more and more women recognized that they might be on their own for more extended periods of their lives, they had greater incentives to establish themselves as income earners in their own right.

Women’s Changing Paid Labour Force Participation

The percentage of women in the paid labour force increased steadily after 1945 and did so dramatically between 1960 and 1980 (Statistics Canada 2000). In the 1960s and 1970s, most women tended to start employment after leaving school and to withdraw from the labour force after their marriage or first pregnancy. Increasingly by the end of the period, however, women tended to return to paid employment once the youngest child began school. Between 1965 and 1975, the number of employed women increased by 70% (increasing from 2,076,000 civilian workers to 3,515,000). In 1961, 28.7% of all women aged 15 and over were in the paid labour force. Between 1971 and 1981, women’s participation in the paid workforce steadily increased from 36.5% to 52%, including almost 42% of married women by 1975 (Statistics Canada 1995). The formal labour force participation of Québec women during that period was slightly lower than that of the Canadian average, moving from 34.6% in 1971 to 47.8% in 1981 (Institut de la statistique du Québec 2007c). Undoubtedly, one must see in this discrepancy the effects of the sharp opposition to the participation of Québec women in formal labour by the traditional male-dominated local elites, trade unionists, intellectuals, and politicians, as well as religious authorities, who, until la Révolution tranquille (the Quiet Revolution), considered women’s paid work more a threat to social cohesion than an achievement in itself.

However, in all provinces, in addition to changing demographic conditions and women’s increasing desire to ensure their own financial autonomy, the expansion of women’s formal labour force participation reflected the effects of structural changes generated by the bureaucratization of enterprises and states, both national and provincial, as well as the expansion of the service sectors (health, education, maintenance) where female labour was traditionally accepted, not to say confined. The increase in women’s participation in the paid labour force was also at least partially attributable to the increasing availability of goods and services that in earlier times were produced and exchanged almost exclusively within private households.

The labour force was even more segregated by sex than it is now: the existence of a dual labour market based on the social division of the sexes considerably limited the range of paid jobs open to women. Most women had jobs in the clerical and retail sectors, where the labour market was expanding but where wages were low and benefits few or non-existent. In 1971, 64.2% of women in the labour force were confined to twenty professions in which they accounted for 70.2% of the entire workforce. All of these—except for the occupations of teacher and nurse—were located in devalued or undervalued professional categories in which employees had few or no responsibilities and few professional chances of mobility (Descarries 1980). In all these professions, the average wages were—and are still— affected by the systematic undervaluation of women’s work. Consequently in 1971, on average, Canadian women earned about 57.3% of what men earned, and the situation deteriorated even more by 1976 to merely 52.1%. Women of colour and immigrant women were almost always in the lowest paying, least attractive jobs, and most of them, despite their formal qualifications, had trouble advancing in their occupations.

In many workplaces, women faced explicit sexist discrimination and harassment, even though this reality was hardly recognized, let alone named and condemned. They also had to deal with dominant ideological values that maintained that woman’s place is in the home, and that as wives and mothers their obligation was to be at home full-time. Women had to juggle the competing demands of their paid employment and their domestic and family responsibilities, especially for child care, in a work and community environment that was usually hostile to such concerns and offered no support services. The concept of articulation famille/travail, balancing work and family, had not yet reached social consciousness, and women’s demands for a more equitable sharing of domestic tasks was yet to be formulated (Luxton 1980). Women were captives of a patriarchal system, vigorously denounced by Simone de Beauvoir, that treated them like le deuxième sexe (the second sex), a situation also documented, significantly, by Chatelaine magazine under the editorial leadership of Doris Anderson (1957–77), as well as later on by Betty Friedan, who labelled and laid it bare in her landmark book, The Feminine Mystique (1963).⁵ Such experiences meant that many women were receptive to feminist critiques of the double shift of paid and unpaid work and of sexist discrimination as these critiques became more widely available.

As the numbers of women in the paid labour force grew and as the labour movement began organizing new sectors such as the public service where there were more and more women, the proportion of women members in the labour movement increased. In 1962, women made up only 16.4% of all union members, but between 1965 and 1975, the number of union women increased by 144% (Ontario Women’s Bureau 1977), resulting in the unionization of almost one woman worker out of four (23%) in 1976; rates of unionization did, however, remain uneven: relatively low numbers in Nova Scotia (16%) and Ontario (18%) compared to the strong advances in British Columbia (28%) and Québec (30%) (Akyeampong 1998).

While the labour movement in the early 1960s was male dominated and did not promote women’s issues, it did offer women union members an organizational base in which and from which they could fight for women’s concerns and urge their unions to begin to take up women’s issues. The first claims dealt with the development of maternity leave programs and equal pay for equal work; this issue was not yet formulated in Canadian legislation in terms of equal pay for work of equal value. Inside their unions, women held conferences, ran educational and training programs, organized themselves in women’s caucuses, challenged the male dominance of union structures and issues, and progressively brought women’s issues to the bargaining table. For example, in 1964 the United Auto Workers held its first conference for women workers and called for full equality (Sugiman 1993, 172–88). In 1965, the Ontario Federation of Labour set up its first women’s committee, chaired by Grace Hartman, a vice-president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. The next year, the Ontario Federation of Labour organized a conference on women and work (Crean 1995, 68). In 1968, the Canadian Labour Congress included the eradication of sex discrimination in its constitution (Canadian Labour Congress 1968, 9).⁶

The labour movement provided union women with education, and a forum in which to develop their demands. In Québec, documents put out by women’s committees of the Confédération des syndications nationaux (1976) and the Centrale de l’enseignement du Québec (1974) were among the first to bring feminist issues into the open and to formulate an analysis in terms of the social relations between the sexes and power relations. As leading women in the union movement were also active in women’s organizations, they provided mutually reinforcing links between the two arenas (Luxton 2001b). At the same time, women were making slow gains in professional occupations and in business. These women, too, faced sexism at work and in their professional associations, which prompted many of them to swell the ranks of the existing women’s organizations, set up new professional and business organizations, and lend their support to equity struggles.

Gender Ideologies and Women’s Realities

During the Second World War, the Canadian government launched major advertising campaigns urging women to enter the paid labour force and the military as part of their contribution to the war effort. A range of services, including limited child care, was implemented to enable women to do so. Immediately after the war, that effort was reversed. The government tried to ensure that returning servicemen were reintegrated into postwar society and given priority in the labour force. Women were encouraged to leave their paid work and return to the home, reorienting their lives around their domestic responsibilities as wives and mothers. The dominant image of women presented in the mass media, especially magazines, was the consumer of domestic goods whose main source of happiness was hearth and home. In this period, there was a factitious professionalization of the roles of housewives and mothers. Domestic chores became a creative art form according to the media. The whiter than white slogan of one soap company was complemented by the publication of numerous handbooks on child care. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) was published in pocketbook format. The book quickly became essential for a whole generation of mothers and sold more than 50 million copies throughout the world, an exploit exceeded at the time only by the Bible. The idea that women’s main aims in life were marriage and motherhood was widely reinforced. Schools encouraged girls to learn home economics, while textbooks portrayed girls playing with dolls and mothers staying at home, in contrast with boys doing a range of activities and fathers going off to work away from home. Most middle-class girls were encouraged to get just in case educations that prepared them for jobs such as teaching or nursing. Such careers, deemed socially acceptable for women, were assumed to permit women to get jobs before marriage and allow them to return to those jobs either once their children were grown or in case the marriage failed.

Even the report of the Commission royale d’enquête sur l’enseignement dans la province de Québec (the Parent report) (1966), which was seen as a groundbreaking document in Québec and introduced real coeducation, was cautious about discussing women’s access to higher education and promoted it only in a just in case tone. The notion of women’s education persisted. In spite of real structural changes, the objective was still to develop women’s predispositions and qualifications to prepare them for their roles as mother, wife, and housewife. Seen only as a complement or substitute, women’s paid labour force participation was still described apologetically as a counterweight to boredom, auxiliary wages, or pin money. Article 1019 of the Parent Report states, to a certain extent, one must prepare them [girls] to be aware of married life’s major problems and to become mothers capable of taking care of their children and raising them suitably. Lastly, one must provide all girls with training to hold jobs that will enable them to earn their living either before or during their married life, or after their children have been raised. Such preparation and holding a job can make a woman a sharper (more awake) and more interesting person, often more satisfied and more balanced, and possessing some security since it enables her, if need be, to help her husband financially, or to ensure the subsistence of the family if her husband were to disappear. Article 1020 recommends in part that family and domestic education must be part of every girl’s training and accustom girls to find both aesthetic and human enjoyment in domestic work. After advising boys to be useful in society (art. 1023), the report also suggests that boys acclimatize themselves to domestic realities: "Without wanting, of course, to transform men into ‘bonnes à tout faire’ [all-purpose maids] or subjecting them to domestic tyranny, one can think of simplifying their participation in domestic life by giving them a certain preparation. In particular, they should be introduced to child psychology, trained to discuss the family budget, and prepared to see the problems which the woman must raise" (art. 1024).⁷

Dominant practices in women’s health attributed various illnesses and depression, as well as lesbian sexual orientation, to the individual’s failure to accept her appropriate feminine role. Religious organizations and leaders advocated marriage and motherhood as the best life for women and railed against anything that encouraged women to do otherwise. These gender ideologies were reinforced by a variety of laws, regulations, and policies that supported women’s domesticity and thwarted their independence. Women could not get credit or make major purchases without their husband’s permission. Many employers refused to hire married women and fired women workers if they got married. For a long time, it was illegal for married women to hold jobs in the federal civil service, and it was illegal for women to work in some jobs, such as mining, right up until the 1970s.

However, despite the almost hegemonic ideology of femininity in the 1950s, there were major discrepancies between the messages about the way women should live and the way most women were living. Racism meant that women who were not White and Euro–North American, like those who were not elite or middle class, were often actively prevented from achieving these ideal family lives. Many Aboriginal women’s children were forcibly removed and sent to residential schools. Immigrant women, especially from the Caribbean, were not allowed to bring their children into Canada with them. Working-class women were in the paid labour force out of economic necessity, and White middle-class women were employed in ever increasing numbers—and not just in search of pin money either.⁸ By the late 1950s, leading women journalists such as Doris Anderson and June Callwood noted these discrepancies and wrote controversial articles challenging that ideology and encouraging women to demand alternatives. In Revue Populaire (which became the French edition of Châtelaine), in 1962, Renée Pelletier-Rowan published an article that defied existing laws by discussing birth control and the joy of having a child by choice: La régulation des naissances: la joie d’avoir un enfant quand nous l’avons voulu (Birth control: The joy of having a child when we wanted to).

The Formal Political Context, 1966–76

By 1966, fifty years after some women won the right to participate in electoral politics,⁹ a total of only forty-six women had been elected to provincial and territorial legislatures, eight women had been elected to the House of Commons, and nine women had been appointed to the Senate. Only one woman had led a political party: Thérèse Casgrain. Having belonged to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF; predecessor of the New Democratic Party), Casgrain held office as president of the Québéc wing during the period 1951–57 (Trimble and Arscott 2003, 14). In 1972, Rosemary Brown became the first Black woman elected to a legislature (Brown 1989), and in 1974 Eleanor Millard was the first Aboriginal woman elected (Trimble and Arscott 2003, 30). Trimble and Arscott calculate that in 1970, women held only 2.1% of the key public positions in Canada (2003, 37). Formal politics was totally male dominated, largely hostile to women in politics, and, at best, indifferent to women’s issues.

In the immediate postwar period, the federal state proposed to develop a comprehensive welfare system that would institutionalize the government’s, rather than the market’s, ultimate responsibility for social welfare, in which an interventionist government was seen as a principal instrument of economic development and social progress (Ornstein and Stephenson 1999, 35). Subsequent governments never realized this promise, although, through the 1950s and 1960s, federal governments did expand welfare programs, based on regulation of the economy by fiscal and monetary means, not direct state intervention (Granatstein 1982). In the late 1940s, the federal government strove for labour peace in the face of major organizing initiatives by industrial workers through the recognition of trade unions and collective bargaining regulations designed to restrain the excesses of employers and limit workers’ right to strike (especially the 1948 Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigations Act). Over the next two decades, the state took on the major costs of two components of social reproduction: expanded post-secondary education and health (for example, with