LIFE SPACES

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 LIFE SPACES

Gender, Household, Employment

edited by
Caroline Andrew
and
Beth Moore Milroy

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA PRESS

Vancouver 1988
® The University of British Columbia Press 1988
All rights reserved
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-7748-0295-2

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Life spaces : gender, household, employment

Bibliography: p.
ISBN 0-7748-0295-2
1. Women and city planning — Canada.
2. Cities and towns — Canada. 3. Feminism.
4. Women — Employment — Canada. 5. Sociology,
Urban — Canada. I. Andrew, Caroline, 1942-
II. Milroy, Beth Moore, 1940-
HT127.L54 1988 307.7'6'0971 C88-091278-2

This book has been published with the help of a grant

from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds
provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
 Contents

Introduction 1
CAROLINE ANDREW AND BETH MOORE MILROY

1 Building Women, Building Cities: Toward Gender Sensitive

Theory in the Environmental Disciplines 13
SUZANNE MACKENZIE

2 Women Workers and the Inner City: Some Implications of

Labour Force Restructuring in Montreal, 1971-81 31
DAMARIS ROSE AND PAUL VILLENEUVE, WITH FIONA COLGAN

3 Practical Idealism: Women in Urban Reform, Julia Drummond

and the Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association 65
JEANNE M. WOLFE AND GRACE STRACHAN

4 Divergent Convergence: The Daily Routines of Employed Spouses

as a Public Affairs Agenda 81
WILLIAM MICHELSON

5 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives: Case Studies in

Physical and Social Innovation 102
GERDA R. WEKERLE

6 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments:

The Case of Single-Parent Families 141
FRAN KLODAWSKY AND ARON SPECTOR

7 Interacting with the Urban Environment: Two Case Studies of

Women's and Female Adolescents' Leisure Activities 159
DENISE PICHE

8 Gender-specific Approaches to Theory and Method 176

BETH MOORE MILROY AND CAROLINE ANDREW
vi Contents

Annotated Bibliography 187

BETH MOORE MILROY AND CAROLINE ANDREW, ASSISTED BY
SUSAN MONTONEN
 Notes on Contributors

CAROLINE ANDREW, Department of Political Science, University of

Ottawa.

FRAN KLODAWSKY, Status of Women Office, Carleton University,

Ottawa.

SUZANNE MACKENZIE, Department of Geography, Carleton University,

Ottawa.

WILLIAM MICHELSON, Department of Sociology and Centre for Urban

and Community Studies, University of Toronto.

BETH MOORE MILROY, School of Urban and Regional Planning,

University of Waterloo.

DENISE PICHE, Ecole d'architecture, Universite Laval, Quebec.

DAMARIS ROSE, Institut national de recherche scientifique—Urbanisation,

Universite du Quebec, Montreal.

ARON SPECTOR, Ark Research Associates, Ottawa.

GRACE STRACHAN, Community Renewal Branch, Ministry of Munici-

pal Affairs of Ontario, Toronto.

PAUL VILLENEUVE, Departement de Geographic, Universite Laval,

Quebec.

GERDA R. WEKERLE, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York Univer-

sity, Toronto.

JEANNE M. WOLFE, School of Urban Planning, McGill University,

Montreal.
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 Introduction

CAROLINE ANDREW and BETH MOORE MILROY

Existing theories about urban structure make no allowance for the fact that
women's and men's experiences of cities are different or that women's
activities shape and are shaped by urban structure and processes. Current
analyses tend to wash out all distinctions between women and men in the
name of a genderless humanity. Implicitly, if unintentionally, male
experience has become the societal norm, and changes in gender relations
have been ignored. Eliminating women as a distinct category of urban actors
leads to inaccurate descriptions, explanations, and prescriptions for our
cities.
This book explores the inter-relationship between gender and urban
structure; it is concerned with feminist analyses of how and why urban areas
are structured as they are. Gender—which signifies socially created as
opposed to biologically based differences between women and men—is
relevant to the analysis of urban structure. Just as Marxist scholarship has
made researchers aware of the importance of class as a factor in analyzing
social phenomena, so feminist scholarship has helped illustrate the
centrality of gender.
This collection is a tribute to the vitality and excitement of the research
being done into gender and urban structure in Canada. The authors come
from a variety of disciplines and use various approaches in their common
concern to explore the ways in which gender relations operate in Canadian
urban environments. The collection originated in a day-long session at a
conference organized by the Institute of Urban Studies of the University of
Winnipeg in August 1985. The object of the session was to bring together
people interested in the analysis of gender relations in an urban context and
to present an overview of the state of research in this area.
By using the term "gender" rather than "sex," one is insisting on the
social construction of differences between females and males and, therefore,
focusing on the role of social institutions and social processes in moulding
patterns of behaviour and thought. It is not biological differences (which
may be denoted by "sex") that are the focus of attention; rather, it is the
way in which elements of the social structure, and specifically those elements
germane to urban life, create differences in what females and males do and
2 Introduction

are expected to do in a particular society. Our knowledge about urban life is

overwhelmingly androcentric, or male-centred, and yet it is created without
explicit reference to either sex. Gender-based studies are explicit about
whether women or men are under scrutiny as well as about the social
conventions within which the behaviour occurs (Eichler and Lapointe,
1985).
The authors whose studies appear here all work in areas at the junction
between physical urban structure and the socioeconomic practices that shape
it and spring from it. In this collection, "urban structure'' connotes the way
everyday life spaces are laid out and made more or less accessible to women
and men and express their interests as they conduct their daily lives. This
book presents a uniquely Canadian perspective on the question of gender
and urban environment, with certain general themes reappearing through-
out the chapters.
The study of gender relations through an examination of urban structure
and process is a relatively recent activity which can be best understood
within the context of the evolution of feminist thought. In what can be
called the first wave of contemporary feminist thought—characterized by
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex—the solution to the inferior position
of women was seen to lie in their entrance to the paid labour force. Research
focused on the labour force and on the work place as its physical location. A
second phase of feminist thought, focusing not so much on the equality of
women but on their specificity, examined the dual roles of women
participating in market labour and continuing to be largely responsible for
the care of children and the maintenance of households. The physical setting
was no longer either the work place or the home; it was an interrelationship
of the two. The city, in particular, can be seen as the physical stage on which
the multiple aspects of women's lives are acted out. The feminist emphasis
on the "personal as political" encouraged women to treat the environment
of daily life as a lens for understanding their experience. As Robin Morgan
perceived, women were not dealing with idiosyncractic, but widespread,
experience:

Women's liberation is the first radical movement to base its politics—in

fact, create its politics—out of concrete personal experiences. We've
learned that those experiences are not our private hang-ups. They are
shared by every woman, and are therefore political. (1970, p. xvii)

Access, equality of treatment, dominance, power—all these vital questions

can be raised through an examination of the institutions governing social
relations in the modern urban environment.
 Introduction 3

CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES

This book differs from others that deal with gender and environment in
that it takes a Canadian perspective; all the articles deal specifically with
Canada and aspects of the Canadian urban experience. The Canadian
experience of gender and environment differs from other countries in three
ways: 1) Canadian cities are different from those in other countries; 2) the
Canadian institutional and policy framework is unique, and 3) there are
specifically Canadian elements to the theoretical material used to under-
stand the development of urban structures. In the research process, that is,
the process of moving back and forth between practice and theory, all these
factors become important.
The history, geography, demography, and culture of Canada mean that
our cities have a specificity of their own. Although large Canadian cities
share many characteristics common to North American cities, they are not
identical to those of the United States. This argument has been developed in
detail by Michael A. Goldberg and John Mercer in their book, The Myth of
the North American City: "Canada and the United States are distinct and
distinguishable places and societies. Moreover, and in keeping with our
thrust that cities are tightly integrated into the societies of which they form
an important part, Canadian and American cities differ markedly and
across well-defined dimensions" (1986, p. 246).
Some of these differences are central to the study of gender relations in
the urban environment. To take one significant example, Canadian inner
cities are less devastated than are their American counterparts; they still
retain a viable residential component relatively close to the core, and they
are less dangerous places to visit or to live in. For this reason, a higher
percentage of families with children are found in Canadian cities, as
compared to American ones. These factors obviously affect the lives of the
women and men living in these cities and therefore will influence the analysis
of gender relations and the urban environment. One might even speculate on
the relationship between this Canadian characteristic of liveable cities and
the fact that the articles in this volume treat women as playing a variety of
roles, both as actors in and as victims of the structuring of urban space,
rather than treating women almost exclusively as submitting to unfavourable
urban conditions created by others. As Canadian cities are seen to be places
in which families, and therefore women, can choose to live, it has been easier
to conceptualize the relationship between urban structure and women as
involving both influence on women and influence by women.
Another Canadian feature has been our long tradition with resource
towns and with the particular form of urban planning associated with this
4 Introduction

kind of community. In the early period, the creation of the resource town
was very much the responsibility of the private company interested in
exploiting the resources. What little planning took place was done by the
company. However, more recently, governments have taken a much more
active role in the development of resource towns, and the planning has
increasingly introduced a wider variety of aspects, such as recreational and
social dimensions. Some of the particular features of resource towns—a
narrow range of employment possibilities, usually dominated by traditionally
male occupations; a social hierarchy tightly focused on one's place in the
work force of the major company; a high level of social problems—are of
obvious import to a study of gender relations. The impact on gender
relations of this particular form of development has been one focus for
studies of resource towns (Women's Research Centre, 1977; Luxton, 1980).
Another difference in the Canadian urban reality comes from the
particular institutional and policy framework that exists in Canada. Existing
governmental structures, intergovernmental relations, and policy directions
shape the direction of urban governance and the directions of urban
research. The fact that there has been greater public intervention in social
and economic questions in Canada, as compared to the United States, once
again makes the Canadian urban experience unique. At all levels, the state
has played a more active role in the development of the urban structure. An
indication of this public sector activity can be seen from the fact that much
of the early impetus to study gender and the urban environment in Canada
stems from government initiatives, notably from the federal government.
The National Capital Commission, emphasizing its Canada-wide responsi-
bility for developing model urban environments, organized a national
workshop in 1975 on the concerns of women in shaping the urban
environment. The Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, whose brief existence
was the high point of federal concern for urban policy, sponsored a series of
studies in 1975 on the place of women in various cities across Canada. In
both cases these activities were part of the federal government programme
for International Women's Year. It may be that the federal government was
more interested in fulfilling its international obligations than in looking
seriously at questions of gender relationships but its activities clearly
sparked interest in this area.
Not only has Canadian urban development been influenced by the
relatively interventionist role of the government as a whole, but it is also
clearly influenced by the particular division of responsibilities within the
public sector. The Canadian federation is, comparatively speaking, decen-
tralized, and the provincial governments have been quite conscious of their
constitutional responsibility for municipal institutions. Compared to the
United States, Canada's provincial governments have been stronger and the
 Introduction 5

municipalities weaker. This has led, among other results, to much greater
success in creating regional governments in Canada because provincial
governments have been better able to impose regional structures.
The nature of the overall governmental system obviously influences the
kinds of programmes available and the capacity of different groups to make
use of them. Our analysis of social housing programmes, for instance, is
influenced by the fact that the recent trend in Canada has been towards a
greater provincial role in this policy area, changing the political strategies
involved. For example, the organization involved in promoting housing
programmes specifically for women differs depending upon whether the
initiative is provincial or federal.
But research does not only stem from the observation of reality; it is also
influenced by theory. The area of gender and environment has been
influenced by a great many fields of study, as the references in these articles
witness. Urban sociology, geography, urban studies, women's studies, not to
mention the work done on gender and environment itself—all these
disciplines and perspectives have helped mould the way Canadian researchers
have examined the relations between gender and our urban environment. A
great number of these theoretical influences are international, but some of
them are Canadian. For instance, the metropolitan thesis in Canadian
history emphasizes the role of cities and the importance of the urban
influence throughout Canadian development (Careless, 1967; Davis, 1985).
Development has taken place through linkages between metropolitan centres
and through urban influences penetrating the surrounding hinterland.
Economic, social, and cultural progress has come from the urban centres
and has spread to the areas controlled by these centres. This tradition of
historical research interprets the role of cities in a more positive light than
the rather more anti-urban tradition associated with the frontier thesis in the
United States. The strength of the metropolitan thesis in Canada may help to
reinforce the characteristic of the research done in Canada that we noted
earlier, that of seeing women in a wide variety of roles, rather than simply as
victims of a hostile urban environment.
The Canadian perspective on the study of the relations between gender
and environment emerged from the interplay of practice and theory. The
Canadian urban experience influenced researchers and practitioners, and
this practical understanding was clarified by reference to the different bodies
of scholarship. Certain early federal initiatives have already been mentioned,
such as the NCC Conference and the studies undertaken by the Ministry of
state for Urban Affairs. The centre of this emerging research area in Canada
has been York University. Particularly important is the work of Gerda
Wekerle, who was instrumental in creating Women and Environments, a
periodical which acts as an information exchange and a link between urban
6 Introduction

practice and theory.1 One of the co-editors of New Space for Women
(Wekerle et al., 1980), Gerda Wekerle has not only been active in
promoting research in Canada but has also acted as a link between Canadian
and international scholars interested in the study of gender and environments.

KEY THEMES

The articles in this book share the sense of urgency common to much of
modern feminist scholarship that argues the vital importance—both
practical and theoretical—of understanding gender relations. The authors
recognize that Canadian cities, like those elsewhere, are currently undergo-
ing processes of economic restructuring that are profoundly affecting both
urban structure and gender relations. The contributors believe that the
better the understanding of these major changes, the more able one is to
work for desirable outcomes or to prevent harmful consequences.
One way to understand the impact of these processes of economic
restructuring on gender relations is to analyze the inter-relation of the
processes of production and reproduction.
Gender relations in any particular society can be understood by examining
the relations between the organization of 1) the production of goods and
services and 2) the way in which the society goes about maintaining and
reproducing the labour force outside the labour process itself. In effect, all
societies produce goods and services and must also maintain the conditions
necessary to continue that production. This process of reproducing the
society may involve education, health services, child care, emotional
support, and so on. The extent to which these are carried out within or
beyond the home and the extent to which they form part of "family
responsibilities" or are socialized vary; they must be examined for specific
societies at specific times.
This approach exists in mainstream theorizing about urban systems,
notably in the Marxist perspective. The feminist research using this
approach differs from the Marxist by emphasizing gender as a theoretical
construct and set of social relations not reducible to class. This concern with
gender has led to a clear appreciation of the intricacy of the inter-relations
between production and reproduction.
In her article, Suzanne Mackenzie explores the impact of changes in
production and in reproduction not only on gender roles but also on the way
urban form is structured. She selects two periods both marked by an "urban
crisis" and a "woman crisis." The late 1800's and the mid-1900's were both
transition periods in which significant economic restructuring occurred.
Mackenzie discusses the shifts in the organization of production and
 Introduction 7

reproduction that took place in both periods and identifies how cities were
restructured and gender roles altered. The beginning of the twentieth
century saw the transition to industrial capitalism in Canada, accompanied
by an urban pattern of reproduction isolated in private homes away from
spheres of production. This had obvious repercussions for urban structure—
with the creation of residential suburban neighbourhoods—and for gender
roles—with the full-time housewife in a nuclear family supported in the
suburban home by the income of her husband.
Changes in the organization of production in the middle and late
twentieth century include massive entry of women into the paid work force
(Armstrong, 1984). The increasing use of female labour brings about
modifications in the form and locus of reproductive activities: for instance,
demands for child care outside the home. Changes in production and
reproduction are beginning to influence both urban structure and gender
relations. In the case of urban structure, for example, the logic of bedroom
suburbs is being questioned, leading to a reinvestment in central residential
areas. The pattern of gender relations is also changing, in part because
working mothers present a challenge to the household division of labour.
The article by Damaris Rose and Paul Villeneuve shares the same general
perspective of the impact of economic restructuring on gender roles,
although it deals specifically with the contemporary period. It has a double
mission: 1) to investigate how city structure changes with restructuring in the
labour market, and 2) to examine how residential patterns are linked to the
spatial restructuring of the labour market. Major shifts at the present time
include the feminization of the labour force and an increasing bipolarization
of jobs into professional and unskilled categories as the proportion of
traditional middle-class jobs shrinks. With these shifts in the labour market,
the pattern of residential location changes. And residential location is a key
element in how reproduction is structured.
Rose and Villeneuve examine the extent to which inner-city Montreal
neighbourhoods have been socially transformed as a result of both labour
market changes and gender relations. In certain neighbourhoods, a large
number of new residents are professional women who share with the
long-resident working-class women a need for social services and support
systems. In these circumstances, class differences may be mitigated by
similar gender needs, allowing socially mixed neighbourhoods to develop.
Once again urban form and gender relations are linked with production and
reproduction.
Jeanne M. Wolfe and Grace Strachan's article also deals with the impact
of economic changes on urban structure, in a case study of late
nineteenth-century Montreal and the role played by Julia Drummond in the
Montreal Parks and Recreation Association. The urban reform movement
8 Life Spaces

can be understood as a reaction to the social problems created by

industrialization and immigration, and Wolfe and Strachan argue that
insufficient attention has been given to the role of women in the urban
reform movement. Women, largely of the upper middle class, organized to
push for better services in order to improve the living conditions of the
urban poor and, therefore, mitigate the social costs of industrialization.
They were concerned with improving the living conditions of women, almost
exclusively in terms of their role as mothers: better parks and playgrounds
would allow for healthier, happier, and eventually more productive children.
Wolfe and Strachan look closely at the organizational methods used by
these women activists. They used their husbands' positions, which
combined the resources of social respectability and wealth, with their own
energy and networks, creating organizations and activities that have had
enduring impacts on urban structure. This study underlines, as does that of
Rose and Villeneuve, the importance of understanding both the impact of
economic restructuring and the influence of community organizing on
gender roles and urban structure. The restructuring of relations of
production and reproduction in urban settings has transformed gender roles.
However, women have not been merely passive victims of these changes;
they have also acted to redirect, channel, and control processes of urban
change.
William Michelson's article is also directly concerned with understanding
the impact of major economic changes on the lives of women in the urban
community and how these women have experienced these changes. He looks
at the impact of the trend towards increasing paid employment for women
and concludes that although there is some convergence between the
apparent uses of time and space by women and men working outside the
home, there are important differences in their experiences. For instance,
while the amount of daily travel time for employed women and men is
similar, the experience of the time spent differs considerably. For women,
the commute is tension-producing because they are in transition between
responsibilities at both ends of the travel. Michelson's conclusions
emphasize the difficulties felt by working mothers in reconciling their dual
roles in the home and at work. Michelson is concerned about elements of
urban structure that act either to facilitate or to hinder the lives of working
women; his policy recommendations call for planning that more fully
physically integrates the different spheres of activity. "Creating more mixed,
integrated land uses" would be a concrete step in linking work and home so
that groups in the population, such as working mothers, encounter fewer
difficulties in their daily struggle to bridge these different realms. However,
this is never imagined to be either a panacea or a sufficient change. Indeed,
running throughout this collection is an understanding of the tension
 Introduction 9

between the need to make minor adjustments so that mothers can better
handle a double-load and the wish to alter attitudes towards home and child
care in more fundamental ways.
The article by Gerda Wekerle continues the policy thrust developed by
Michelson. She examines the origins and evolution of women's housing
cooperatives developed in Canada. Her conclusion is that they have been
successful in creating supportive communities for women and in creating
opportunities to participate in decisions about their own environment. This
has not been automatic: with respect to physical design, for example,
Wekerle analyzes the struggles of various cooperatives to try to adapt
government programmes and procedures to desired ends. On the whole,
however, housing cooperatives are seen as an attractive solution to the
particular problems many women face in housing markets.
Fran Klodawsky and Aron Spector also pursue the relationship between
women and housing, focusing their attention on single-parent families. If
the problems are primarily economic in nature for this predominantly
female group, the authors argue that the solutions must be sought more
broadly—through financial assistance in some cases but also the provision
of community facilities, the possibility of job training, and the general
development of a supportive urban environment. Once again, the analysis of
women's needs and women's experiences illuminates linkages between a
broad variety of areas rather than the segmentation of the urban
environment.
Piche's article is based on the early stages of a project using action
research. Her central concern is how to bring women into the planning
process: how to ensure that they participate in decisions and that their
concerns are recognized. But these are not simple objectives to attain and
Piche' reflects on the difficulties involved. The women she studies have been
so socialized by their gender and class affiliations that it is not easy for them
to articulate their needs. When asked what leisure activities they wanted,
their first answers were in terms of activities entirely related to their role
within the family; their imaginations have been so constrained that they can
only think in terms of furthering the role they play in serving others. Only
after extensive discussion and as they gain confidence in articulating their
needs and aspirations do they begin to make timid claims on the public
realm: for example, expressing their desire for collective space that they can
control. Gaining a sense of women's real needs and desires for urban spaces
requires research techniques capable of cutting through their initial
responses, so tenaciously anchored in notions of women's needs as
secondary and subordinate to those of children and men.
Throughout this book runs the theme of the relationship between
understanding situations and changing them. This is one of the major
10 Life Spaces

themes in recent feminist thought: how can we build understanding that

simultaneously escapes sexism and recognizes the need to change current
affairs? Much of feminist methodological literature attempts to deal with
this problem of designing methodologies that are non-sexist and that can
deal with what should be and not only with what is. As Jill McCalla Vickers
has expressed it:

It is important to realize that most of our thought is still conditioned,

constrained and limited by the fact that we first learned to think using
tools and categories devised by men to understand their reality, not ours.
As some women become culture-makers and as we communicate with
our own students in a new idiom, we must create new tools of thinking
and establish new norms for feminist research and action. Probably the
most important political value of feminist research at this stage is its
capacity to challenge, however implicitly, the ontological underpinnings
of male-stream thought and of patriarchal symbol systems. (1982, p. 44)

In the urban context, this theme has obvious practical implications. How
can interventions in urban structure and processes be planned and developed
in order to create a non-sexist city when all the people involved in the
planning and intervention are themselves products of a sexist society and a
sexist urban structure? It is Piche's text that deals most explicitly with this
methodological problem; she addresses the question of planning for the real
needs of women and female adolescents through the participation of those
people concerned. How does one go beyond the first articulations of
expressed needs, which often reflect the patterns of socialization of the
society, and allow for the articulation of the real needs? In her article, Piche
outlines the kind of action research that she feels can lead to democratic
planning processes. Through group interviews with women and female
adolescents, research can be a consciousness-raising activity rather than a
manipulative process. Planning can be done with the participation of those
most affected by it, but proper attention must be paid to the question of
methodology. As Piche shows, women's first answers about their needs were
in terms of helping others—the traditional female role. It was only with
discussion that women were able, and willing, to put forward their own
needs in relation to leisure activities and therefore begin to understand the
present situation in such a way as to be able to transform it.
Michelson's methodology also addresses this question. The research has
important implications for public policy because the findings indicate that
something that might be seen as genderless—travel patterns of working
women and men—in fact involves two very different kinds of experience.
This finding would not have been possible with all data-gathering methods.
By using time-budgets and by interviewing for subjective evaluations of
 Introduction 11

behaviour, researchers were able to differentiate between superficially

similar patterns of behaviour.
Wekerle's method represents yet another way to connect the process of
understanding reality with that of changing it. By conducting case studies of
admittedly unrepresentative but innovative projects, the author hopes to
understand the processes of change in our society. There may be very few
housing cooperatives for women in Canada, and so it can be argued that
understanding the processes that create them is not relevant to understand-
ing Canadian society. However, if they are examples of new developments in
our society, then understanding them helps us understand and act on future
directions and changes. Once again, what has traditionally been labelled the
subjective element becomes important: the choice of subject is not
determined by its objective importance but because it is felt to represent the
working out of specific problems and to contain the germ of things to come.
This shared preoccupation with the relationship between understanding
and changing reality emerges clearly in the articles in this book. It is for this
reason that policy recommendations are so much a part of the arguments
presented—if reality is to be understood so it can be changed, then it is
necessary to explain the kinds of changes that should be introduced. This
policy thrust leads to a constant tension between what is seen as feasible and
what is seen as desirable. Housing programmes should be altered or zoning
modified, but at the same time fundamental changes are needed in the basic
structure of our society.
From the major points of view in this book—the importance of the
processes of production and reproduction and the relationship between
understanding situations and changing them—emerge the book's triple foci
on theory, research, and policy. These three elements are seen as
indissolubly tied together: it is necessary to theorize, to observe, and to act.
In organizing this book we have chosen to recognize the importance of these
questions by discussing them more fully in a concluding chapter dealing
with gender-specific approaches to theory and method. We have also chosen
to emphasize research and methodological aspects by including a bibliogra-
phy on Canadian materials relating to women and environments. We hope
that the inclusion of this bibliography will encourage more research and will
reinforce the integration of theory, research, and policy.

NOTE
1. Women and Environments is published three times a year and is available from
the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto, 455
Spadina Avenue, Room 426, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2G8, Canada.
12 Life Spaces

REFERENCES

Armstrong, Pat (1984). Labour Pains. Toronto: Women's Press.

Canada. Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (1975). Metropolitan Canada:
Women's Views of Urban Problems. Ottawa: Ministry of State for Urban Affairs.
Careless, J. M. S. (1967). "Frontierism, Metropolitanism and Canadian Histori-
ans." In Carl Berger (Ed.), Approaches to Canadian History (pp. 63-83).
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Davis, Donald E. (1985). "The 'Metropolitan Thesis' and the Writing of Canadian
Urban History." Urban History Review, 14 (2), pp. 95-113.
Eichler, Margrit, and Lapointe, Jeanne (1985). On the Treatment of the Sexes in
Research. Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Goldberg, Michael A., and Mercer, John (1986). The Myth of the North American
City. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Luxton, Meg, (1980). More than a Labour of Love. Toronto: Women's Press.
Morgan, Robin (Ed.) (1970). Sisterhood Is Powerful New York: Random House.
National Capital Commission (1975). Women in the Urban Environment. Ottawa:
National Capital Commission.
Vickers, Jill McCalla (1982). "Memoirs of an Ontological Exile: The Methodologi-
cal Rebellions of Feminist Research." In Angela Miles and Geraldine Finn (Eds.),
Feminism in Canada (pp. 27-46). Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Wekerle, Gerda, Peterson, R., and Morley, D. (Eds.) (1980). New Space for Women.
Boulder: West view.
Women's Research Centre (1977). Northern British Columbia Women's Task Force
Report on Single Industry Resource Communities. Vancouver: Women's Re-
search Centre.
 1

Building Women, Building Cities:

Toward Gender Sensitive Theory
in the Environmental Disciplines
SUZANNE MACKENZIE

Twice in the last hundred years, the "woman question" has assumed a
central social importance: first at the turn of the century, and again within
the last two decades. And twice within the last hundred years, Canadians
have experienced, or at least been assured they were experiencing, an
"urban crisis": first at the turn of the century, and again within the last two
decades. In both periods, some alert though not always discriminating
observers drew some connections, suggesting that women were largely
responsible for problems in the city. More sensitive observers pointed out
that women's activities appeared to be in a process of transition and that this
transition appeared to threaten the social and environmental norms of urban
life.
Nellie McClung said at the beginning of this century: "At the present time
there are many people seriously alarmed at the discontent among women.
They say women are no longer content with woman's work and woman's
sphere. Many people believe that women are deserting the sacred sphere of
home-making and rearing of children: in short, women are losing their
usefulness" (n.d., p. 228). Almost eighty years later, a French urban
sociologist, Manuel Castells, wrote:

The feminist movement is threatening the very logic of urban structure,

for it is the subordinate role of women which enables the minimal
"maintenance" of its housing, transport and public facilities. In the
end, if the system still "works" it is because women guarantee unpaid
transportation . . . because they repair their homes, because they
make meals when there are no canteens, because they spend more time
14 Life Spaces

shopping around, because they look after others' children when there
are no nurseries, and because they offer "free entertainment" to the
producers where there is a social vacuum and an absence of cultural
creativity. . . . The subversive nature of the feminist movement is not
due to its demand for more nurseries, but to the refusal
henceforth onwards to look after anything at all! (1978, pp. 177-78)

The parallels are startling. Both McClung and Castells emphasize that the
activities of women are specific to and well defined by their gender: bearing
and educating children and caring for adults is woman's work. Both
emphasize that these activities are centred in a specific place—the
home—which is women's primary work place. Both emphasize that this
work is useful and in fact essential to society as a whole; but while society
could not exist without it, this work is somehow separate from society. And
both emphasize that women are resisting this role, doing different and often
unexpected things, and organizing to demand and create the social and
environmental prerequisites for extending these new activities.
What is not so obvious as these parallels are the connections between
these two periods of unruly, discontented women and urban crisis. How did
the discontent of McClung and her contemporaries become absorbed into
the "logic of urban structure"? And how has this laid the basis for a new
discontent, a new feminist movement which threatens that urban logic?
This paper is about these connections, both the historical connection
between the two periods and the more general, theoretical connections
between women's lives and urban change. These are traced by examining
how women's activities and protests relate to the restructuring of urban
process and city form, looking at the emergence of the woman question and
urban question in Canadian cities between the 1880's and 1910's, its
apparent resolution, and the subsequent development of new problems and
protests in the late twentieth century. This discussion will lead to some
conclusions about the relations between gender change and changes in cities.
In order to do this, however, it is first necessary to outline some basic
concepts which underlie the historical discussion and which are presupposed
in the theoretical conclusions.

GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT

The connections between women's activities and urban problems are part
of the more general question of the relationship between gender and
environment, a question of growing concern in the environmental disciplines
as a whole1. The attention it has received has made it evident that this
question requires more than the grafting of a new empirical object of study
 Building Women, Building Cities 15

onto existing disciplinary discourses. It requires, rather, a re-examination

and reformulation of our understanding of gender and the development of
concepts for urban analysis which are sensitive to a socially constructed idea
of gender.
This reformulation begins where feminist analysis as a whole does, with
the disaggregation of the ahistorical category " woman'' (and by implication
"man"). As feminism developed, the concept of "woman" altered. Women
became social actors, and as they acted, consciously and collectively, to
change their conditions of life, feminism developed a far-reaching and
comprehensive analysis which recognized that women's and men's patterns
of activity, and the constituents of femininity and masculinity are
historically constructed and changed. Any attempt to understand women's
position in society had to begin not with an ahistorical and biologically
determined category "woman" but with the question: what social processes
throughout history structured women's lives and, thereby, the gender
category "woman"? Feminists are reanalyzing the whole of contemporary
and historical social life from the perspective of its influence on gender
relations. The aim of this analysis is to identify and then strategically to alter
the processes and institutions which restrict women's use of social resources.
Feminists have identified the relations between the production of social
goods and services and the reproduction of people as the major conditions
structuring gender relations. These two kinds of work are ahistorically and
universally necessary for the maintenance of a society, but their specific
content and the relations between them vary historically, in an inter-related
manner. Feminists argue, from anthropological and historical evidence, that
women's biological capacity to reproduce was socially translated into a
primary responsibility for child care and, in many societies, a responsibility
for other aspects of social reproduction, such as the care and maintenance of
adults and a household. Some responsibility for reproduction of people was
a consistent feature of women's roles and structured their access to resources
and participation in productive work. However, the circumstances in which
reproduction went on, the social meaning of this work, and thus the social
status of women has varied over history. Women's role is seen as a social
construction, and its variation is largely a function of the way in which
production and reproduction have been organized and related to each other.
At certain periods of history, when the relations of production and
reproduction were changing, gender roles would also undergo transition.
The activities of women and men would alter, calling into question the social
definition of what was appropriate behaviour for men and women and what
the nature of "woman" and "man" was. Periods of social transition in
production and reproduction were therefore accompanied by a concomitant
"gender question."2
At such times of transition, the change of gender roles could become a
16 Life Spaces

publicly contested "woman question," if women acted to control the

processes of this change. Such was the period in which McClung wrote, and
such is the period in which we now live: periods of transition in the way we
produce social goods and services and the way we reproduce ourselves as
individuals and as a community, a transition in which gender role change is
an integral feature.
In order to understand the importance of changing gender roles to the
constitution and change of city form and urban process, we must examine the
city from the perspective of the relations between production and
reproduction. A gender sensitive understanding of cities begins by looking at
cities as concrete but mutable systems which provide resources for
production and reproduction.3 Using the relations of production and
reproduction as an organizational skeleton, we can trace how changes in
these essential activities affected not only women's and men's activities and
gender roles but also city form and urban process.
The following sections of this paper utilize such a framework. As
industrialization changed social and economic life in turn-of-the-century
Canadian cities, there was a crisis in women's social position, one both
articulated in and partially resolved by the transformation of urban
morphology. Women living in this altered city created new patterns of
activity which came into conflict with the previous resolution, giving rise to
a new woman question.

THE RISE AND DEMISE OF THE FIRST WOMAN QUESTION

The first publicly recognized woman question in Canadian cities arose

with the transition to an industrially based monopoly capitalist society.
Although actual processes varied regionally, the colonial nature of the
Canadian economy meant that for all Canadian cities, industrialization was
not a gradual development but was imposed in a relatively short period
stretching over the three decades between the 1880's and the First World
War.4
The pre-industrial economy of Canadian cities was primarily commercial.
Cities were largely trade and transportation centres, where kinship-based
patronage structured the elite. Throughout the pre-industrial period, the
expanding scale and specialization of production led to its growing spatial
and functional separation from the activities of reproduction. The family,
which in pre-capitalist and early capitalist rural economies had been the
basic unit of both production and reproduction, became more exclusively
concerned with reproducing workers and class relationships.
The degree of separation and insularity varied in different urban classes
 Building Women, Building Cities 17

and was reinforced by changes in the social landscape of the city. The
emerging commercial bourgeoisie developed specialized and territorially
discrete productive and reproductive districts. The latter was built around
the "ideal" family centred on an "ideal''woman, and complemented by
educational and social services. Bourgeois women, who were largely
removed from productive activity, were concerned with bringing up and
maintaining the city's leadership. Artisanal families, producing commodi-
ties for local markets, retained closer spatial and functional integration of
workshop and home. Women in these families were part of a household
productive unit, combining the production of goods and services for sale
with the care of the family and household. The home and workshop were
one: a woman doing the household accounts was doing the business
bookkeeping at the same time. The commercial export-oriented economy
offered little steady, socially valued work to unskilled workers whose families
experienced considerable friction between their spatially and socially
unconnected working lives and home lives. Women in these families had
especially conflicting dual roles.
Thus the definition of what was appropriate behaviour and attributes for
women varied over classes. But while Bliss Carman's "Protectress of the
immortal seed . . . restricted to the cradle and the hearth . . . skipping
the valley of reason" (Bliss Carman Papers, n.d., quoted in Cook and
Mitchinson, 1976, p. 80), may have been the bourgeois ideal for the feminine
gender, the records we have of the lives of non-elite women indicate that
most women were more family partners, albeit junior ones.
Cities in this period had few specialized areas. Transportation and
commercial activities tended to be concentrated in a warehouse/office
district, but most of the city, with the exception of the few elite residential
districts, was a heterogeneous collection of homes, shops, and small
workshops: compact, dense, and undifferentiated.
Between about 1880 and 1910, people's activities and the urban landscape
changed beyond recognition. Large-scale factory production based on
machine technology—which had been replacing artisanal craft manufacture
in the U.S. and Britain for some time—was introduced into Canadian cities,
often in the form of American branch plants. This led to a growing
concentration of people in cities, increased competition for urban space,
and heightened demands on urban resources, and thus to scarcities and the
crowding of housing, streets, utilities, schools, and markets.
Large-scale machine manufacture also finally shattered the unity of home
and work, which had been weakening in the late commercial period. As
production became concentrated in the factory or retail firm, family
members no longer worked together but went off, as individuals, to wage
jobs. The household became a separate and private sphere, where people
18 Life Spaces

pooled their wages to maintain themselves and where they lived: carrying
out essential leisure time functions such as eating, resting, learning, loving,
and expressing feeling. These many home activities became seen as
secondary to work; their timing, their form, their quality and quantity
became increasingly dependent on the relations family members had with
the public wage sphere.
The separation of life into two spheres created not only a new (and
universally contested) kind of life for the majority of people but also a new
urban problem. Value was now produced in the manufacture of commodi-
ties, a process which required a healthy, relatively literate, and disciplined
labour force, available in the requisite industrial divisions and willing to
work for a given number of hours every day. The viability of new enterprises
presupposed that an industrial labour force could be created out of a
pre-industrial one, one which was generally self-trained and self-regulated,
accustomed to relative independence and to the integration of their living
and working times and places.
Throughout the 1880's, it became more and more evident that the
working-class family, in its present form, was unable to reproduce this new
kind of industrial labour unaided. People were unskilled and unused to
machine work. Many were ill-fed and unhealthy; many—including children—
were homeless, more and more seemed threateningly angry. The family had
neither the skills nor the resources to reproduce labour alone.
Increasingly, private charities and local governments intervened to help the
family. The reproduction of labour became a social question. A leading
activist in the Toronto Children's Aid Society, J. J. Kelso, summed up the
situation in 1894, saying:

The governing power must come to regard the child as a future citizen
and must see that it has opportunities for development along the lines of
education and morality. A child's education begins from its earliest
infancy and the State has a right to insist that its training shall be such as
to fit it ultimately for the proper discharge of its duties and
responsibilities, (quoted in Rutherford, 1974, pp. 212-13)

As Kelso implies, there was simultaneous need for new services to educate
and maintain the labour force and for a new kind of family, one centred on
producing good workers and citizens. But these needs appeared to be
contradictory. And the contradiction arose from the adjustments which
women were making to these new industrial conditions.
As more and more elements of family service—such as education or
health care—and of household manufacture—such as raising and proces-
sing food or making clothing—were transferred from the family unit to the
 Building Women, Building Cities 19

factory and from homes to public institutions, women brought their

traditional activities into the wage sector. By 1891, women had followed
these activities to such an extent that they numerically dominated the new
public sectors of nursing, teaching young children, and, in an unpaid
capacity, organizing charity. A less privileged group of women formed the
majority of workers in the factories producing consumer goods. And as
factory work was displacing traditional (male) craft manufacture, and as
women's service work replaced male clerks and charity administrators,
women were seen to be displacing male workers.
Even more menacing, women in the now-public wage and charitable
sector were seen as a threat to the family. The public sectors into which most
women moved were providing substitutes for household goods and family
services. Women's entry into wage work and other areas of public life both
reflected and reinforced the erosion of the household. And at the same time,
growing numbers of bourgeois women, claiming that government and
commerce "have ursurped what used to be our responsibility" (Leathes,
1914, p. 78), were leaving their own families to organize for voting rights,
higher education, and professional careers.
All of this, in conjunction with declining marriage and fertility rates,
raised the spectre of the decline of the family. A letter to the Toronto Star in
1892, signed by a "working girl," gives voice to the ultimate fear when it
says: "Women are gradually declaring and proving their ability and
willingness to bear the burden of their own support. These days, marriage
isn't all that attractive to the average girl" (quoted in Klein and Roberts,
1974, p. 227).
The "new woman," resisting or delaying marriage, working in public,
bearing fewer children, and demanding some economic and political
equality, was seen as a threat both to the bourgeois ideal family and to the
working-class family. The responses women made to new industrial
conditions appeared not only to create the problems of factory production
but also to undermine the family. And despite its eroded productive role in
the face of extended socialization of reproduction, the family was still a
necessary institution. It reproduced the future and current industrial labour
force, provided a refuge from the increasingly intensive and dehumanized
work processes in the public wage sphere, and offered a market for the new
manufactured household goods. There was no institution to replace the
family and no viable model to act as alternative to the bourgeois ideal
family. The family needed to be supported, restructured, and improved.
Providing services for a new industrial labour force while at the same time
strengthening the family and maintaining women in (or, more accurately,
confining them to) an unwaged, private, but essential domestic role became
an important urban question. Contemporary reformers saw the city, and
20 Life Spaces

especially the slums, as leading to "drunkenness in parents; to delinquency

in children; to disorderly conduct; to wife and family desertion . . . to
immorality in the growing generation" (Kelso, quoted in Rutherford, 1974,
p. 167); they warned that "the city has destroyed the home" (Woodsworth,
1911, p. 23; see also Rutherford, 1974 and Stelter and Artibise, 1977).
The separation between "work" and "life" which had created this
problem and given rise to the woman question also suggested a solution.
This solution was based on an extension of the separation, through
reorganizing the urban landscape into a city of separate spheres: on the one
hand, suburban residential neighbourhoods which provided single family
homes complemented by a range of appropriate services to assist the family;
on the other, central industrial/commercial areas where the public work of
the city could be carried out, complemented by appropriate infrastructure
and support services and unhampered by reminders of private life—hungry
children, church bells, or courting couples.
The new urban-suburban landscape reflected both the operation of
market forces—the speculation in urban land as a means of profit
accumulation—and the coordination and facilitation of these market
processes by local governments. Between the 1880's and the First World
War, urban governments extended and rationalized the ongoing process of
suburbanization, extending city boundaries or providing trunk sewers,
gaslights, and street car lines, for example. Gradually, urban cores became
more exclusively commercial and industrial, while suburban housing
developments expanded with increasing numbers of shops, schools, and
other services to complement them. This process was not entirely a planned
solution, but it helped to alleviate both the issue of creating a new industrial
labour force and the "woman problem." And the rhetoric of the solution
and the problem took on strong overtones of environmental determinism.
Single-family homes in suburban neighbourhoods separated women and
children from the temptations of the city, temptations like wage jobs and, in
the words of a contemporary reformer, " 'communistic modes of thought'
and sexual promiscuity" (quoted in Wright, 1975, p. 42). But they did more
than keep women from displacing male workers and threatening the stability
of the family. They also provided the basis for a new role: the full-time
housewife, a role which developed with the proliferation of new household
commodities and the emergence of the new science of home economics.
The home economics movement in the late nineteenth century extended
the principals of business and science into the household, giving women a
scientific and social mission with which to absorb their potentially
dangerous energies. Women's ordering of the household—fighting against
newly discovered germs and applying newly discovered psychology to
children and husbands—became an essential part of ordering the social
 Building Women, Building Cities 21

world. The goods, methods, and expertise of the market were thus extended
into the household, making it in many ways a healthier and more
comfortable place for women to work and everyone to live. But it was a
contradictory change. On the one hand, it tied women's household work
ever more firmly to the market, replacing their traditional skills and control
over manufacture and service with purchased goods and magazine images of
families and homes to be emulated. On the other hand, it reinforced the
separation between home and wage work place, between public and private
times and spaces, so that women were bound ever closer to an increasingly
specialized, spatially separated, and single gender world (see Cross, 1977;
MacMurchy, 1919; and National Council of Women of Canada, 1900).
The woman question was resolved by defining women's nature and
activities in terms of the home and neighbourhood, which became the focus
of private life, offering rest from work (and passivity), time for emotion
(and illogic), and a place for sexual expression (and its confinement). And
women, who actively maintained the home and neighbourhood, themselves
became associated with all these things. Women came to be seen as private,
passive, non-working, emotional, illogical, and sexually confined. They
were bounded by the home, they filled up the home, and they tied up the
bundle of its associated values. And these values soon came to be seen as
defining women's nature.

THE NEW PROBLEMS OF WOMEN AND THE CITY

Throughout the twentieth century, most Canadian women have lived and
worked within these bounds. They have been no more passive than their
publicly active mothers and grandmothers. They campaigned vigorously to
improve their working conditions; they organized Women's Institutes to
educate themselves; they pressed for family allowances and better schools;
they offered each other time, money, and advice. But all of this went on "at
home"; it was private and, somehow, thereby both "natural" in the sense of
being women's activity, and invisible.
The bounds extended spatially, into more distant suburbs, with larger
houses, larger shops, and more sophisticated services. Caring for the home
required new kinds of work and new machines and products; most
especially, reaching the shops and services required a car. Domestic work
and raising a family became more and more expensive, while the increased
need for homes, schools, hospitals, and other services required more and
more workers, leading to the recruitment of women for wage jobs.
By the 1950's, these push and pull factors caused more and more women
to enter the labour force. Their priorities had not changed; most still saw
22 Life Spaces

themselves primarily as mothers and wives responsible for ensuring the best
and most comfortable life for their families. But it was now more
advantageous, often necessary, to earn some money as well as work at home.
Once again, women adjusted their organization of time and their use of
space to maintain their families. But, as in the earlier period, this was not
easy.
The primary source of problems is the dual role. Most women, whether
married or single mothers, have to work at wage earning jobs while retaining
most or all of the responsibility of caring for children, other adults, and a
home and neighbourhood. This dual role problem is in large part a result of
the solution to the earlier woman question.
While the nineteenth-century urban question had focused on inadequate
conditions for reproduction in the central cities, the solution to the
problem—the extensive, distant, and expensive suburbs separated from wage
work places—became the mid-twentieth-century urban problem. It is
especially acute for that growing proportion of the labour force who also
care for their home and family. Work in the home, the place associated with
leisure, is not seen as real work, nor are the home and neighbourhood
designed to be work places. What women do in these places is invisible in the
public sphere (as it was meant to be), so employers make few concessions to
the fact that women have other jobs (except perhaps to pay them less and
fire them more readily because they are assumed to have other means of
support). Transit companies make few concessions to women's different
working hours and the fact they must travel not only to work but also to
shopping areas and day care. And because it is assumed that women are
caring for children in the home, child care is not a public priority. Even if a
woman is fortunate enough to find adequate, affordable child care, it is
unlikely to be where she wants it or available when she requires it. At the end
of a long day, after getting the family off to school, child care, work,
travelling to a wage job herself, to shop or to meet with a child's doctor or
teacher, she comes home again to a domestic work place which requires
hours of hard work and complex planning to keep running. 5
Just as the initiation of the "suburban solution," based on the spatial,
temporal, and functional separation of home and work, depended upon the
separate housewife role for women, so the maintenance of this complex and
expensive separation now depends upon women's dual roles. And just as the
suburban solution resulted in a woman who confined herself to the activities
of nurture, so this new dual role gives us "super woman": shorn perhaps of
an overwhelming maternal instinct which guided her to cook, clean, and
bear unrestricted numbers of children but newly endowed with abilities to
pursue a career and earn her own money; while efficiently raising a clever,
companionate family.
 Building Women, Building Cities 23

These super women, while based in real changes in gender relations and
women's activities are no more representative than the total mother had
been. The conflicts in women's dual roles gave rise to a new woman question
and women's movement in the late 1960's, resulting in women defining
themselves at least in part as political actors. These problems are also giving
rise to new solutions created by women themselves, solutions which are
helping to restructure the city.
Women are once again readjusting their use of space and time and
breaking down the temporal and functional separation of home and work.
Because many women work both at home and in the wage sector, they are
organizing services at the interface. Community day care centres, health
advice centres, and alternative consumer services structure women's
domestic working conditions, provide time for wage work, and create
employment. Women are creating their own jobs—looking after each
other's children, sewing each other's drapes—jobs which are socially
necessary to reproduce a family but are also remunerative and located at the
intersection of the private home and the public wage economy.6 Women are
redesigning, or redesignating, homes and neighbourhoods: sharing houses
with other single parents, turning basements into workshops, or reoccupying
and revitalizing inner cities (see Holcomb, 1981; Rose, 1984).
These changes are neither adequate, easy, nor straightforward practical
solutions. They often create as many problems as they solve, both practically
and analytically. But it is essential that we understand these changes as the
ongoing and simultaneous creation of new cities and new women.

BUILDING WOMEN, BUILDING CITIES: METHOD AND PROSPECTS

As can be seen above, focusing on changes in the relations between

production of goods and services and reproduction of people provides an
analytic framework within which to study gender change in the urban
environment and the reason why a woman question arose coterminously
with periods of urban crisis twice within the last hundred years. The two
benchmarks examined in this paper—the-turn-of-the-century women's
movement and contemporary feminism—have both been periods when
appropriate female roles and the very nature of "woman" have come into
question. These changes in gender roles have been the result of changes in
the activities which women and men were performing in order to produce
society's goods and services and reproduce people. In both periods, a
fundamental element of this transition has been the development of new
modes of environmental appropriation, the creation of new urban forms,
and the new use of old forms.
24 Life Spaces

It is not a simple coincidence that periods of urban transition happen

simultaneously with periods of gender role alteration. Women in part create
the urban crisis. Their actions are responses to both the kinds of cities in
which they live and work and the resources their living and working
environments provide for them. Changes in the city and in women's activities
are inextricably linked. Neither the role of housewife-mother nor those of
the children and men who formed her primary concern would have been
created in its early twentieth-century form without the separated city. Nor
would the suburbs have developed without the housewife-mother, her
children, and her breadwinner husband. The transformation of the city was
partly a process of creating and reinforcing a new feminine activity pattern.
And while this new role animated and expanded the suburbs, maintaining
them has caused women to take on dual roles as homemakers and wage
workers, which has made the suburbs in some measure obsolete and is
forcing the creation of new urban forms and spaces.
The historical discussion suggests, therefore, that gender and urban
environments are constructed interdependently. Gender is an essential
parameter of city development and change, neither of which can be fully
understood unless our concept of the people who occupy cities and act in
them is an androgynous one. Similarly, the urban environment is a factor in
the way women (and men) work, organize, and change.
But the history of women's activities in Canadian cities has revealed more
than a historical link between gender and environment. It has indicated how
this link is created: through the day-to-day, often apparently insignificant
and disconnected actions of women in cities. These activities are at the
centre of the reciprocal relation between women and cities.
Women have moved the boundaries and rearranged the content of
analytic categories as they have moved the location and timing of their
activity. Understanding women and cities therefore requires not only a new
set of concepts structured around the relations of production and
reproduction but also a new methodology which permits one to examine
how daily activities alter and adapt these analytic constructions.
Production and reproduction remain useful because the activities
encompassed within them are universal, trans-historical necessities. For any
society to survive, its members must reproduce themselves as biological and
social entities and produce the goods and services for their needs. But
production and the reproduction of people are complex, and while some
form of production and reproduction is always necessary, there is no
established way in which these things must be done.
These categories, therefore, offer only an analytic starting point.
Continuing the analysis, we must focus on the historically specific and
mutable content and relations of these categories, by focusing on human
 Building Women, Building Cities 25

actions in time and space as these actions alter these categories.7

Time and space are useful concepts with which to guide empirical
examination. They not only form the context of human environmental
relations, but they also shape and are shaped by human interaction; they
illuminate the process and shifting boundaries of production and the
reproduction of people. The boundaries are breaks in space and time:
changing behaviour, clothing, companions, locations, and rhythms of
activity as people move from home to wage work place and public to private.
The boundaries shift as changes occur in where people live and work, in the
extension or contraction of the number of areas in which they do things
associated with living or working, or in the curtailment or extension of time
available or necessary for various aspects of life and work.
Space and time are categories which allow us to collect the multitude of
activities which make up people's lives while at the same time retaining the
conceptual fluidity to see changes in these lives. They give form and
substance to human action; they allow the bundling together of various
aspects of human action into what Raymond Williams calls "practical
continuities" which guide and legitimate action (1979, p. 116).
We have seen above how the various components of production and
reproduction of people are separated in time and space and how this
temporal-spatial separation confirms their social separateness and even
opposition. Conversely, the dimensions on either side of this permeable
division are associated in time and space, and this temporal-spatial
association confirms their interdependence. For example, home and family
places and times are also places and times for private, non-market,
emotional, and sexual relations, all of which converge in the constitution of
"woman" and are confirmed by the presence in and activities around the
home. The work-place becomes "non-woman," confirmed by her relative or
apparent absence from productive places and times.
But space and time not only provide the basis of routine, tradition, and
social reproduction; they are also powerful agents of change and the basis of
new patterns of activity. This process of change alters both the patterns of
people's lives and the constituents of gender categories. In the late
nineteenth century, women adjusted their space and time to industrial
factory production, moving from the household-workshop into the public
wage sphere, thereby gaining resources in the form of wages rather than
solely through home manufacture and service. In the early to mid-twentieth-
century, women reallocated their time to domestic work, providing resources
within the private and non-productive space of the home and community.
The separate sphere of home-community, and women's activity there,
implied a definition of women as passive and nurturant. And the
maintenance of this separate sphere assumed women carried out this socially
26 Life Spaces

invisible but essential work. In the late twentieth century, both the suburban
solution and this gender definition began to break down as women once
again readjusted their space and time to provide resources in monetary form
as well as in kind, both within the wage sphere and increasingly within the
community or even the home.
There is a pattern, a repetitive rhythm, to this readjustment of women's
space and time. The achievement of one set of objectives always seems to
throw up a series of new problems. This stems largely from the fact that
women live, work, and organize from a contradictory position. Women are
defined in terms of, and in many cases are primarily occupied with, essential
social work—mothering and caring for adults—in a society where power,
planning priorities, and even language and analytic categories derive from
the public sphere of producing goods and services. Whether or not they
directly act in public space and time, domestic workers must accommodate
themselves and their activities to it—to their husbands' wages (and their
own) or to the kinds of goods, housing, or education provided by this public
sphere.
Throughout the capitalist period, women's organization has been con-
strained by the need to balance the requirements of reproduction—the
bearing and education of children and the maintenance of adults—with the
need to produce society's goods and services. Therefore, women in the
period under discussion are always functioning at the interface of productive
and reproductive resources and spaces, in a society which separates these
resources and spaces both concretely and analytically.
And yet, the monotonous and frustrating rhythm of solutions leading to
new problems which is engendered by this contradictory position is also an
indication of women's efficacy. The achievement of objectives creates new
problems precisely because these achievements alter the urban environment.
As women adjust and accommodate, they also alter their own working and
living environment, rendering previous solutions obsolete and opening up
new possibilities. By extending the resources available to full-time domestic
workers, women helped to create the preconditions of their own dual roles.
The birth of this dual role in the 1940's and the 1950's, and its extension in
the following decades, demarcates a new adjustment in the relations between
production and reproduction, one where the city of separate spheres is
animated, tied together, and contradicted by the lives of women who work in
both spheres. And in responding to the problems of their dual roles, women
are breaking down, shifting, and redesignating the boundaries between
home and work.
The shifting of activities and social definitions which bemused, disrupted,
and angered nineteenth-century urban dwellers is now visible to us as the
transition toward a new relation between production and reproduction, a
 Building Women, Building Cities 27

different city, and new activity patterns. However, it is not so easy to explain
these diverse and apparently disconnected activities and changes in our own
period. It is certainly not easy to see into the future to predict the outcomes
of the changes in urban form which women and men are now creating, nor
to foresee their implications for gender roles. What is evident, however, is
that the process of gender constitution and the process of constituting urban
environments are inextricably linked; the historically creative as well as the
analytic link must be sought in the way in which real men and women act to
ensure their survival as individuals and as a community.

NOTES

1. Within the past ten years, an international and interdisciplinary literature

concerned with women and environments has grown up. See for example,
Keller (1981), Stimpson, et al. (1981), Wekerle, et al. (1980). For a review of
the geographic literature, see Zelinsky, Monk and Hanson (1982). Also see the
journal Women and Environments.
2. These concepts are based on a modification of Engels's work on The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State. Some other classic works in this area
include Clark (1968), Pinchbeck (1930), Reiter (1975), and Rowbotham (1974).
3. Although some non-feminists have also made an argument for viewing the city
as a system in which production and reproduction interact, most urban analysts
still see the city primarily in terms of a productive system or, as Manuel Castells
has done, as an arena for reproduction (1977). As noted below, working from
the intersection is analytically difficult. Both "common sense" (pre-feminist
common sense) and analytic language tend to slide to one side or the other.
4. A more detailed discussion of the first "woman question" is found in
Mackenzie (1980). The discussion of pre-industrial and early industrial cities
draws upon Cross (1974), Glazebrook (1968), Goheen (1970), Kealey (1973),
Masters (1947), Naylor (1975), and Woodsworth (1911). Although most of
these works take some note of women's role, the primary sources for discussion
of the "woman question" are Canadian Women's Educational Press Collective
(1974), Cook and Mitchinson (1976), Griffiths (1976), McClung (1915), and
the National Council of Women of Canada (1900).
5. These problems have been well documented in the literature on gender and
environment. See references in Note 1 and the article by William Michelson in
this volume.
6. Similar kinds of alterations have been discussed in the emerging literature on
post-industrial society. While much of this literature remains pre-feminist and
tends to see informal, home-based solutions in industrialized societies as
temporary or peripheral, some international feminist-informed analysis has
28 Life Spaces

begun to assess the implications of these alterations. See for example, Oppong
(1983), Redclift (1985), and Roldan (1985). This is also true of some work
emerging out of the Locality Studies initiative in Britain. See Cooke (1986).
Canadian contributions include Mackenzie (1986, 1987), Ross and Usher
(1986), and Nicholls and Dyson (1983).
7. Geographers and those in related disciplines have recently begun to reconsider
the concepts of time and space within the context of exploring humanist and
historical materialist frameworks. One of the more influential non-geographic
discussions, which has engaged both humanists and historical materialists, is
that of Anthony Giddens, especially Giddens (1981).

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Canadian Women's Educational Press Collective (1974). Women at Work: Ontario,

1850-1930. Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational Press.
Castells, Manuel (1977). The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. London:
Edward Arnold.
Castells, Manuel (1978). City, Class and Power. London: Macmillan.
Clark, Alice (1968). Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century. London:
Frank Cass.
Cook, Ramsay and Mitchinson, Wendy (Eds.) (1976). The Proper Sphere: Women's
Place in Canadian Society. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Cooke, Philip (Ed.) (1986). Global Restructuring: Local Response. London:
Economic and Social Research Council.
Cross, D. Suzanne (1977). "The Neglected Majority: The Changing Role of Women
in Nineteenth-Century Montreal." In G. Stelter and A. Artibise (Eds.), The
Canadian City: Essays in Urban History (pp. 255-81). Toronto, Carleton Library,
McClelland and Stewart.
Cross, Michael (Ed.) (1974). The Workingman in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto:
Oxford University Press.
Engels, Friedrich (1973). The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
New York: Pathfinder Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1981). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.
Volume I: Power, Property and the State. Berkeley: University of California
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Glazebrook, G.P. (1968). Life in Ontario: A Social History. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Goheen, Peter (1970). Victorian Toronto, 1850-1900: Pattern and Process of Growth.
Department of Geography Research Paper 127, Chicago: University of Chicago.
Griffiths, N. (1976). Penelope's Web: Some Perspectives on Women in European
and Canadian Society. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Holcomb, Briavel (1981). "Women's Roles in Distressing and Revitalizing Cities."
Transition, 77(2), pp. 1-6.
Kealey, Greg (1973). Canada Investigates Industrialism: The Royal Commission on
 Building Women, Building Cities 29

the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Keller, Suzanne (Ed.) (1981). Building for Women. Lexington: Lexington Books.
Klein, Alice and Roberts, Wayne (1974). "Besieged Innocence: The 'Problem' and
Problems of Working Women, Toronto, 1896-1914." In Canadian Women's
Educational Press Collective (Eds.), Women at Work, Ontario, 1850-1930 (pp.
211-60). Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational Press Collective.
Leathes, Sonia (1914). "Votes for Women: Speech Given to the National Council of
Women of Canada, Montreal." University Magazine, 13, pp. 68-78.
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1980). Women and the Reproduction of Labour Power in the
Industrial City: A Case Study. Urban and Regional Studies Working Paper 23,
University of Sussex, Brighton, England.
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1986). "Women's Responses to Economic Restructuring:
Changing Gender, Changing Spaces''. In Roberta Hamilton and Michelle Barrett
(Eds.), The Political Diversity: Feminism, Marxism, and Canadian Society (pp.
81-100). London: Verso.
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1987). "Neglected Spaces in Peripheral Places: Home-Workers
and the Creation of a New Economic Centre." Cahiers de geographic du Quebec
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MacMurchy, M. (1919). "The Canadian Girl at Work." In R. Cook and W.
Mitchinson (Eds.), The Proper Sphere: Women's Place in Canadian Society
(pp. 195-97). Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Masters, D. C. (1947). The Rise of Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McClung, Nellie (1915). In Times Like These. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
reprint 1972.
McClung, Nellie, (n.d.) "The New Citizenship: Political Equality League of
Manitoba." In R. Cook and W. Mitchinson (Eds.), The Proper Sphere: Women's
Place in Canadian Society (pp. 287-93). Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976.
National Council of Women of Canada (1900). Women Of Canada: Their Life and
Work. Ottawa: National Council of Women of Canada, reprint 1975.
Naylor, Tom (1975). The History of Canadian Business: 1867-1914, Vols. 1 and 2.
Toronto: James Lorimer.
Nicholls, William and Dyson, William (1983). The Informal Economy: Where
People Are the Bottom Line. Ottawa: Vanier Institute for the Family.
Oppong, Christine (1983). "Women's Roles and Conjugal Family Systems in
Ghana." In E. Lupri (Ed.) The Changing Position of Women in Family and
Society: A Cross-National Comparison (pp. 331-43). Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Pinchbeck, Ivy (1930). Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850.
London: Frank Cass.
Redclift, Nanneke (1985). "The Contested Domain: Gender, Accumulation and the
Labour Process." In N. Redclift and E. Mingione (Eds.) Beyond Employment:
Household, Gender and Subsistence (pp. 92-125). London: Basil Blackwell.
Reiter, Rayna (Ed.) (1975). Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York:
Monthly Review.
Roldan, Martha (1985). "Industrial Outworking, Struggles for the Reproduction of
Working-class Families and Gender Subordination." In N. Redclift and E.
Mingione (Eds.), Beyond Employment: Household, Gender and Subsistence (pp.
248-85). London: Basil Blackwell.
30 Life Spaces

Rose, Damaris (1984). "Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Develop-

ment of Marxist Urban Theory." Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 7(2), pp. 47-74.
Ross, David and Usher, Peter (1986). From the Roots Up: Economic Development as
if Community Mattered. Toronto: Lorimer.
Rowbotham, Sheila (1974). Women, Resistance and Revolution. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Rutherford, Paul (Ed.) (1974). Saving the Canadian City: The First Phase
1880-1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Stelter, Gilbert and Artibise, Alan (Eds.) (1977). The Canadian City: Essays in
Urban History. Toronto: Carleton Library, McClelland & Stewart.
Stimpson, Catharine, Dixler, Elsa, Nelson, Martha, and Yatrakis, Kathryn (Eds.)
(1981). Women and the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wekerle, Gerda, Peterson, Rebecca, and Morley, David (Eds.) (1980). New Space for
Women. Boulder: Westview.
Williams, Raymond (1979). Politics and Letters. London: Verso.
Woodsworth, James S. (1911). My Neighbour: A Study of City Conditions.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, reprint 1972.
Wright, Gwendolyn (1975). "Sweet and Clean: The Domestic Landscape in the
Progressive Era." Landscape 20(1), pp. 38-43.
Zelinsky, Wilbur, Monk, Janice, and Hanson, Susan (1982). "Women and
Geography: A Review and Prospectus." Progress in Human Geography 6(3), pp.
317-66.
 2

Women Workers and the Inner City:

Some Implications of Labour Force
Restructuring in Montreal, 1971-81
DAMARIS ROSE and PAUL VILLENEUVE,
with the collaboration of
FIONA COLGAN

INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with changes in the occupational and sexual division of
labour within a Canadian metropolitan city, Montreal, during the 1970s, a
period of major economic restructuring during which women entered the
labour force in ever greater numbers.1 The article is based in a perspective
which sees changes both in women's roles in employment and in the kinds of
households in which women live as important to an understanding of labour
force restructuring and its social implications, particularly at the neighbour-
hood level. This perspective is broadly situated within neo-Marxist
approaches to spatial divisions of labour and urban restructuring (see, for
example, Massey, 1984; Williams, 1986), but unlike much of this work (for
example, Smith, 1986), it refuses to accept "second billing" at the
conceptual level for transformations occurring in modes of reproduction of
labour and social relations. Furthermore, in trying to explore in a
Canadian, and specifically a Quebec context, theoretical arguments and
issues developed largely on the basis of American experiences, we have been
forced to question some commonly held assumptions about the effects of
the current round of labour force restructuring at the neighbourhood level.

FEMINIZATION AND BIPOLARIZATION OF THE WORK

FORCE: INTERLINKED TENDENCIES

There is an inter-relationship between two widely noted tendencies in the

present phase of economic restructuring: the widespread process of
32 Life Spaces

feminization of the work force, and an increasing tendency for bipolarization2

or bifurcation of the work force. Bipolarization refers to the redistribution
of the labour force along the spectrum of occupational types: at one pole,
there is an increase in managerial, professional, and supervisory occupa-
tions; at the other pole is a concentration of non-specialized white-collar
and low-level service and sales occupations. These two extremes are both
growing more rapidly than the middle layer of white-collar workers (Weiss,
1985, p. 84). In the United States the relative decline of the skilled
blue-collar work force combined with falling real incomes of large fractions
of the middle class has prompted a flurry of concern (Ehrenreich, 1986;
Wessel, 1986). Canadian analysts have also expressed concern about such
tendencies, particularly with respect to white-collar jobs undergoing
transformations associated with the introduction of new technology
(Bradbury, 1985, p. 41; Payeur, 1985). Both of these processes have been
linked to the growing numbers of tertiary sector jobs. Some of the key
growth sectors within the service industries are known to exhibit a more
bifurcated distribution of occupations than traditional manufacturing
industry, a bifurcation whose amplitude is reinforced by the fact that it is, by
and large, low-paid women who occupy these new lower-level jobs (Smith,
1984).
The feminization tendency is widespread, common to many countries and
found across almost all economic sectors in Canada (see, for example,
Armstrong, 1984; Labour Canada Women's Bureau, 1983). The increased
availability of employment for women has been closely linked to the
expansion of white-collar office work and the personal, public, and
commercial services sectors—a process which began in the 1950's (see, for
example, Mackenzie, 1983). Not only has such employment grown massively
in absolute terms, but in Canada and Quebec most of it also became
increasingly feminized in the 1970's (Armstrong, 1984; Messier, 1984). In
the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) between 1971 and 1981, the
largest single contributor to female job creation was the group of sectors
which we have designated "distributive services" (that is, transportation,
warehousing, utilities, wholesale and retail trade). In this area, 52,755
female jobs were created, amounting to more than a quarter of the increase
in female employment over the decade. Just over half of these jobs were
non-specialized white-collar and service positions. Inferring from published
data available by detailed sector (Statistics Canada, 1981, cat. 93-965), most
of these new positions were in retail sales. In general, since feminization is
particularly noticeable in the sectors of retail trade, accommodation and
food services, recreational services, public administration, finance, and
services to business management (Armstrong, 1984), one would expect to see
strong expressions of this tendency in metropolitan cities where these
 Women Workers and the Inner City 33

functions have experienced rapid growth.

With respect to manufacturing, there is now a fairly well-developed
literature in regional geography which has documented how the deindustri-
alization of traditional heavy industries (employing mainly men) in
peripheral regions has often gone hand in hand with the growth of light
assembly manufacturing (employing mainly women), largely because of the
availability of new and malleable work forces (see, for example, Aydalot,
1981; Massey, 1984). Within the manufacturing sector in the province of
Quebec, the existence of an overall feminization trend in the division of
labour is open to question, however, because a very high proportion of
manufacturing consists of labour-intensive industry that has traditionally
employed large numbers of women (such as clothing, shoes). This type of
production has been undergoing large-scale deindustrialization, while the
type of manufacturing that is prospering is based on high-technology
engineering, in which few women have been able to gain a foothold. We shall
return to these developments and their implications in the Montreal context;
what is important for now is that, with manufacturing, feminization seems
to be associated with those branches that are being "deskilled."
The notion of bipolarization is both theoretically controversial and
empirically difficult to research. Still, it is a more satisfactory way of
conceptualizing the overall tendencies in the current round of employment
restructuring, than to argue, as has been the tendency until recently, that
there is currently either an overall deskilling or an overall reskilling of
employment, depending on one's point of view (see Lipietz, 1986; Villeneuve
and Rose, 1985). Bipolarization is integrally connected with changes in the
technical division of labour, which involve a greater functional separation of
the activities of production from those of control over both manual and
clerical tasks. Control functions can be increasingly concentrated and
routine operations more easily fragmented—a process facilitated by the
introduction of computerized technology (Menzies, 1982a, 1982b, 1985a,
1985b). The introduction of technological change tends to produce
situations where, on the one hand, a higher proportion of the work force are
in positions of control over others (such as managers or supervisors) while
on the other hand, previously skilled jobs are deskilled or routinized.
Evidently some economic sectors are more prone to technology-influenced
bifurcation than others (Villeneuve and Rose, 1985): finance, insurance and
postal services are areas where this has been well-documented for Canada
(Menzies, 1982a; 1985b; Payeur, 1985). Furthermore, within manufactur-
ing, a distinction should be drawn between specialized production requiring
highly skilled workers and "deskilled execution and assembly" (Lipietz,
1986, p. 30).
The expression of such tendencies is far from constant over space. As
34 Life Spaces

economic geographers have pointed out, functional fragmentation com-

bined with enhanced control technologies often lead to increased geographi-
cal separation of the activities of major corporations (Pred, 1978, pp.
107-20). The regional political economy perspective has since gone further:
Lipietz argues, for instance, that work tasks can be fragmented and
delocalized, to the extent that ''labour pools differentiated mainly by skills
and social conditions" occupy different regions (1986, p. 31). The effects of
bipolarization may thus vary greatly between localities (Harrison, 1982),
depending on the pre-existing configurations and characteristics of labour
pools, which will influence the types of employment restructuring carried
out (Massey, 1984).
To this aspect of bipolarization, linked to the importance of technological
change to cheapen the costs of producing goods and information, should be
added two other aspects. The growth of service sector jobs in food services
and personal and recreation services, and the fact that these sectors make up
an increasing proportion of the total labour force, itself increases
bifurcation of the work force. Jobs created in this sector are either
managerial and supervisory or low-paying white-collar and service jobs:
there is very little employment in the middle levels.
A third, more recent aspect, less noted by researchers, is that pressures
resulting from budgetary cuts and the current ideological climate are leading
to an increasing marginalization and downgrading of jobs in the middle of
the spectrum. In Canada over the past few years a number of bitter labour
disputes in the public and parapublic sectors have centred on this issue; in
Montreal it is particularly apparent in the continuing crisis in health care
funding (Armstrong, 1984, Ch. 3; Maroney, 1983; Rose and Villeneuve,
1985).
In order to appreciate fully what is entailed in bipolarization processes, it
is necessary to examine the restructuring of occupational structure by
gender. Feminization and bipolarization are interlinked processes. Up until
now, those sectors in which the largest number of female jobs have been
created—retailing, restaurants, and hotels—have not been particularly
affected by technological change. Yet the massive increase in such low-level
white collar and service jobs combined with the expansion of professional
and managerial employment in already highly feminized sectors such as
education, health, and social services in the 1970's, does suggest that
feminization processes seem likely to contribute to an overall bipolarization
in the employment structure of large metropolitan areas. Thus it is not
adequate to explain polarization trends only in terms of technological
change and the growth of low-level service jobs. Moreover, within
manufacturing, the split between reskilled highly specialized sectors and
 Women Workers and the Inner City 35

routinized parts and assembly work is also likely to be strongly gender-

typed. There are complex causal links between technological change, the
availability of cheap labour, and the weaker position of women within the
labour force. These links still require much greater theoretical specification
and elaboration.

BIPOLARIZATION AND FEMINIZATION IN MONTREAL

It has been recently argued, by Ross and Trachte (1983) and by

Sassen-Koob (1984), with the aid of detailed survey material, that tendencies
for bipolarization of the work force are strongest in cities which have
become centres of concentration in advanced services to corporations, either
at the global or the regional level (Cohen, 1981). These types of services are
more likely than other services to have concentrations of people in both
well-and poorly paid jobs. Sassen-Koob argues moreover that "the existence
of a critical mass of very high income workers provides the conditions for a
rapidly expanding process of high income residential and commercial
'gentrification.' This entails . . . [a] demand for low-income workers to
service the high income lifestyles" (1984, p. 157; see also Holcomb, 1984).
In addition, such cities typically had a labour-intensive manufacturing
sector such as the clothing industry. Despite declines in official employment
levels, these sectors have largely been maintained. Thousands of jobs have
gone underground in that they continue to exist but in forms very different
from traditional manufacturing. The emergence of new sweatshops and
industrial homeworking are ways for the small- and medium-sized compa-
nies in this sector to survive foreign competition (Ross and Trachte, 1983,
pp. 407-16). The attraction to global cities of recent waves of legal and illegal
Third World immigrants makes possible this emergence of a downgraded
manufacturing labour force (Greater London Council, 1985; Labelle et al.,
1984; Sassen-Koob, 1984).
Montreal is not a global city in the sense of being a high-level control
centre for multinational corporate capital. Its financial sector has stagnated
in terms of high-level national control functions (these having become
increasingly concentrated in Toronto, as documented by Semple and Green,
1983). On the other hand, Montreal has become a strong corporate centre
for the province of Quebec, while services to business management,
including services for export, have shown a strong growth. In the 1970's the
city exhibited significant differences from, for instance, Toronto, in seeing a
stronger growth in public services such as education, health, and social
services, and in public administration (Lamonde and Polese, 1984).
36 Life Spaces

Montreal was somewhat atypical of Canadian cities in the 1970's, in that the
public sector continued to show a fairly rapid expansion; this may be owing
in part to its strong role as regional centre for the province of Quebec for
education and hospitals and to the strength of research and development in
the medical sector, as well as to the expansion of the Quebec state apparatus.
Montreal also has a high proportion of its labour force in retailing and
recreation services as well as in tourism, which is seen as a means of
economic revitalization. Tourism creates low-wage service jobs that are
dependent on the wider economy (ibid.).
These general trends make Montreal seem a strong candidate for an
increased bipolarization of the work force, in which gender has played an
important role. We have already noted that retailing and recreation services
are low-wage, increasingly female sectors. The public sector in general has a
high proportion of professionals, managers, and supervisors and, as a result
of union pressure for affirmative action, these have become much more
feminized occupations. The stagnation in finance is reflected in an
occupational composition that is more and more gender-typed: analysis of
special compilations obtained from Statistics Canada3 shows that this sector
is increasingly polarized, with male managers on the one hand and low-level
female white-collar workers on the other. (Overall, there were more men
than women employed in the sector in 1971 and more women than men in
1981.) In the business services sector, both male and female professional
jobs have been increasing rapidly (although men still greatly outnumber
women) and there has been a substantial rise in the number of women in
low-level jobs.
In the manufacturing sector, a high proportion of Montreal's labour has
been in the clothing and related labour-intensive industries—much like New
York or London. As alluded to earlier, restructuring in the 1970's and
1980's has involved the deindustrialization of traditional labour-intensive
industries, entailing in situ closures and relocations to other areas. At the
same time, there has been a partial conversion (Lamonde and Polese, 1984)
to capital-intensive high technology engineering industries, to which access
is restricted to those with highly specialized skills. This has led to a doubly
bipolarized occupational structure. In 1981, the Census of Manufacturing
data (Statistics Canada, cat. 31-209, 1981) indicate that 16.9 per cent of all
manufacturing production workers were in the clothing industry; in spite of
this sector's decline, it remained an important part of manufacturing. Of
these workers 73.1 per cent were female. The greatly modernized transporta-
tion equipment sector was the next most important branch of manufactur-
ing, employing 11.9 per cent of all production workers, 93.5 per cent of
them men. Women's opportunities within manufacturing are still largely
restricted to precisely those sectors that are in decline: 40.3 per cent of all
 Women Workers and the Inner City 37

female production workers were in the clothing industry in 1981 (ibid.).

These figures do not, however, tell the full story. Women's employment in
the clothing industry may be declining far less precipitously than official
accounts suggest. An estimated 22,000 garment industry jobs in Montreal
have gone underground while official unionized work has shrunk drastically
(Rose and Grant, 1983). As in New York and London, female immigrant
workers have been heavily used in this process. Various factors have created
a sizeable pool of immigrant labour in Montreal since the mid-1970's,
including the particularly liberal immigration policies of the Quebec govern-
ment toward political refugees from Central America; the attraction of
Haitians to Quebec for linguistic reasons, and the high number of women
among such recent immigrants (Berneche, 1983; Labelle et al., 1984). About
two-thirds of these women work in manufacturing, mostly in the clothing
industry (ibid.). This dequalification within the clothing industry, which has
taken place at the same time as the expansion of specialized engineering
industries employing highly skilled male labour, may thus be seen as adding
to gender-typed bipolarizations of the work force.
Economic restructuring and the increased participation of women have
affected the occupational composition and sexual division of the Montreal
work force between 1971 and 1981. The statistics are summed up in Figure 1
(which, like all the data on occupations presented in this chapter, uses a
seven-fold categorization of occupations).4 All occupational categories have
become increasingly feminized (overall, the change is from 34.7 per cent to
41.4 per cent), with the notable exception of skilled production occupations,
in which the share of jobs held by women fell from 9.5 per cent to 9.0 per
cent, presumably because of the particular nature of deindustrialization and
industrial conversion that have taken place in Montreal.

SPATIAL VARIATIONS IN FEMINIZATION AND BIPOLARIZATION IN MONTREAL:

THE INNER-CITY RESIDENT WORK FORCE

We are concerned about the social impacts of feminization and

bipolarization, particularly inasmuch as these may be reflected in new forms
of unequal competition for resources within urban neighbourhoods where
people at both ends of the spectrum may be living (Rose, 1984). Although
major global and regional centres tend to concentrate such tendencies within
their midsts, little attention has been focused upon how these processes are
differentiated within cities.
There is reason to suppose that a higher proportion of the labour force
resident in the inner city would be female, compared to the metropolitan
area as a whole, because of life-cycle factors as well as employment
38 Life Spaces

Figure 1
OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE BY GENDER

LEGEND FOR OCCUPATIONAL GROUPS*

(these abbreviations are used in all figures and tables)

Man Managers and senior administrators

Prof Professionals (such as liberal arts, social science, engineering)
Sup Supervisors and forepersons
Tec Technicians and upper-level white-collar (such as nurses, secretaries,
police, real estate agents)
Prol Skilled production and construction workers
LCSS Lower-level clerical, service, and sales
Pro2 Semi- and low-skilled production and construction workers

*See chapter notes for discussion of categories used.

 Women Workers and the Inner City 39

structure. Labour force participation rates of non-married women are still

much higher than those of married women, and much greater proportions
of non-family households are found in inner-city areas than in the suburbs.
With certain exceptions, women who live in the inner city also tend to work
there (although not necessarily in the central business district—CBD—
itself); this is especially true of those who live in the downtown core.5 To the
extent that single women, and those in dual-income couples, obtain
substantial numbers of the new professional and managerial jobs created in
the processes of growth and restructuring of white-collar jobs in the inner
city, we may reasonably expect many of these women, as housing
consumers, to opt for inner-city rather than suburban locations (Rose,
1984).
It also seems reasonable to suppose that within inner-city areas of
Canadian cities, levels of bipolarization of the resident labour force might
be higher than for metropolitan areas as a whole. Canadian inner cities are
typically socially heterogeneous places, more so than their United States
counterparts (Goldberg and Mercer, 1986, pp. 157-61). Montreal is no
exception, having always contained wealthy neighbourhoods of substantial
size, notably Upper Outremont and Westmount (zones 76 and 75 in Map 1),
while at the same time, neighbourhoods of a traditionally working-class
character still remain not far from the downtown core (e.g. Pointe-St-
Charles, zone 81) and Centre-Sud (zone 45 and the eastern part of zone 44).
The large ethnic minority concentrations in certain neighbourhoods
(Saint-Louis/ Mile End, zones 70 and 71) also contribute to the lower end of
the occupational spectrum, as many are employed in traditional manufac-
turing and low-level service occupations. During the late 1970's, the
downtown fringe (zones 77, 83, 73, and 44) began to experience upscale
gentrification both through redevelopment for offices and commerce and
through housing renovation. More recently, gentrification has occurred on a
far more modest scale in the Plateau Mont-Royal (a working- and lower
middle-class district, zone 72 and part of 73 and 74) and in Saint-Louis/
Mile End. At the same time, skilled manufacturing jobs were disappearing
as a result of closures and relocations accelerated by physical expansion of
the downtown area (Morin, 1984). These trends would tend to increase
bipolarization of the labour force, especially when coupled with the large
population decline experienced in most inner-city neighbourhoods from the
early 1960's to the 1980's, owing mainly to the movement to the suburbs of
large numbers of middle-income blue-and white-collar households (see, for
example, Mathews, 1986, pp. 107-11).
In view of these suppositions, we carried out a simple empirical analysis
of bifurcation in the occupational structure in Montreal's inner-city resident
work force, compared to the CMA as a whole. We present trends in
 Women Workers and the Inner City 41

feminization after an initial discussion of bifurcation, because, as we shall

see, the gender composition of the poles sheds further light on the findings.
In order simply to measure bipolarization in Montreal, we examined the
overall occupational structure of the resident labour force (without regard to
sector or gender) for the Montreal CMA as a whole and for an area which we
have designated as the inner city. The latter is a geographical area
comprising the Island of Montreal's downtown core and the older
neighbourhoods, generally built up before 1945, and other high-density
neighbourhoods located within about thirty minutes of the downtown core
by public transit in 1981.6 Our definition deliberately includes two
high-density areas built up in the 1960's and early 1970's, which have
become important zones of settlement for new (mainly Third World)
immigrants. The work force in this geographic area is probably divided
between inner-city and inner-suburban manufacturing and low-level service
work in the inner city and elsewhere.
Within the inner city we also designated a central core, consisting of the
CBD and immediately adjacent residential and mixed-use neighbourhoods.
(The map illustrates the boundaries of these zones.) The central core was
singled out because it is there that economic and physical restructuring of
urban space are most intertwined: we have already alluded to the eastward
expansion of the CBD into a working-class neighbourhood, for example.
We also operated under the assumption that the labour force living in the
urban core was most directly linked to employment restructuring in the
CBD; thus we expected levels of bipolarization to be highest here.

TABLE 1

Indices of bipolarization and average level in the occupational

structure of the Montreal labour force, 1971 and 1981

Bipolarization level Average level Change 1971-81

1971 1981 1971 1981 Bipolar. Average
Montreal
CMA 1.848 1.873 3.348 3.462 1.35% 3.41%

Inner city 1.875 1.915 3.245 3.352 2.10% 3.28%

Central
core 1.852 1.904 3.104 3.205 2.81% 3.26%

Source: Computations based on Statistics Canada, Censuses of 1971 and 1981,

special compilations. For explanation of calculations, see text.
Figure 2(a) LABOUR MONTREAL,
FORCE BY OCCUPATIONS
INNER CITY

LABOUR MONTREAL,
FORCE CENTRAL
BY OCCUPATIONS
CORE
Figure 3(a) OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE
DIVERGENCE OF INNER CITY FROM CMA

OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE
DIVERGENCE OF CENTRAL CORE FROM CMA
44 Life Spaces

Bipolarization in the Inner City

Two simple statistics were computed in order to summarize the changes in

proportions of the work force in the seven different occupational groupings
used for the analysis [see the legend on Figure 1 for a brief description of the
categories used]. We ranked these groupings from 7 (managers) down to 1
(semi- and low-skilled production workers). We used these rankings to
obtain statistics, weighted according to the proportions of work force in each
category, of the "average occupational level" and the standard deviation of
distribution across occupational categories. Changes in the average give an
indication of overall reskilling or deskilling (bearing in mind that these are
not real measures and power levels since we cannot consider job content).
Changes in the standard deviation provide a crude indicator of trends in
bipolarization: an increase in the index can be produced by changes in the
proportions at the top and/or at the bottom. As well, a large proportionate
decrease in the middle (specialized white-collar workers and technicians) can
increase the index value.7
The results of these computations are illustrated in Table 1, while Figures
2(a), 2(b), 3(a), and 3(b) describe the changes in total labour force
composition that have produced the values tabulated for the inner city and
the central core. For the CMA as a whole, the increase in bipolarization is
statistically significant, but its size is muted by the fact that, during the
1970's, tens of thousands of women joined the labour force in specialized
white-collar jobs—that is, in the middle of our spectrum. Most of these
women were resident in suburban areas. The increase in polarization is
sharper in the inner city and sharper still in the core area.
The occupational composition of the resident labour force (both sexes) in
the inner city and its central core in 1971 and 1981 are shown in Figures 2(a)
and 2(b). While the patterns are broadly similar in the inner city and the
core, in the latter we find lower proportions of managers and higher
proportions of non-specialized clerical, sales, and service workers. The
central core also shows a slight decrease in specialized white-collar and
technical workers and an increase in low-skilled production workers,
opposite trends to those for the inner city as a whole. These trends are
reflected in the indices of average occupational levels and bipolarization.
The average level increased more in the inner city than in the core area,
reflecting the growth in managerial and professional categories. Bipolariza-
tion, however, increased more in the core—reflecting a growth in both the
top and the bottom categories, combined with a decline in the middle.
If the occupational composition of these areas relative to the CMA as a
whole (Figures 3(a) and 3(b)) is examined, some major differences between
the whole inner city and its central core emerge. The inner city became
 Women Workers and the Inner City 45

relatively more deficient in residents with managerial occupations between

1971 and 1981, while the core became relatively less deficient. The core did
not lose forepersons and supervisors or skilled production workers to the
same extent as the inner city as a whole: in spite of deindustrialization and
redevelopment, the working-class character of some neighbourhoods in the
core was retained in 1981. The increase in professionals is striking, as is the
shift from an over-representation to an under-representation of specialized
white-collar workers, compared to the CMA, in both the inner city as a
whole and its core, owing no doubt to suburbanization of white-collar
families. The representation of low-level white collar, sales, and service
workers increases slightly in the inner city but decreases in the core; this
could be related to displacement caused by gentrification.
With respect to the inner city as a whole, these findings are consistent with
the theoretical propositions and research on global cities presented earlier.
All the same, the empirical analysis presented here cannot make a direct
causal link between trends regarding the residence of managers, profession-
als, and non-specialized white-collar and service workers and trends in the
restructuring of employment along global city or regional control centre
lines. To investigate such links requires detailed analysis of place of work by
place of residence, which is beyond the scope of this chapter.8

Feminization in the Inner City

In order to appreciate more fully the social significance of these trends,

we also need to examine shifts in gender composition within this increasingly
bifurcated work force. This is particularly important since our indices do
not take account of employment income, a crucial element mediating the
"consumption power" associated with different positions in the occupa-
tional hierarchy. Since, by and large, women's earnings are only around
three-fifths of those of men, the extent to which women hold occupations at
either pole could possibly increase or decrease the social effects of
bifurcation at the neighbourhood level (we shall return to the question of
income levels later on).
The extent to which the occupational structures in the inner city and
central core are feminized is depicted in Figures 4(a) and 5(a). Notably,
within the non-specialized white-collar and service category—increasingly
important in the inner city, as we have seen—more than 50 per cent of those
living in the core were female in 1981, higher than for the inner city as a
whole. All the same, as shown by Figures 4(b) and 5(b) (which show whether
a category contains a greater or lower proportion of women than the same
category in the CMA as a whole), this category was by 1981 less feminized
than in the CMA as a whole, whereas in 1971 there was no difference. This
Figure 4(a) FEMALES IN THE RESIDENT LABOUR FORCE
MONTREAL, INNER CITY

4(b) FEMALES IN THE RESIDENT LABOUR FORCE

MONTREAL, CENTRAL CORE
Figure 5(a) FEMALES IN THE RESIDENT U\BOUR FORCE
INNER CITY, DIVERGENCE FROM CMA

5(b) FEMALES IN THE RESIDENT LABOUR FORCE

CENTRAL CORE, DIVERGENCE FROM CMA
48 Life Spaces

finding presumably reflects the vast growth in female jobs in retailing in the
suburban areas since our cross-tabulations show that, comparing the inner
city to the CMA as a whole, the female work force in the inner city was less
likely to be in retail trade and was more concentrated in personal, food, and
recreational services.
The labour force in the inner city and its core is more female than that of
the CMA, although the gap has decreased since 1971, notably for
upper-level white-collar workers. Yet both the managerial and the semi- and
unskilled blue-collar work force in the inner city have become more female
at a faster rate than in the CMA. In view of the lower earnings of women,
two of these gender-linked trends exacerbate the degree of bipolarization, an
important nuance not revealed by our simple index. First of all, the high
proportion of the semi- and unskilled blue-collar work force in the inner city
heightens the import of the increase in bipolarization created by the growth
of the lower end of the job spectrum. Secondly, the decline in upper-level
white-collar and technical women workers (a decline occurring, according to
our cross-tabulations, mainly in the heavily unionized and thus reasonably
paid education, health, and social services sectors) contributes to the decline
in the middle stratum of women workers. On the other hand, the fact that
women comprise a large share of the new managerial work force living in the
inner city, combined with the strong feminization of the group of
professionals resident there, could possibly mitigate the effects of the
increase in bipolarization produced by this growth at. the upper pole,
because the incomes of such women are much lower than those of men in the
same categories. (This is not to deny the combined earning power of a
two-earner professional household, but in fact a relatively small proportion
of professionals in gentrifying areas are in two-earner households, since, as
we shall see later on, the majority of professionals in gentrifying areas are
not married.)9 In the central core, however,no such mitigation of bipolariza-
tion could be expected, since although the percentage of women managers
there is high, the trend is toward a masculinization of the managerial and
professional resident labour forces.
Thus, in the central core we can see a sharp increase in bipolarization
which is largely gender-typed: at one end we find male managers and
professionals; at the other, low-skilled female production workers and
non-specialized office, sales, and service workers of both genders. The
partial gentrification of parts of the working-class districts of Centre-Sud
(zone 44) and Sainte-Anne and Petite-Bourgogne (zone 83), as well as the
relatively 'downscale' character of some apartment buildings on the
downtown fringe, are probable contributors to these extremes.
At the level of the CMA (and using a broader division of thirty-two large
component zones in order to ensure statistical viability), we have also carried
 Women Workers and the Inner City 49

out an analysis of bipolarization within the female work force alone,

differentiated by economic sector (see Villeneuve and Rose, 1985). Accord-
ing to our technique for measuring polarization, it is the business services
sector—a major growth area for female employment (Rose and Villeneuve,
1985) and one where most of the jobs are in the downtown area (Polese et
al., 1984)—that has shown the greatest tendency for increased bipolarization
among women. This is particularly evident in the resident labour force
downtown and in adjacent "gentrifying" neighbourhoods. (Office cleaners,
as well as architects, fall within the category of business services.) Within the
education, medical, and social services sectors, bipolarization among
women increased in the downtown area and the heavily professional and
managerial communities of Westmount and Outremont (the latter's old
neighbourhoods were almost completely gentrified in the 1970's). This
change was attributable in the main to an absolute decline in the numbers of
upper-level white-collar and technical workers living in those zones.
This brief discussion of the trends of feminization and bipolarization of
the labour market structure in the inner city forms the backdrop for the next
section. We now turn to the growth of the professional labour force in the
inner city and its degree of feminization. Examining the household
characteristics of women professionals, we explore the possible impacts of
these trends on the form taken by gentrification of the inner city in light of
the bipolarization processes outlined above. We look at the group of
low-paid female workers rather than at managerial workers because at the
fine level of spatial disaggregation which is required for the latter, the
numbers are too small (especially for women) to guarantee significance. In
the final section of the paper, we present some speculations about the
implications of a strong presence of professional women among gentrifiers
for community structure and service provision, and for the ongoing presence
of semi- and unskilled women workers in the same or adjoining
neighbourhoods.

FEMALE PROFESSIONALS AND GENTRIFICATION

In inner zones with a high overall concentration of professionals in 1981,

the feminization of the professional labour force is higher than the CMA
figure in only two: Outremont and Notre-Dame-de-Grace (NDG) East—
both of which are, incidentally, zones with a high proportion of professional
couples. These excepted, the zones where a high percentage of professionals
are female are zones where the overall proportions of professionals in the
work force are low: the eastern part of the Plateau, excluding zone 73;
50 Life Spaces

Saint-Louis/Mile End; Verdun east, and Pointe-St-Charles. One is immedi-

ately led to speculate that these zones attracted female professionals because
of relatively modest housing prices and accessibility to inner-city work
places. If we examine the mean employment income data for women
professionals, we find that in almost every one of the non-professional zones
where women represented a disproportionate number of all professionals,
their mean incomes in 1981 are below the CM A mean income for women
professionals and, in some cases, significantly below (for example, 82.3 per
cent in zone 72 and 68.8 per cent in zone 70). There seems to be a direct
relationship between the overall employment income level of these zones and
the income of their female professionals.
Women professionals living in the inner city are, like those in the CMA as
a whole, heavily concentrated in one sector: education, medical, and social
services (Rose and Villeneuve, 1985). Between 1971 and 1981 however, their
placement became more diverse, with an increasing involvement in the
business services sector and in the group including communications,
cultural, recreational, and personal services. Most professionals in this
group of sectors are actually in communications and recreation, particularly
in television, radio, and the literary and performing arts (Dansereau and
Beaudry, 1985). Indeed, compared to women professionals in the CMA,
although all the trends are in the same direction, there is a much higher
concentration in the communications-cultural-recreation sector in the inner
city. In the Plateau Mont-Royal, the proportion of female professionals
employed in this sector doubled, from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. A high
proportion of these women evidently work downtown, and we could suggest
that in this sector the prevalence of work at unusual hours and the nature of
contract work (which requires personal contacts) are factors encouraging a
central location.
So far we have remarked on the increased concentration of both male and
female professionals in the inner city. We have implied that, especially for
women, this, combined with a declining proportion of middle-level
white-collar workers and technicians, is increasing the bifurcation of the
work force. However, once we begin to disaggregate professionals by income
level as well as gender, this inference may need modification. We shall now
examine trends in the incomes of male and female professionals in different
parts of the inner city.
To place the discussion in context, we must understand the mean
employment income of the total employed labour force in the inner-city
zones, without regard to occupation or gender. The mean incomes are
consistently lower than in the metropolitan area as a whole, and in some
cases (Villeray and Cote-des-Neiges, for example) they have not kept pace
with the general increase in the CMA (10.3 per cent in constant dollars). The
 Women Workers and the Inner City 51

largest increases have occurred in Downtown west (zone 77: 23.3 per cent),
the zone of the Plateau closest to the CBD (zone 73: 32.3 per cent) and
Downtown-east/Centre-Sud (zone 44: 20.5 per cent). (The latter is still a
poor area but since the construction of CBC/Radio-Canada's Quebec
headquarters there, it has seen considerable gentrification, notably through
an increase in male managers and professionals.)
In a number of cases, the influx of male professionals has been
accompanied by a larger increase in mean male professional employment
income than the CMA average increase, notably in zones 70 and 73. All the
same, the incomes remain below the CMA average for male professionals
($26,961 in 1981.) Relative to the CMA, 1981 mean incomes were marginal
in inner-city areas other than downtown, Outremont, Westmount, and
NDG.
In 1981, the mean employment income of female professionals in the
Montreal CMA was only $16,960, or 62.9 per cent of that of their male
counterparts. In inner-city zones the discrepancy was slightly lower, there
being less spatial variation in the earnings of female professionals than those
of males. The spatial patterning of female professionals' mean employment
incomes follows, in general, that of the total labour force. A number of
points are striking, however. In most inner-city zones, the increase since
1971 has been close to or a little higher than that for the CMA as a whole,
although many zones still remain below the CMA average. The most
noticeable increase is in Lower Outremont (zone 69), where female
professionals' incomes were 100.8 per cent of the CMA average in 1971 but
121.3 per cent in 1981. In two zones that experienced an influx of women
professionals (zones 70 and 71), the mean incomes of female professionals
actually decreased in constant dollar terms, which suggests that many of
those who moved in were economically marginal.
Rose (1984) has proposed that not all gentrifiers corresponded to the
Young Urban Professional ("yuppie") image, with its connotations of
upward mobility and conspicuous consumption by households with two
professional or managerial jobs (see, for example, Beauregard, 1986). It was
argued that, at least in some cities, with a large stock of modestly priced
housing in the inner city, there were also "marginal gentrifiers": young
people in occupations that were certainly professional but irregular and not
well paying; not-so-young people whose career trajectories were blocked by
recession or retrenchment in the public sector; and other groups for whom
suburban environments did not offer the appropriate combination of
affordable housing, fast access to work and services (such as day care), and
social networks. Female single parents with professional jobs are a typical
example of this latter group (Rose and Le Bourdais, 1986; Saegert et al.,
1985); another example is groups with so-called alternative lifestyles which
52 Life Spaces

can be lived more easily in the inner city, such as gay men in the arts and
media. This label of marginal gentrifiers is not fully satisfactory; over time,
some people in this group doubtless become more upwardly mobile and
obtain more stable work. However, the uncertainty brought about by the
present phase of economic restructuring makes this dubious for many
(Ehrenreich, 1986; Wessel, 1986).
To what extent can marginal professionals, a high proportion of whom
are female, be said to be active in the gentrification process? What are the
social implications of this activity? If homeownership in the inner city is one
indication of gentrification, there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence
from Montreal to show that women professionals are over-represented
among owners of undivided condominium duplex and triplex units. This
form of tenure, which has grown rapidly since the early 1980's, has offered
an inexpensive form of homeownership as well as the advantages of knowing
one's neighbours and perhaps exchanging services. All the same, home-
ownership was still a rarity in the inner city in 1981, even among households
headed by a professional. The relative concentration10 of homeownership
among professionals is increasing in the downtown area, Outremont,
Westmount, Saint-Louis/Mile End, and the Plateau. However, in the
Plateau, professionals are still under-represented among homeowners. This
can be looked at in two ways: either you do not have to be a homeowner to be
a gentrifier; or you may be part of the influx of professionals but you cannot
afford homeownership because your income is too low or insecure. It is
probable that both of these contain elements of truth, especially in view of
the general context of homeownership rates in the city, which never exceeded
20 per cent in 1981 among all households.
In order to cast further light on the possible neighbourhood-level impacts
of the growth in numbers of female professionals, we also examined their
marital status and the presence of children at home. For these purposes we
have focused on three gentrifying neighbourhoods: Carre Saint-Louis/
Milton-Pare east (zone 73, and most gentrified as of 1981), Saint-Louis/
Mile End west (zone 70) and the central core of the Plateau Mont-Royal
(zone 72).
The relative importance of female professionals in these zones can be
inferred by looking at more general trends. Overall, the total labour force in
the three zones (excluding those whose occupation was not declared)
increased only slightly in number from 1971 to 1981 (from 34,005 to
34,590). The female labour force, however, increased by 11.4 per cent (from
13,005 to 14,490), to comprise 41.9 per cent of the work force (slightly
higher than the CMA figure of 41.4 per cent). Without this increase the
resident labour force would have declined in numbers; we can thus see one
concrete indication of the social importance of women's increased labour
 Women Workers and the Inner City 53

force participation. Among the resident female labour force of these three
zones in 1981, 15.2 per cent were professionals, compared to 12.2 per cent in
the CMA as a whole. By way of comparison, women occupied 31.3 per cent
of the lower-level clerical, sales, and service jobs, similar to the CMA
average. Women professionals made up about one in sixteen of the total
labour force (both sexes), compared to about one in twenty in the CMA as a
whole. Although women professionals are still not as important numerically
in the gentrifying zones as their male counterparts (about one in twelve
members of the total work force), a higher proportion of the professional
labour force is female (42.8 per cent) than in the CMA (40.0 per cent); the
numerical increase of women professionals from 1971 to 1981 was greater in
zones 70 and 72 than that of males, bringing the female shares up to 46.8 per
cent and 46.3 per cent respectively. Thus there seem to be strong grounds for
exploring the structure and possible impacts of the resident female
professional work force in these zones.
Combining these three zones and both genders, we found that the
percentages of both single and separated or divorced professionals were
nearly twice as large as in the CMA as a whole, consistent with the broader
trend for the inner city to become less family-oriented (see, for example,
Mathews, 1986, pp. 107-11). However, the degree of over-representation
(measured by means of the location quotient)11 declined from 1971 to 1981,
as the percentage of non-married professionals increased throughout the
CMA. (In the census, "married" includes couples living together outside
marriage.) Interestingly, the degree of over-representation in 1981 was much
lower among women professionals than among their male counterparts,
while there was considerable variation between zones: in zone 70, 40.6 per
cent of female professionals were married (still much lower than the CMA
average of 56.7 per cent); in zone 72, 35.9 per cent; and in zone 73, only 32.8
per cent.
By way of comparison, the trends in marital status among women in
lower-level clerical, sales, and service occupations were not entirely similar,
although the overall tendency for an increased percentage to be married
rather than never-married was the same (a simple reflection of the general
growth in married women's labour force participation). While in the CMA
as a whole there was a slight increase in the proportions separated or
divorced (from 7.4 per cent to 7.7 per cent), in the three neighbourhoods
experiencing some gentrification, the trend was in the opposite direction,
especially in zone 72 where the proportion dropped from 12.1 per cent to 6.2
per cent. The size of the never-married group has fallen in absolute as well as
in relative terms in zones 72 and 73, while it has increased in zone 70.
Although the reasons for these trends are not fully clear, one wonders
whether by 1981 gentrification was already having an impact on the abilities
54 Life Spaces

of non-married women in this low-wage occupational category to pay for

housing in these neighbourhoods. (In zone 70, there was an increase in the
stock of moderately priced high-rise units, which probably accounts for the
increase in numbers of never-married, low-level white-collar and service
workers in this area.)
The high proportions of non-married women among female profession-
als, combined with the fact that women professionals' incomes tend to be
modest in these zones, leads one to suggest that the housing demands of this
fraction may not have a drastic inflationary impact on the housing market.
Indeed, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, it would seem that women
professionals living independently and with limited or unreliable incomes
are attracted to non-profit housing cooperatives in Mile End and the Plateau
Mont-Royal. At the same time, in the privately rented market, even the more
marginal women professionals can still outbid the much lower paid sales and
service workers who also want or need to live in these neighbourhoods.
Among the latter a good number are probably single parents; and over a
quarter of them live by themselves.
Comparing actual and potential gentrifiers in Montreal to other Canadian
cities (see Ley, 1985), the relatively small proportion of dual-income couples
among professionals in 1981 is probably closely related to the nature of the
housing stock in Montreal's inner city. The prevalence of large three-flat row
dwellings (triplexes) has historically helped to keep rents affordable (Choko,
1986). As gentrification was experienced in combination with a scarcity of
single-family housing, 12 middle-class couples and singles with quite modest
incomes were encouraged and enabled to purchase flats in undivided
co-ownership tenure. Those with a little more money converted two-flat
dwellings (duplexes) into single-family units or bought such units already
renovated. As a result of these trends, rents drastically increased. The trends
have accelerated since the 1981 census so one would suspect that one-income
households are finding it increasingly difficult to afford their accommoda-
tion. The recent formation of a group bringing together women wishing to
share accommodation in the Plateau Mont-Royal district is one indication
of this problem.
Women professionals, regardless of their marital or household status and
given their higher household incomes, inevitably contribute to the problem
caused by gentrification. Yet one could venture to say that the relatively
higher proportions of married people (as well as single parents) among
women professionals could lend a more familial character to the gentrifica-
tion process. This is less likely to be the case where male professionals
dominate the process. The almost total absence of families is generally seen
as one of the most negative features of gentrification. The negativity is not
so much because of a pro-nuclear family bias in the literature but because
 Women Workers and the Inner City 55

TABLE 2(a)

Presence of children at home, in all households whose "head" had a professional

occupation, selected gentrifying neighbourhoods, Montreal, 1971 and 1981*

1971 1981 1971-81

Relative
ZONE With Location With Location change
Total children quotient Total children quotient quotient
# Name (children) (children) (children)
70 Saint-Louis/
Mile End
(west) 315 95 0.507 1030 195 0.378 0.745

72 Plateau
Mont-Royal
(Centre) 585 185 0.532 1345 310 0.460 0.865

73 Carre
Saint-Louis/
Milton-Pare
(east) 800 90 0.189 1525 165 0.216 1.142

Subtotal:
3 gentrifying
neighbour-
hoods 1700 370 0.366 3900 670 0.343 0.937
CMA 82450 49045 1.000 11055 55185 1.000 1.000

* See note 11.

gentrification tends to produce "consumption landscapes": areas providing

specialized services and amenities antithetical to the needs of low-income
families trying to survive in the same neighbourhoods. This stress on the
non-family orientation of gentrifiers is largely owing to the American bias of
most gentrification literature. As Goldberg and Mercer (1986, pp. 154-66)
point out, Canadian inner cities, especially in central and eastern Canada,
contain a higher proportion of families with children at home than do
American cities, and these families are far less likely to be of low income.
With respect to gentrifying neighbourhoods in Montreal, although our
data do not enable us to quantify the trend, a certain number of
non-married female professionals head single-parent families with depend-
ent children. This group is notably evident among condominium purchasers
56 Life Spaces

TABLE 2(b)

Presence of children at home, in all family households whose "head" had a

professional occupation, selected gentrifying neighbourhoods, Montreal, 1971 and
1981*

1971 1981 1971-81

Relative
ZONE % of Location % of Location change
all prof, quotient all prof, quotient quotient
# Name house- (children) house- (children) (children)
Total holds Total holds

70 Saint-Louis/
Mile End
(west) 165 52.4 0.782 405 39.3 0.688 0.880

72 Plateau
Mont-Royal
(Centre) 335 57.3 0.750 590 43.9 0.751 1.002

73 Carre
Saint-Louis/
Milton-Pare
(east) 240 30.0 0.509 870 24.3 0.638 1.252

Subtotal:
3 gentrifying
neighbour-
hoods 740 43.5 0.679 1365 35.0 0.702 1.034

CMA 66615 80.8 1.000 78905 71.6 1.000 1.000

* See note 11.

for instance (Choko and Dansereau, 1986). We cannot, unfortunately,

identify presence of children at home in all households where a female
professional is present, since our data are tabulated with reference to the
occupation and sex of the 'household head' (1971) and 'person one'(1981).13
Moreover, since these two categories are not comparable we are unable even
to do a longitudinal analysis of presence of children in households where the
head or person one is a female professional. Instead, for the three zones used
 Women Workers and the Inner City 57

earlier, and in comparison to trends across the CM A as a whole, we have

simply looked at presence of children at home, among households headed
by a professional, regardless of sex. Tables 2(a) and 2(b) present our
findings.
The location quotients relative to all households show clearly the low
representation of families with children among professionals in these
neighbourhoods. (It should be remembered that, in the census, a family
consists of a female-male couple, with or without children, or a single
parent with a never-married child living at home). Interestingly, however, in
zone 73 (one of the first to be gentrified) the number of children increased
slightly between 1971 and 1981. If we now examine only family households
headed by & professional, the relative change quotient14 of zone 73 is greater;
in zone 72 there is no relative change; and in zone 70 the decline is less
drastic. Since these data are five years old at the time of writing, and since
we may speculate that a mini-baby boom among professional women over
thirty seems to be occurring, it is possible that before the end of the 1980's
the presence of women professionals in inner-city neighbourhoods may have
gone some way toward reversing the trend toward low numbers of children in
inner cities. Already, we have seen signs of gentrifiers participating in fights
against elementary school closings (Schulze, 1986) as well as being active in
parent-run day-care centres.

CONCLUSION

In this paper we have shown that the labour force residing in the Montreal
CMA became increasingly bifurcated from 1971 to 1981, between profes-
sional and managerial occupations at one end and unskilled blue-collar and
non-specialized white-collar and service occupations at the other. We have
suggested that this is a result of the form taken by economic restructuring in
Montreal between 1971 and 1981. The development of a 'regional city' with
important control and knowledge functions for the new international
economic order necessitates an increase in the numbers of managers and
professionals, at the same time as building a large corps of low-level
white-collar and service workers to service both the downtown infrastructure
and the new labour fractions. In Montreal's inner city, the move toward
advanced services has taken place in a context where increasingly marginalized,
labour-intensive manufacturing also persists. Further, we have pointed out
the gender-typing of this bipolarization such that the bulk of those at the
bottom are female.
The particularly strong reflection of the bifurcation trend among the
work force resident in the inner city is the result of a number of factors. Here
58 Life Spaces

we have touched on but one aspect—gentrification in or near zones where

there has traditionally been a pool of low-cost housing. In some areas the
social effects of gentrification have been negative from the point of view of
existing communities, particularly in terms of housing and neighbourhood
services. This has been evident in the strong working-class opposition to
gentrification and the mobilization of housing cooperatives in Centre-Sud,
for example.
At the same time, we have suggested that in some zones the gentrifiers
may not all be "yuppies," especially in terms of their income prospects.
Furthermore, by using data on gender, marital status, and household we
were able to shed some light on modes of reproduction of these new
fractions of labour. That is, we have been able to show that women
professionals with fairly modest incomes—of whom a good number are in
family households— are an important part of the total picture. Theoreti-
cally, there is a reciprocal and dialectical relationship between modes of
reproduction and the consumption patterns of the new fractions of labour
produced by the current round of economic restructuring.
This leads us to some more speculative comments, particularly concerning
gentrifiers with young children. These appear to be on the increase.
Conceivably, when gentrifiers have young children there may be less of a
clash with the existing community and its needs. Nonetheless, without
intervention to ensure affordable and secure housing these gentrifiers put
severe pressure on the low rental housing stock. An option would be to
expand the stock of cooperative housing.
We would suggest in particular that whether or not gentrifiers have
children is central. Indeed, it could be as important a factor as their income
levels and the trajectory of their job prospects over time in differentiating the
social implications of gentrification and assessing what political strategies
can be adopted. One- and two- parent families with children and paid jobs
must continually juggle their responsibilities for both child care and
breadwinning, especially when children are very young. Certain types of
neighbourhoods, well-provided with support services of a formal and
informal nature, can be supportive of families with these multiple
responsibilities. Such pressures are faced by the professional and the
immigrant clothing industry home-worker alike, but of course the former
has more resources at her disposal to deal with them. To the extent that
gentrifiers mobilize for improved provision of publicly supported child care
services in a neighbourhood, this could also benefit the immigrant mother
living not too far away, who has "chosen" to do piece work at home in order
to be able to mind her child. 15 The active role of women in urban community
struggles has been widely noted (see, for example, Andrew, 1984), but
analyses of gentrifiers as urban activists or supporters of urban reform
 Women Workers and the Inner City 59

movements have never specifically looked at women.16 Of course, gentrifica-

tion with a strong family component can bring with it a new kind of
unintended elitism, as Ley (1985) has put it. This has occurred in Canadian
inner cities where the progressive middle class has successfully fought to
prevent subdividing single-family dwellings, thus excluding low-to-modest
income non-couple households (ibid.). Toronto is an excellent example.
Clearly, any potentially positive spill-over effects of gentrifiers' pressure for
improved community services can only be actualized to the extent that
strong measures are taken to maintain the social and demographic
heterogeneity of such neighbourhoods.
These observations, together with the fact that the housing stock of
gentrifying neighbourhoods across Canada varies greatly, suggest that we
need case studies which examine the different kinds of local social
movements generated in gentrifying neighbourhoods with different social
and income mixes, household structures, and housing stocks. It seems
important to make use of the political leverage as well as the time,
experience, and resources of the more community-oriented gentrifiers to
help fight for neighbourhoods supportive of families of a range of different
income levels, slotted into different fractions of the labour force. If we do
not want to accelerate the apparent tendency for newly marginalized strata
and their children to be forced into poor quality suburban apartment
buildings without good access to services (Rose and Le Bourdais, 1986), we
shall have to find imaginative ways of developing inclusionary instead of
exclusionary urban revitalization in all the existing city neighbourhoods
where it is not already too late.

NOTES

1. This chapter is a substantially revised and enlarged version of a paper presented

at the Canadian Urban Studies conference, Winnipeg, August 1985. We wish to
thank the editors, Francine Dansereau, Anne Gilbert, Alex Kowaluk, Janet
McClain, and three anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. Julie
Archambault prepared the map. The research project on which this article is
based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, whose assistance we gratefully acknowledge.
2. We use the neologism "bipolarization" instead of the term "polarization,"
used in everyday English, in deference to our colleagues in the regional scienc
milieu for whom the latter term has completely different theoretical connotations.
3. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistical information cited in the remainder of
this article is based on calculations using special tabulations of the 1971 and
60 Life Spaces

1981 censuses obtained for the larger research project.

4. Our occupational categories are based on various recent attempts to derive
class, rather than status, indicators from census data (see e.g. Hunter and
Manley, 1986; Legare, 1977; Pelletier, 1982). (For instance, a nurse is seen as a
technician, not a professional.) The classification is centred on the notion of
social relations of power, power being considered as a relation exercised
through the control of information in the broadest sense, and, where necessary,
with recourse to coercion. Our categories are thus related to each other through
asymmetrical relations of power based on differential control of information.
We also distinguish power over others (managers or supervisors, for example)
from power over specialized or technical knowledge (professionals or techni-
cians), although in reality one form of power is likely to entail the other. Finally,
the distinction between white- and blue-collar workers reflects on conceptions
of "fractions" of capital, although it is clear that in manufacturing,
white-collar workers have been increasing in proportion over the years.
Inevitably, the assignment of four-digit census occupational categories to one
of our seven groups can be arbitrary at times. This has been minimized by
referring to the detailed definitions of occupations found in Occupational
Classification Manual: Census of Canada, 1971. Cat. 12-536. (We used the
1971 rather than the 1980 classification because the former can be used for both
1971 and 1980.)
5. This observation is drawn from a preliminary analysis of place-of-work by
place-of-residence data obtained from Statistics Canada as part of the larger
research project.
6. The area thus delimited bears a close resemblance to that used by Mathews
(1986, pp. 45-47). The larger research project uses a division of the CMA into
94 zones, initially drawn up for a concurrent study (based at INRS-
Urbanisation) on single-parent families in Montreal. As far as possible, the
zones represent recognizable neighbourhoods.
7. We have retained three decimal places in these indices because a small change
(about 0.02) in the values of either statistic is of statistical significance. For a
discussion see Villeneuve and Rose (1985).
8. All the same, our preliminary analysis shows that, as of 1981 there was little
decentralization of white-collar employment from the inner city of Montreal to
the suburbs. Employment in the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors, as
well as in business services—sectors closely associated with the "corporate
city"—was concentrated in the central core (see also Polese et al.9 1984).
Moreover, there was little "reverse commuting" among the labour force
resident close to downtown.
9. Furthermore, although the great majority of married women professionals
have spouses who are employed, the proportions are a little lower in some
gentrifying neighbourhoods; this suggests that some may be supporting their
husbands financially.
10. By relative concentration we refer to the ratio of the proportion of homeowners
in a zone that are professionals to the proportion of all households in a zone
that are professionals.
 Women Workers and the Inner City 61

11. The location quotient is the ratio of the proportion of professional households
in a certain zone with children at home to the proportion of professional
households in the whole of the CM A with children at home. The index can vary
between 0 and infinity. A value of 0.5 indicates that the concentration in a zone
is only half that found in the CMA; a value of 2 indicates a concentration twice
that in the CMA. It should be noted that when the values of numerator or
denominator are very small, the index is much less reliable.
12. Exceptions were Outremont and Notre-Dame-de-Grace, which rapidly became
very expensive from the late 1970's on.
13. In the 1981 Census Statistics, Canada replaced its previous concept of
"household head" with that of "person one," defined as the person in a
household responsible for payment of rent, mortgage, taxes, or electricity.
Although this was supposed to get rid of sexist bias, in reality numerous
problems remain in this respect (see Armstrong and Armstrong, 1983 for
discussion). Moreover, the new definition is still unable to take account of
households where two adults share equally in financial responsibilities.
14. The relative change quotient is the 1981 location quotient divided by that of
1971.
15. As Meintel, Labelle and Turcotte (1985) have suggested, immigrant women may
also be short of support either because selective immigration has fractured
kinship networks or because their kin and friends also have to work long hours.
16. For an illustration of this point, see Ley and Mills's (1986) study of
gentrification and political activism in Montreal in 1982.

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 3

Practical Idealism: Women in Urban Reform,

Julia Drummond and the
Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association
JEANNE M. WOLFE and GRACE STRACHAN

INTRODUCTION

The urban reform movements in Canada between 1880 and 1920 have been
well documented (Rutherford, 1974; Stelter and Artibise, 1977; Weaver,
1977; Germain, 1984) as have the conditions of our cities and towns during
the middle and late nineteenth century that triggered the reforms (Ames,
1897; Woodsworth, 1911; Hart, 1919; Copp, 1974; Linteau, 1979). However,
there has been scant attention paid to the contribution of women in these
movements. Women were the prime actors in welfare organizations, often
wielding power through their husbands. In Montreal during this period,
women were responsible for the foundation of the Charity Organization
Society (later to become the Family Welfare Association), they were promi-
nent in the University Settlement Movement, founders of the Parks and Play-
grounds Association, and central to the establishment of the Victorian Order
of Nurses through the National Council of Women. Women also coordinated
traditional charities such as foundling hospitals, Ladies Benevolent Societies,
and associations for the protection of women and children.
This paper examines some aspects of the role of women active in urban
reform in Montreal at the turn of the century. It is clear that women's
concerns focused on the domestic, family, and environmental aspects of
urban life rather than on the political, administrative, and economic. There
are two reasons for this: first, caring and children are traditionally the
concern of women; second, women were simply not enfranchised in most
areas of public life.
This preliminary examination of the role of women focuses mainly on the
foundation and evolution of the Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Associa-
tion (MPPA) and on the life of Lady Julia Drummond. The Montreal Parks
66 Life Spaces

and Playgrounds Association began as a women's protest movement, and the

breadth of its activities and its longevity are noteworthy. It is one women's
organization among many that has had an enduring effect on urban life.
Similarly, the work of Julia Drummond illustrates the scope of reform
activities among and for women, children, and working-class families. Many
other women of this period did similar work for a similar range of
organizations; activists such as Lady Kingston, Mrs. John Cox, and
Josephine Gerin-Lajoie were, like Drummond, amateurs and philanthro-
pists. Other later ones, such as Professor Carrie Derick, a botanist, Maud
Abbott, a lawyer, and Dr. Grace Ritchie England and Helen Y. Reid, social
workers, were pioneer professionals with wide-ranging interests. However,
both groups shared common interests and common approaches to the
problems of the times.
We make no apologies for starting our enquiry through examination of
the work of a member of the elite; sources about working-class women of
this period are scarce, possibly non-existent, although more is becoming
known about their working lives. (See Cross 1977; Dumont et al., 1982;
Lavigne, Pinard and Stoddart, 1977; and Lavigne and Stoddart, 1983.)

URBAN REFORM

The urban reform movement in Montreal, as elsewhere, arose at the

beginning of the twentieth century in response to the conditions created by
large-scale industrialization and immigration. From a population of 78,000
in 1851, just before the building of the Grand Trunk Railway, greater
Montreal grew to a third of a million by the turn of the century and had
passed the one million mark by 1931. As migrants streamed into the city to
fill unskilled jobs, so health, crowding, and sanitation problems com-
pounded. Concern for the city's poor, voiced only by a scattered few in the
late 1800's, foreshadowed the rise of urban reform movements, which led to
town planning in the 1910's and 1920's.
Urban reform in the nineteenth century focused on: (1) public health and
housing concerns, (2) the city beautiful movement, (3) the parks and
playgrounds drive, (4) civic administrative reform, and (5) the conservation
movement (Lubove, 1967; Spragge, 1975). In many respects reformers
pursued similar ends but approached the problems from different perspectives.

THE PARKS AND PLAYGROUNDS MOVEMENT

The Parks and Playgrounds Movement in North America dates from the
mid-nineteenth century. Its beginnings are marked by the passage of the First
 Practical Idealism 67

Park Act by the New York State legislature in 1851. Previous to this, there is
no recorded example in North America of outdoor recreational space on
land acquired and owned by a public authority, developed with public
funds, and open indiscriminately to all, although various civic and
ornamental squares existed (Newton, 1971, p. 267). The first steps in the
acquisition of Central Park in New York City date from this time; other
cities rapidly followed suit, including Boston, Chicago, Buffalo, San
Francisco, and San Diego, and, almost twenty years later, Montreal. The act
authorising the purchase of Mount Royal was passed in 1869 and some 485
acres had been acquired by 1875, despite various disputes (Jenkins, 1966, p.
413). In 1873, Frederick Law Olmstead was retained as designer for the park
(Marsan, 1983, pp. 301-4).
The parks movement pre-dates the playground drive by a few years: the
first focused on large-scale natural open space; the second concentrated on
organized play areas as an alternative to cluttered streets. The parks
movement, urged on by the developing profession of landscape architecture,
can be considered as the urban counterpart of the conservation movement.
Conservation experts in the United States such as Gifford Pinshott, John
Wesley Powell, El wood Mead, and Benton Mackaye first introduced the
concept of scientific resource management, but they soon moved beyond
natural resource policy into the realm of social and community theory
(Lubove, 1967, p. 2). Thus the idea of large urban parks with naturalistic
landscaping evolved in response not only to rapid urbanization and the
distancing of the countryside from city dwellers but also to an emerging idea
of a rural-urban continuum satisfying aesthetic and emotional needs (Fein,
1972). The impetus for acquiring and developing parkland came then, as
now, from the upper middle classes (Harry, Gale and Hendee, 1969).
The playgrounds movement followed rapidly, prompted by concerns about
urban crowding, sanitation and hygiene, and juvenile delinquency. Sand
"gardens," a new idea introduced from Germany, were prescribed for the
very young as a creative form of play and learning. Organized games
emphasizing discipline and good sportsmanship were recommended for
older children, along with useful lessons such as woodwork and metal work
for boys and cooking and sewing for girls. These playgrounds would (1) keep
children from slum areas off the streets where they might be injured or
subjected to all sorts of temptations, (2) get them out into the sunshine to
improve their health, and (3) train them to be better citizens (MPPA, 1901,
1904).
The Parks Protective Association, forerunner of the Montreal Parks and
Playgrounds Association (MPPA), was founded in the winter of 1895-96. Its
purpose was to save Mount Royal from the threat of disfiguring develop-
ment, prompted by the Montreal Street Railway Company's attempt to build
a railway through the park to provide improved access. (After the opening of
68 Life Spaces

Mount Royal park in 1876, a privately operated incline railway had been
built to provide access to the summit, but it was unreliable, costly, and
underused. However, Fletcher's Field, on the eastern foot of the mountain,
was always crowded [Ewing, 1922], prompting the railway company to seek a
franchise there.) Reaction was immediate: a Park Protective Association was
formed by a group of well-connected women under the leadership of Lady
Hingston. Popular sentiments were divided, however. Some feared that,
without rail access, the top of the mountain "would only be for the rich who
could reach it in their carriages" (letter to the Montreal Star, 25 July 1891).
Lady Hingston, wife of Dr. William Hingston who had officiated as
mayor at the opening of the park twenty years earlier, agreed with Frederick
Law Olmstead's passionate belief in the dangers of encroachment on
naturalistic landscape. Olmstead was a leading American promoter of the
view that the market system did not create environments conducive to the
socialization of urban dwellers. Lady Hingston rapidly organized a petition
of twenty thousand signatures to persuade the legislature to refuse the
franchise. On the very day it was presented, the company, sensing defeat,
withdrew its request (MPPA, archives MG.2079.cl3. File 313). The
committee of ladies then met with the city council and persuaded it to
amend the city charter so that the mountain would forever be preserved in its
natural beauty (MPPA, Annual Report, 1901).
In spite of the women's success, the mountain continued to be threatened
by development schemes. In early 1900, for instance, a member of the
Quebec legislature moved to amend the city charter with a view to alienating
the southwest corner of Fletcher's Field. Although protested vigorously, the
amendment went through, though in modified form. The women of the
Parks Protective Association sensed that their informal watchdog group was
not strong enough to withstand development pressures, and they moved to
incorporate a more forceful and durable society (MPPA, archives MG.2079.c8.
Scrapbooks).
Meanwhile it was becoming clear that the mountain was not the only open
space issue. Working-class areas suffered an appalling lack of parks and
playgrounds. The 38,000 residents of the western section of the lower city
only had two public squares, Richmond and St. Patrick's. Similarly, the
26,000 residents of St. Louis ward had access only to Viger Square. For the
people of St. Laurent ward there was only Dufferin Square which, like
Dominion Square, had been a cemetery (Robert, 1928). Lafontaine Park,
(Logan's Farm), a military training ground from 1845 to 1888, did not
become a park until towards the end of the century, and St. Helen's Island,
also a military base from 1818 to the late 1870's, was accessible only by ferry.
Its southern tip became a park in 1874, but the city did not purchase the
whole island until 1907 (Atherton, 1914, Vol. 2, p. 644; Marsan, 1981, p.
306).
 Practical Idealism 69

Most of the women of the Parks Protective Association were affiliated

with other groups, notably through the Montreal Local Council of Women
(MLCW), and a vigorous chapter of the National Council of Women of
Canada (NCWC) founded by Lady Aberdeen in 1893 (Strong-Boag, 1976)
which brought together members of women's philanthropic, charitable, and
cultural associations for mutual benefit. The ladies of the Parks Protective
Association, through their work in other organizations, were only too well
aware of the deficiencies of slum neighbourhoods. They recognized the need
for a dual-purpose open space organization, first to protect existing open
spaces, and second to foster the development of playgrounds and the ideals
of the growing playground movement.
The so-called play movement came to Canada through the United States
from Germany. Before its inception, sports such as football, cricket, and
athletics were practised on open space such as the town commons of New
England, and on vacant land in the outskirts of town such as Fletcher's Field
in Montreal. These manly sports were replaced by curling, hockey, and
snowshoeing in winter, usually organized through private clubs and catered
primarily, though not exclusively, to middle- and upper-class men (Metcalfe,
1978). Play space for children was simply not considered.
The idea of sand gardens was brought to Boston from Germany by Dr.
Marie Zakrewski in the late 1880's and was popularized by Miss Ellen Tower
of the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association. There was great
excitement over sand play, and Miss Tower was invited to Montreal to lecture
on the subject in 1902 (MPPA, Annual Report, 1903). Her ideas were gladly
incorporated into the fledgling parks movement (Wilson, 1953).
The Parks and Playgrounds Association was formally launched in 1902,
with Mrs. William Peterson, wife of the principal of McGill University, as
president. In the first year two Protestant School Board yards, at Berthelet
and Royal Arthur schools, were rented for the summer and set up as play
centres; members of the association worked as volunteer leaders. A total of
12,912 children attended over a nine-week summer period, with total
expenditures of $386.43 (MPPA, Annual Report, 1902).
Meanwhile the association set in motion an Act of Incorporation. The
petition was signed by most of the leading figures of the day, including
George A. Drummond, William Kingston, Raoul Dandurand, Frederick L.
Beique, Mayor Hormiadas Laporte, Dr. William Peterson, Sir Alexandre
Lacoste, and many others, along with a great list of their wives, including
Julia Drummond. In 1904, the association received its Quebec Charter, and
at the annual meeting a group of distinguished gentlemen were elected to the
board, with the Hon. George A. Drummond as president (MPPA, Annual
Report, 1904).
The presence of men on the governing board of an organization started by
70 Life Spaces

women can be explained by a speech made by Julia Drummond some years

later. She enumerated three conditions necessary for the success of an
organization: "It must have women in it"; "its governing board must be
composed largely of business men. . . . that business men should think it
worth their while as citizens to put into charity those same principles of
order, economy and adaptation of means to ends which characterize all
business"; and "everyone should make use of it" (Drummond, 1907, pp.
136-37). The annual reports of the MPPA for the first years consistently
show a male board of directors, while the two committees, one for parks and
the other for playgrounds, were composed entirely of women, whom, Julia
Drummond said, have more "sense and sensibility" (1907, p. 136).

GRACE JULIA DRUMMOND

Grace Julia Drummond was born in Montreal in 1859, the third daughter
of Alex Davison Parker, an insurance broker, and Grace Parker, a former
lady-in-waiting to Lady Elgin, wife of the Governor General. Julia was
raised and educated in Montreal; she was fluent in French and an advocate
of bilingualism (Osborn, 1919). At the age of twenty, she married an
Anglican clergyman, George Hamilton, who died the following year. In
1884, she married George A. Drummond, a prosperous, Scottish-born sugar
merchant, financier, company director, patron of the arts, and well-known
philanthropist. He was fifty-five and she was twenty-five. George Drummond
was later to be made a senator and knighted. They had two sons, Julian,
born in 1885, who died in infancy, and Guy, born in 1887, who was killed at
the second battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915.
The first record of Julia Drummond's involvement with activities outside
the domestic sphere is as a member of the Women's Historical Society and
the Women's Art Association, both "normal" pursuits for a Victorian
woman of her class. The Women's Art Association was particularly suitable
for Julia since her husband was a collector of paintings and served as
president of the association from 1896 to 1899. Her first independent step
into public life was in 1893, when she became the first president of the
Montreal Local Council of Women (MLCW).
Lady Aberdeen had come to Canada as wife of the Governor General and
was already an activist in the rapidly evolving women's club movement
(Strong-Boag, 1977); she was elected president of the International Council
of Women at their founding convention in Chicago in 1893. Arriving in
Canada later that year, she immediately set about founding a national
organization with chapters in each major city. Not unsurprisingly, she
became president of the Canadian Council. A note in the Aberdeen diaries
 Practical Idealism 71

gives a clue to why Julia Drummond was elected president of the Montreal
group. Dated Thursday, 30 November 1893, and written at the Windsor
Hotel in Montreal, the entry reads: "Dr. Barclay has happily suggested the
name of Mrs. Drummond as Pres. of Local Council. She is the wife of
Senator Drummond and a very distinguished charming looking women
. . . . Mrs. Cummings [nee Emily Ann Short, a Toronto activist] went
around to explain things to her this morning & she readily accepted and
spoke a few words saying Yes in a v. dignified and pleasant way" (Saywell,
1960, p. 36).
Dr. James Barclay, a presbyterian minister who had emigrated to Canada
in 1844, was a highly influential person. He had a great reputation as a
preacher, lecturer, sportsman, and philanthropist, and his fame was such
that he was often summoned to Balmoral to preach to Queen Victoria (ibid.,
p. 485). He was a great friend and confidant of the Aberdeens. Thus, it
appears that Julia Drummond was really chosen rather than elected first
president of the MLCW.
Julia Drummond served as president of the MLCW for the first five years
of its life. The Montreal council was a voluntary federation of both women's
groups and individual members. The main aim of the council was to
promote unity among women; its secondary objectives were aid to women
and children and social reform. Respecting but not necessarily supporting
the views of its member groups, the MLCW remained non-sectarian and
non-political, although it started in an essentially Anglo-Protestant milieu.
The council was soon joined by groups such as the Girls Friendly Society, the
YMCA, the Child Welfare Association, the Day Nursery, the Foundling and
Baby Hospital, the Ladies Benevolent Society, the Women's National
Immigration Society, the Child Welfare Association, the Montreal Women's
Club, the Women's Art Association, and the Alumnae Society of McGill
University (Strong-Boag, 1976). A number of prominent French-Canadian
women also joined, despite the opposition of their church, including: Mme
Rosaire Thibaudeau (Marie Loulou Lamothe), founder of the Notre Dame
hospital; Josephine Marchand Dandurand; Marie Gerin-Lajoie, daughter
of Lady Lacoste; and Caroline Be'ique. All were to gain valuable
organizational experience and to hold office in the council (Pinard, 1977).
In 1907, they formed a French-Canadian parallel to the MLCW, the
Fondation des Dames Patronnes de 1'Association St-Jean Baptiste, and
although their work with the Local Council provided them with a durable
model, they soon drifted away from the MLCW (Lavigne et al., 1977;
Johnson, 1968).
Julia Drummond's work with the MLCW also prompted her to take a
decisive role in the newly emerging Charity Organization movement which,
like the Parks and Playgrounds movement, was a direct import from the
72 Life Spaces

United States. The idea at first was to coordinate all charitable activity in the
city and have all paupers registered so that they could not exploit several
different agencies. The available funds would thus go further, and the truly
needy would have more chance of getting relief. As Drummond said, "We
hear from another city of a woman who has buried her husband seventeen
times. He is still going about and able to enjoy his dinner" (1907, p. 138).
An earlier attempt to found a Charity Organization Society under the
leadership of the Reverend Dr. Barnes had failed, so the women decided to
put all their support behind this movement. Local councils set up study
groups, and they surveyed the various methods used in dealing with
unemployment and want in "civilized countries." Mrs. John Cox (wife of a
McGill University professor) became convenor, and Julia Drummond was a
moving force on the executive committee. A public meeting was held to air
the issues in October 1899; presided over by the mayor, it was attended by all
the notables of the city and Lady Minto, wife of the Governor General. Dr.
Gordon Taylor and Lady Drummond gave addresses (Derick, n.d.); Julia's
was the first public speech by a woman in Montreal (Collard, 1982), and it
was much praised for its lucidity and elegance. Sir George Drummond was
elected president, a position he was to hold until his death in 1910. Lady
Julia then took over this task, a sign of both the changing times and the
changing attitudes of Lady Julia herself.
The Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) was founded in a similar way. The
NCWC was looking for a suitable way to commemorate the Queen's jubilee,
and it was also concerned about the lack of medical care for rural women
and children. Encouraged by the activities of Florence Nightingale and the
establishment of nursing services in rural England and Ireland, the VON was
created. Sir George Drummond agreed to serve as a trustee (Gibbon, 1947),
and Lady Julia sat on the organizing committee, later becoming a
vice-president.
Julia Drummond's public speaking abilities became famous. She
addressed not only the women's and charitable organizations but also such
groups as graduating nurses at McGill, women's church groups on "How to
Be Happy," and the working men of the Sunday Afternoon Society of Point
St. Charles, in addition to addresses to the British nobility (Drummond,
1907). She was familiar with the classical philosophers, knew the work of
Charles Booth and John Ruskin, was aware of "a fierce form of socialism"
(1907, p. 116), and was horrified by one contemporary commentator's
notion that women were incapable of further intellectual development after
the age of twenty-five.
These sentiments inevitably led Julia Drummond into the suffrage
movement. The International Council of Women had debated suffrage in
1904 and 1909, but it was not until 1910 that the Canadian Council overtly
 Practical Idealism 73

expressed sympathy with the movement. This caution seems to have been
more because of the council's avowed non-political stand than because of
disinterest. Many members firmly believed, like the women of the Women's
Christian Temperance Union, that the only way to ensure legal rights for
women was through the franchise (Cleverdon, 1950; Bacchi, 1977, 1978).
The local council of women had long been struggling for women's rights
on issues such as property, injurious assault, child support, stools for shop
assistants to rest on, and higher education for women. It was not until 1888
that McGill timidly admitted the first women; even then, they were not
permitted in professional faculties (Gillett, 1981). By 1913 the MLCW
decided it must take a real stand. Under the leaderhip of Professor Carrie
Derick, a botanist and the first female professor at McGill, the Montreal
Suffrage Association was formed. It was quick to explain that it was not
militant in the way of some American feminists, but that it sought equal
rights for all.
A special issue of the Montreal Herald was produced on 26 November
1913 to launch the suffrage campaign. In it Julia Drummond wrote an
article titled "A Great Movement: Its Trend and Significance." She reviewed
the achievements of the Montreal Council, including work on sanitary
conditions and public health, propaganda lectures on diet, child care, and
disease prevention, work in the Pure Milk League, the anti-tuberculosis
campaign, the establishment of the Royal Edward Institute for pulmonary
diseases, agitation for medical inspection of schools, certificates of training
for teachers, and pressure to allow women to study medicine. On the civic
scene they included the parks and playgrounds drive, housing standards, and
the construction of public baths.
Meanwhile the Parks and Playgrounds Association continued its activi-
ties. Public subscriptions and city contributions enabled it to employ
professionally trained graduates from McGill to work with children in the
parks and school yards each summer. Their ranks were swelled by workers
from the Montreal University Settlement, which was founded by the McGill
Alumnae Society following the model of Toynbee Hall in London as
popularized by Octavia Hill and by Jane Addams in Chicago (Morton,
1953). The concept was that young university people should live in
low-income areas in order both to help the residents with educational and
recreational programmes and to learn the true nature of social problems.
The University Settlement and the MPPA worked closely together for many
years to provide activities for children. By 1919, the MPPA had five
playgrounds in operation in the summer; slides, sandboxes, and swings in
many localities; and recreational programmes for all age groups.
The MPPA also became a member of the Montreal City Improvement
League, a federation which included the Province of Quebec Association of
74 Life Spaces

Architects and the Greater Montreal Housing Association, whose prime aim
was to campaign for town planning as a remedy for all urban evils. The
MPPA also became a member of the Charity Organization Society and was
from its beginning a member of the MLCW. All these groups lobbied the
city to set up a real Parks and Playgrounds Department. By 1913 the city was
giving $10,000 per year for playgrounds, but publicly organized recreation
did not become a fact until after the Second World War. Until that time the
MPPA ran the children's programmes in the city parks (Canadian Municipal
Journal, 1913; McFarland, 1970).

CONCLUSION

Various conclusions can be drawn from this account of the operation of a

women's organization at the turn of the century and its role in urban reform.
The first, and most striking, is that with the exception of the Parks
Protective Association, the ideas of women were not native to the local
scene, nor even to Canada. The parks and playgrounds movement, the
National Council of Women, the Charity Organization Society, the
Victorian Order of Nurses, and the Montreal University Settlement all had
their antecedents in the United States and England. Canada was very much
the colonial society, obeying the wishes of the Governor General and his
wife and absorbing social movements from south of the border.
Networking, a concept that receives much contemporary scholarly
attention, was highly developed among the women of late nineteenth-
century Canada. It was in fact formalized through the various overlapping
federations of volunteer associations and societies. The Montreal Local
Council of Women, the National Council of Women of Canada, the
Charity Organization Society, and the City Improvement League were all
umbrella groups bringing together diverse single-purpose agencies; they
could all rapidly muster support for causes.
At the beginning of the reform period, power was exercised through
husbands. This is well illustrated by Lady Kingston's mustering of 20,000
signatures: she simply had the association write to each of her husband's
friends and associates, encouraging them to ask their employees to sign the
petition! Later, as associations gained credibility and women gained
confidence, and took advantage of increased educational opportunities,
women started to organize independently.
Feminist perspectives also prompted a change in conventional wisdom
about the nature of urban ills. The urban environment was full of
temptations and evil influences: drink, prostitution, thievery and vagrancy.
Early reformers believed that human nature was weak and impressionable,
 Practical Idealism 75

and that children were especially vulnerable to destructive forces (Hart,

1919). By the early twentieth century, the notion that the poor were
somehow responsible for their own miseries was being diluted. Julia
Drummond gives us a fine illustration of this; writing in 1913, she says "take
only Montreal with its noble site and splendid possibilities—and its slums
and bad housing and lack of open spaces, with all that these bring of
physical and moral degradation—are not these miserable actualities of today
the direct result of the lack of public conscience, of the seeking only for
immediate and personal profit in Montreal of the past?" (Montreal Herald,
26 November 1913).
Lubove (1967) has interpreted the parks and playgrounds movement as the
introduction of a form of social control, similar to other reform initiatives.
We prefer to think that it stemmed from heartfelt and sincere concern.
Victorian volunteers had to tread daintily between images of "Lady
Bountiful" and charges of "slumming it" for their own gratification.
However, it is clear that many of them went far beyond what was perceived
as the path of duty for women of their class, and one can only speculate on
the ire these activities must have raised in their own families.

EPILOGUE

Julia Drummond went on to become more and more famous. During the
First World War she went to England to work for the Canadian Red Cross
and became head of its information services. She founded the Maple Leaf
Clubs for Canadian servicemen overseas, meanwhile maintaining her
interest in the Charity Organization Society. She received many honours;
among others, she was made a Lady in her own right by the Order of St.
John of Jerusalem in 1919, and she was awarded an honorary LL.D. from
McGill in 1921. After the war she resumed her Canadian volunteer
activities, remaining active until her death in 1942 at the age of eighty-three.
The biography of this remarkable woman has yet to be written; perhaps a
"trained intellect," her own expression for a university-educated woman,
could take up the challenge?

BIOGRAPHY OF GRACE JULIA DRUMMOND, 1859-1942

Born: 17 December 1859, Montreal.

Baptised: Presbyterian Crescent Church, 3 May 1860.
76 Life Spaces

Parents: Alex Davison Parker, who came from Edinburgh in 1846 to open the first
office of Standard Life Insurance Co.
Grace Parker, formerly Grace Gibson, lady-in-waiting to Lady Elgin, wife of the
Governor General.
First husband: Rev. George Hamilton, Anglican clergyman, son of Robert Hamilton, a
Quebec merchant. Married 1879; died 1880.
Second husband: George A. Drummond, 1829-1910
1854: came to Canada from Scotland, aged 25.
entered sugar business (Redpath).
1857: married Helen Redpath (sons: Huntley R. and Arthur L.; three others,
Maurice, Edgar and George, died young).
1872: ran unsuccessfully for Parliament (Conservative).
1874-78: in Europe.
1878: founded Canada Sugar Refining Company.
1882: became a director of the Bank of Montreal.
1884: married JULIA.
1888: made a Senator.
1894: founded Home for Incurables (Sisters of St. Margaret).
1896-99: President of the Art Association.
1897: trustee for Victorian Order of Nurses.
1900-10: President, Charity Organization Society.
1904: Charter member, Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association.
1904: Knighted.
1904-5: President, Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association; President,
Royal Edward Institution.
1905: President, Bank of Montreal.
1910: died, aged 81.
Children: Julian 1885-86.
Guy 1887-1915. Killed at age 28 at the second battle of Ypres, 22 April 1915.
Married 18 April 1914 to Mary Hendrie Braithwaite; one son, Guy Melfort
Drummond, lawyer.
Work:
Women's Historical Society, 1893.
Art Association.
National Council of Women of Canada:
First President, Montreal Local Council of Women, 1893-97.
Victorian Order of Nurses, Organizing Committee, 1897.
Convenor, NCWC presentation for the Paris International Exhibition, 1900.
Convenor, Reformatory Committee, 1908-10.
Quebec Tercentennial Celebrations Committee, 1908.
Montreal Suffrage Association, Organizing Committee, 1913.
Political Speech for reform candidate, 1 April 1913.
Life patron, NCWC, 1915.
Parks and Playgrounds Association:
Parks Protective Association, 1895-1904.
Charter member, 1904.
Board member, 1904-8.
 Practical Idealism 77

Charity Organization Society (later the Family Welfare Association and the
Council of Social Agencies):
Organizer, 1899.
(Husband president, 1900-10).
Executive Committee, 1900-10.
President, 1910-20.
Mothers' Aid Branch of the Family Welfare Association, 1922.
Montreal Women's Canadian Club: First President, 1907-8.
War Work
Canadian Red Cross Society:
Head of Information Bureau in England, 1914-18.
Founder and President of King George V and Queen Mary Maple Leaf Clubs
for soldiers on leave, 1914-18.
Post-war
Family Welfare Association:
Honorary President, 1920-32.
Board of Directors, 1920-22.
Mothers' Aid Branch, Executive, 1920-22.
Womens Directory of Montreal (organized in 1914 to help unmarried mothers)
Honorary President.
Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association: Board member, 1931.
Montreal Industrial Institute for Epileptics (providing training for the mentally
and neurologically handicapped; 17 pupils): Committee member.
Montreal University Settlement: Life Governor, 1922
Murray Bay Convalescence Home (196 patients): Director.
Victorian Order of Nurses:
Honorary Vice President.
Local Board of Management, 1922.
Honours
Royal Montreal Ladies Golf Club Cup, 1905.
Medaille de Reconnaissance, France.
British Red Cross Medal.
Serbian Red Cross Medal.
Lady of Grace, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 1916.
Lady of Justice, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 1919.
Honorary LL.D., McGill University, 1921.

NOTE

1. Julia Drummond's grandson, Guy Melfort Drummond, a Montreal lawyer, has

kindly helped with information for this paper. We are greatly indebted to Miss
Barbara Whitley, Past President of the Women's Canadian Club of Montreal,
for her generous help in providing materials concerning Lady Drummond.
78 Life Spaces

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Montreal." Master's of Social Work thesis, McGill University.

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 4

Divergent Convergence:
The Daily Routines of Employed Spouses
as a Public Affairs Agenda
WILLIAM MICHELSON

INTRODUCTION

The increased participation of women in paid employment outside the home

is a pronounced trend of our times. Consequently, women's activity patterns
seem to resemble what men do, but women's qualitative experience in the
daily routine is actually quite different from that of men.
This article explores ways in which the daily experience of employed
mothers converges with and diverges from that of their husbands.1 It also
describes how public policies and practices, especially those concerning
urban organization, infrastructure, and transportation, compound the
difficulties of employed mothers, and it suggests what can be done to
increase support for this growing segment of the working population.

WHY PERSONAL DECISIONS ARE OF PUBLIC CONCERN

It is helpful first to give some perspective on reasons for linking public

affairs with employment decisions and the daily activities of individuals and
families. A laissez-faire approach to maternal employment means that
mothers of young children cope individually and independently with the
daily activities confronted when they enter the labour force. Some
well-meaning how-to books written by women urge other women to devote
greater effort to personal organization, but this conveys an impression that a
career women who is overburdened has only herself to blame.
Personal lives are in fact played out on a vast stage; forces originating far
beyond the self and family influence what people do and how well they can
do it. In the case of maternal employment, for example, public policies
82 Life Spaces

affect such critical matters as the basic decision to undertake employment

and the logistical conditions under which non-household activities are
conducted in the daily routine.

Increasing Employment of Women

Neither formal employment nor work as such are new to women. The
dramatic new trend in western industrial societies is the extent to which
different categories of adult women have joined the labour force. Before the
Second World War, women who held jobs were principally those who were
poor, single, or childless, or they might be highly educated professionals.
The war effort's temporary demands expanded work participation beyond
these groups, including women with school-age or older children. The
economic expansion after the war, and the absence of traditional sources
and levels of immigration, led to even greater increases of *'acceptable"
female employees, who filled the burgeoning "pink-collar" jobs. This
expansion included mothers of young children (Fox and Hess-Biber, 1984;
Hayghe, 1982; Mortimer and London, 1984; Oppenheimer, 1982; Ross,
Mirowsky, and Huber, 1983).
Employment decisions reflect incentives and disincentives imposed by the
public realm and beyond the individual's immediate control. Thus many
women were far less likely to enter employment when they were neither
needed in work-place roles nor culturally supported in seeking jobs. What
women choose to do is not simply the outcome of personal decisions but
reflects much larger contexts.
Labour market demands and incentives are one side of the picture,
representing forces that pull women to jobs. The other side of the picture is
equally important: that is, the influences that push women to jobs. The
greater portion of the increase in outside employment among Canadian and
American women with children under six—rising from less than 20 per cent
in 1955 to about 50 per cent at present—has come since 1970. The 1970-85
period was marked by great increases in the cost of living (particularly
housing costs) and in the divorce rate (Michelson, 1985).
There is an undeniable logic behind the movements for women's liberation
and equal opportunity. Unquestionably these forces are influential among
women with education and career interests. Nevertheless, recent studies
consistently show that economic need provides the greatest single incentive
for employment among the general population of women. Kamerman, for
example, reported that 60 per cent of white married professional women,
and as many as 90 per cent of working-class women, worked "for the
money" (1980, p. 87).
In short, much more than individual preference is involved when mothers
 Divergent Convergence 83

of young children enter the labour force, although each decision is made
individually. Labour-force entry reflects major developments in society that
most women can scarcely ignore, and such employment trends are
inherently matters of public concern.

The 24-Hour Cycle: Time and Space

Some of the everyday needs that occupy part of the 24-hour cycle are
attributable to participation in the labour force, such as hours spent at work
or commuting. Other activities relate to basic survival: eating, sleeping,
eliminating, and so forth. Others are a function of family structure: child
care, housekeeping, and chauffeuring. Still others are discretionary, such as
the many forms of leisure and social activities. How much an individual is
obligated to do clearly relates to the responsibilities he or she has agreed, or
is forced, to accept. Since the 24-hour day is inelastic, the multiple
obligations people actually discharge during the weekday are complex
functions of priority-setting—often dictated by external parties such as
employers—and related time trade-offs (Cullen, 1978; Staikov, 1973). The
nature of individual activities seldom determines the ease or difficulty of
carrying out a given set of daily activities (whether obligatory or
discretionary). An everyday routine does not occur in a vacuum, but in a
community, which influences the ability to realize sets of activities. In short,
the logistics of the typical workday are a legitimate public policy concern.
Some population subgroups—such as infants, prisoners, and hospital
patients—may lead their daily lives without thought of changing locations.
Most self-sustaining adults, however, have to consider accessibility in time
and space in choosing and carrying out activities. Time considerations
involve not only the amounts of travel people have to add to the time taken
by actual activities within the daily schedule but also such matters as the
opening and closing hours of markets and services they may need to
patronize.
Space and time considerations are closely inter-related. The greater the
travel required for any activity, the more time it will usually demand. The
clustering of potential activities, or their distribution over space, will affect
the amount of travel and time required to perform them all. Thus, urban
land use is pertinent not only to public health and safety (its main statutory
justifications) but also to the ease or difficulty with which citizens conduct
their daily activities. From the individual's perspective, a major and
generally overlooked criterion is how well the individual's pattern of
obligations, responsibilities, and desires can be carried out within any
particular land-use pattern.
Temporal and spatial dimensions are, however, by no means identical.
84 Life Spaces

The time it takes to travel depends on the availability, nature, routing,

scheduling, and speed of transportation facilities. Automobiles may be
privately owned and scheduled at will, but the time it takes to get from point
A to point B is still a function of the public infrastructure including: the
types and patterns of streets, highways, or bridges, and their availability
relative to the number of users. Public transportation—whether in the
absence of or as an improvement over privately owned means of travel—puts
even more emphasis on externally determined influences on everyday
behaviour. The location of routes as well as transit spacing, speed, and
hours of service per day are all influential.

"Time-Geography" and Constraints on Daily Life

Time-geography (or chronogeography) is a school of analysis founded by

Torsten Hagerstrand, a Swedish geographer. His interpretation posited three
kinds of constraints placed on daily life and activity by the temporal and
spatial conditions of cities (and rural areas [Palm, 1981]):
1. Coupling constraints. These are limits on what is available to
obtain or do, given the critical masses of persons within a spatial/
temporal proximity necessary to support a given behaviour/good/
service. For example, can enough people converge during a weekday to
support speciality stores or only a general store?
2. Capability constraints. There are limits to what a person can fit
into his or her daily timetable, in the community's spatial/temporal
circumstances. For example, do the respective opening and closing
hours, locations, and travel characteristics permit visits to a post office
or shoemaker during a workday?
3. Authority constraints. These are limits on when activities can or
cannot take place, or where they must or must not be located, imposed
by decisions by external parties. For example, mandatory closing hours,
blue laws, and public service hours are all potential constraints on the
individual's behaviour (Hagerstrand, 1969; Pred, 1977).
Hagerstrand does not view his time-geography considerations as deter-
mining behaviour. People are cultural beings motivated by a host of group,
subgroup, and personal interests. The ease of accomplishing activities,
however, is in fact a function of the kinds of constraints Hagerstrand treats
(van Paasen, 1981). Practical matters considered under this perspective
include: urban transportation, use of medical facilities, factors affecting the
inequality or equality of women, regional planning, day care, and societal
development (Carlstein, 1982; Hagerstrand, 1970; Lenntorp, 1976;
Martensson, 1977, 1978, 1982; Palm and Pred, 1974). In all cases, daily
activity is seen as a complex function of personal and cultural needs and
 Divergent Convergence 85

desires, on one hand, and practical circumstances on the other (Chapin,

1965, 1974).2
A serious question in the case of maternal employment is how urban
conditions (such as transportation) help or hinder accomplishment of the
daily obligations, responsibilities, and desires of the woman involved.
External societal forces encourage labour-force participation by mothers of
young children, but has equivalent recognition been given to the way a
community's structure and functioning can facilitate such participation?

LOGISTICS OF MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT: RESEARCH FINDINGS

The following discussion is based on data gathered in metropolitan

Toronto in 1980. Members of a research programme called "The Child in
the City" concluded that having a mother with outside employment was a
new factor in the lives of many urban children. While the provision and
financing of sufficient day care places was already an issue in Canadian
urban areas, it was less clear what effects maternal employment might have
on the lives of various family members. Accordingly, a three-phase study
was designed to focus on the logistics and implications of maternal
employment for women and their families.3
A multiple-stage sampling procedure was used to survey 538 families. (See
Appendix: Note on Methodology.) The survey covered school days from
March to June 1980, including a variety of weather conditions. A
comparative substudy of a random selection of 78 of the same families was
conducted during the subsequent summer vacation period, to assess
differences in the absence of compulsory schooling on weekdays.
The first phase of the study was an intensive three-day set of interviews
and observations, within a much smaller sample of families, assessing in
greater depth the relevance of questions and wording to be used in the later
survey. This included a validation of self-administered time-budget proce-
dures, through observation of the same time periods (Ziegler and
Michelson, 1981). The final phase was a set of group discussions with
women who had been part of the survey, conducted after the compilation
and analysis of initial results. The purpose was two-fold: to provide feedback
to respondents while at the same time benefiting from their assessment of
the accuracy and meaning of the conclusions inferred from the data.
We were able to assess the extent to which the daily lives of employed
mothers of young children were becoming more like those of their husbands.
We also noted the conditions and patterns of activities that might make their
situations qualitatively different.
86 Life Spaces

Husband-Wife Convergence

Certain major indicators give the impression that the everyday employ-
ment experiences of working women are starting to approximate those of
men. Thus, in the amount of time devoted to aspects of the daily routine,
full-time working wives resemble their husbands more than part-time or
unemployed wives resemble theirs.
By definition, of course, this is true for hours spent at an external place of
work. Nonetheless, employed women also resemble their husbands in other
ways. Daily travel is an example. Conceivably, employed women might not
spend more time in travelling than housewives, since the latter could devote
additional time to travel related to family, shopping, recreational, or other
noncommuting purposes.In fact, however, employed women actually do
travel more than housewives, and they approximate men's traditionally
higher daily transit time. For example, women with full-time jobs spent 81
minutes a day travelling, compared to 66 minutes for women with part-time
jobs, 44 minutes for housewives, and 87 minutes for husbands.
Women also trade off the time devoted to employment with other
activities in the same way as men. The greater the amount of weekday time
devoted to a job, the less time both men and women put into housework,
child care, shopping, social activity, or both active and passive forms of
leisure.
In addition, when women have greater exposure to outside employment,
their daily tensions increase, culminating in levels identical to those of men.
Tension was calculated over the whole day, weighted by the length of time
devoted to contributing activities and with reference to the performance of
specific activities. Both men and women view paid employment as relatively
high-tension (though men rate it slightly higher), and tension associated with
a major daily activity affects employees of either sex in similar ways.

Husband- Wife Divergence

Paid employment is a major responsibility. Of the 24-hour day, a full-time

job demands more than half the remaining time left after removing time for
sleep and other necessary personal activities, particularly if much commut-
ing is required. Paid employment places great constraints on the extent to
which other activities can be undertaken during a workday.
The total pattern of a person's day, however, along with his or her
subjective experience of it, is not determined solely by the work responsibil-
ity. Activities that occupy the remainder of the day also count. Moreover,
this more inclusive conception of everyday life brings out differences
between women and their husbands. There is much evidence that the
 Divergent Convergence 87

everyday subjective experiences of employed mothers differ markedly from

those of their spouses. Although women working outside the home make
most of the same daily time trade-offs as their husbands, the absolute
amounts of an activity men and women put into the daily routine differ,
sometimes greatly. Consequently, the art of fitting activities in and weaving
them together will also differ.

Household Work and Child Care

The most prominent differences between employed spouses occur in the

use of time related to housework and child care. Women with full-time jobs
spend less time than housewives at such tasks, indeed less than half as much.
(Women with full-time jobs spend 192 minutes a day versus 436 minutes a
day for housewives. Women with part-time jobs are in-between at 356
minutes). Nevertheless all women do much more of these activities than do
their husbands, who only devote an average of 71.2 minutes to housework
and child care. Even women with full-time jobs spend nearly three times as
much daily time on housework and child care as their husbands. The latter's
contribution to domestic activity also varies little with their wives'
employment status.
If one adds employment, housework, and child care responsibilities, and
characterizes them as a basic unit of obligatory daily activity, it becomes
apparent that the daily routines of women with children and outside jobs
involve more of such activity than those of men, or indeed, of women with
less extensive employment. The mother employed full-time spends nearly 10
hours a day (584 minutes) in obligatory activities (see Figure 1). Moreover,
the definition and the data shown in Figure 1 fail to cover related activities
such as commuting and shopping, which typically add still another hour per
day. The different categories of men typically spend half an hour to an hour
less in daily obligatory activities than women with full-time jobs—with the
greatest differences reflecting the comparatively low obligatory activity by
men whose wives work full-time (in other words, the opposite of
expectations that men might compensate for their wives' total loads).

Women and Everyday Travel

These differences between men and women in the nature and juxtaposi-
tion of daily activities carry serious implications for everyday travel. The
most tension-producing daily activities in women's routines are transitions
to and from household responsibilities and outside employment. These
tensions are stronger for women than for men, because the women are
responsible for what happens both before and after their commuting trips.
88 Life Spaces

FIGURE 1: Minutes of "Obligatory Time" on a weekday by

Wives and Husbands
Wife's Employment Status

Thus they have to see children off or accompany them to their destinations
yet must still appear at the place of employment on time and ready to work.
In the evenings, they leave work at a fixed hour but upon reaching home
must be available for child care, companionship, dinner preparation, and
other household chores. Since travel can thus exacerbate both of the
demanding portions of women's daily routines, it takes on a different
subjective tone.
Attitudes about travel are intensified because women typically have
relatively marginal travel resources, being described as "transportation
deprived and transit dependent" (Carp, 1974). In families with one
automobile, the husband typically takes the car to work, leaving the wife to
contend with the inflexibilities of public transit systems or to seek a job that
 Divergent Convergence 89

emphasizes proximity to home rather than career enhancement (Koppelman

et #/., 1978; Levine, 1980). Indeed, women are less likely than men to have
acquired driver's licences (Pickup, 1981; Sen, 1978). Yet when taking
responsibility for transporting children to their daily locations, women
strongly prefer automobile travel because of the relative ease of handling
children and their gear (Studenmund et #/., 1978). Single mothers who
usually have low incomes are especially unlikely to have access to
automobiles, despite family travel needs.
Documentation of this and other widely reported information about
women's transportation shows that precise travel patterns reflect local
and/or national variations in city size and structure, nature of public
transportation, socioeconomic status, and the logistics of owning and using
a private automobile. Canadian urbanites typically lie between Americans
and Europeans in the number of automobiles owned and the use of public
transportation. Yet, regardless of the precise nature of the system,
differences by gender appear to run in the same direction. Our data support
most of these general gender-relevant findings (Michelson, 1983). Our data
from Toronto indicate that women are about three times as likely as their
husbands to use public transportation, such use being almost exclusively for
trips to and from work. Forty-four per cent of their trips are made with
chidren, exclusively by foot or automobile. Public transportation is most
often used for the relatively long commutes from suburbs to the central city.
This reflects both the Toronto public transit system's highly efficient service
and the difficulty and expense of centre-city parking. In all, 38 per cent of
the women interviewed lacked driver's licences. Among those taking the
subway downtown, 50 per cent lacked licences, rising to 73 per cent among
those who took the slower and less convenient buses in non-central
directions.

Transportation, Time Pressure, and Tension

Being deprived of transportation increases tension. Thus women experi-

ence a high degree of tension in travelling, second only to certain other
transitional activities such as getting children out of the house in the
morning. Travel causes more tension than most routine activities, such as
in-house child care and housekeeping. Furthermore, travel by public
transportation (which as noted reflects intrafamilial and external conditions
more than personal desire) is felt to cause more tension than travel by car,
and this is not a function of trip length or duration.
The time pressure that respondents reported experiencing the day
preceding the interview was clearly related to both their own and their
husbands' mode of transportation to work. Of women taking public transit,
90 Life Spaces

35.1 per cent were in the high time-pressure category ( + 5 to +10 on a scale
from -10 to -f 10), compared to only about 19 per cent of those using a car
for some or all of the trip to work.
Men typically have more choice than women about their means of travel,
and they do not show the same patterns of tension associated with travel as
do women. Our more general analyses of tension indicate that the degree of
tension associated with an activity is correlated with the extent to which
choice is lacking. Thus with respect to public transit, the correlation between
tension and lack of choice is +0.43 for women and +0.37 for men.
Men's jobs are the only relatively significant source of high tension
among their daily activities. But women report employment as only one of
half-a-dozen job- and transition-related family responsibilities rated high in
tension (see Figure 2). Many of these activities involve travel and, as noted,
women often travel with less efficient resources and have fewer choices.
Consequently, daily travel requirements should be expected to produce
different subjective experiences among employed women than they do
among their husbands.
This is illustrated by day care centres and their relation to women's places
of employment. Our data show that mothers are about four times more
likely than fathers to take a young child to a day care centre. These data
further indicate that the divergence of day care locations from optimal
locations with respect to the daily commute (that is, near home or work or
on a direct line in between) adds a conservatively estimated increment of 28
per cent to the trip. While tension in daily travel was not found to be
significantly related to total amount of travel, it is indeed significantly
related to how much more the child care drop-off adds to what would
otherwise be the mother's commute to work.

Employment Flexibility

An analysis of different kinds of employment flexibility gave other

indications of the relationships of tension to transportation and to other
aspects of an employed person's day.
Our analysis included comparisons of part-time job-holders with full-
time employees, on one hand, and those with no outside employment, on
the other (Michelson, 1985). As one would expect, part-time employment
moderated the impact of employment responsibilities on non-work activi-
ties. Feelings of time pressure and tension among part-time employees fell
in-between those reported by housewives and women working full-time. In
short, part-time jobs provide needed income but also allow time during the
day for shopping and other household tasks, lessening capability constraints
on these activities. Respondents appreciated being able to do these things
 Divergent Convergence 91

FIGURE 2: Mean Tension in Selected Daily Activities (women and men)

Scale of Mean Tension Scores

Women (highest) * Men

Getting children ready 3.7

Employment: care to older children

Arriving-leaving 3.5
employment
Waking children

Care to older children

Care to babies; food

3.0 Arriving-leaving; waking children
preparation; indoor
cleaning
Dishes; shopping
Laundry
Meals at home; putting to
bed; sleep
Food preparation; correspondence
Personal hygiene
Conversations; gardening and 2.5
Care to babies; personal hygiene
animals Talk with children
Correspondence Dishes; meals at home
Visits Getting children ready; shopping
Conversations
Joke, play with children Laundry; putting to bed; sleep
Relaxing, thinking Indoor cleaning

Television 2.0 Gardening and animals

Reading Visits; reading

1.8 Joke, play with children; relaxing,
thinking; television

(lowest)*
* Mean tension scores reflect a transformed scale on which raw scores ranged from 1 (ease)
to 7 (tension).

themselves during the day, freeing evenings so they can be home and at ease
with other family members.
Part-time employment is not, however, a solution to the logistical
difficulties of employed mothers. Many need the larger incomes that go with
full-time jobs, and many are actively pursuing careers. Furthermore, the
terms of part-time employment are often inferior to full-time employment in
such matters as wage rates, fringe benefits, and permanence.
We investigated other forms of employment flexibility among employed
respondents: how the nature of the work, and/or employer rules, permitted
flexibility in hours of employment, and whether women worked a standard
92 Life Spaces

9-to-5 day, 5-day week, or one of the many variations.4

Flexibility in either form was associated with reduced daily travel time
(15-18 minutes less a day) and with reduced feelings of time pressure. These
differences attributable to work-place flexibility held true for both full-time
and part-time employees, emphasizing the importance of work place
flexibility to people with multiple responsibilities and sources of tension (the
circumstances wives confront much more often than their husbands).

Cultural Lag

Our findings thus indicate that women diverge considerably from men in
their subjective experience of the average workday, despite superficial
appearances of convergence. A better realization of equality at home would
clearly ease the logistical challenges that employed mothers face. Transition
problems, for example, would be less pressing if immediate obligations at
both ends of the commute did not so uniformly fall on women.
Nevertheless, the pressure-producing conditions of the daily routine are at
least as much external to the family as they are internal. Thus, hours of
employment and of other necessary services and facilities, land-use patterns,
and transportation systems can increase or decrease the pressures arising
from internal domestic arrangements.
If conditions in the public sphere are part of the problem, their
amelioration should be part of any solution. Societies typically accept
innovations (usually technological) that appear progressive, without consid-
ering side-effects, other implications, or the adaptations needed to cope with
these influences. This has been called "cultural lag" (Ogburn, 1964), with
culture lagging behind technology. In the case under study, acceptance of the
virtues of maternal employment have come first, before the full-scale
adaptations required as a result of the addition of employment to a host of
other traditional women's obligations.

MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT AND PUBLIC POLICY

Some ways public-sector adaptation could help improve the kind of day
experienced by employed mothers are now examined. Since transportation is
an obvious consideration, its implications are considered first. The data also
suggest more fundamental, far-reaching changes, which are subsequently
discussed. The accumulation of these arguments suggests the need for a new
kind of planning.
 Divergent Convergence 93

Transportation Options

As noted above, employed women travel approximately as much as men,

but the conditions of travel and their subjective experiences diverge greatly.
Optimizing the number and variety of trips that can safely be taken by
public transportation would provide both male and female travellers with
more positive choices in travelling. Public measures making public transit
"the better way"5 for a growing number of trips should help reduce travel
tension among those taking such transit trips, as well as among those who
choose to drive. Fixed-rail transit systems are particularly popular for
everyday commuting.
Public transit can have decided advantages for work trips in central or
congested areas, such as downtown Toronto. One obvious form of public
assistance would be a better distribution of parking lots/garages at
non-central subway stations, facilitating safe and inexpensive changes of
transportation mode. This would help achieve the most rational choices of
travel for the plural activities that must fit into limited time periods.
Can public transit reflect more sensitively the needs of its current or
potential users? The use of public transit for more than one purpose—for
example, combining trips to the work place, for child care, and shopping—
would be facilitated by measures such as economical monthly passes or
transfer formulas that permit stopovers. Can the use of public transit be
made a more relaxing experience? Many airlines have tried to do this for
their passengers, who admittedly spend more money for fewer trips than
transit riders. Could better use of light, colour, and sound make public
transit more attractive? Could the wide variety of transit employees who
meet the public be better trained in interpersonal relations? Some transit
systems have pioneered services for the handicapped. Could similar efforts
be made to render transit services more appropriate or desirable for use by
parents and children?

Non-Transportation Options Affecting Travel and Everyday Logistics

Logistical problems of everyday travel and their outcomes can also be

helped by approaches that reach well beyond purely transportation
solutions. Policies only indirectly related to transportation can effect travel
and daily life. For example, as noted earlier, work-place flexibility can
alleviate travel tension and feelings of daily time pressure, giving employees
some additional freedom of action (that is, a reduction of capability
constraints). Moreover, employment systems that reflect more appropriately
the time demands on individual employees need much more attention.
Working-hour variations within firms, reflecting individual and family
94 Life Spaces

needs, are much more likely to provide positive benefits to individuals than
flex-time formulas that merely try to redistribute peak travel loads.
Furthermore, the use of job-sharing by interested employees in regular
positions could make the benefits of part-time employment more readily
available, without the drawbacks of inferior status and benefits. There is
evidence that job-sharing employees maintain unusually high productivity
records, presumably indicating how job-sharers feel about and respond to
the logistical opportunities offered them (Commission of Inquiry into
Part-time Work, 1983; Meier, 1979; Meltz et al.9 1981; Nollen et al., 1978).
The evidence on day care location suggests that more suitable sites would
help reduce the travel tensions of employed mothers. Land-use regulations
should be re-examined and modified where necessary to permit day care
centres to operate in the midst of residential clusters, minimizing travel
distances from homes and reducing the need for young children to commute.
A second alternative is work-place day care, which minimizes travel for the
mother, though it maximizes travel for the child. Work-place day care also
gives both mother and child opportunities for some daytime access to each
other. A third alternative, feasible where public transportation is well
developed, is day care facilities located at major transfer points. While
commercial facilities are often found in such locations, they rarely include
nonprofit or limited-profit enterprises. To sum up, the place of child care in
land-use planning merits special concern but is seldom given explicit
consideration. Instead, child care is typically one of the last land uses
considered when land or buildings are allocated or constructed. Note how
many day care centres end up in church basements, because these are the
only spaces available.

Clustering and Mixed Uses

Creating more mixed, integrated land uses reduces but does not eliminate
the need to travel. People usually cannot find everything they want in one
location; moreover, they do not want undesirable or inappropriate land uses
(such as factories or warehouses) near their homes. They often prefer to
drive even to a nearby store to carry purchases home more easily. Even so,
increased clustering is likely to reduce the number of daily trips required.
When daily essentials are close to home, the kinds of trips that put pressure
on the daily timetable can be more readily absorbed, as can trips in the
absence of a car. In any event, our respondents were definitely interested in
having a variety of land uses such as stores, banks, and clinics available
closer to home, a preference that was pronounced among respondents
expressing greater feelings of time pressure.
 Divergent Convergence 95

Extension of Hours

One recent change in community infrastructure is extension of local store

hours into the evening and night, as well as Sundays, thereby providing more
shopping capability. The private sector has increasingly discovered that
many customers find it more convenient to shop and receive deliveries
outside traditional store hours. Night-time has been called our last frontier
(Melbin, 1978).
Admittedly, some long-term store employees may dislike the new working
hours. Others, however, find new schedules fitting better with their other
obligations or with the schedules of other family members. Young people,
for example, can more easily combine school with employment. Pairs of
working parents whose schedules differ can provide home child care without
resorting to external sources.
More can be accomplished with greater ease when people are able to fit
employment and other obligations in during the day, without constraints
caused by a near identity of opening and closing hours. If nonwork
opportunities are available when people are not at work, a single family car
can be used during the day for more purposes. Longer store and service
hours thus take some pressure off transportation systems in several ways.
Understandably, most of our respondents favoured such longer hours for
many services and facilities.
The public and nonprofit sectors lag behind the private sector in this
regard. Many people, for example, continue to find post office hours
difficult. The hours of preventive medical services are characteristically
inconvenient for children whose parents are both employed. For working
parents, arranging the often-vital check-ups and shots is no longer a routine
day-time maternal activity. With both parents employed, such visits require a
flexible schedule, an agreeable employer who will permit one parent to take
time off (and lose wages), the cooperation of a helpful school staff, or a
physician who keeps evening hours. Contact with physicians has already
begun shifting to evening and weekend hours (Jordan-Marsh, 1981);
however, this is principally in crowded emergency wards and hospital clinics,
for the treatment of acute illnesses not for preventive medicine.
There have been private sector adaptations with respect to maternal
employment, because providing some kinds of service when needed can be
profitable. Out-of-hours needs for public- and non-profit-sector services
are, however, largely not being met.
96 Life Spaces

CONCLUSION: A NEW KIND OF PLANNING

It is extremely important for transportation planning to be integrated

more fully with other forms of community planning. Moreover, planning in
general should be recognized as a life-enhancing process, not merely a
regulatory procedure that imposes minimum standards.
But if this argument is accepted, there is still a major dilemma. Who
formulates the policies? Who does the planning? Who is concerned about
communities being functional for the everyday lives of residents? The answer
is "everybody and nobody."
"Everybody," because decision-making on many aspects of temporal and
spatial dimensions of communities is widely dispersed among firms,
services, stores, bureaucracies, clinics, transit systems, and the other
structures that comprise society. Each is guided by its own interests, lacking
a comprehensive view of the whole picture. The authority of each imposes
patterns of external constraints on the everyday lives of individuals.
"Nobody," because there is no clear, undivided jurisdiction over or
responsibility for decisions about community time and space. The current
form of disaggregated decision-making presents people in general, and
employed mothers in particular, with unintended but real capability and
authority constraints. It is dysfunctional insofar as it lags behind people's
circumstances. In contrast, a more inclusive view of planning and public
policy would create opportunities, thereby enhancing human liberties in
everyday life as well as the individual's ability to optimize desired
efficiencies.
Conventional planning seeks to avoid known dangers and achieve an
economically rational infrastructure development. Expansions in the realm
of planning may be liberating or constraining, depending in large part on
how they are done. If the objectives of planning for everyday logistics are
democratic and nondeterministic, reflecting a positive view of the individual
and his or her needs, its procedures should be consistent and emphasize
coordination rather than control.
A first step is recognition that many aspects of urban infrastructure have
powerful influences on everyday behaviour. While this is particularly true
for such population subgroups as employed mothers, who undertake
non-traditional activities, it also applies to nearly everyone to some degree.
There is a rational basis for measures to optimize opportunity and minimize
unwanted constraints. Voluntary, well-informed coordination among the
bodies and interests that can influence the logistics of everyday life would be
a kind of democracy in action.
In any event, it is a legitimate matter of public concern when community
patterns and infrastructure contribute to dramatic divergences in subjective
 Divergent Convergence 97

experiences of employed spouses. Dealing with this calls for policy and
action. That the policy sphere is relatively uncharted is more reason for its
pursuit. The various sectors and actors must work together to rethink and
coordinate the timing of urban functions. The "time of our lives" is not
enhanced by a constant fight against time.

APPENDIX: NOTE ON METHODOLOGY

Interviewers in twenty randomly selected, representative census tracts called on

households according to a random numbers table, screening them for eligibility, that
is, whether one or more children up to 14 years of age lived there with one or more
parents. Stratification procedures ensured that within each of the census tracts there
were sufficient numbers of single-parent families and users of particular child care
alternatives. Nineteen per cent of the families interviewed were headed by single
mothers.6 Among these single parents, 68 had outside employment, while 35 did not;
the subsample of two-parent families included 247 women with jobs and 188
housewives. In most respects, the families chosen were diverse and representative of
others in the metropolitan area.
Several data-gathering approaches were used to capture the complexity of everyday
behaviour. A major tool was the time-budget. Everyone 10 years old and over in a
household simultaneously filled in a chart, under an interviewer's supervision.
Respondents detailed step-by-step what they had done the previous day (always a
weekday). This included the starting and completion time of each activity, its
location, and the persons involved. The information covered the period from the
time each person arose, to the time they got up the following day (the day of the
interview). Also included were less traditional, subjective aspects of each of the
activities. Seven-point scales were used to indicate the degree to which an activity was
perceived to involve choice and to record personal feelings of ease or tension. Trips
were considered as activities and treated accordingly. The weekend time-use of family
members was also assessed, but in less detail. The time-budget provides a
quantitative measure of everyday behaviours, the various aspects of which can be
analyzed simultaneously, permitting subpopulation and even cross-cultural compari-
sons (Szalai et al., 1973; Michelson and Reed, 1975; Michelson, 1979).
In addition, there were extensive interviews with each of the mothers in the
primary household units, obtaining basic time-budget data for each of the children
under 10, in consultation with the children as necessary. The mothers also provided
information on the extent and sources of their own perceived time pressures, division
of labour within the family, objective data on the family and its coping mechanisms,
resources, and routines, and evaluations of the children, plus a variety of subjective
assessments of life decisions.
The analyses were done at the University of California, Irvine, while I was
Professor of Social Ecology there.7 The Irvine branch of the university's Institute of
98 Life Spaces

Transportation Studies stimulated my interest in the travel implications of the study

data,8 and a special substudy was carried out with the support of both the Institute
of Transportation Studies and the United States Department of Transportation,
Urban Mass Transportation Administration (Grant CA-11-0024).9

NOTES

1. A preliminary draft of this report was presented to the Canadian Urban Studies
Conference, Institute of Urban Studies, University of Winnipeg, 16 August
1985. A revised draft was published as "Divergent Convergence: The Daily
Routines of Employed Spouses as a Public Affairs Agenda," Public Affairs
Report, 26(4) (August 1985) (Berkeley, California: Institute of Governmental
Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1986). The author is grateful for
substantive and editorial suggestions by Robert Aldrich, Karen Altergott, Clair
Brown, Tora Friberg, David Jones, Solveig Martensson, Risa Palm, the
editorial staff of the Institute of Governmental Studies, and to Beth Moore
Milroy.
2. This view was also espoused, but operationalized in a different way than has the
Lund school, by F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., and his colleagues at the University of
North Carolina. In this regard, see Chapin (1965 and 1974).
3. This research was principally funded through a contribution by the Ministry of
National Health and Welfare, National Welfare Grants Program. Basic funding
for The Child in the City Programme came from Toronto's Hospital for Sick
Children Foundation. Linda Hagarty, Susan Hodgson, and Suzanne Ziegler
were co-investigators during various stages of the research and made substantial
contributions to it, as did many interviewers, coders, and data processing
personnel.
4. Sherry Ahrentzen took the initiative in formulating this analysis.
5. "The better way" is a slogan used by the Toronto Transit Commission.
6. Six families headed by single fathers were also interviewed. Because of their
small number, they are not included in the findings.
7. The Program in Social Ecology helped support computer analyses. I am
extremely grateful for extraordinary research assistance by Sherry Ahrentzen,
Joan Campbell, Doug Levine, Linda Naiditch, and Danny Sun.
8. I am indebted in this regard to Gordon J. (Pete) Fielding, Al Hollinden, Will
Recker, Genevieve Giuliano, and Lyn Long.
9. Nat Jasper and Judy Meade were interested and supportive research monitors.
 Divergent Convergence 99

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 5

Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives:

Case Studies in Physical and Social Innovation1

GERDA R. WEKERLE

Throughout Canada, women have been responding to the current crisis

in affordable housing by developing their own non-profit cooperative
housing projets. Women's groups have participated in federal non-profit
housing programmes either through constructing new housing or by
renovating existing buildings. Women are the focus of these projects,
making them not only primary housing consumers but also, in some
instances, the developers of the housing. Although there are fewer than
twenty such projects nationally and they are all relatively small (averaging
only thirty residents), an examination of these "aberrations'* in the housing
market highlights the circumstances under which women can be more
actively involved in the creation and management of housing that is
responsive to their needs.
Just as feminist services have resulted in questioning the conventional
institutions of health care and family violence programmes (Dale and
Foster, 1986), so feminist and women-dominated housing projects might
challenge the traditional ways of delivering and managing housing. Because
much of the housing literature portrays women as victims—unable to afford
market costs, and, increasingly, homeless (McClain and Doyle, 1984)—these
Canadian women's housing projects are important demonstration projects:
living laboratories of what happens when women take charge of their own
housing.
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 103

OUR STUDY

Between September 1985 and October 1986, Joan Simon, a Toronto

architect, and I conducted in-depth case studies of ten women's housing
projects in eight Canadian cities. We had two objectives: first, to document
how each project was developed; second, to learn the residents' experience
of living in a housing project specifically for women. Both objectives were
carried out through in-depth interviews. In each city we also met with
municipal, provincial, and federal housing officials to discuss housing
conditions; we talked with directors of battered women's shelters and visited
single parent centres. We generally tried to obtain some insight into women's
housing needs and how they were being met in different regions of the
country.
Our greatest initial difficulty was finding projects. We wanted to include
all the women's housing projects in the country in our study. But even
though all received some funding from CMHC, there was no list of projects.
To find them, we followed up leads from newsletters, unpublished reports,
and chance meetings with other women from across the country.
Our original sample included eight projects; two more were added later.
When we visited cities, we learned of other women's housing not included in
our study. For instance, in Vancouver, two women's housing projects, Sitka
and Entre Nous Femmes, were starting construction in the fall of 1985; in
Toronto, a third women's housing coop, the Perth Avenue Coop, was in the
planning stages. One project, non-profit housing for native women on
Manitoulin Island in Ontario, could not be included in the study because
residents felt that they had already been over-studied. Women's housing
projects have been proposed in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and
Quebec.
As projects have been completed in the larger centres, their success and
the attendant publicity have encouraged women in other parts of the country
to try to obtain funding to build housing for single parents or for other
groups of women. By providing information about existing projects, we
hoped to encourage other women's groups to consider housing projects
developed by women. By increasing the visibility of women's housing issues,
we hoped to increase support for women's housing projects from funding
agencies and within the housing cooperative movement.
Diversity characterizes Canadian women's housing projects. There is great
variety in their origins and sponsorship, in their physical design, and in their
social objectives. They include new construction such as the Constance
Hamilton Coop and the Beguinage in Toronto and renovations of existing
buildings such as Grandir en Ville in Quebec City. There are small projects
of only six units (Munroe House in Vancouver), while the newest coop in
104 Life Spaces

Toronto—Perth Avenue Coop—has 109 units. Some of the projects are

concentrated in one building, while a couple are on scattered sites.
There are three types of sponsorship: non-profit housing cooperatives;
second stage housing for battered women and their children run by a
non-profit group; and projects for single parents run by a non-profit group
or a public housing authority. We were particularly interested in issues of
empowerment and how different forms of tenure, the length of residence,
and the presence or absence of a feminist philosophy affected women's
opportunities for involvement in their housing.
This chapter examines the similarities and differences among five
non-profit housing cooperatives. The coops span the country, with one each
in Regina, Quebec City, and Halifax, and two in Toronto. Ethnic groups,
religious groups, unions, and even groups of artists have long used the
non-profit coop programme to create what the coop sector calls a "thematic
coop": a living environment which reinforces group values and builds on
existing social networks. Only recently, however, have women viewed the
non-profit cooperative housing programme as a way to obtain appropriate
housing. These five cases are the first examples of how women have used the
programme to meet their housing needs and support their social objectives.

WOMEN FACE HOUSING CRISIS ACROSS CANADA

Reports of housing officials and social agencies across Canada portray an

acute crisis in affordable housing—a crisis that primarily affects women. In
all the cities we visited, agencies working with women reported that women's
lower incomes and responsibility for children make them one of the most
vulnerable and needy groups in today's housing market. In 1980, more that
64 per cent of Canadian women had incomes under $12,000, with 18 per
cent under $4,000 (McClain and Doyle, 1984). Single parents fared worse.
The poverty rate nationally for female-headed single-parent families was 44
per cent (Ross, 1983, p. 70). Because women are predominantly renters
rather than homeowners, the majority of low-income women live in some of
the worst accommodation: the oldest dwellings and the least adequate in
terms of size and amenities (McClain and Doyle, 1984, p. 11). To compound
the problem further, in the largest Canadian cities such as Vancouver,
Toronto and Halifax, where vacancy rates for rental housing are less than 1
per cent, interviews with workers dealing with women in crisis revealed that
landlords practise widespread discrimination against women heads of
families, especially if they are on social assistance.
In every city, housing officials reported that single parents face severe
problems in obtaining affordable housing. Single parents make up the
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 105

majority of applicants for assisted and rent-geared-to-income housing; they

comprise 58.5 per cent of all families in public housing and rent-
supplemented units (CMHC, 1983); and they are the majority of families on
waiting lists for assisted housing in major Canadian cities. Yet the chance of
obtaining such housing is low. For example, Cityhome, the City of
Toronto's housing agency, reported 12,000 persons on its waiting list in May
1984 (City of Toronto, Department of Pubic Health, 1984). The situation is
no better in other cities. In Ottawa-Carleton, 18.9 per cent of families are
headed by single parents; the majority of applicants for subsidized units are
single mothers, many of them recently separated, with children. Yet
appropriate housing can be found for only about 10 per cent of these
families (Duvall, 1985). In Halifax-Dartmouth, an increasing number of
women with children in serious housing crisis has been noted since the early
1980's. Social service agencies report that the largest number of calls came
from single parents with children who were on social assistance or other
fixed incomes. Around 15 per cent of these were homeless, the majority of
them with children (Mellett, 1983).

NON-PROFIT HOUSING COOPERATIVES AS A RESPONSE TO WOMEN'S HOUSING

CRISIS

In the mid-1970's both Canada and the United States re-examined their
affordable housing strategies. The United States turned to cash assistance for
targeted households, while Canada greatly expanded its non-profit and
cooperative housing programmes. Both strategies represented a shift from a
centralized housing programme to one that increased control at the local
level.
In 1973, Canadian federal legislation established the non-profit coopera-
tive housing programme. Amendments to the Canadian National Housing
Act in 1978 placed responsibility for the actual development of housing
projects in the hands of local community groups and municipalities. The
federal government did not provide direct lending. Coops were financed by
the private sector, with the federal government providing assistance to cover
the gap between the economic costs of a project and its market potential at a
time of double-digit inflation (Hannley, 1986). Approximately 30,000 coop
units were developed between 1979 and 1985 in almost every region of the
country.
Non-profit cooperatives were eligible for 100 per cent mortgage financing,
with National Housing Act (NHA) insurance from Canada Mortgage and
Housing Corporation (CMHC). CMHC covered the total operating costs up
to the difference between monthly amortization costs at the market rate of
106 Life Spaces

interest and an interest rate of 2 per cent. Rents were set at the "low end of
market" compared with market rents in the adjacent neighbourhood. It was
a requirement of the program that at least 25 per cent of units be assisted
housing for low-income residents.
The purpose of the non-profit cooperative housing programme was to
extend the social status benefits of quasi-homeownership to two groups:
first, a moderate income group which probably could not afford to purchase
a dwelling; and second, low-income residents who received further
assistance to reduce housing charges to a maximum of 30 per cent of
adjusted family incomes. This programme had the intention of creating a
social mix in coops, thereby avoiding the ghettos of the poor which had
plagued the public housing programme.
Housing subsidies for low-income residents were decentralized by creating
a subsidy pool for each cooperative to be distributed by members. While
there was no theoretical or legal limit to the number of units that a coop
subsidized, there was a limit to the amount of money for subsidy. CMHC
gave the coop monthly cheques equal to the difference between a market-rate
mortgage and a 2 per cent mortgage. This amount, plus rents, must cover the
mortgage, all bills, and any subsidy to tenants. If rents are high, there is
more money for subsidy; if rents are low, there is less money available.
Coops have a fair degree of flexibility in how they use their subsidy pool.
Some coops elect to give a large number of residents a small amount of
subsidy, while others provide what they call "deep subsidies" which lower
the rent of a few residents to 30 per cent of adjusted income. In addition,
some provinces have provincial rent supplement programmes, which can be
used in addition to the CMHC subsidy to lower housing costs for residents
who pass an eligibility test.
The Canadian programme has two imaginative provisions to facilitate the
creation of community-based initiatives. First, start-up funds are a
fundamental part of the Section 56.1 delivery process and a key to the
programme's success. The programme recognized that community groups
require assistance in the planning and development of proposals to construct
or rehabilitate dwellings for low-income individuals and families. If the
project does not proceed, the funds provided to undertake assessment
studies and pay for other preliminary professional assistance are treated as a
grant; if the project does proceed, the development costs are included as part
of the capital costs (CMHC, 1983, pp. 22-23).
In addition, the Community Resource Organization Program (CROP)
helped to organize resource people who would take projects from the idea
stage to final completion. The CROP groups quickly developed the expertise
needed to deal with government officials, lawyers, architects, and bankers.
They understood the steps involved in the development process and assisted
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 107

the local coop groups in making applications or hiring consultants; they

were also skilled in working in the participatory manner typical of volunteer
groups. The CROP groups were paid by the coops from start-up funds.
After the first three to five years, the resource groups became self-sufficient
from the revenues received, and their funding was withdrawn (CMHC,
1983, p. 23).
Women are attracted to non-profit cooperative housing by the low
membership fee (often less than $100) and by housing costs which are
assisted or lower than market rents. The drawbacks of coop housing are
implicit in its structure: with as much as three-fourths of units charging
market rents, this housing can provide only a limited solution to the
affordability problem facing many women.
Nationally, 25 per cent of residents living in non-profit and cooperative
projects are single parents (Klodawsky, Spector, and Hendrix, 1983). A
recent study of households living in thirty-seven non-profit cooperatives in
Metropolitan Toronto found 20.4 per cent are single parents (Schiff, 1982).
In the Ottawa-Carleton region, women living alone are attracted to coops far
more than single men (21 per cent of residents are female singles compared
with 13.5 per cent males) (Barton, 1983). Single parents are also attracted to
coops because the mix of incomes avoids the stigma of public housing.
Further, with their emphasis on equality, equity, and mutual self-help,
housing coops do not appear to practise the discrimination against women
heads of families so prevalent elsewhere.
Since women housing consumers are more likely to rent housing than to
be homeowners (McClain and Doyle, 1984), they are also more likely to
benefit from the positive aspects of collective ownership, such as greater
housing security and freedom from worries of being evicted for housing
conversions or demolitions. Over the long term, coop housing remains
appealing because its housing charges are not expected to rise as quickly as
costs in the private market and because women on low or stable incomes do
not anticipate ever owning their own home. In our interviews, non-profit
coops were described as the housing of first choice to which many women
with children aspired.

WOMEN RESPOND TO THE NEED: THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Women's coop housing has been developed by people who perceive that
women have unique housing needs. But these people have come from diverse
groups: professionals, social service workers, politicians, and the women
themselves. Not surprisingly, several of the coops were initiated by single
parents who had experienced difficulty in obtaining affordable housing for
108 Life Spaces

themselves and their children. According to Cathy Mellett, the Halifax

Women's Cooperative was founded in 1981 by four single mothers who had
not been able to find suitable affordable housing (personal correspondence
with Cathy Mellett, 1985). They shared similar political ideals and wanted to
share a household for mutual support. Their solution was to renovate
existing housing on four sites close to downtown Halifax to create a coop of
twelve units.
Similarly, Marie Leclerc, one of the founders of the Grandir en Ville
Non-Profit Housing Cooperative in Quebec City, was motivated by the
difficulties she experienced in living alone with a child. Her solution was to
join with three other women who were also single parents. "I thought that if
I was living with similar people to me, it would be easier. We did research to
see what kind of project would suit us. It did not take long to figure out that
cooperative housing was the way to go. To share responsibilities, rights,
democracy—it was a good model for us" (personal interview with Marie
Leclerc, 1986).
As part of a plan to save a heritage building, the Bon Pasteur Convent in
Quebec City's financial district, the four women proposed to renovate it and
use the space for seven non-profit cooperatives. Grandir en Ville gives
priority to single parents but it does not limit members to this family type.
To maintain diversity, the coop distributes its thirty units among singles,
nuclear families, and single parents.
The Joint Action Coop in Regina, Canada's oldest women's housing
cooperative, was incorporated in 1972 by a board comprised of profession-
als, academics, and persons in the housing and social service fields. The
board members saw the need for low-cost housing for single parents, and the
coop bought four existing low-rise buildings with a total of forty-eight units.
Basing its exclusion criteria on stage of the life cycle, this coop is exclusively
for single parents with children.
The Constance Hamilton coop in Toronto was spearheaded by women's
hostel organizers and a municipal politician. In 1979, at a series of meetings,
representatives of various women's hostels working on the Metro Toronto
Social Services Long-Term Housing Committee (1979) discussed the
concept of forming a structure that could acquire and run long-term
housing for women. City of Toronto alderman Janet Howard initiated the
idea of using CMHC funding to form a housing cooperative for women. A
voluntary board of women, many of them professionals in the social service
field, incorporated the Constance Hamilton Coop, which opened for
occupancy in 1982.
The Beguinage,2 a second Toronto women's housing cooperative,
followed closely with the completion of a twenty-eight-unit coop in 1984.
Again the motivation was concern about the housing situation faced by
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 109

women. Under the heading "Why a Women's Housing Co-op?" an initial

flyer for the coop stated:

The current crisis in housing inevitably has the greatest effect on the
most vulnerable members of society. At a time when the proportion of
women-headed households is on the increase, the availability of
adequate affordable housing is declining. Sole-support women of all
ages, with and without children, are faced with serious housing
problems. The Toronto Women's Housing Cooperative is one answer to
the housing needs of women. (Toronto Women's Housing Cooperative,
Inc., 1982)

Four of the coops—Constance Hamilton, the Beguinage, the Halifax

Women's Cooperative, and Grandir en Ville—were feminist in their origins
and objectives. The founders were active in the women's movement in each
city, and their goals were to provide a supportive community to women and
opportunities for empowerment. Selection procedures for new members in
two of the coops, the Beguinage and the Halifax Women's Cooperative, give
preference to women active in feminist activities or organizations. The Joint
Action Cooperative (Regina), on the other hand, focused primarily on
providing affordable housing to single parents without a specific ideology or
set of social objectives.

GAINING ACCEPTANCE FOR A "WOMEN'S COOP"

The first obstacle for each group was gaining acceptance for a "women's
coop," even though there were precedents in existing coops based on ties of
ethnicity, religion, or trade union membership. According to Lynn Hannley,
Director of Communitas, a coop housing resource group operating in
Edmonton since 1972, "If you are using a responsive model, it attracts
people who know each other. This was not a programme requirement but
happened in various areas" (personal interview with Lynn Hannley, 1986).
Within the coop housing sector, these "thematic" coops, as they are called,
have aroused considerable debate because by their very nature there is some
element of exclusion and segregation. At the same time, it is this ability to
select members which also gives residents control over their community and
the opportunity to build housing tailored to their particular needs.
The Constance Hamilton Coop illustrates how the concept of a women's
coop was sold. According to Gay Alexander, the coop's project officer at
the Toronto branch of CMHC:
110 Life Spaces

The initial contact was very important. In the spring of 1980, Janet
Howard approached CMHC and she was passed on with skepticism.
Janet has some credibility at CMHC because she was involved with
DACHI (Don Area Cooperative Homes Inc). The initial skepticism
centered around comments that "we can't discriminate; we can't just
house women to the exclusion of other groups/' The women's coop
idea was softened because of the hostel component. No one questions
the need for hostels. The report from Metro Social Services carried some
weight as did their recommendations for longer term hostel care. If it
had been a straight women's housing coop, there would have been a lot
more trouble. It would have gone through because they were persistent,
but it could have been held up while management questioned whether
there should be coops exclusively for women. They [the coop] modified
the charter to get away from charges of discrimination.
The major concern of Constance Hamilton was that women be in
charge of the project and that women sit on the Board. CMHC had no
comment about that. Constance Hamilton obtained credibility from the
hostel and from [the coordinators] who were cooperative and competent
people. Some of the women on the Board are strong social worker types
and known in the community. All that stability impresses. I felt I could
support it because it was a very solid group of people. The reaction at
CMHC was out of all proportion to the project. It has calmed down
now and the project is seen as different because of the hostel and not
because it is women, (personal interview with Gay Alexander, 1982)

One of the striking similarities in the stories about the development

process of the various women's housing coops is the use founders made of
women's networks and links among women active in the women's movement,
women working in the coop movement, women professionals in the
community, and women bureaucrats working at CMHC and in city housing
departments. For instance, Gay Alexander was made project officer of the
Constance Hamilton coop because she had been active in organizing a
women's group within CMHC and was seen as an advocate for women. She
subsequently became project officer for the Beguinage when it sought
CMHC funding, and she later became development officer for the Perth
Avenue Coop when she took a position with Lantana, a Toronto-based
resource group. The project was inititated by women active in providing
transition housing; it was carried forward by Janet Howard, a City of
Toronto alderman active in housing and neighbourhood reform. Initial
board members included Jean Woodsworth, former director of Victoria
Daycare Services, who had prior experience with housing for sole-support
mothers, Moira Armour, active in the Toronto feminist community and the
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 111

National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and Annette Salem, a

feminist with experience in construction. Several board members of
Constance Hamilton became founding members of the second Toronto
women's housing coop, the Beguinage.
Commenting on her experiences with the government approval process for
the Constance Hamilton Coop, architect Joan Simon said:

Throughout we have found women who have been supportive of the

project, some of whom had known that it was in the pipeline and were
fostering it, some of whom just happened to be in the approval process
and were intrigued by the idea. As women became aware of the coop
and asked to be involved, they became so supportive it was hard to
distinguish them from board members in terms of their attitude and
concern, (personal interview with Joan Simon, 1982)

These examples illustrate that although few women have prior experience
in developing housing, women have been successful in developing housing
coops by drawing upon the sympathetic support of key women in the
non-profit housing sector, government housing bureaucracies, and the
voluntary sector.

HOUSING INNOVATIONS: THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

There has been much speculation about the form that housing responsive
to women's needs should take (Hayden, 1981; 1984; Leavitt, 1985; Matrix,
1984). The few foreign examples of women's housing (all of which are
transitional housing for single parents for a limited time period) have
received considerable attention: Nina West Homes in London, England; the
Mother's House in Amsterdam; and Warren Village in Denver (Hayden,
1984). However, there have been no detailed evaluations of how well they
work from the residents' point of view.
Dolores Hayden argues for the need to provide physical space for
communal sharing of household tasks, in particular meal preparation and
dining. Her proposal for a non-sexist community includes space for the local
provision of collective services and the creation of jobs for residents within
the community (1981, 1984). Leavitt's (1985) plans for a new American
home call for a flexible dwelling unit which would allow single parents to
share housing with one another or with an elderly person or would provide
space for working at home.
In a comprehensive summary and critique of the literature on the housing
needs of single parents, Klodawsky, Spector and Rose (1985, pp. 8-13)
112 Life Spaces

conclude that eight non-physical and physical elements are critical in

planning for housing for single parents. The most important is affordability.
Two other non-physical elements are security of tenure, and procedures
which ease the transition and the move in. Five elements of the physical
environment are: accessibility based on the location of housing; the
provision of appropriate facilities for children; minimal household mainte-
nance; the creation of opportunities for sharing and support among
residents; and privacy.
The women's housing cooperatives discussed in this chapter have
incorporated these elements to varying degrees, based on the relative
importance of physical design, services, and participation in management
and decision-making.

Control of the Development Process

Founding members of several of the projects were familiar with the

literature on women's needs in housing, and they spent considerable effort in
defining how women's activities translated into design. A priority for the
Constance Hamilton Board was to maintain control of the design and
development process rather than allowing a resource group to make
decisions on these matters. Janet Howard, the initiator of the coop,
describes the early decision to maintain control:

Early on the coop made the decision to maintain control of the

development process and, in particular, to hire its own architect rather
than giving over the building process to a resource group. It never would
have entered our head to do a thing like that. We were developing a
coop. We wanted to work with an architect and have a large say in how
the units worked. We hired a resource group to save us time to free us to
develop our membership. The Labour Council was hired and they were
tactful enough not to send a man. Our priorities were in the software of
this coop and the resource group could be very helpful with change
orders, etc.
We were looking for someone used to working with a group; someone
experienced with a community setting, not just building beautiful
isolated housing; someone experienced in working with CMHC. It was
nice if it was a woman, but not mandatory; someone with sensitivity to a
client group; someone aware that this was a development by and for
women and realizing any special considerations this entailed. [When we
interviewed her] Joan Simon had a certain amount of say about
household traffic—who is where in a house and when. She showed
slides illustrating the thinking behind that and is someone considering
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 113

the users of the architecture. Our experience with her has been excellent.
She has never tried to bully us; she has concerns about the convenience
of women, (personal interview with Janet Howard, 1982)

The Beguinage started with the ideal of restoring a stately downtown

building. After half a dozen buildings were rejected by CMHC as
uneconomic, the coop settled for new construction of stacked townhouses
on two adjacent sites on the edge of skidrow near a large pubic housing
complex. Although the coop had a commitment to working with a feminist
architect in a participatory programming process, in order to have the
housing built before the initial board burned out, it accepted a turnkey
building where the architect and builder were preselected by the owner of the
land. Despite these compromises, the coop feels itself fortunate to have
found a sympathetic architect, Phil Goldsmith, and Rich Tyssen, a resource
group project officer with extensive development experience. Both of them
respected the group's concerns for how the small details of a project
translated into livability. The end result was excellent, according to Kye
Marshall, one of the founding members of the Beguinage: "When I first saw
the project I was thrilled. I like it. It is well built. The women there feel it fills
the function it was designed for. We quite liked the architects. They were nice
guys and did a wonderful job on the outside. The developer and architect
may have decided to make this their showpiece" (personal interview with
Kye Marshall, 1986).
In all these women's housing cooperatives, the ultimate goal was to make
affordable housing available quickly and within budget: design innovations
or the expression of a women's culture and community through physical
form were secondary. Although the design innovations are not striking, each
group fought for certain features that it felt would contribute to members'
quality of life.

Quality Materials, Long-term Maintenance, Privacy

The use of quality materials and long-term maintenance and durability

were a key concern for the developers of the women's coops. Joan Simon
discussed the attitude of the Constance Hamilton Coop Board: 'The Board
was very concerned with the habitability of the units. If we were working for
a private developer, attention would have frequently been on gimmicks and
trim rather than basic quality. The Board wanted to maximize living space
and make houses better for people to actually live in" (personal interview
with Simon, 1982). This involved attention to such aspects of the building as
using concrete block walls, good quality wood windows that would not leak,
more than a minimum amount of insulation, and construction that would
114 Life Spaces

Halifax Women's Coop

 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 115

ABOVE: The Beguinage, Toronto

BELOW: Grandir en Ville, Quebec City
116 Life Spaces

allow residents to upgrade their housing and make additions in future.

Similarly, at the Beguinage, special attention was paid to sound and
energy conservation. To eliminate sound transmission, a common problem
in stacked townhouse projects, the architect stayed with simple forms and
simple unit separation, designing special wall and floor treatment to buffer
each unit. For energy conservation, external walls used 2x6 construction
with extra insulation, sealing, and wood windows instead of cheaper
aluminum windows.
At Grandir en Ville, the coop spent a lot of time considering the laundry
room location. To save residents time, they debated having small laundries
on each floor or a communal laundry room in the basement. Initially, they
planned to have a walkup unit, but later an elevator was seen as necessary,
adding $2,000 to the cost of each unit and making laundry rooms on each
floor economically prohibitive. Another issue at Grandir en Ville was
unconventional apartment layouts. Living rooms were located in the corners
of the building to give them double exposures. As a consequence, in some of
the apartments it was necessary to pass the bathroom and bedrooms to enter
the living room. Although this was of concern to CMHC, residents chose
this layout to get better living room space.

Design for Diversity

An objective of coop founders was to provide units which would meet the
needs of a broad range of women. In the Constance Hamilton project, there
are five different unit designs. Joan Simon commented:

We designed units to suit a large number of lifestyles: 2-3 women

sharing, multi-generational families, two single parents, etc. I split the
living areas and put the living room on one floor and the dining room
and kitchen on another so that both social spaces could be used at the
same time. This meant the kitchen moved to the front of some units.
The board wanted dining kitchens and not separate galley kitchens. The
plan allows for a linear kitchen on one end of the dining room. The
entrance to the units is often in the kitchen. Almost all the men in the
approval process commented on this, while all the women who looked at
the plan thought it was sensible. There is also a toilet in the laundry
room for kids in the park, which had to be deliberately designed,
(personal interview with Simon, 1982)

At the Beguinage, diverse unit sizes were created with different layouts of
one-, two-, and three-bedroom units within the context of a simple form of
stacking which facilitates servicing. The one-bedrooms are in mid-block; the
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 117

three-bedrooms are in row houses at the end. The board insisted on

same-size bedrooms rather than the conventional "master" and "junior"
bedrooms since they assumed that some women would be sharing units. This
small modification took considerable effort to convince both CMHC and
the architect since conventional housing differentiates status within the
family by size of bedroom.
At the Halifax Women's Coop, the response to the need for a diversity of
units was the creation of a coop on four different sites in three different
types of housing. There is a house with five bedrooms where women live
communally, two duplexes, and a six-unit apartment building. Since
members were involved in buying and renovating the buildings in which they
were going to live, they determined details such as kitchen layouts and
fixtures.
Because the Regina Joint Action Coop reduced costs by purchasing
existing rental apartment buildings, where one-third of the units were
one-bedroom apartments, this has built-in inflexibility and made it difficult
to house single parents and their children comfortably over the long term.

Opportunities for Sharing

One of the requirements of non-profit cooperatives is that members

participate in decision-making and managing their own project. Yet an
ongoing complaint of coop residents is the lack of space within the projects
for meetings and shared activities. One of the drawbacks of the women's
housing coops and small non-profit coops is the lack of communal space.
Joan Simon describes the dilemma faced by the Constance Hamilton Coop
in Toronto:

To make the coop work, we needed space for the coop members to get
together. There is not much flexibility in a small coop to build a meeting
space. We maximized the use of the laundry room as a community room
by keeping it at ground level, so as to be able to supervise children in the
park from there. The laundry room is also opposite the entrance to the
women's hostel, (personal interview with Simon, 1982)

The coordinator's office is in a small dark office in the basement; the only
inside communal space is a tiny basement room which would accommodate
four people comfortably. A courtyard provides a large communal outdoor
space which is heavily used for periodic coop celebrations, barbecuing and
socializing, a communal herb garden, and a young children's play area. Jean
Cote, architect of Grandir en Ville in Quebec City, discussed the issue of
communal space:
118 Life Spaces
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 119

Noms des cooperatives

lachevrotiere
coop coop
ste-marie
faubourg
st-louis coop de la coop la saluade
chevrotiere mixte
pers. agees chapelle
mixte 30 logements pers. agees
45 logemcnt s 38 logements 37
logements

atelier

coop
via de quartter
coop
grandir en ville familiale
familial! 30 logements
30 logenen ts
berthelot
120 Life Spaces

CONSTANCE HAMILTON CO-OP

Simon Architects

East Elevation

West Elevation
Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 121
UnitE Third Floor

Second and Third Floors

Second Floor

Constance
Hamilton
Co-operative
Housing
Toronto, Ont.

Unit Plans

UnitF Ground Floor Special Unit Ground Floor

Unit A Third Floor UnitC Third Floor

Constance
Second Floor Second Floor Hamilton
Co-operative
Housing
Toronto, Ont.

Unit Plans

UnitB Ground Floor UnitD Ground Floor

 SHUTER SHUTER

SITE PLANS
THE BEGUINACE
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 125

THE BEGUINACE
126 Life Spaces

When the project started the group had an idealized vision of how they
wanted to live which could not be translated into physical reality. On a
practical level, one of the features that the group would have liked was
an extra room on each floor to be used as a community space or when
people have house guests. It might have even been possible to use this
space as a temporary extension to an apartment. Under MUP's
[Maximum Unit Prices] this sort of space was not economically
feasible. There was constant pressure from CMHC to produce a
"normal, conventional" apartment building. The coop did manage to
get some communal space under the guise of a bachelor apartment that
had to be squeezed in at the end to bring the unit costs in under $30,000
per unit. This has never been rented as an apartment and is used as an
office and communal room, (personal interview with Jean Cote, 1986)

At the Beguinage, there is a small coop meeting room, a coordinator's

office, and one laundry room for the whole project. Outdoor areas are
private and attached to ground level units.
The Joint Action Coop has no communal space other than a ground level
unit which has been taken over for the coordinator's office. There is no
communal indoor space; outdoor shared space is the large backyards
attached to each building which are used for children's play equipment.
Coop groups expressed their frustration with CMHC guidelines which did
not allow funding for the meeting space essential to transacting normal coop
business or developing a supportive community. Further, even the coop
resource groups may not give communal space the priority it deserves.
Commenting on this lack of support, Karen Macmillan of Lantana, a
Toronto resource group, said:

In the coop sector, there has not been a lot of thought given to
community space. What there is comes from notions of property
management so that spaces provided include offices, space for
meetings, a kitchen for socials, washrooms, and a laundry room. The
coop sector approaches the mainstream model of privatized space. We
do not have a model of community space. We fight with CMHC over
community space; CMHC squeezes common space when the economics
of a project dictate it. They argue this is less maintenance. It accords
with the homeownership ethic, yet the norm of coop housing is that
people are sharing, (personal interview with Karen Macmillan, 1986)
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 127

Constance Hamilton Coop, Toronto

128 Life Spaces

Appropriate Facilities for Children

It is uncommon for non-profit housing cooperatives to provide child care

on-site. For example, 70 per cent of Toronto area coops do not provide any
form of organized child care (Cooperative Housing Federation, 1985). All
coops studied were concerned with the availability of child care, but only
two were able to provide it. Grandir en Ville shared a child care centre with
the project's six other coops and persons working in the adjacent financial
district. The Joint Action Coop created child care space from three
basement units. An outdoor play area was created in the common space
shared by the four buildings. The Constance Hamilton Coop provides no
formal child care; it is adjacent to a small park which provides play
equipment and a wading pool; interior layouts were designed to facilitate
supervison of small children. The Beguinage and Halifax Women's Coop
have no child care facilities nor do they provide shared outdoor play space.

Accessibility

All of the coops chose locations which would provide good access to
public transportation and other services. The Halifax Women's Coop is the
best situated: its units are in two neighbourhoods within walking distance of
downtown Halifax and with good access to bus service. The Joint Action
Coop bought property in a stable suburban neighbourhood of family homes
where recent construction has been luxury condominiums. The coop is
located across the street from a major shopping mall, on a well-used bus
line, close to the university, and in an area of good schools. Constance
Hamilton is located in a community of other housing cooperatives, close to
the subway line, in the west central part of Toronto. Major public recreation
facilities are close by. The Beguinage also insisted on a downtown Toronto
location. Although the location on the edge of skidrow and in a
neighbourhood with a heavy concentration of public housing is not ideal,
there is proximity to social services and transportation.

None of the projects described here will be written up in architectural

journals as Aldo van Eyck's Mother's House in Amsterdam was (Hertzberger
et al., 1982), for there are few design innovations. Small concessions, such as
Constance Hamilton's kitchens that blend into the living room or the same
size bedrooms at the Beguinage, are considered major victories. The Section
56.1 non-profit cooperative housing programme limits the kind of construc-
tion, interior space, communal space, and amenities that can be provided
through establishing Maximum Unit Price (MUP's) for each city and
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 129

Grandir en Ville, Quebec City

130 Life Spaces

region. Since MUP's are based on a combination of land and construction

costs and are frequently not updated for several years, non-profit
cooperatives are often severely constrained in where they can locate and
what they can construct. Coops are often left with marginal housing sites
which private developers consider undesirable: adjacent to railroad tracks,
arterial roads, or on previous industrial lands. These are also the least
desirable locations for families with children and for women living alone.
In addition, the focus on providing financing only for shelter and not for
community services limits the ability of individual housing coops, and even
larger communities of coops, to respond to many of the basic needs of
single-parent households: child care, education and job training, opportuni-
ties for employment, and a supportive community (Social Planning Council
for Metropolitan Toronto, 1984).
Lynn Hannley comments on the difficulties of achieving any design
innovations under the coop housing programme:

With low MUP's, it is difficult to do good quality anything. If you want

to do anything innovative, the next step is to fight with CMHC. They are
traditional and are reluctant to have things that are different. CMHC
says innovations cost more and they get uptight. If something is
unusual, they talk about this programme funding "modest housing"
which is not seen to be innovative, (personal interview with Hannley,
1986)

Karen Macmillan of Lantana continues:

The environment forces uniformity—the economic environment and the

construction industry. The ideologies of resource groups are often
business-oriented and it is hard to break through. The characteristics of
user groups are such that only those which are particularly strong-willed
and idiosyncratic get what they want. Women are not usually like that;
they are often more compliant. We find that when we make innovations
upfront, for users this is a one-time success; but the developer won't do
any more coops. And so the resource group loses, (personal interview
with Macmillan, 1986)

According to Macmillan, one reason that space for services such as child
care is often left out of coops is the extra work required of the resource
group. It is difficult to develop a housing project; adding social services of
various types requires making connections with other funding agencies and
piecing together different programmes. Resource groups need specialists in
soft services who can integrate them with the physical environment.
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 131

SOCIAL INNOVATIONS

In the women's housing coops, it is the social innovations, not the physical
innovations, that are impressive. These include responses to special needs,
stratagems to keep housing affordable, a focus on the creation of
community, and attention to management and decision-making structures
that empower women.

Responding to Special Needs

While the coop housing sector is only now addressing its responsibility to
provide housing for special needs groups such as the disabled, homeless
singles, or single parents, women's coops have quietly responded to some of
these needs. The Constance Hamilton Cooperative included a six-unit house
to provide services to homeless women. These women may stay for as long as
a year; the coop provides counselling and social supports. For three years,
members of the cooperative took on the responsibility of managing the
house, furnishing it, finding tenants, hiring and supervising a part-time staff
person, and serving as volunteers to work with transition house residents.
This year, for the first time, two women from the transition unit have moved
into permanent housing within the cooperative. Since 1985, Nellie's Hostel
for Women in Toronto has managed the hostel unit and provided full-time
staff support: coop members found the hostel's operation too burdensome
when added to their work managing the coop.
At the Beguinage there is a special concern for women with low incomes
or special problems who cannot be accommodated in other coops. One unit
is reserved for an ex-psychiatric patient and a deep subsidy is provided to
reduce housing costs to less than 30 per cent of income. A new coop, the
Sitka Coop in Vancouver, provides units for a new class of disabled persons:
women with environmental allergies who need non-toxic housing. The
leadership of single parents in developing the five housing projects described
in this chapter has ensured that their needs and those of their children have
been taken into account.

Affordability

All the women's coops are conscious of the relatively low incomes of
women housing consumers and their pressing need for affordable housing.
The coops employ various stratagems to reduce housing costs. The Joint
Action Coop, where approximately half of the residents are on social
assistance, has deliberately maintained rents at $275- $280 per month—
substantially lower than market rents in the community. Giving priority to
132 Life Spaces

affordability has backfired, however, as the coop has neglected to maintain

reserve funds and to perform necessary maintenance. As a result, the coop is
viewed by the community as being rundown and a last resort for low-income
single parents.
The Halifax Women's Coop looked for good housing available at less
than the MUP's allowed by CMHC to keep housing costs affordable for
members. This led to a major disagreement between the coop and its
resource group:

It was a conflict between their ideas of what our income potentials

should be and a push to spend the maximum available under the
programme with our evaluation of what our incomes were likely to
remain at and the need to make the housing as affordable as possible.
Some very astute purchases were made by the members and good
housing at the lowest possible price was achieved by buying units in
areas not yet "desirable" for renovations. The second way that quality
and price were controlled was by putting an enormous amount of sweat
equity into the renovations of the units. CMHC never allowed enough
capital for extensive repair to these older buildings. So, in order to
maximize the amount of renovations that could be done to the units,
most of the labour was done by the women. The programme has not
turned out to be as affordable as first expected. This does tend to change
the longer we have the units, but repair costs, taxes, insurance, etc., all
increase each year and this gets added to both the minimum and
maximum housing charges. However, the coop has provided good
quality housing and, more importantly, control over our housing which
would not be possible for women who in no other way could ever
consider owning housing in the inflated inner-city areas, (personal
correspondence with Mellett, 1985)

Residents of Grandir en Ville have the best deal of all. The land was
donated by the Quebec government: its cost is not part of the housing price.
Thus, coop units rent for $225-$300 per month for studios to four-bedroom
apartments in a renovated heritage building in the centre of Quebec City.
The dilemma for the coops which have chosen new construction is that
high land prices, rising construction costs, and the requirement to set
housing costs at the low end of market rents have made housing charges so
high that often even founding members of the coop cannot afford to live
there. At the Beguinage, housing charges are $430-$450 for a one-bedroom,
$650 for a two-bedroom, and $720 for a three-bedroom unit. Heating costs
and parking are extra. Of the twenty-eight units, eight are on permanent
subsidy ranging from $100-$600 per month. In addition, the coop has found
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 133

it necessary to provide two units with emergency subsidies as residents lose

their jobs, are employed only part-time, or encounter unusual circum-
stances. In an effort to increase its subsidy pool, the Beguinage has even
considered a special levy on residents whose housing costs are less than 30
per cent of income. This applied to only four units and was not considered a
solution.
While the security of tenure offered by coops is an attractive feature to
women residents, the relatively high cost of housing produced under the
coop programme makes it inaccessible to most single-parent families and
low-income women in general.

A Supportive Community

Creating a supportive community of women was the expressed goal of all

the women's housing coops. According to Jean Woodsworth, chair of the
founding board of directors of the Constance Hamilton Coop, one of the
initial objectives was to create an environment where women might obtain
support from other women to make changes in their lives, such as after
divorce. It was to provide security of living arrangements and the possibility
of community life. This has occurred: coop residents put out a monthly
newsletter, sponsor workshops, and organize several yearly celebrations.
Child care and exchanges of services are arranged informally.
Grandir en Ville was started by four single parents who viewed their status
as an opportunity for personal and social transformation. They wanted to
use housing to create an environment supportive of their way of life and
favoured the coop model because they could control their own housing,
solve common problems, and state their right to live as single parents.
In general, the women's coops provide a housing environment which is
also a supportive community where residents know one another, friendships
form, and a level of mutual aid develops that is more intense than is usually
found even in other housing coops.

What Housing Does in Women's Lives: Empowerment Through

Decision-making

Women's housing projects emphasize participation in management

further than is typical in most coops. They view the potential resident
control of coops in terms of feminist goals to empower women and allow
them to take charge of their environment. Management in women's housing
coops is seen as a learning experience where women can learn new skills
from one another and develop new models of decision-making.
134 Life Spaces

In his book, Housing by People, John Turner outlines how participation

in management can empower residents:

When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their
own contribution to the design, construction or management of their
housing, both the process and the environment produced stimulate
individual and social well-being. When people have no control over, nor
responsibility for key decisions in the housing process, on the other
hand, dwelling environments may instead become a barrier to personal
fulfillment and a burden on the economy. (1976, p. xxxiii)

One of the most important and least-noted advantages of living in coopera-

tive housing is the opportunity for participating in policy-making and
management of the housing environment. For residents, these "community"
aspects are often more important than the shelter component. Schiff's
(1982) study of Toronto coops found that 61 per cent of residents felt that
the single most important reason for moving to a coop was the ability to
manage their own housing. The image of a cooperative as fostering a sense
of community was important to 52 per cent of residents. With these
opportunities for involvement, two-thirds of residents may serve on a coop
committee.
Recent studies show that women living in housing cooperatives place a
higher value than male members on developing a supportive community and
participating in coop decision-making (Farge, 1985a; Gerritsma, 1984;
Leavitt and Saegert, 1984). Women also provide much of the on-going
leadership in housing coops. Gerritsma's (1984) case study of a small
Toronto coop demonstrates that women use coop positions to learn new
skills in such areas as maintenance and finance and to develop and exercise
leadership skills. However, even in housing coops, men are still more likely
to be presidents and treasurers while women are secretaries and members
who do the committee work (Farge, 1985b).
In women's housing coops, women do not "participate"; they are in
control: women set up the coop, buy the land or buildings, hire the architect
and resource groups, negotiate with CMHC for funding, and define how
their needs might be met by the housing. Coop members have given careful
thought to decision-making structures, to questions of participation and
hierarchy, and to selection criteria for members. In the ongoing management
of their coops, women are involved in hiring and supervising staff, financial
planning, and maintenance.
Participation by members is typically higher in women's housing
cooperatives than in other coops. At Constance Hamilton, 96 per cent of
residents surveyed in 1983 served on at least one coop committee (Morrison
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 135

and Payne, 1983). The Halifax Women's Coop rejected the hierarchical
structure of president, vice-president, and so forth found in most coops;
instead, it chose to run itself by consensus decision-making. The board of
directors is all members and only members, and all major decisions are
brought to a meeting of the full membership. The Beguinage decided to
retain control of its own marketing rather than give over this function to a
resource group. Although volunteers are inexperienced in marketing coop
housing and thus may be slightly more inefficient, the coop wanted to target
women who have a commitment to feminism and are identified with other
women.
The question of who can be a coop member has been vital to these three
coops. All have chosen to limit membership to women to ensure that control
of the housing and the benefits remain with women. At Constance
Hamilton, this means that men may live in the coop with a woman but they
may not be voting members. This issue is not settled, especially concerning
male children who are excluded from membership; it remains to be seen
whether these bylaws will be retained.
The Joint Action Coop is the exception to the rule, and it has had
enormous difficulties, many of which can be traced to management
problems. In 1972, community professionals founded the coop, but they
withdrew from active participation when the project was occupied. Over the
years, a highly bureaucratized and punitive management structure evolved
which pits resident against resident. As in all the women's coops, residents
must share in certain maintenance tasks—snow clearing, yard work, cutting
grass—and participate in the normal functions of the coop—serving on the
selection committee or board of directors. However, unlike the other coops
in our study, where residents participated willingly and according to their
ability, at the Joint Action Coop there is a coercive system of verbal and
written warnings for infringement of rules. Three written warnings result in
eviction. Residents designated as block reps have the job of reporting on
fellow residents. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to find residents willing to
serve either as block reps or coop directors, and there is a high turnover in
such positions. A 70 per cent yearly turnover of residents makes it
impossible to develop either a supportive community or a stable manage-
ment structure. In these circumstances, key budget and tenant selection
decisions have been turned over to outside staff, exacerbating the problem.
Unlike the other coops in this study, the Joint Action Coop was not
feminist in its origins. Regina feminists neither know nor identify with the
Joint Action Coop. Because the coop was a pioneer with the concept of
providing single-parent housing, it predated the 56.1 programme and did not
benefit from the substantial start-up assistance and member education
provided to later coops. Since its inception, this coop has been on a
136 Life Spaces

downward spiral, experiencing difficulties with financial management,

decision-making, controlling staff, resolving disputes, and maintaining the
buildings. One of the members of the board of directors said: "We're left
alone; taboo in Regina. Residents are attracted by cheap housing. There is
nothing for them here; no sense of companionship. Either your back is up
against the wall, or you stay in your own apartment" (personal interview).
Evidence of the reputation of the coop in the community are the comments
of Diana Elias, Director of Regina's Transition House:

Housing for single parents is theoretically a really good idea; women

supporting women is very positive. At the Joint Action Coop, women
receive mostly negative feedback, by and large. It is a tight hierarchical
structure and especially for kids there is no structure. The Coop needs
more objectivity and less bias; an environment where residents still have
input and control. I would not refer any woman to Joint Action unless
she was a very strong individual. When women come out of really
destructive relationships, if they go into an environment where there is a
lot of negativism, where power things are going on, they have to be fairly
solid. I question whether our residents are ready for that. My dream has
always been to incorporate a woman's place with housing and child care
that provides a supportive environment for women, (personal interview
with Diana Elias, 1986)

A positive development has been the interest taken in the coop by the
Coop Housing Foundation of Canada which funded a feasibility study to
examine needs for physical improvements and changes in management. As a
result, residents approved taking on a $300,000 second mortgage to improve
boilers, kitchens, and landscaping and pay for this through raising housing
costs. This first contact with the larger coop sector through CHAS, a
Saskatchewan resource group, has also highlighted the kinds of assistance
available in member education and advice on management. There is some
hope that social improvements will follow the physical ones.

CONCLUSIONS

The Joint Action Coop experience illustrates that women's housing coops
need more than cheap housing in a good location to be successful. Residents
seek, and in some cases need, a supportive community; they value the
opportunities that coops provide for participation in decision-making and
learning new skills.
To the disappointment of feminists, Canadian women's housing coops
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 137

have no distinctly feminist design solutions. Their most striking aspect is

that they have been built and are continuing to be built. Their innovation lies
beyond the physical environment—an environment constrained by funding
and bureaucratic hurdles—and in the realm of social innovations. The
feminist approach has gone beyond housing as shelter, using it for the
delivery of essential services, the creation of community, and the develop-
ment of an economic base supporting on-site jobs for community residents
(Simon 1986; Sprague, 1986). Using housing as a base for local economic
development is a theme running through the feminist design literature
(Hayden, 1984; Simon 1986; Sprague, 1986) and was part of the initial
objectives of the Constance Hamilton Coop. However, CMHC guidelines
generally preclude the design of residential units for home-based occupa-
tions, although the Perth Avenue Coop (Toronto) incorporates communal
space which may be used either for child care or for enterprise space. The
multi-dimensional view of housing held by founders and residents of the
women's housing coops runs counter to current trends in the housing field to
view housing as a commodity provided by the private market and the
housing unit as a private sphere, isolated from the surrounding community.
The very existence of housing developed, controlled, and managed by
women provides an alternative paradigm to the market experience of women
who are marginal housing consumers.
Since 1986, the Section 56.1 programme has been dramatically changed.
The new coop programme will be funded by an indexed mortgage scheme
which separates the construction of housing from the provision of subsidies
to low-income residents; these residents will now be served by a rent
supplement programme directed at households with "core need." It is still
too early to say how these changes will affect women's housing coops still in
the planning stages. Hannley (1986) suggests that there will be difficulties in
matching persons eligible for subsidies with available housing and that this
may pose problems for women's coops that insist upon additional criteria in
their selection of members.
Within the context of the development of thematic housing cooperatives,
defined by such characteristics as ethnicity, union affiliation, or artistic
pursuits, it will be interesting to note how women's coops fare over time. Will
they meet a short-term need for women at particular stages of the life cycle,
or will members grow old together as some founders hoped? To what degree
will feminist goals and objectives be maintained as the initial founders are no
longer involved? Will there be pressures to admit as members men or male
children raised within the coop, and will this inevitably lead to the dilution
of women's control of the housing? Or will the development of a women's
community be able to withstand these pressures and adapt to new realities?
As the number of women's housing coops grows, will the initital isolation
138 Life Spaces

experienced by all these groups decline as networks of women's housing

projects are developed and more linkages are made both with the wider
housing cooperative movement and with the women's movement?
The small coops documented in this chapter cannot begin to serve the
critical and massive housing needs of women across Canada. But their
existence has called attention to housing as a women's issue and has
highlighted an alternative solution. A recent development has been the
emergence of grass roots organizations focusing solely on women's housing
concerns. In Halifax, Mothers United for Metro Shelter (MUMS), whose
leaders have lived in battered women's shelters and public housing, has
mobilized the city in demonstrations and actions dramatizing poor women's
housing plight. A new Toronto organization, Women Plan Toronto, has
begun to lobby on behalf of women's shelter needs. During the International
Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987, women's organizations across
Canada are organizing to focus widespread attention on women's housing
crisis. The experience of Canadian women's housing cooperatives shows
that for women, adequate housing goes beyond shelter.

NOTES

1. This chapter is dedicated to Joan Simon, who was my partner in designing this
study and visiting all the women's housing projects. Because of her untimely
death, she could not participate in the creative task of making sense of the data;
this study is the poorer for being without her insights and analyses. Claude
Andre, a graduate student in the York University Faculty of Environmental
Studies, contributed immeasurably to the study by his supervision of the coding
of data and his knowledge of computer applications. He provided direction in
the case study of Grandir en Ville. Sylvia Novae, a graduate student in the
Faculty of Environmental Studies, participated in interviewing and in supervis-
ing other interviewers in Toronto. She generously shared her insights and
experiences of living in coops. I am grateful to Gerald Daly and Slade Lander for
their comments and queries which challenged me to sharpen my focus. Slade
Lander deserves my continuing gratitude for his editorial assistance and advice.
While the study was funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, these
agencies are not responsible for the views expressed here.
2. The coop explained its choice of name. ''The building we purchase will be called
the Beguinage. In seeking a name for the Co-op we discovered that during the
13th and 14th centuries, there were groups of women in various European
countries called beguines. The beguines lived in communal houses called
beguinages. The beguines were sole-support women who purchased their own
 Canadian Women's Housing Cooperatives 139

homes and shared their lives with other women. Our home, to be purchased by
women, renovated (where possible) by women, maintained and sustained by
women, will carry the name Beguinage, in honour and memory of those early
beguines" (Toronto Women's Housing Cooperative Inc., 1982).

REFERENCES

Barton, Debbie (1983). Housing in Ottawa-Carleton: A Women's Issue. Ottawa:

Elizabeth Fry Society.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) (1983). Section 56.1:
Non-Prof it and Cooperative Housing Program Evaluation. Ottawa: CMHC.
City of Toronto, Department of Public Health, Social Environment Work Group
(1984). Housing and Health: Public Health Implications of the Affordable
Housing Crisis. Toronto: City of Toronto, Department of Public Health.
Cooperative Housing Federation (1985). Preliminary Results of Survey of Members.
Toronto: Cooperative Housing Federation of Toronto.
Dale, Jennifer and Foster, Peggy (1986). Feminists and State Welfare. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Duvall, Donna (1985). "Emergency Housing for Women in Canada." Ekistics, 310
(January/February), pp. 56-61.
Farge, Brenda (1985a). "A Contribution to the Feminist Debate over Cooperative
Housing." Toronto: OISE, Department of Community Psychology.
Farge, Brenda (1985b). "Survey of Cooperative Housing Foundation Annual
Meeting." Toronto: OISE, Department of Community Psychology.
Gerritsma, Mary (1984). "Instead Housing Coop: Women's Second Chance to
Lead and Learn." Toronto: OISE, Department of Adult Education.
Hannley, Lynn, (1986). "The New Federal Co-operative Housing Program."
Canadian Housing, 3(1), pp. 14-17.
Hayden, Dolores (1981). "What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like?" In C. Stimpson
et al. (Eds.), Women and the American City (pp. 167-84). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hayden, Dolores (1984). Redesigning the American Dream. New York: Norton.
Herzberger, Herman, van Roijen-Wortmann, Addie, and Strauven, Francis (1982).
Aldo van Eyck. Amsterdam: Stichting Wonen.
Klodawsky, Fran, Spector, Aron, and Hendrix, C. (1983). The Housing Needs of
Single Parent Families in Canada. Ottawa: CMHC.
Klodawsky, Fran, Spector, Aron, and Rose, Damaris (1985). Single Parent Families
and Canadian Housing Policies: How Mothers Lose. Ottawa: CMHC.
Leavitt, Jacqueline and Saegert, Susan (1984). "Women and Abandoned Buildings:
A Feminist Approach to Housing." Social Policy, 75(1), pp. 32-39.
Leavitt, Jacqueline (1985). "A New American House." Women and Environments,
7(1), pp. 14-16.
140 Life Spaces

Matrix (1984). Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment. London:
Pluto Press.
McClain, Janet and Doyle, Cassie (1984). Women and Housing: Changing Needs
and the Failure of Policy. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company.
Mellett, Cathy (1983). At the End of the Rope: Women's Emergency Housing Needs
in the Halifax/Dartmouth Area. Halifax: Women's Emergency Housing Coalition.
Morrison, Heather, and Payne, Margo (1983). "The Evolution, Implementation,
and Initial Assessment of the Constance Hamilton Cooperative." Guelph:
University of Guelph, Department of Consumer Studies.
Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, Department of Social Services (1979). "Long
Term Housing Needs of Women." Toronto: Municipality of Metropolitan
Toronto, Department of Social Services.
Ross, David (1983). The Canadian Fact Book on Poverty—1983. Toronto: James
Lorimer and Company.
Schiff, Myra (1982). Housing Cooperatives in Metropolitan Toronto: A Survey of
Members. Ottawa: Cooperative Housing Foundation of Canada.
Simon, Joan (1986). "Women and the Canadian Co-op Experience: Integrating
Housing and Economic Development." Women and Environments, 8(1), pp. 10-13.
Sprague, Joan Forrester, et al. (1986). A Manual on Transitional Housing. Boston:
Women's Institute for Housing and Economic Development.
Toronto Women's Housing Cooperative, Inc., The Beguinage (1982). "What is the
Toronto Women's Housing Cooperative Inc.?" Mimeo.
Turner, John F.C. (1976). Housing by People. New York: Pantheon.
 6

New Families, New Housing Needs,

New Urban Environments:

The Case of Single-Parent Families1

FRAN KLODAWSKY and ARON SPECTOR2

INTRODUCTION

After the Second World War, government policies supported a large-scale

housing industry in order to provide housing for veterans and their families,
encourage their employment, and promote economic expansion (Klodawsky,
1985).
Between 1945 and 1966, most new housing took the form of single-family
suburban dwellings. Private developers, influenced by building codes and
mortgage insurance incentives, primarily built detached homes for tradi-
tional, two-parent nuclear families. Community support facilities were
rarely emphasized; it was assumed that families would fill most of their own
needs with the help of the neighbourhood school and district shopping
centre. For families unable to buy into this dream, social housing
programmes, including public housing, were developed to provide tempo-
rary shelter until they could afford to purchase homes.
By the early 1960's, various changes were starting to affect housing policy.
Central urban commercial facilities and adult-centred, high-rise apartments
emerged, and much low-cost housing was cleared to make way. Centrally
located housing for the poor became costly and difficult to find. At the same
time, the dominance of two-parent families began to decline, while elderly
households and mother-led, one-parent families increased.
The number of single-parent families with children under 18 has been
growing extremely rapidly since divorce legislation was reformed in 1968. In
1966, roughly 4 per cent of families with children under 18 were headed by a
single parent. By 1981, this percentage had grown to over 9 per cent. The
1986 estimates, at the time of writing, are that roughly 11 per cent of
families with children under 18, over 550,000 families, will be headed by a
single parent.
142 Life Spaces

Single-parent families headed by women are predominantly poor, with

family incomes averaging 52 per cent of those with two parents. In
single-parent families, particularly those with children too young to help, a
single adult undertakes what is usually the work of two. Female-headed
single-parent families are resource poor but require the housing and
community resources necessary for rearing children. It is thus not surprising
that female single-parent families spend a much higher percentage of their
income on shelter, on average, than any other family group.
This essay starts with a discussion of how single-parent family housing has
arisen as an issue in Canadian cities. Within this context, a number of
specific criteria for assessing adequate and amenable family housing are
identified. The magnitude and growth of single-parent families and the
nature of their income and housing problems are then reviewed. Statements
as to the nature of the housing needs of single-parent families are then
developed using the identified housing criteria.

SINGLE-PARENT FAMILY HOUSING AS AN ISSUE

Contemporary housing design and the structure of the housing market

itself are, to a great degree, a reflection of traditional views of the life cycle
(Rossi, 1955, 1982). The majority of urban Canadian adults are assumed to
move from the family home to a series of apartments, then to a single-family
home designed for child rearing, then possibly back to a condominium or
rental unit (Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1979). The
design of much urban and housing policy in Canada is predicated upon the
assumption that during the full extent of the life cycle, each household unit
is occupied by either a single unattached individual or a single nuclear
family headed by a husband and wife. Extended family households are
increasingly uncommon. In addition, within the last two decades older
children have more frequently left the family home, and older adults have
joined separate communities away from younger adults raising children. An
outcome of all of these trends has been increasing demand for separate
housing units, each occupied by smaller numbers of people.
Households containing single-parent families reflect these trends. Most
single-parent families are separate, nuclear families. In contrast, in the
previous *'bulge" of single parenting which occurred during and following
the Second World War, families were much more likely to become
extensions of existing households. Today, single-parent families search in
housing markets where only part of the housing is geared towards family
rearing (ibid.).
Implicit in the life-cycle housing model is the central role of home
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 143

ownership as an investment opportunity. The early part of the adult life

cycle is seen as a period of savings in the expectation of accumulating a
sufficient down payment for entry into the ownership market. For the great
majority of Canadian families, paying off the home mortgage has
represented the principal source of investment and savings. The house is an
asset useable by the mature family for such functions as financing higher
education and sustaining an adequate standard of living during retirement
(Fallis, 1983; Goldberg, 1983).
Single-parent families, with income levels well below those of other family
types, are thus faced with a number of problems in the housing market,
primarily related to their inability to buy single-family owner-occupied
homes. For this reason, they are, by and large, unable to take advantage of
those housing and neighbourhood forms designed for child rearing. In
addition, they are unable to allocate funds to shelter and savings at the same
time in order to accumulate a down payment. Finally, they face the dual
responsibility of maintaining and sustaining a family in an environment
where these functions are usually undertaken by two adults (Brandwein,
1977).

HOUSING AND THE FAMILY: ASSESSMENT CRITERIA

What criteria can be used in evaluating the adequacy of the living

conditions of a particular type of family? In the following, emphasis is
placed upon the requisites for effectively producing an adequate environ-
ment for the physical and psychological health of family members. These
criteria are drawn from literature on women and environments,3 from
general discussions on contemporary families,4 and from housing policy
analyses.5 The following discussion provides an overview of ten common
assessment criteria. (For a more extensive discussion of why these criteria
were selected, see Klodawsky, Spector, and Rose, 1985, Chs. 2 and 6.)

Affordability

Can a family afford sufficient housing, and is there then sufficient income
left over for other needs such as food and clothing? The meeting of this
criterion depends upon a composite of family income level and housing
supply (Goldberg, 1983, p. 11). Most Canadian single-parent families are
faced with low incomes and reside in relatively tight housing markets
(Canadian Council on Social Development, 1984; Metropolitan Toronto
Planning Department, 1983b; Ontario New Democratic Party Caucus,
1984; Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1979).
144 Life Spaces

Accessibility

Are family members able to reach required services, schools, and

employment opportunities easily and expeditiously? Location and proximity
are related to such factors as access to public and private transportation and
the concentration of destinations (Hayden, 1981, 1984; Michelson, 1983;
Wekerle, 1979/80).

Availability

Is there a sufficient stock of units suitable for family rearing? If so, are
there any forms of discrimination in the housing market which restrict
access? Historically, there has been little incentive to provide housing for
low- and moderate-income families in the private sector of the Canadian
housing market (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 1984b, 1985;
City of Toronto Housing Department, 1982; Dennis and Fish, 1972;
Metropolitan Toronto Planning Department, 1983a, 1983b). Various levels
of government have intermittently added to the existing supply, either
through direct provision or through subsidy and incentive programmes. In
the case of single-parent housing, supply problems may be aggravated by
discrimination (Gurstein and Hood, 1975).

Security of Tenure

Are units secure or is there a threat of loss because of such factors as unit
conversion? In terms of raising a family, stable homes, neighbourhoods, and
schooling have been identified as important factors which contribute to
positive child development and adult mental health (Dulude, 1984; Eichler,
1983; Leavitt, 1984). This is particularly important for single-parent families
who are in the process of adjusting to significant events such as marriage
dissolution, death of a spouse, or the responsibility of a newborn child
(Anderson-Khlief, 1981; Schorr and Moen, 1979; Weiss, 1984).

Appropriateness of Facilities for Children

Are there adequate nearby neighbourhood facilities for children, such as

school playgrounds and child care services? Does the housing unit itself
provide sufficient and safe play areas and allow parents to supervise young
children? Multi-unit apartment buildings with play areas well away from
kitchen and other adult work areas are disadvantageous in terms of adults
being able to supervise children casually while carrying on with other
necessary activities (see, for example, Hayden, 1984; Leavitt, 1984).
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 145

Household Maintenance

Can the unit be maintained at a reasonable level of repair given the

financial and time resources of family members? This is a particular concern
in single-parent households where there is often a shortage of both income
and person power (see, for example, Hayden, 1984).

Opportunities for Sharing and Support

Does the housing unit and its surrounding environment facilitate

neighbourhood support and possibly sharing if required? Are there
community-based support and information facilities nearby? Community
resources can often provide a substitute for missing family resources. Is
there the potential to substitute or augment community resources for
insufficient family resources? (see, for example, Simon, 1983; Soper, 1980).

Privacy

Do the house and the neighbourhood provide sufficient privacy for

families? Does the housing itself convey unsatisfactory images to others? A
criticism of large public housing developments has been that their variance
from surrounding housing designs often leads to stereotyping and stigmatiz-
ing their inhabitants. In addition, inadequacies in areas such as soundproofing,
private living, and play space affect family privacy and its nurturing capacity
(see, for example, Ontario Standing Committee on the Administration of
Justice, 1982).

Suitability for Transition

How flexible are financial and housing arrangements to the needs of

families in both the short and long run? Family life implies constant
transition (Dulude, 1984; Duncan and Morgan, 1984; Eichler, 1983). For
single parents there are often dramatic adjustments, such as during and
shortly after separation or after the birth of a child. For most, there is a
period of learning to get along under new, and often trying, circumstances.
For others, single parenthood represents a phase ending in remarriage. For
many, the ability to move two or three times in a short period, culminating in
a new stable environment, is important in the process of adjusting to a new
equilibrium.
146 Life Spaces

Cost Effectiveness in the Use of Public and Private Funds

Is the housing unit a cost-effective way to invest private and/or public

funds? Given scarce family and public resources, which options are most
cost effective in achieving nurturing environments? What are the social costs
of not producing a fully adequate environment? What mix of public,
private, and third sector housing is most effective in providing an
appropriate mix of environments for single-parent families? (see, for
example, Hayden, 1984).

SINGLE-PARENT HOUSING PROBLEMS IN THE CANADIAN CONTEXT

How Many Single Parents are There?6

The single parent population has been growing rapidly in recent years. For
1986, the estimates are that there were approximately 550,000 single parents
with children under 18, or close to 11 per cent of all families raising
children. Of these, the great majority—just under 500,000 families—will be
headed by women.
Single parents on the whole are younger now and a greater number are
becoming single parents either without marrying or through divorce.
Between 1976 and 1982, the average age of single parents declined by over
two years, from 39 to 37. During this period, the number of never-married
single parents grew at an annual rate of 11 per cent, and divorced single
parents at an annual rate of 9 per cent. In contrast, the number of separated
single parents increased at an annual rate of 3.6 per cent while the number
of widows and widowers declined at a rate of 0.6 per cent, primarily because
of better health care.
Many single-parent families are in transition. For example, recently
widowed single parents, who tend to have more mature families, often have
children who enter the labour force shortly after the death of the spouse.
Among never-married women who bear children, only 16 per cent will form
single-parent families.
Among divorced single parents, there is a fairly high probability of
remarriage, although the average period of single parenthood is long. We
have estimated that in 1982 the mean number of years before remarriage
among divorced single parents was 11.6 years for women and 9.71 years for
men. This is roughly the same amount of time that children under 18 live
with a single parent.
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 147

What are the Income, Education, and Employment Characteristics of

Single-Parent Heads?

In 1981, single-parent families had markedly lower incomes than did

husband/wife families. Mother-led families have incomes which are dramat-
ically lower than that of husband/wife families (60 per cent lower on average
in 1981) whereas male-headed single families have incomes that are only
slightly lower (15 per cent lower). In 1981, roughly 56 per cent of female
single-parent families were below the low income cutoff line defined by
Statistics Canada. Income varies by the gender of the single parent, his or
her age, and any dependence on public assistance.
The reasons for these income variations can be partially traced to the
degree and type of labour force participation of single mothers. Only 61 per
cent of female heads were in the work force in 1981. Among these women,
54 per cent were employed in low-paid service and clerical occupations.
Single mothers experience discrimination in the work force as do other
women. In 1981, within all major job classifications, full-time employed
women earned less than men. However, holding type of occupation
constant, full-time employed single mothers in 1981 earned even less on
average than other women (derived from Statistics Canada 1984a and 1985).
As well as discrimination, this trend may be related to the inability of single
parents to exercise choice among job opportunities or to be flexible about
work time because of the restrictions imposed by child rearing. Exacerbat-
ing wage issues is the greater number of single mothers who are employed
part-time.
An important future concern for single parents raising children is the loss
of experience and seniority in the job market. While income for both men
and women generally increases with age, the wage gap between the sexes also
dramatically increases.
Among mother-led families, this factor is somewhat exaggerated by the
low family income levels of those headed by young mothers. Those under 25
have an average income that is 32 per cent of other families. This is in
contrast to a high of 71 per cent for those over 55. Compounding these
problems was the large increase after 1982 in unemployed single mothers,
particularly those under 25. It is not surprising, then, that the major source
of income for over 70 per cent of young single mothers are government
transfer payments. For those chiefly dependent on government assistance,
average incomes were only 18 per cent of the two-parent family average
income.
A factor which is not significant in explaining income and occupation
differences is education. The number of years and level of education
completed by single mothers are quite similar to those of other married
148 Life Spaces

women. Single mothers are marginally more likely to have completed high
school than single fathers, although, like other women, they are less likely to
have completed university or other post-secondary education.

In What Types of Housing Do Single Parents Live?1

Single parents are predominantly renters. In 1982, approximately 68 per

cent rented in contrast to just over 26 per cent of other families with
children. Among those that own, just over one-third were widowed. A
promising trend, probably related to reform in divorce settlements, has been
a 4 per cent decrease from 1978 to 1982 in the number of female single
parents who rent. Like other Canadian renters, most single-parent families
reside in multiple family dwellings. However, among Canadians renting row
housing and detached dwellings, single parents considerably outnumber
other household types.
The homes of single-parent families, like those of most Canadians, are
rarely without basic amenities such as baths, toilets, and hot water.
Indications of variations in other aspects of quality are, however, apparent.
In 1982, for example, an estimated 16 per cent of single parents lived in
housing requiring major repairs, in contrast to 11 per cent of all families.
Another indication of quality, overcrowding, shows a different trend. In
surveys conducted by Statistics Canada between 1978 and 1982, single-
parent housing is consistently less crowded, in terms of rooms or bedrooms
per person. This is probably related to the loss of an adult as well as the
smaller average family size of single parent families.
Thus, given available measures housing quality issues for single-parent
families centre on the design of available units and the level of repair of these
units.

THE HOUSING PROBLEMS OF SINGLE-PARENT FAMILIES

The ten criteria identified above serve as a basis for examining the
inter-relationships among housing, the dynamics of single-parent family life
cycles and family policy issues. What are the particularly pressing
housing-related issues for this group?

Affordability*

Because single-parent families are predominantly female headed, income

is an especially significant problem. In all single-parent households, a
primary concern is that the principal roles of family sustainer and income
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 149

earner are played by a single person. Among female single parents there may
be a dramatic and sudden reduction in income, while among male single
parents the phenomenon is less frequent or extreme. Because of their
incomes, male family heads are usually better able to purchase household
and child support services.
Nevertheless, for all single-parent families, the loss of the co-parent
through death or divorce or the absence of a co-parent when a child is born
are times of disruption marked by declining income and disinvestment.
According to 1982 estimates, two-parent family assets grew at an annual rate
of 9.2 per cent, female single-parent assets by 2.1 per cent, and male
single-parent assets by 6.47 per cent.
For single mothers, shelter is the single largest expenditure. In 1982, an
average of 26 per cent of their expenditures were allocated to shelter. Among
female single parents, this varied by position in the life cycle and tenure.
Expenditures ranged from an average of over 36 per cent of total budget
allocations for those under 25 to 19.6 per cent for those over 55. Renters
allocated an average of 29.1 per cent of expenditures to shelter; home
owners without mortgages allocated 15.4 per cent.
Particularly among poorer mother-led families, shelter and food domi-
nate expenditures. Based on 1982 expenditure data, we estimate that for an
average mother-led family earning $17,692 in 1982, $48.46 of every $100
spent is allocated to food and shelter, leaving $51.54 for other expenditures.
Reducing income by a $100/month leads to an average extra $1.00 or 4 per
cent shift toward each of food and shelter and away from other expenditures
such as transportation and health services. For those earning less than
$10,000, over $64 of every $100 is committed to food and shelter. At this
level, there is little left for anything over and above basic survival.

Accessibility

One area where expenditures are low, and where they decline sharply with
decreasing income, is transportation. Mother-led single-parent families
spend roughly one-third less of their income on transportation than do other
families. The major reason of course is that these families are less likely to
own cars. Roughly 47 per cent of these families have no access to an
automobile, in comparison to 11 per cent of two-parent households. Car
ownership varies with age; those least likely to own cars are families with a
female head under 25.
Reduced mobility may influence income, since it limits both job choice
and access to services. For example, the job of ferrying children to school
and reaching work on time without an automobile is a difficult task for
many parents. Lack of capital to purchase a car and the cash flow to
150 Life Spaces

maintain it limit choices for single parents in the labour market. In turn,
these tend to limit residential choices to relatively expensive but accessible
and service-rich downtown locations in larger Canadian cities.
In general, single parents have clustered in large cities over the last decade,
primarily to be near support services. In 1982, an estimated 96 per cent of
female single-parent families lived in cities with a population of over 25,000.

Availability

There is an increasing tendency for central-city, moderate-cost rental

housing to be converted to other uses, such as condominiums and higher
priced rental housing, reducing the overall supply of low- and moderate-
income housing (City of Toronto Housing Department, 1982; Mellett, 1983;
Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton Planning Department, 1984). The
growth of poor- and moderate-income single-parent families puts further
pressure on the shrinking supply. Single parents are thus heavily concen-
trated in subsidized low- and moderate-income housing. For example, in
Ontario the majority of rent-geared-to-income and public housing units now
accommodate female single-parent households. In Manitoba, in 1984,
roughly 65 per cent of participants in the Shelter Allowance Program were
single parents. With respect to differential rents paid by male and female
single parents, evidence from the 1978 and 1982 family expenditure data
indicates that female heads tend to pay about 1 per cent more for
comparable units.
Discrimination against single parents in market rental housing may
accentuate availability problems. There is evidence of discrimination by
landlords against female single parents (Gurstein and Hood, 1975).

Security of Tenure

As we have seen, single mothers are mainly low- and moderate-income

renters. They are thus prone to the vagaries of particularly tight housing
markets. In many parts of Canada, low- and moderate-rent units have
increasingly been converted to luxury apartments and condominiums,
particularly affecting this group's security of tenure.
There is another security of tenure problem. Because publicly funded
housing is geared towards providing relatively short-term relief for the
poorest of families, once a single parent increases her income through
employment and/or through the earnings of teenage children, she may have
her rent increased and eventually be required to vacate her unit. (In Ontario
this is true when children are out of school and over 18 years of age.)
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 151

Appropriateness of Facilities for Children

There is no information available on the adequacy of low-income housing

for child rearing generally, let alone for single-parent families. There is some
evidence, however, that for the great majority of single-parent families,
housing units have basic amenities and are in relatively good condition. The
potential exists for further evaluation using available National Housing Act
(NHA) design guidelines for play spaces and unit design appropriate for
children of all ages in various types of housing units.
Approximately 46 per cent of young single parents (those under 35 in
1981) live in multiple-unit apartment complexes in large cities. These are not
often designed with appropriate facilities for single-parent child-rearing.
Aside from the conscious effort to provide supportive environments in
specific circumstances, such as in the Constance Hamilton Coop in Toronto
(Simon, 1983), the provision of safe play environments with areas for
parental supervision is haphazard.

Household Maintenance

In 1982, mother-led families spent, on average, about 30 per cent more of

their incomes on household maintenance, excluding child care, than did
two-parent families. There is also a higher probability that single-parent
homes require major repair. The loss of a parent puts an additional onus on
the remaining adult, and sometimes on other family members, to provide
the missing services either through purchase or additional effort. For
women-headed single-parent families, there are shortages of both time and
income. As a result, a great number of single-family detached houses,
particularly units sheltering widowed and older, recently divorced single
parents, have problems relating to irregular and inadequate maintenance.
There has been little work in the area of housing design for single-parent
families with respect to ongoing maintenance (Leavitt [1984] is a notable
exception).

Opportunities for Sharing and Support

Alternatives to better design are shared living arrangements that permit

pooling maintenance tasks among groups of single parents or between single
parents and others.
Extended families, neighbours, and other community members may be
prepared to help lone parents with some of their tasks, including child care,
transportation, and sharing information.
752 Life Spaces

A number of single parents, particularly those who have never married,

become part of an extended family. In many cases, this can lead to conflicts
over issues such as privacy and child rearing, as Anderson-Khleif notes
(1981). Being part of an extended family, though, does seem to have the
benefit of aiding short-term adjustments to single parenthood (MacKay and
Austin, 1983).
Providing collective child care and car pooling are examples of activities
that are easily organized when single-parent housing is clustered. Child care,
however, may require space in community centres or schools.
There are indications that shared housing arrangements help reduce
housing costs, distribute various household responsibilities such as mainte-
nance and child rearing, and, in some case, encourage emotional support
from empathetic peers. However, having appropriate private, public,and
collective space in shared housing appears to be important to its success
(Leavitt, 1984; Ontario Ministry of Muncipal Affairs and Housing, 1983).

Privacy

For many single parents, the wish to present themselves as "normal"

families is important. In the past, large, badly designed and constructed
public housing developments were built in part to prevent poor families from
being able to satisfy this feeling (Dennis and Fish, 1972). While such families
may wish, and require, enhanced support from the community and from
neighbours, the appearance of normalcy is nonetheless crucial. "Privacy,"
in the sense of an environment that does not stigmatize the household, is
thus a significant criterion for single-parent families.
In partial response to the "stigmatization" problem, the construction of
large public housing projects was replaced during the 1970's by the building
of social housing communities designed to "fit" within the surrounding
community and suit tenants with a range of incomes. However, this income
integration has, in some cases, resulted in isolation and the stigmatization of
being obviously different than most of one's neighbours (Ontario Standing
Committee on the Administration of Justice, 1982).
A potential alternative to traditional social housing options is to promote
"intensification" strategies that encourage expanded use of housing stock
that is too large for individual households. This approach encourages both
the stabilization of population in older neighbourhoods and the continued
viability of local services. Such strategies increase modest-cost housing
opportunities for single-parent families in neighbourhoods with a variety of
household types (see, for example, Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs
and Housing, 1983).
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 153

Suitability for Transition

Housing needs vary for different single-parent families at different stages

of transition. At one end of the spectrum could be a need for short-term
emergency shelter. Somewhere "in the middle" is perhaps a need to start
again, perhaps in rented accommodation without the encumbrance of
long-term commitments. At the other end is a need for long-term housing in
which to establish a stable, nurturing environment.
Housing options are needed which recognize that transition takes forms
different from those experienced by nuclear families. Central to such
options is mutual support, which might be achieved by mixing tenure forms
and families in different stages of adjustment.
The case of older, widowed single parents is somewhat different. These
women often have homes without mortgages, and loss of regular income
becomes the main problem. Options that enhance mutual support could be
encouraged, including having other single parents as boarders, and setting
up mini cooperatives.

Cost-Effectiveness in the Use of Public and Private Funds

Fundamentally, effective use of public and private funds in the case of

single parents must be judged by the overall ability to create nurturing
environments for raising children. Several policy thrusts are needed. One is
affordable housing units. Further thrusts should recognize the employment
and wage prospects for women given their loss of experience in the labour
force as a result of child rearing. There are special needs for job training and
accessible child care.

CONCLUSION

Single-parent housing problems are income and resource problems.

Because roughly 85 per cent of single parents are women, their problems
relate to a differentiated labour market in which women's employment
income is much less than men's. Moves towards resolving this general
problem are also moves toward improving the housing and other living
conditions of single-parent families.
The income problem is exacerbated by the "opportunity costs" of child
rearing. Women lose experience and job opportunities when raising young
children. When they do enter the labour market, they are often limited in the
jobs they are able to take and the hours that they are able to work. Given
154 Life Spaces

their initial low income levels, they are often unable to afford cars which
help them seek and choose jobs, housing, child care, shopping, and other
opportunities. Single parents are thus often caught in a "web" of poverty
aggravated by a general loss of experience and social and physical mobility.
In addition to inadequate income is the problem of lost adult resources.
Housing and neighbourhoods have been designed to suit conventional life
cycle patterns. The job of maintaining a household, of shopping, cleaning,
and fixing, is onerous when combined with raising children and earning a
living. Housing designed so that tasks such as cooking and child supervision
cannot be easily shared with others or so that large amounts of maintenance
are required increase the burden. In effect, the single parent lives as one
adult in a world designed for nuclear families with two adults.
Lastly, the characteristics of single-parent families vary greatly and
therefore call for varied solutions. Never-married single parents (often
under 25, with infant children, and little job experience) is the group
requiring the most comprehensive support. Divorced single parents, in
contrast, often require short-term help to get through a traumatic
adjustment period before re-entering the job market. Women between 25
and 44 make up the largest and fastest growing group of single parents. For
these parents, part of the problem lies beyond income and maintenance in
the areas of job retraining, more stringent definitions and enforcement
policies regarding child support from absentee parents, and physical
environments more compatible with doing both paid and domestic work.
Key policy questions in the context of lost income and human resources in
single-parent families are the degree to which social and community services
can complement the remaining store of family resources, and how these
could be further developed and made more accessible.
Not addressing the housing and community needs of single-parent
families can only lead to generations of destitute older women and children
who have not been able to achieve their skill and aptitude potentials. The
costs of refusing to deal with this problem are therefore enormous. Such a
refusal would also indicate that Canadians were abandoning the tradition
that has underpinned social policy since the 1930's, that is, using public
resources for the effective development of Canada's social capital. Surely
single-parent families deserve a continuation of this tradition of public
support for the development of their potential.
 New Families, New Housing Needs, New Urban Environments 155

NOTES

1. The report upon which this paper is based, Single Parent Families and
Canadian Housing Policies: How Mothers Lose (1985), was carried out with
the assistance of a grant from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
under the terms of the External Research Program (CR File No.: 6585 S8-2).
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the official
views of the corporation.
2. The authors of this paper, listed alphabetically, accept full and equal
responsibility for its contents.
3. See for example, Anderson-Khlief, 1981; Gerson, 1983; Gurstein and Hood,
1975; Hayden, 1981, 1984; Jordan, 1981; Leavitt, 1984; McClain and Doyle,
1983; Michelson, 1983; Netter and Price, 1983; Rose, 1984; Simon, 1983;
Soper, 1980; Wekerle, 1979/80.
4. See for example, Armitage, 1978; Armstrong and Armstrong, 1982; Brandwein,
1977; Canadian Council on Social Development, 1984; Dulude, 1984; Duncan
and Morgan, 1984; Eichler, 1984; MacKay and Austin, 1983; Ontario New
Democratic Party Caucus, 1984; Priest, 1984; Schorr and Moen, 1979;
Voluntary Children's Services Coordinating Committee of Ottawa-Carleton,
1984; Weiss, 1984; White, 1983.
5. Baer, 1979; British Columbia Housing Management Commission, 1983;
Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, 1984a, 1984b, 1985; City of
Toronto Housing Department, 1982; City of Vancouver Planning Department,
1983a, 1983b; Dennis and Fish, 1972; Dowler, 1983; Fallis, 1980, 1983; Goetze,
1983; Lapointe et al., 1982; Metropolitan Toronto Planning Department,
1983a, 1983b; Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, 1983;
Ontario Standing Committee on the Administration of Justice, 1982; Regional
Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton Planning Department, 1984; Schubert, 1982;
Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, 1979; Zamprelli and
Everett, 1982.
6. Data in the following sections concerning basic demography, income, labour
force status and participation, tenure and income for single parents is derived
by the authors from the 1981 Census Public Use Sample Tape family and
household file (Statistics Canada, 1985) and from Vital Statistics published by
Statistics Canada annually.
7. Housing quality and automobile access data in the following sections is derived
from the micro data file compiled from the Statistics Canada Household
Inventory, Fixtures and Equipment surveys of 1978, 1980, and 1982 (Statistics
Canada, 1981, 1983, and 1984c).
8. Expenditure data in the following sections is derived or estimated from the
micro data file of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditures Surveys of 1978
and 1982 (Statistics Canada 1982 and 1984b).
156 Life Spaces

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 7

Interacting with the Urban Environment:

Two Case Studies of Women's and
Female Adolescents' LeisureActivities

DENISE PICHE

In discussing theoretical and structural perspectives for the study of women

and the urban environment, one could start by reviewing the work done
since Lofland's "the thereness of women" (1975; see also Dagenais, 1980;
Masson, 1984). Another approach, which is also appealing would be to look
at urban studies in the light of the extremely valuable guidelines for
non-sexist research put together by Margrit Eichler and Jeanne Lapointe for
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (1985). Further, how
revealing an exercise it would be to examine the conscience of urban studies
and urban planning with respect to what Eichler calls the deadly sins of
sexist research (1985).1 Would not such sins be plentiful, such as the sins of
overextension of concepts when defining residential environments as private
places and as rest areas for work done elsewhere? Would we not identify as
sins of under specification the use of generic terms for such sex-specific
situations as the typical car-driver in our transportation models or the
reference to sex-indeterminate beneficiaries in urban plans and policies?
Surely, we would not be surprised to find the sin of slothful slackness in the
use of the stereotyped idea of the family.
However, my point of view here is more restricted, limited essentially to
proposing and discussing one approach to the study of women's relation-
ships with the environment: the study of women's experience of the city
within the context of action research (Lewin, 1948), and what I would
daringly call an interactive study of the feminization of urban culture.
Urban studies are at least partly aimed at producing more enlightened
planning decisions, and planning is aimed at creating the world of
tomorrow. Since these fields of investigation have generalized their view of
160 Life Spaces

urban society on the basis of only one sex, it is a priority to learn about
women's experiences, representations, and aspirations to straighten out our
biased knowledge and policies. As Hayden (1980) has tried to illustrate with
her student projects for a non-sexist city, tomorrow could be planned
differently if women are involved and taken into consideration.
However, it would be wrong to think that any interview with any woman
would lead the planner to feminist Utopia.2 Moreover, a feminist planner,
even though conscious of the duality of urban experience, cannot give a
ready-made answer to questions such as whether we should plan for women's
needs as they are expressed in a sexually segregated society or plan for a
changing society. The women's movement is carrying a major cultural
change, but as with all major cultural transformations, its social projects are
tried out, evaluated, and monitored in a dynamic process rather than having
specific objectives from the beginning.
In this context, research for women, in the sense of "research that tries to
take women's needs, interests and experiences into account and aims at
being instrumental in improving women's lives in one way or another"
(Duelli Klein, 1983, p. 90), raises questions about the nature and role of an
appropriate methodology. On the other hand, learning about women's
needs, interests and experiences calls for methods that will free our
knowledge of all sexist assumptions and also free women's speech of its
conditioned responses to the environment. It also calls for research projects
that will take the form of "qualitative and descriptive studies, taxonomies of
situations, systematic analysis of situations and just plain talking to people
and observing them" (Reinharz, 1983, p. 173). Without a deep understand-
ing of the experience of women, the stance for equality could result in the
decline of their values and their integration into a world that they reject. On
the other hand, the concern for the improvement of women's conditions
often leads the researcher to opt for action research: an approach suited to
supporting the actions and political aims of the women's movement and to
documenting women's lives and strategies for change. (See, for example,
Bowles and Duelli Klein, 1983; Dagenais, 1986; and Roberts, 1981.)
Feminist urban studies follow a similar pattern. For instance, many
different women's projects in the city have been studied and reported. (See,
for example, Keller, 1981; Wekerle et al., 1980, and the journals Ekistics,
1985; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1978; Signs:
Journal of Women and Culture in Society, 1980; and Women and
Environments, 1976-87). Still another direction for research is investigating
women's images and desires in a consciousness-raising approach that
exposes the alienating effects of sexual oppression and liberates women's
capacity to plan a non-sexist future. 3 Drawing upon two ongoing case
studies, I shall try to illustrate that the latter approach can be fruitful with
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 161

women who have not yet been at the forefront of urban projects.
One aim of these studies was to examine women's representations of their
own leisure activities and leisure environment. Because leisure is defined by
both its character of freedom and its socioeconomic range of activities, it
was thought that the study of this area of human activity would facilitate a
comprehension of both women's culture and their unequal condition. There
is reason to believe that in spite of inequality of access to official leisure
activities, women develop a form of leisure that remains invisible and
undervalued on the fringe of the dominant world. This qualitative approach
questions the unconscious sins of sexist planning such as the understated
concept of family recreation, the apparently neutral investments in ice rinks
and lighted baseball grounds, and the implicit assumption that a sports
centre or an art centre are experienced similarly by men and women.
The first study here is at the stage of preliminary field work prior to action
research. It consists of group interviews with married women with children,
active in their homes and the community and as members of various
women's or voluntary organizations, and of interviews with female
adolescents from a public school. The women were interviewed about their
urban experiences during their free time or leisure activities. These
interviews focused on the social representation of these experiences rather
than on the quantity and spatial range of their activities (see Szalai et al.,
1972; Vandelac et al. 1984).4 The study was done in a small town (5,000
inhabitants) and its rural vicinity, located in an economically depressed
region which was, at the time, the object of major planning operations.5
The group interviews lasted for approximately two hours, and they
brought together from four to seven persons. The participants in the four
groups of women were selected by the various women's organizations in the
community. The women varied greatly with regard to their age and their
husbands' socioeconomic status, but they were all active in the community.
The six groups of adolescents were selected by the public school's counsellor
responsible for sociocultural activities: he was asked to organize groups of
adolescents aged 13 and 14 years and others aged 15 to 17 years. The
participants differed in terms of place of residence, family socioeconomic
status, rate of participation in formal leisure activities, and favourite
pastime.
The second study resulted from the demands of the tenants' association of
the largest public housing development in Quebec City (1,400 residents; 446
apartments) for replanning and redesigning the whole site, paying special
attention to adolescents' needs6 and to those of women-headed families. In
this case, we are still involved in participant observation and have completed
a first proposal for the site. Here we have worked with the tenants'
association, composed mainly of women, including many single parents and
162 Life Spaces

elderly widows. We also reached two groups of adolescents involved in

organizing activities for youth. We have yet to reach women and female
adolescents who do not participate in any community activity.
It must be said that, because of the state and nature of these case studies,
the observations reported here cannot be applied to all women nor even to
women sharing the same socioeconomic status as our respondents. They can
only illustrate the importance of recognizing the sexual differentiation of
environmental experience for the construction of unbiased urban theories
and for the development of democratic planning processes.

WOMEN'S REPRESENTATIONS OF THEIR LEISURE TIME

The analysis here focuses on the nature of leisure for women, on how and
where they seek leisure activities, on the constraints they feel, on their wants
and desires in terms of leisure environments, and, to conclude, on their
means to make these wants and desires known to planners and urban
authorities.
As is the case with other workers, our respondents understood leisure time
as the adverse of work. Since their unpaid work is domestic and entails
organization and management of family life, and since their main work
involves their homes, leisure for them is mainly getting away from home and
from activities associated with it. This perspective clearly inverts their
husbands' ideas of their own leisure, as they report it, which is often to take
refuge in the home. Leisure is expressed by many as a way of preserving
one's personal integrity and maintaining a balance with one's compulsory
work load. The character of unpaid domestic work includes confinement,
monotony, and continuous pressure from family demands (Friedan, 1963;
Oakley, 1974; Vandelac et al., 1984). It is thus not surprising to find that
leisure is conceived of in terms of meeting people, especially adults, getting
away from home and child supervision, and/or resting alone.
Leisure time must be actively sought and set aside because women's work
activities are endless and tied to the essentials of everyday life. In this
context, free time is infrequently offered or given. Often, it seems that a
special additional energy investment is required of our respondents to find
free time and to occupy it with their own projects. Therefore, a profit must
follow the extra investment. Whereas this profit could be sought in personal
pleasure and gratification, our interviewees valued sociocultural activities;
they have learned to forget themselves. Therefore, when their leisure activity
is not strictly aimed at recuperating from fatigue, they turn to activities
which offer social recognition. Their own physical fitness does not, in our
investigation, appear as a motive; instead, it is treated as a hedonist
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 163

achievement that is not meant for them. 7

Family and domestic activities are hard work, and family members
impose sharp limits on the chief homemaker's leisure time. Therefore,
women often experience family leisure as work. Nevertheless, it can also
become a valued leisure activity for them by permitting shifts both in work
roles and in social life, providing that constant responsibility for children is
relaxed, domestic tasks are reduced, and social relations are enhanced.
These conditions account for the great success of permanent camping
grounds during holiday periods. These places, at least on the surface,
correspond to the dream of an idealized primitive or past society which is
latent in some feminist thought:8 a communal and integrated response to life
requirements together with a "get away from it all" attitude in reaction to
the regular demands of industrial and consumer society and, in the case of
women, to the requirements of domesticity (see Cerullo and Ewen, 1984;
Morville-Descolonges, 1978). Another way that domestic work can be
experienced as leisure is when it requires special skills and competence and is
socially recognized as an achievement of women's culture and traditions. An
example is craft work, an important activity among our respondents.
The home, although it is the work environment of our respondents, can
become a place for leisure between periods of work when they can gain
enough privacy to indulge in crafts, reading, seeing friends, or simply being
by themselves. It is striking that television is not a valued leisure activity; it is
rather a last resort to get away, especially in the restricted space of a public
housing apartment.
Outside the home, our respondents seek public life and social contacts,
often within the extended family, and they prefer unorganized, informal
types of leisure activities, such as going to restaurants with friends, walking
in the neighbourhood, or shopping. Even in sport and physical activity, they
want to be able to go at their own rhythm. The only organized forms of
leisure that are valued by these women are related to women's associations,9
craft courses, and volunteer work. Although feminist studies tend to
interpret these activities, especially community work, as unpaid work typical
of women (Vandelac et al., 1984), women engaged in it see it as part of
leisure. Their personal satisfaction emerging from these activities occurs
because it is taking place in public life, in contrast to the majority of their
activities which take place in the private and invisible domestic sphere.
These means of association are important because they are the channels
through which our respondents enjoy other activities such as local fairs,
"days out," and facilities for craftwork. The craft courses in municipal
recreational programmes are appreciated, but they are also criticized for
being superficial and ill-equipped for practice after the sessions.
Constraints on leisure are numerous and were well-identified in the
164 Life Spaces

interviews. The main constraints are domestic and family tasks, with the
responsibility for children being most demanding.
Financial constraints also limited access to leisure facilities, to services for
replacing women's formal work, to transportation, and even to the required
equipment for an activity. The women interviewed in the first study work out
ingenious strategies to compensate for their economic dependency: they
exchange books, travel with one another, or join women's associations
where they can enjoy an inexpensive public life. However, to get organized
like this, women must have minimum financial resources. In the public
housing estate of the second study, poverty excludes them from most public
and private services and activities and swells the burden of child care since
the children also cannot get away. This poverty reinforces their feeling that
they are segregated from the rest of the community. Few women feel in
control of their environment in this case.
A third constraint perceived by our respondents is the instability of leisure
programmes offered to them. They often mention activities that are not
reliable or are cancelled for lack of participants. They also regret that their
projects are not taken seriously by the municipal authorities. This lack of
concern is interpreted by them as a devaluation of what they are and as a
treatment of their leisure activities as superfluous pastimes. Women are here
describing a subtle form of sexism that is detrimental to the development of
new attitudes and behaviours.
These reality-based perceptions of constraints and lack of control over the
environment can lead deprived women to social withdrawal. However, it
does seem to bring many other women close together in informal social
activities and structured women's associations. In this way, our respondents
assert their belief in the power of their groups and in the autonomy they gain
as members.
This overview of our respondents' perceptions of their leisure time leads
us now to their perceptions of the urban environment. The places most
often referred to are those accommodating informal activities and support-
ive of a variety of uses. Women may refer here to the home if they have a
space of their own and a neighbourhood supportive of the supervision of
children. More often, they talk about a series of accessible and amenable
urban places, like the street or the commercial centre, which provide a
context for social interactions. They visit public places which are accessible,
open, and friendly (see Lofland, 1984), especially when they are located in a
natural or exceptional environment. However, women in our two studies
differ on this point. Women in the public housing estate would need such
resources close to their homes to use them with a feeling of security. It seems
that they need to feel secure in proximate places before reaching out to a
larger environment.
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 165

In contrast to places with informal rules, behaviour settings operating

with a rigid organization and a fixed schedule, like the sports centre and the
cultural centre, are not appealing to our respondents. These places do not
belong to them.
A study of the characteristics of the local camping ground could be
instructive for planners. What is appreciated about this setting? Is it the easy
transition between privacy and community? The easy supervision of
children? The sharing and visibility of domestic work? The provision of
facilities and space for varied activities and games? The social mix of the
users? Or simply the commercial Disneyland fiesta atmosphere?
However, on the whole, the greatest desire spelled out by the women who
were interviewed is to find a roof for their shared activities and projects.
They are constantly fighting for space: for their meetings; for handicrafts;
for a municipal library; even for providing community services like support
for the elderly, accommodation for women facing crises, and so on. In the
same vein, just simply going out and about is a strong ambition of our
respondents. This activity requires means of transportation that are flexible
and under their control; the struggle for transportation might become
another important issue for women.
The women in the first study express only two reservations about the
future of their environment. First, they are fearful that the development of
tourist facilities in their region might not be conceived of primarily as being
for the needs of the local community. Second, they do not like large-scale
festivals when the community loses control over the use of its environment to
outsiders. In the second study, many women seem insecure in public
environments, and they resent both the changes to their housing project
imposed by the public housing corporation and the fact that their own
demands are never taken into consideration.
In sum, the portrait of their leisure activities painted by the women
interviewed is simple and clear. Is it read and understood by planners and
urban authorities? If not, why not? Our respondents admit that they are
consulted over recreational programmes and that they are aware of public
hearings over planning objectives, but during the course of the group
interviews, there was uneasiness over this topic. The participants felt
something was wrong with their unwillingness to get involved, but they could
not explain this. With further probing we discovered that, on the one hand,
they are not really concerned by the questions asked or the object put
forward for discussion during public hearings. On the other hand, they feel
that their own priorities do not fit the general framework of the
consultations and that they are often swept aside for their irrelevancy.
Many studies have shown the discrepancy between the understanding
planners have of the environment and the way citizens experience it (for
166 Life Spaces

French analysis, see Ledrut, 1973; Raymond, 1984; Ostrowetsky, 1983). We

can see here that this is the case between planners and women. For instance,
women are asked in surveys if they prefer to attend a lace-making course or
physical fitness training when, in fact, they really want a women's centre or a
well-equipped workshop where they could exercise their handicraft skills. In
our first case study, social and health services were left off the agenda
entirely when planners consulted citizens about priorities for the develop-
ment of their region. Requests from the workshop organized by women
concerning these particular subjects could not be fitted into the planning
framework.
If these different representations of the environment and the lack of
communication are to be over come, planners must begin searching for
women's own terms of reference. For this purpose, research on women's
social representations can be an important, although insufficient, support.
These representations are modified with rapid social transformations, and
women develop better strategies for the future as they become more
conscious of their own interpretations of the environment; consequently
research and action must become intermingled and carried on longitudinally.
Planners and researchers experience the same situation: they simultaneously
help create the conditions for change and study the process of that change.

ADOLESCENTS' REPRESENTATIONS OF THEIR LEISURE TIME

The mothers interviewed in the first study were very optimistic about the
young generation in terms of its leisure activities. They believe their children
are generally developing healthy leisure habits and do not see any
discrimination working against their daughters. In the public housing estate,
the situation is perceived differently: women see their children hanging
around, and they blame the urban authorities for not offering proper
services. But the mothers seem more sensitive to the effect of this situation
on male adolescents than on female, most probably because male deviant
behaviour is more noticeable.
In studies on adolescence, reality appears in a different light and it is far
less comforting. Generally, it seems that the mechanisms of social
reproduction are still efficient in modelling sexual differentiation in
adolescence. For instance, surveys in Quebec show that female adolescents
value family life more than careers and that they consequently continue to
confine their career choices to traditional female sectors (Radio-Canada,
1979; Roberge et al., 1979). Unfortunately, there is a dearth of research on
their spatial behaviour and strategies.10 Hill's study of Toronto's ninth-
graders is a rare source on the leisure time of adolescents (1980). Some of his
findings are not surprising: girls show more social orientation in their leisure
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 167

behaviour than boys, their involvement in sports is much less important, (de
Koninck et al., 1983) and their spatial mobility is more limited. But Hill also
found that males and females do not differ between them as much as
individual adolescents differ from one another. Independently of their sex,
some adolescents will be active in sports and some in cultural activities;
others will spend most of their time just socializing. Girls involved in sports
will behave much the same way as their male counterparts, although their
numbers will be fewer.
The preliminary study presented here bears no comparison in scope with
Hill's survey. Nonetheless, it is possible to draw from our interviews some
observations on adolescents' concept of leisure, their leisure activities, their
favourite environments, the constraints they feel, and some of their desires.
Unlike their mothers, female adolescents enjoy a lot of free time. Their
leisure activities follow on from each other with much time devoted to
socializing. As is the case for their mothers, domestic chores are not
generally considered by them as leisure activities, although some specific
domestic activities may be considered as leisure if the outcome is a sign of
having a special skill. Also, unpaid or paid work outside the home is usually
considered as leisure.
For the adolescents interviewed, having company is on the whole
extremely important. However, their personalities seem to vary over a
continuum between two poles. We find, at one end, adolescents who are
self-willed and pursue their activities mainly to enjoy themselves and to
achieve their goals and, at the other end, adolescents who are mainly
looking for company and seeking the recognition of their peers. The variety
of activities performed by the first group seems greater and these girls
complain much less about having nothing to do, although they are not
involved in many organized activities with scheduled meetings. The school
orchestra and an informal softball league are the only exceptions mentioned.
The second group of peer-oriented girls mostly participate in informal
activities or watch the activities of other performers. Nevertheless, the lack
of variety in female adolescents' activities by comparison with male
adolescents is less related to the quantity of different activities open to them
as to the quality of participation implied: female adolescents seldom
participate with the aim of gaining in competence.
Explaining this situation is not an easy task. I would hypothesize that
social recognition, reinforcement, and training are the weak "links" in the
life of our respondents. These conditions are even worse in the public
housing estate studies because the only support offered there is through
organized sports which, according to male participants' own remarks, are a
way out of delinquency. Female adolescents resent this lack of encourage-
ment: they all mention the lack of training, support, or equipment as well as
168 Life Spaces

the instability of and unprofessional approach to programmes offered. Even

in the area of traditional female handicrafts, they receive little encourage-
ment to attain high skills: for instance, they are kept out of a women's
association renowned for the achievements of its members.
Contrary to what we expected, female adolescents did not complain about
being restricted in their access to the environment. In fact, they go wherever
they can find peers and they seem to frequent all accessible places, except
areas associated with groups of people with whom they do not identify.
Places are differentiated according to life style, not sex. Adolescents enjoy
each other's homes, the streets, outdoor sites, sports facilities, and
commercial meeting places. At first glace, it seems that only lack of
financial resources or transportation can prevent their access to a place. But
their usage of places seems to be different from that of male adolescents:
they are more often spectators or seeking social contacts, and they enjoy play
activities rather than sports.
Female adolescents enjoy a privilege over their male counterparts: they
can participate earlier in activities barred to them because of their ages.
Indeed, they gain access to bars and to distant places because they go out
with older males who have more money and access to cars. For all that,
females envy male adolescents who can participate in wilderness excursions,
an activity that is not seen as possible for them. Certainly, these facts show
that female adolescents are not as autonomous as males, in spite of
appearances.
Although they report being involved in many activities and going to many
places, the majority of the girls interviewed complained that they have no
space, that there is no place for them, and that there is not much to do in
their town (this "no place to go, nothing to do" syndrome also exists for
male adolescents; see Hill, 1980; Larkin, 1979). It is true that they are
handicapped by having little money, which is not compensated for by
memberships in clubs and leagues as is often the case for boys. But a
stronger explanation for their complaints would appear to be the subtle
sexism displayed, particularly through the lack of encouragement and
recognition they get; the absence of models of innovative activities; and the
generally unsupportive role of local organizations. It must be noted that
male adolescents may suffer from the same deficiencies, but, according to
the adolescents interviewed, males suffer less than females.
Being taken seriously, be it in sports or in arts and crafts, is our female
adolescents' greatest desire. Their lack of deep and competent involvement
may be assuaged by developing intimate affective bonds with a number of
friends and meeting frequently at each other's homes, but these behaviours
could also be interpreted as a compensation for the lack of opportunities
offered to them in the public realm. Having no indoor space for such
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 169

gatherings is another major problem for girls brought up in public housing

estates because, in their case, they are often the object of sexual harassment
while using outdoor space. Some female adolescents join males in their
activities; this mixed participation seems to benefit the females. For
instance, a few adolescents reported during the interviews that they could
learn a sport or a skill with their boyfriends, or with males generally, that
would otherwise have been inaccessible.
If insufficient encouragement is a main concern for female adolescents,
what kinds of change would be meaningful to them? Certainly there are
many positive measures that do not concern planners directly, such as those
aimed at changing attitudes via education. However, city officers such as
recreation specialists should be aware of and investigate the deep meaning of
female adolescents' complaints and preferences. City authorities and
planners must realize that they do not necessarily cater equally to girls'
favourite activities, such as dancing, as they do to boys' participation in
sports. Female leisure activities could be reinforced and recognized simply
by being officially housed in a city's buildings. In questioning female
adolescents, planners will also discover that they enjoy mixed social
gatherings in the local camping grounds, in local events, in organized
competitions. These androgynous recreational activities are positive when
male and female adolescents learn to participate together. Therefore, there is
a need for appropriate programmes and places. Public places should offer a
variety of amusements, surfaces, and loose pieces of equipment for games
and sports and proper facilities for handicrafts. Transportation should be
offered in a flexible manner, since travelling, visiting, and going camping are
all desires of adolescents. Another need that should be met is intimate
private space for adolescents in residential settings, especially where housing
density is high.

CREATING SPACE FOR WOMEN IN QUEBEC

The research we have been discussing was instigated by a new planning

context in Quebec, starting at the beginning of the 1980's. The urbanization
of Quebec and the modernization of its urban structure had taken place
without any coherent planning. The 1,500 municipalities were each defining
projects with no regard to the larger environment; not all had urban
development or land-use plans or zoning by-laws. After fifteen years of
argument and a few never-adopted draft bills, an Act Respecting Land-Use
Planning and Development was finally adopted by parliament in 1979. This
act establishes the general framework that will govern the development and
application of regulations pertaining to land-use planning and development.
170 Life Spaces

The 1979 Planning Act, together with various policies (such as a policy on
leisure) that appeared during the same period, brought new hopes for
involving people in the planning process. Previously, the ways citizens could
express their concerns, such as through referenda on zoning amendments,
proved quite insufficient for deciding the use value of the land (see, for
example, Blary-Charles, 1981; Pilette, 1978). Apart from creating a new
level of regional government through the formation of ninety-five regional
county municipalities (RCM) responsible for the coordination of the
choices and actions emanating from the various levels of decision making,
the act has made statutory the preparation of a land-use development plan
by each RCM as well as the preparation of a planning programme and
bylaws affecting zoning, sub-division, and building. The citizens' hopes for
this act rest on one of its main principles: "The citizen is involved in the
various phases of the planning and revising procedure, through the vehicles
of information, consultation and participation/'
In theory, the domain that comes under the act's regulations is so broad
that it calls on all citizens to participate. For instance, women would
certainly have something to say about the general policies and planning
objectives of their RCM, on the intermunicipal facilities and infrastructures
to be installed, on the general aims of land development policy in their own
municipality, and on a three-year schedule for the implementation of the
projects proposed. Moreover, the compulsory framework defined by the act
multiplies the opportunities for the citizen to get involved. For instance,
citizens are to be informed of preliminary planning proposals, revised
proposals, and the adopted land-use development plan and planning
programmes. The act even specifies the means of pursuing this aim: in some
circumstances, publication of the proposals in the local newspapers will
satisfy the requirements of the act; in other cases, the municipal authorities
are to mail an abstract of the plan to each civic address in its territory. Next,
well-advertised public hearings must be held by the municipal authorities at
various times during the planning process and whenever bylaws are to be
adopted. The citizens may also require the Commission nationale de
1'amenagement to prove the conformity of the bylaws to the planning
programme; citizens may then vote to amend or repeal provisions contained
in the bylaws.
Can this framework meet its ends? As Blary-Charles (1981) has shown,
the institutionalization of participation may well discourage the ordinary
citizen while the active urban agents (sellers) may well devise means of
controlling the process. It is not enough to disseminate information about
two or three views held by a municipality and to call for public hearings. The
information must appeal to everyone by reflecting his or her life conditions.
Unfortunately, the means of establishing a public dialogue and of
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 171

translating people's voices into a plan have not been part of the planning
tradition in Quebec. If women are to make an imprint on the urban plan and
urban structure, a search for these aims must begin.
It must be reasserted that the data presented here are not representative of
the whole population of women. They are the results of small group
interviews with a number of women; therefore, they simply illustrate that
people hold different representations of reality according to social status,
age, and experience. However, the study shows that the social representa-
tions of the women and female adolescents interviewed are related to their
sexual role. Women will not participate in the planning process unless it
makes room for their views of the environment. Furthermore, because they
have construed their wants in a social context that is based on the sexual
division of labour, an adequate investigation of women's needs and desires
cannot be limited to asking them directly what they want. As an example,
when asked what they wanted, our adult respondents first expressed the
needs of others, for instance the elderly and adolescents; later, they asked
for leisure activities that would make them more competent in their domestic
chores, like courses in home-decoration and child psychology. For their
part, adolescents are so responsive to commercial influence that some would
not hesitate to ask for horse-riding facilities simply because they have just
visited a ranch. What should we do with such demands? Comply with them?
Reject them? Work with them? Answering such questions will be the aim of
a long-term research project directed primarily toward trying out new
methods for listening to women.
The attempt to let women speak for themselves has to be a two-fold
action. Reaching out for women is one aim. But women themselves should
strive to take their place in public life. Confronted as they are with the urban
environment, they are in a position to discuss its development with regard to
their perceived needs. Therefore, they must develop a sense of the
importance of their own views of the city, an ability to insert the answers to
these needs in a planning programme and land-use development plan, and
ways of expressing needs and solutions publicly. Further research should
lead women to share their experience and to discuss their real priorities. It
could consist of an exercise in planning conceived for women's groups aimed
at helping the participants to state their choices for the environment, insert
these proposals within the urban development scheme of their town, and
evaluate means of implementing them. The whole idea is to create space for
women in the planning process as well as space in the city. In this way,
women will add their own knowledge and experience to our understanding
of the city and our visions of its future. On the basis of preliminary studies,
we foresee that women will express concerns over the physical planning and
enhancement of all public spaces and the implementation of community
772 Life Spaces

facilities. However, it remains difficult to predict how, in the long term,

women's ideas will evolve in interaction with the changing environment.
This proposal for women's participation is feasible on a large scale, the
women's movement is well-enough structured with its many associations and
interest groups to involve more women in the planning process. The interest
of women is already there. Tapping this resource will therefore need little
public investment in communications and support. 11 Reaching adolescents
will be a more difficult task because they are less organized into formal
groups. The school is the only reliable place to meet with them, and it is not
a popular place. But, with a little imagination and an examination of many
environmental education programmes, some progress could be made in
planning for the needs of adolescents.
Nevertheless, the means of implementing and developing women's
participation must themselves be objects of study in the framework of
action research. It is necessary to study how women come to express
themselves and what they express. Qualitative research into women's lives
and actions to implicate them in decision-making about the city can
therefore become one and the same approach, so that in addition to planning
for women's changing social roles, we will construct a city where women
have the power to create their own visions and plans.

NOTES

1. The author lists six main deadly sins: the overextension and underspecification
of concepts, transforming a sociocultural difference into a biological one, the
supposition that reality is experienced the same way by both sexes, the idea that
there are appropriate roles and behaviours for each sex, the double-standard,
and the extraction of social facts from their social context. She adds a seventh
sin: the omnipresent stereotype of the family.
2. For instance, in several workshops I have organized for groups of women on
their urban environment, I have never heard of any desire for the collectiviza-
tion of domestic tasks that is often an aspect of Feminist Utopia.
3. The work of groups like the National Congress of Neighbourhood Women in
the United States is an example here. They use consciousness-raising methods
and develop education programmes in their work with women, because their
experience taught them that it is the best way to induce change and support
women in their actions to control their neighbourhood. Unfortunately, too little
of the knowledge they have construed reaches the "scientific community."
4. As a whole, studies point at the limited spatial range of women's activities,
their short periods of free time, their low rate of participation in sports and
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 173

physical activity, and the disregard of their favourite forms of leisure by

officialdom.
5. The data presented here are extracted from group interviews with women. The
case study also included analyses of the ongoing planning operation, the
"schema d'amenagement" of the region and the "plan directeur d'urban-
isme" of the municipality, and a survey of women's organizations in the
community.
6. The initial demand did not specify male adolescents, but it appeared with
further examination that they were the main problem because of vandalism,
noise, and so on. Invisible but known female behaviours like prostitution were
more easily forgotten.
7. It must be emphasized that our respondents showed no trace of being
preoccupied by glamour. The reproduction of the model of beauty without
muscles has often been presented as an explanation of women's low rate of
participation in sport. For instance, see de Koninck et al. (1983).
8. The yearning for a small, communal, and ecological society can be traced in
radical feminist works such as D'Eaubonne (1974). Many feminist projects
through American history can be likened to this search; many are related in
Hayden (1981).
9. When I refer to women's organizations, I am not referring to feminist groups
only. I am talking about a variety of women's groups, formal or informal,
national or local, with varied objectives from health promotion to women's
education. Their common characteristics are that they are instigated by women
and that their membership is mainly female.
10. This contrasts with the numerous works on what is seen as youth problems:
drug abuse, sexual behaviour, dropping-out of school, and so on.
11. In discussing women's strategies for sharing power in society, many thinkers
have put forward the idea that local politics would be a good school where
women could become initiated to politics, and that it is probably a suitable
place for them to act on their own life conditions. The Council on the Status of
Women in Quebec took such a stance a few years ago. For an interesting study
of women in local politics, see Tardy (1982).

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Blary-Charles, R. (1981). "Participation: formalisme et realite." In Corporation

professionnelle des urbanistes du Quebec, La loi 125 et la participation
(pp. 57-64). Montreal: Corporation professionnelle des urbanistes du Quebec,
CPUQ.
Bowles, G. and Duelli Klein, R. (Eds.) (1983). Theories of Women's Studies.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cerullo, M. and Ewen, P. (1984). "The American Family Goes Camping: Gender,
174 Life Spaces

Family and the Politics of Space." Antipode, 75(3), pp. 35-45.

Dagenais, H. (1980). "Les femmes dans la ville et la sociologie urbaine: Les
multiples facettes d'une meme oppression." Anthropologie et societes, 4(1),
pp. 21-36.
Dagenais, H. (Ed.) (1986). Approches et methodes de la recherche feministe: Actes
du colloque de mat 1985. Quebec: Groupe de recherches multidisciplinaires
feministes, Universite Laval.
D'Eaubonne, F. (1974). Lefeminisme ou la mort. Paris: Pierre Horay Editeur.
de Koninck, M., Saillant, F., and Dunnigan, L. (1983). Essaisur la santedes femmes.
Quebec: Conseil du statut de la femme.
Duelli Klein, R. (1983). "How to Do What We Want to Do: Thoughts About
Feminist Methodology." In G. Bowles and R. Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories of
Women's Studies (p. 90). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Eichler, M. (1985). "Les six peches capitaux sexistes." Cahiers de recherche du
GREMF, no. 6. Quebec: Universite Laval (Groupe de recherches multidisciplin-
aires feministes).
Eichler, M. and Lapointe, J. (1985). On the Treatment of the Sexes in Research.
Ottawa: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Ekistics (1985). Special issue: "Women and Space in Human Settlements," 52.
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton.
Hayden, D. (1980). "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?: Speculations on
Housing, Urban Design and Human Work." Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, 5(3), pp. 170-87.
Hayden, D. (1981). The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs
for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
Hill, F. (1980). The Lives and Times of Urban Adolescents: Activity Patterns and
Neighborhood Perceptions. Child in the City Report, Centre for Urban and
Community Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (1978). Special issue:
"Women and the City," 2(3).
Keller, Suzanne (Ed.) (1981). Building for Women. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington
Books.
Larkin, R. W (1979). Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ledrut, R. (1973). Les images de la ville. Paris: Anthropos.
Lewin, K. (1948). Resolving Social Conflicts: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics.
New York: Harper.
Lofland, L. H. (1975). "The 'Thereness of Women': A Selective Review of Urban
Sociology." In M. Millan and R. M. Kanter (Eds.), Another Voice: Feminist
Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (pp. 140-70). New York: Anchor
Books.
Lofland, L. H. (1984). "Women and Urban Public Space." Women and
Environments, 6(2), pp. 12-14.
Masson, D. (1984). "Les femmes dans les structures urbaines: apercu d'un nouveau
champ de recherche." Revue canadienne de sciences politiques, 77(4), pp.
754-82.
 Interacting with the Urban Environment 175

Morville-Descolonges, M. (1978). "A propos de la socialisation du travail

domestique: 1'analyse d'un village de vacances." International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 2(3), pp. 482-98.
Oakley, A. (1974). The Sociology of Housework. New York: Pantheon.
Ostrowetsky, S. (1983). L'imaginaire bdtisseur: les villes nouvelles francaises. Paris:
Librairie des Meridiens.
Pilette, D. (1978). "Les acteurs du zonage et leurs pratiques." Cahiers de geographie
du Quebec, 22(57), pp. 393-419.
Radio-Canada (1979). Nous les 12 a 15 ans. Montreal: Services des recherches,
Radio-Canada.
Raymond, H. (1984). L'Architecture: les aventures spatiales de la raison. Paris:
Centre du creation industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Reinharz, S. (1983). "Experiential Analysis: A Contribution to Feminist Research."
In G. Bowles and R. Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women's Studies
pp. 162-91. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Roberge, P., Belanger, P., and Rocher, G. (1979). Aspirations scolaires et
orientations professionnelles des etudiants. Les Cahiers d'A.S.O.P.E. Quebec:
Universite Laval.
Roberts, H. (Ed.) (1981). Doing Feminist Research. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
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the American City," 5(3).
Szalai, A. et al. (1972). The Use of Time. The Hague: Mouton.
Tardy, E. (1982). Lapolitique: un monde d'hommes?: Une etude sur les mairesses au
Quebec. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH.
Vandelac, L., Belisle, D., Gauthier, A., and Pinard, Y (1984). Du travail et de
ramour. Montreal: Editions St-Martin.
Wekerle, G., Peterson, R., and Morley, D. (Eds). (1980). New Space for Women.
Boulder: Westview.
 8

Gender-Specific Approaches
to Theory and Method
BETH MOORE MILROY AND CAROLINE ANDREW

A principal issue raised in this book and central to the field of gender and
urban environments is the desire by researchers both to understand and to
change current affairs. In this concluding chapter we wish to explore some
of the research consequences of this position.
Linking "understanding" and "changing" is not straightforward. The
meaning of understanding is itself complex, although it is widely taken to
include knowing from without, by way of observation, and also knowing
from within, experientially, empathetically and intuitively. It entails both
description and recognition of the context within which the description is
proposed. Changing refers to physically rearranging the phenomena in our
environment and the processes carried on there; to altering the concepts,
methods, theories, and languages we use to investigate the world and
ourselves; and to redefining criteria for what counts as knowledge. It means
creating contexts in which women can act on their knowledge and
understanding. Understanding and changing, then, as themes in feminist
research embrace the desire to change values and world views rather than
simply to make the existing male world accessible to women.
Insisting on the connection between understanding and changing is more
than an act of research; it is also a political act. It brings scientific enterprise
and politics face-to-face.
Feminists share this broad ground with many social scientists concerned to
develop theories and methods that take human agency and purpose into
account. Their projects are set apart from the tradition of basing theory and
analysis on models of scientific inquiry originally designed to study
non-human phenomena. Within the growing field of human-based theorists,
 Gender-Specific Approaches to Theory and Method 177

a diversity of approaches is developing. Where feminists diverge from these

is in explaining the categories of "woman" and "man," not assuming them
to be givens. How this is done sets apart various lines of feminist thinking or
"feminisms."1
The debate about theorizing in the research community at large reminds
us to think about why we do research in the social sciences in the first place.
Is it purely to acquire knowledge for its own sake? Or is it to change and
improve something? Feminist researchers who are acutely aware of the
pervasive androcentricity that has influenced the shape of urban environ-
ments cannot be disinterested inquirers removed from the prospect of
creating a non-sexist environment. For that half of humankind which feels
isolated from the social science explanations of its own experience, it would
be shooting itself in the foot to settle simply for understanding. Acknowl-
edging purposefulness in the research experience, in both researcher and
researched, creates a dialectic between understanding and changing.
As we pursue this issue, referring first to theory in the field and later to
research plans, we do so from the position that scientific investigation of
social questions is never wholly divorced from political concerns: the entire
enterprise from conceptualization to evidence is conducted within a
framework saturated with conventions and values sanctioned by political
discourse and actions. Further, we see inquiry as a "disciplined dialogue"
between concept and evidence which captures the dynamic relationship
between two indispensable facets grounded in theoretical and practical
domains (Thompson, 1978, p. 43).

Suzanne Mackenzie has noted that little theorizing has been done as yet in
the field of gender and environmental studies (1984a, 1984b). Feminists in
these fields have had to make women visible as a relevant population
subgroup, a task which required generating data about women's experience
simply to permit issues concerning women to be raised. Considerable
literature has been produced in Canada and elsewhere documenting the
problems women encounter in existing urban environments.2
A second area which feminist researchers are developing is an understand-
ing of the dynamic interaction between gender categories and built
environments, in order to see how changes in one affect the other over time
and space. This has entailed opening up the category "woman" (and,
consequently, the category "man' also) to see what has constituted being a
woman at different points in time. Clearly it is not a static category. One has
sought to understand how such constructions come about, what set of social
relations and activities contribute to setting and changing gender relations
over time and space. A further undertaking has been a parallel opening up
178 Life Spaces

of the category "environments" seeing them as "sets of resources

appropriated in historically variable ways, these modes of appropriation
altering with societal space and time patterns" (Mackenzie, 1986, p. 269).
With gender and environment seen as historically contingent, one may
then investigate how one influences the other at specific times and places.
For example, in Mackenzie's empirical work we see that in central Canada
from the turn of the century, the category "woman" increasingly specified a
female who did not "work" but rather managed the home. The
appropriation of the environment increasingly separated women from what
was and still is conventionally construed as work: that is, activity in the
formal economy (1980). There appeared, then, a coincidence between the
full-time housewife, a new social model for masses of women, and suburban
environments, also new to central Canada. Over the last couple of decades
both the concept of woman and the appropriation of space have begun
shifting in different directions again. Opening up the categories to inspection
over time helps one grasp how specific gender relations and spatial forms
develop in concert. Particular gender relations and spatial conditions are
constructed in line with dominant interests; they are neither "natural" nor
necessary in some absolute sense. If this is the case, each can in principle be
shaped to suit women's as well as men's interests.
Now that research has begun to show the constraints of urban
environments and the dynamic quality of gender relations, it is imperative to
include a third task: shaping concepts and evidence into theories of gender
and environment. Principles and empirical studies will not suffice to
challenge the theories which currently underlie explanations in environmen-
tal fields until they are woven together conceptually (see Mackenzie, 1984a,
pp. 16-17; Masson, 1984, pp. 769-70 and 781-82; Evans, 1983, pp. 219-28).
Disconnected, they lend credence to pleas to recognize women, but they fall
short of serving their full potential for understanding and creating
environments where both women and men are recognized as actors.
McDowell (1985) and Holcomb (1986) have noted that gender-sensitive work
has had little impact as yet on geographic thought. But this fact should not
discourage further efforts. The special contribution of this work is to
highlight the tension between production and reproduction which have
traditionally been linked activities for women only, and to challenge theories
that value one to the disadvantage of the other. Inevitably feminists' work
strikes at long-standard conceptualizations of work and economy and their
location in space. Women, because they need to integrate reproductive and
productive work, are inadequately placed into standard models. The
convenient solution is to ignore the problem or make only minor
adjustments. The more creative—and much more difficult to achieve—
solution is to change the conceptualizations, theories, and practices. History
 Gender-Specific Approaches to Theory and Method 179

would seem to indicate that the latter solution will have to be won; it will not
come easily.
A range of descriptive and prescriptive mainstream theories from fields
such as geography and planning merit re-examination given the evidence
generated by making women and men problematic in analyses of urban
phenomena. Probably the most encompassing of these are theoretical
explanations of urban structure—how towns and cities acquire the forms
they do. Conventional explanations depend on the classical economic
principle of competition, reconceptualized in urban theory to account for
constraints on land supply, or access to space. The greatest competition is
for space located near economic activity (Women and Geography Study
Group of the IBG, 1984, p. 45). Thus, the basis for explaining urban form is
economic production and its category of land rent. Location theories show
that activities "naturally" locate given their ability to pay the cost of land
for the quantity of space required and given the spatial configuration
already in place. To the extent that choice exists, it is exercised according to
the traditional, rational, economic manner.
There is an associated, behavioural area of study in geography—also
influential in planning—in which researchers examine people's actual rather
than expected behaviour regarding decisions about locating activities and
moving between them. Using concepts drawn more from sociology and
psychology than economics (Johnston, 1983), this work permits a more
complex interpretation of behaviour. Yet, like location theories, it does not
theorize the implications of gender relations in the structure of decision
making.
Against these dominant approaches, feminist theories are being developed
based on concepts and research findings related in particular to the
production/reproduction dynamic. These open up to investigation the
possiblity that it is the interlinkage between productive and reproductive
activity that structures cities, and that decisions are influenced by gender
(Lewis and Foord, 1984; Klausner, 1986). Gradually the literature is
showing how certain elements, such as conceptualizations of work, home,
family, women, and so on, are related to one another in the creation of
specific forms of gender relations. One feature of existing gender relations is
that women's tasks, spaces, and images are devalued in relation to men's.
Feminists argue that these differential valuations based on gender have
material and theoretical implications for understanding the structuring of
space. The challenge for feminists is to test the thesis that urban structures
reflect the interplay of both productive and reproductive activities (them-
selves shaped by the historically constructed relations between women and
men). Then they must attend to deconstructing and reconstructing the
relations.
180 Life Spaces

We also wish to make several observations about the research plan. If

research is directed to understanding and changing, it follows that the
preferred approaches will be those that link understanding and agency, a
sense of how we are moved to act. This brings us back to the questions about
research and politics that are currently exercising the research community
and which influence the character of research plans.
Conventional social inquiry is frequently premised on the view that
knowledge influences action, but not the other way round. Scientific
research produces knowledge and politics acts on that knowledge; knowledge-
creation and action are sequential and split. However, a different perspective
is widely promoted in certain modes of research, including feminist
research. Its premise is that knowledge and action are inter-related, the one
affecting the nature of the other but neither necessarily taking precedence.
As a consequence, investigation involves legitimizing experience and feelings
in everyday action as sources of knowledge and understanding politics as a
form of knowing-in-action whereby meanings are generated and reinforced
by power.
Feminist methods broach another split in conventional inquiry, that
between subject and object. Because women investigating gender relations
are in some measure investigating themselves, they directly confront the
issue posed in conventional research of determining an object for the
researching subject. Social science methods have traditionally posited a
subject/object split in order to claim that research results are objective. The
researcher is detached from those whom one researches. Objectivity is a
central criterion for reliable research in that tradition. Feminists and others
have been developing research methods which specifically do not separate
the researcher from the people who are the focus of research, nor from the
data that is said to describe them (see Dagenais, 1981; Juteau-Lee, 1981;
Laurin-Frenette, 1981; Morris, 1977; Smith, 1974; Vickers, 1982). Criteria
other than objectivity are consequently used to assess the value of research
results. In particular the value shifts from being able to make detached
statements about some group to being able to speak in unison with it. These
methods seek not only to heighten the researcher's understanding but also
that of the people who are the centre of the research. In the process both the
researcher and researched are subjects; no one is an object. This orientation
proposes actions and solutions developed from within the group rather than
developed by researchers and imposed by policy makers.
With these interpretations of the relationships between knowledge and
action on the one hand and subject and object on the other, feminist
researchers use at least two main avenues to link understanding and
changing. One is via the qualities of the methods themselves, and the other
relates to the use made of the research. The methods themselves can be
 Gender-Specific Approaches to Theory and Method 181

clustered broadly into three categories (see Reinharz, Bombyk, and Wright,
1984, esp. pp. 448-50). In the first category are so called alternative methods
which are qualitative and often characterized by contrasting them to
quantitative methods. Different types of qualitative methods have been
developed in various fields. J In the discussion that follows, a few of these
are mentioned in connection with studies in which they have been used, in
order to demonstrate their translation to research related to women.
One method is action research, which is directed to contemporary
situations. Fundamental to it is the act of bridging the gap between
researcher and group members, a gap occasioned by differing experiences,
knowledge, and perspectives. This idea of suspending preconceived notions
about others in an effort to understand them on their terms generally
underlies qualitative methods and is absent from quantitative ones. This
principle can take several forms, but it always involves both field research
and the participation by those studied in the description, if not analysis, of
their experience. Documented and accessible accounts are found, for
example, in the analysis of Munroe House in Vancouver (Women's Research
Centre, 1980) and in Mies (1983, pp. 117-39) concerning establishing and
running shelters for battered women. Another form of qualitative research is
in-depth interviewing. One example is Luxton (1980). Finally in this
category, one can mention the method for studying historical subjects which
entails the researcher immersing herself in documented evidence of a period
in order to understand what it was like to be a woman at that time. Using
this approach, Wright (1980) has provided an historical study of American
women and their houses, and Scott and Tilly (1982) have prepared an
analysis of women's work and the family in nineteenth-century Europe.
In a second category are the hybrids which conjoin alternative methods
with conventional ones. Armstrong and Armstrong (1983) have argued that
this approach can be advantageous, pointing to the lacunae and distortions
in the depictions of women's lives that can occur through dependence on
quantitative data bases alone. As one corrective, they recommend that
qualitative methods be used to complement quantitative data, to expand
upon and to check the validity of data and implications drawn from
qualitative surveys. These authors cite examples of how interviews with
women about their work experiences have served to revise and enrich
inferences drawn solely from quantitative data bases, such as those
developed by Statistics Canada.
Finally, in a third category are conventional methods of quantitative data
collection, including surveys and time-budgets. Some researchers have
argued that these are useful for developing material that is sensitive to
feminist concerns, provided they are corrected for possible sexist bias (for
example, Eichler, 1983, ch. 3; Jayaratne, 1983). In addition, a number of
182 Life Spaces

Canadian empirical studies, such as Klodawsky, Spector, and Rose (1985)

and McClain and Doyle (1984) have analyzed existing statistics to establish
how women's experience in the built environment differs from that of men.
Perhaps the most fruitful way to approach the choice of method is by
thinking in terms of one's interests. The subject being studied, together with
the interests and understanding of the researcher, should inform the choice
of method. Questions along the line of "How many?" may be better
handled using quantitative methods, while questions such as "What is it like
to ... ?" probably demand qualitative methods (Reinharz, 1983, p. 177).
The problems in choosing a research method are closely associated with
those that emerge from the use of existing data. Caution is warranted when
the research for women draws data from standard statistical data bases.
Certain researchers have described how assumptions underlying data
collection influence the questions that will and will not be asked (Armstrong
and Armstrong, 1983; Oakley and Oakley, 1979; Allin and Hunt, 1982).
They show that simply adopting non-sexist language and producing some
tabulations by sex does not necessarily rid data of androcentric bias. The
concepts and perspective one brings to the task of designing questionnaires
and other data-gathering formats affects the types of questions asked and
how they are presented to respondents (see, for example, Schuman and
Presser, 1981). This poses serious difficulties for research projects concern-
ing waged work and child care, for instance, since the prevailing view is to
consider waged work as principally a male activity and child care a female
activity.
An example drawn from Armstrong and Armstrong may illuminate the
type of problem a researcher encounters. Statistics Canada's definition of
work includes working for pay or without pay in any sort of business but
excludes both work around the house and volunteer work. The authors note
that:

What Statistics Canada is interested in counting is not all the ways

people spend their days or their energy, not how they survive on a daily
basis, not how food gets to their tables, nor even how they improve their
standard of living. On the other hand, interest is not limited to paid
employment, to work that brings individuals money income. Rather,
the focus of concern is work which results directly in profit and
exchange. (Armstrong and Armstrong, 1983, pp. 4-5)

Hence the only things we can find out about what women (and men) do
all day is that which is associated with a business. All of women's family and
volunteer work—which is to say most of women's work—is disregarded.
While the definition is not sexist in its language, it is sexist in its assumptions
 Gender-Specific Approaches to Theory and Method 183

and thus in the data it brings to light. It is imperative therefore to keep in

mind that the numbers that turn up in data bases are the results of certain
choices about what it is important to know. Dominant theories about gender
relations will invariably influence those choices.
A second avenue for integrating understanding and changing is to develop
research plans that, apart from the methods used, incorporate specific
commitments regarding dissemination and action to ensure that research
findings are not left in obscurity. A helpful twelve-point strategy has been
outlined by the International Exchange of Development Resources agency, a
group that raises funds and gathers information to promote the exchange of
resources among women worldwide (1982). Its position is that since
policy-making is a political process, research should be taken to the people
who elect the policy makers. Tasks include ensuring that research budgets
allocate money for disseminating the results of studies, encouraging funding
for women's groups rather than individuals so that skills and knowledge are
developed more widely, and forming groups to monitor policies that run
counter to research findings.
One concern particularly relevant in Canada relates to ensuring broader
distribution of results. There is a tendency for important initiatives
regarding women and environments to become known only locally because
they are geographically specific. But in order to develop theories, policies,
and actions rooted in the Canadian reality, we need the greatest possible
understanding of this work. These locally specific studies are vital to
producing the overall picture. Women and Environments is one publication
designed to surmount the dissemination problem by bringing national and
international attention to studies, experiences, and projects.
The commitment to develop methods sensitive to women and to ensure
that findings reach those engaged in policy and practice can be characterized
as a concern to do research forwomen rather than about them, to learn with
women, not from them.

In conclusion, we reiterate the main point of this chapter: both theory and
research must develop together. In combination they offer the likelihood of
overcoming the sex biases of existing theory and research and of
contributing to more positive gender relations in the future. In this pursuit
feminist scholarship clearly must innovate. With greater understanding we
may hope that communities can become life spaces that enable new
relationships to flourish, and that planning them can be acts that make
possible what we dare to dream.
184 Life Spaces

NOTES

1. "Feminisms" is borrowed from Marks and de Courtivron's presentation of

"new French feminisms" in which the pluralizing is intended to signify the
attack against fixed categories and labels, including feminism, in recent French
writings (1981). In the English-language literature of Britain and North
America, distinctions are frequently made among radical, Marxist, liberal,
socialist, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and humanist feminism. Inter-
pretations are not necessarily international because of the different political
and theoretical traditions within which they have grown. Comparative
treatments of various approaches are found in the Women and Geography
Study Group of the IBG (1984, pp. 24-38); Elshtain (1981, pp. 201-353) and
James (1982, pp. 233-38).
2. Much of the Canadian literature is documented in the annotated bibliography
in this book, and the bibliographies of these sources provide guides to much of
the American and British literature and some of the French.
3. In the area of community development, for instance, see the critical-
emancipatory approaches of Freire (1972a, 1972b), Hall and Shirley (1982),
and van Rensburg (1984), as well as the "empowerment" literature, including
Gran (1983), and James (1982) on the relation between feminism and
community action. For sociology a variety of interpretive methods exist: see
Morris (1977), and Reinharz (1983) for her own form of experiential analysis
designed for feminist research.

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 Gender-Specific Approaches to Theory and Method 185

Gran, Guy (1983). Development by People. New York: Praeger.

Hall, Trish and Shirley, Ian (1982). "Development as Methodology: Locality
Development, Social Planning and Social Action." In Ian Shirley (Ed.),
Development Tracks: The Theory and Practice of Community Development.
Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Holcomb, Briavel (1986). "Geography and Urban Women." Urban Geography,
7(5).
International Exchange of Development Resources (1982). "Making Policy Respon-
sible to Research." Reprinted in International Supplement, Women's Studies
Quarterly, 1, p. 19.
James, Bev (1982). "Feminism: Making the Private World Public." In Ian Shirley
(Ed.), Development Tracks: The Theory and Practice of Community Develop-
ment. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Jayaratne, Toby Epstein (1983). "The Value of Quantitative Methodology for
Feminist Research." In Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories
of Women's Studies (pp. 140-61), London: Routlege and Kegan Paul.
Johnston, R. J. (1983). Geography and Geographers. 2d ed. London: Edward
Arnold.
Juteau-Lee, Danielle (1981). "Visions partielles, visions partiales: visions (des)
minoritaires en sociologie." Sociologie et societes, 13(2).
Klausner, D. (1986). "Beyond Separate Spheres: Linking Production with Social
Reproduction and Consumption." Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 4, pp. 29-40.
Klodawsky, Fran, Spector, Aron, and Rose, Damaris (1985). Single Parent Families
and Canadian Housing Policies: How Mothers Lose. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage
and Housing Corporation.
Laurin-Frenette, Nicole (1981). "Les femmes dans la sociologie." Sociologie et
societes, 13(2).
Lewis, Jane and Foord, Jo (1984). "New Towns and New Gender Relations in Old
Industrial Regions: Women's Employment in Peterlee and East Kilbride." Built
Environment, 10(1), pp. 42-52
Luxton, Meg (1980). More than a Labour of Love. Toronto: Women's Educational
Press.
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1980). "Women and the Reproduction of Labour Power in the
Industrial City: A Case Study." Working Paper 23, Urban and Regional
Planning, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1984a). "Catching Up with Ourselves: Ideas on Developing
Gender-Sensitive Theory in the Environmental Disciplines." Women and
Environments, 6(3).
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1984b). "Editorial Introduction." Antipode, 76(3). Special
issue: "Women and Environments."
Mackenzie, Suzanne (1986). "Feminist Geography." The Canadian Geographer/Le
geographe canadien, 30(3), pp. 268-70.
Marks, Elaine and de Courtivron, Isabelle (1981). New French Feminisms. New
York: Schocken.
Masson, Dominique (1984). "Les femmes dans les structures urbaines: apercu d'un
186 Life Spaces

nouveau champ de recherche." Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue

canadienne de science politique, 17(4).
McClain, Janet and Doyle, Cassie (1984). Women and Housing. Toronto: James
Lorimer and the Canadian Council on Social Development.
McDowell, L. (1983). "Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban
Space." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1, pp. 59-72.
McDowell, L. (1985). "Some Gloomy Thoughts from Britain: A Response to
Suzanne Mackenzie on Developing Gender-Sensitive Theory." Women and
Environments, 7(1).
Mies, Maria (1983). "Towards a Methodolgy for Feminist Research." In Gloria
Bowles and Renata Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women's Studies (pp.
117-39), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Morris, Monica B. (1977). An Excursion into Creative Sociology. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Oakley, Ann and Oakley, Robin (1979). "Sexism in Official Statistics." In John
Irvine, Ian Miles, and Jeff Evans (Eds.), Demystifying Social Statistics (pp.
172-89). London: Pluto Press.
Reinharz, Shulamit (1983). "Experiential Analysis: A Contribution to Feminist
Research." In Gloria Bowles and Renata Duelli Klein (Eds.), Theories of
Women's Studies (pp. 162-91). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Reinharz, Shulamit, Bombyk, Marti, and Wright, Janet (1984). "Methodological
Issues in Feminist Research: A Bibliography of Literature on Women's Studies,
Sociology and Psychology." Women's Studies International, 6(4).
Schuman, Howard and Presser, Stanley (1981). Questions and Answers in Attitude
Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording and Context. New York:
Academic Press.
Scott, Joan and Tilly, Louise (1982). "Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth
Century Europe." In Elizabeth Whitelegg et al. (Eds.), The Changing Experience
of Women (pp. 45-70). Oxford: Open University Press.
Smith, Dorothy E. (1974). "Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of
Sociology." Sociological Inquiry, 44(1), pp. 7-13.
Thompson, E. P. (1978). The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
van Rensburg, Patrick (1984). "Education and Culture for Liberation." Develop-
ment Dialogue, I, pp. 138-50.
Vickers, Jill McCalla (1982). "Memoirs of an Ontological Exile." In Angela Miles
and Geraldine Finn (Eds.), Feminism in Canada (pp. 27-46). Montreal: Black
Rose Books.
Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1984). Geography and Gender: An
Introduction to Feminist Geography. London: Hutchinson.
Women's Research Centre (1980). A Review of Munroe House: Second Stage
Housing for Battered Women. Vancouver: Women's Research Centre.
Wright, Gwendolyn (1980). Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture
and Cultural Conflict in Chicago 1873-1913. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
 Annotated Bibliography
BETH MOORE MILROY and CAROLINE ANDREW,
with the collaboration of SUSANMONTONEN

This bibliography brings together the principal contributions in print relating to

gender relations and the Canadian environment dating from the early 1970's. While
we believe we have included the majority of titles, the bibliography falls short of
being an exhaustive listing.
Our general criteria for selecting an item were that (1) it should be concerned both
with gender relations (or women or sex) and with community environments; and (2)
it should either be written about a Canadian situation or be written by someone
working in Canada. More specifically, we have tried to identify works having to do
with the location of goods and services in space and related design, policy, and
programme considerations, and with gender-based relationships, including political,
economic, and social as experienced in community space. Thus we have emphasized
works on housing; transportation; child care; leisure; planning and design of urban
environments; material on demography and labour linked to urban structure; and
items written from the perspective of specific population groups such as single-parent
households. Because we wished to retain a strong focus on the intersection of gender
and environments, little material from the labour and family debates is included,
even though we realize these are directly relevant and clearly have spatial
implications.
Books, articles, and reports are annotated; theses and dissertations are not because
we were unable to review these. Annotations include the general intent of the item, as
well as specific information on the methods used, the period of time to which each
refers, and the type of space. In the latter we sought to identify various scales in
space from the urban-centred region or small community to the neighbourhood; and
subsets of these include the block level, housing project, park, or building. Some
entries are broadly applicable to a given city or country or are non-specific with
respect to space.
Sources used to compile the bibliography of books, articles, and reports included
the Canadian Periodical Index from 1974 to June 1987; Women and Environments
and Atlantis until they began to be indexed in CP/in 1987 and the papers in this text.
Items were searched in a rippling out process until no new titles were found. Sources
searched for theses and dissertations were Theses universitaires quebecoises sur les
femmes, 1921-1981, by Yolande Cohen, with the collaboration of Andree Boucher
(2d ed. Quebec: Institut quebecois de recherche sur la culture, 1983); A Bibliography
of Canadian Theses and Dissertations in Urban, Regional and Environmental
188 Life Spaces

Planning, 1974-1979, compiled by Helma Libick for the Canadian Association of

Planning Students Bibliography Committee, 1980; and Canadiana (Ottawa:
National Library), for the years 1980-85.
We would appreciate being made aware of missed or new titles. Please send these,
preferably with annotations comparable to those found below, to Women and
Environments, c/o Centre for Urban and Community Studies, 455 Spadina Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2G8.

BOOKS/ARTICLES/REPORTS

AARONS, Rachel (1981). "Women and the Small Town Syndrome.'' Paper
presented at the National Rural Mental Health Conference. (Available from
Women and Environments, 455 Spadina, Toronto, M5S 2G8.) 18 pp.
Describes the reasons why women's resource centres are needed in small towns.
Using the example of the founding of the Squamish, B.C., centre, concrete
experience is tied to a philosophy of community development, a process, and
actions to meet some of the women's expressed needs.
Method: Analysis of a case
Time: Circa 1980
Space: Small towns
ANDREW, Caroline (1985). "La gestion du local: un enjeu pour les femmes?"
Revue Internationale d'action communautaire, 13(53): pp. 103-8.
Analysis of the role played by women in decision-making bodies at the local level.
Women are much more present in structures dealing with questions of collective
consumption (health, education) than in municipal structures.
Method: Case study, analysis
Time: 1980's
Space: Quebec — particularly the Outaouais region
ARMSTRONG, Pat and ARMSTRONG, Hugh (1983). "Beyond Numbers:
Problems with Quantitative Data." Alternate Routes (Carleton University) 6, pp.
1-40.
Begins from the position that data and data-gathering methods are neither neutral
nor atheoretical and proceeds to argue for sex-specific statistical data collection as
well as using qualitative data to complement it. The authors discuss the
shortcomings of some major Statistics Canada data bases and the Census for
doing research for women, showing how these sources can miss or distort
women's experiences.
Method: Analysis of documents; interviews
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada
 Bibliography 189

BARNSLEY, Jan and ELLIS, Diana (1987). Action Research for Women's Groups.
Vancouver: Women's Research Centre.
Provides a 6-part kit on action research: (1) the Women's Research Centre and our
assumptions about action research; (2) an introduction to action research; (3)
making the decision to do a research project; (4) designing an action research
project; (5) carrying out an action research project; (6) communicating the
findings of an action research project.
— Method:
Time: 1980's
Space: non-specific
BARTON, Debbie. (1983). Housing in Ottawa-Carleton: A Women's Issue. Ottawa:
Elizabeth Fry Society. 75 pp.
A study of housing programme needs of women in the Ottawa-Carleton area.
Needs relate to the general problem of affordability and to the provision of
specialized residential facilities for particular groups of women.
Method: Literature review, interviews with directors of residential facilities for
women
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Ottawa-Car leton
BLACK, David M. (1980). The Impact of CMHC Policies and Programs on
Housing for Women. Ottawa: Program Evaluation Unit, Policy Evaluation,
CMHC.
Identifies the proportion of need represented by female-led households vis-a-vis
total housing need and the extent to which the former are clients of CMHC
programmes. Housing need is defined using affordability, suitability, and
adequacy criteria. Data sets are from 1974 and 1976 HIFE, and 1977 to 1979
relating to non-profit, coop, rent supplement, public housing, rural, and native
housing programmes. Author finds that female-led families represent approxi-
mately one-third of the housing need and 57 per cent of the CMHC client group.
Pattern is similar across all five regions of Canada.
Method: Data analysis
Time: Late 1970's
Space: Canada
BOWLBY, S. R., FOORD, J., and MACKENZIE, S. (1982). "Feminism and
Geography." Area, 14(1), pp. 19-25.
Suggests that successful development of geographic theory requires examining
separation of women's and men's roles in light of current feminist theory. Some
recent theoretical writing on geography and women is examined and its links with
current feminist social analyses are explored.
Method: Literature review and analysis
Time: 1970-80
Space: Non-specific urban
190 Life Spaces

BUREAU OF MUNICIPAL RESEARCH (September 1981). Work-Related Day

Care: Helping to Close the Gap. Toronto: Bureau of Municipal Research. 50 pp.
Examines the question of work-place day care as a viable alternative to meet
demand. Recommendations are made for action by the Province of Ontario,
municipalities, the business community, employees, and labour unions.
Method: Case study, analyzing existing statistics, literature review
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Ontario
BUTLER, Diana (1975). "Women in Planning: Career Development." Plan
Canada, 15(2), pp. 62-67.
Provides data on enrolment of women in planning schools, membership of
women in the Canadian Institute of Planners; discusses attitudes that present
obstacles to hiring and promoting women planners; and suggests several measures
needed to improve the status of women.
Method: Data analysis; observation and experience
Time: 1975
Space: Canada
BUTLER, Richard W. and PHILLIPS, Susan (1980). "Women at City Hall." In
G. R. Wekerle, R. Peterson, and D. Morley (Eds.), New Space for Women (pp.
273-86). Boulder: Westview.
Reports on an investigation into the concerns women in London, Ontario, have
about the quality of life in urban environments and the role women play in the
decision-making process. The results were later incorporated with the views of
women in other cities to get a Canada-wide perspective. (See CANADA, Ministry
of State for Urban Affairs, 1975.)
Method: Literature review; partially structured interviews
Time: Mid 1970's
Space: London, Ontario
CANADA. Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (1975). Metropolitan Canada
Women's Views of Urban Problems. Ottawa: Ministry of State for Urban Affairs.
29pp.
Provides a summary of nine separate reports on women's perceptions of the
quality of the Canadian urban environment.
Method: Case study, various methods employed in each case study.
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Canadian cities (Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, London, Montreal,
Quebec City, Saint John, Halifax, and St. John's), October 1971.
CANADIAN COUNCIL ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT (October 1971). The
One-Parent Family: Report of an Inquiry on One-Parent Families in Canada.
 Bibliography 191

Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development. 166 pp.

Inquiry into the problems of men and women who are raising their families alone,
with particular reference to the social policy implications of these problems.
Method: Partially structured interviews; structured questionnaires; group
discussions.
Time: Early 1970's
Space: Halifax/Dartmouth, Hull, London (Ontario), Grey County (Ontario),
Winnipeg, Vancouver.
CICHOCKI, Mary K. (1980). "Women's Travel Patterns in a Suburban Develop-
ment." In G. R. Wekerle, R. Peterson, and D. Morley (Eds.), New Space for
Women (pp. 151-63). Boulder: Westview.
Examines the extent to which the physical form of the metropolis discriminates
against the existing lifestyles and future opportunities for women.
Method: Time-budgets; partially-structured interviews
Time: Early 1970's?
Space: Suburban Toronto
CITY OF HALIFAX (1985). "Housing Halifax: A Symposium on Housing in
Halifax, 1985. Submissions." Halifax: City of Halifax.
Compiles the briefs on housing issues presented to the City of Halifax including
those relating to women and housing from: Women's Emergency Housing
Coalition, Ad Sum House, One Parent Family Support Network, YWCA Halifax,
M.U.M.S. (Mothers United for Metro Shelter), Nova Scotia Advisory Council on
the Status of Women.
Method: —
Time: 1985
Space: Halifax
COMMUNITY PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF CANADA, NOVA SCOTIA
DIVISION (1985). "Women and Community — Dartmouth Project." Dartmouth,
Nova Scotia: CPAC/Nova Scotia. (Available from CPAC/NS, 2015 Gottingen
Street, Halifax, N.S., B3K 3B1.)
Series of publications. Presents material related to this funded project's goals,
which were to obtain the views of women on a range of community planning and
related issues; and to inform and facilitate the participation of women in the
municipal planning review process. Method and results of a systematic survey of
Dartmouth women on community issues are available together with publications
designed to facilitate women's participation in planning.
Method: Questionnaire Survey; multi-cluster sampling; Community development
Time: 1984-85
Space: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
192 Life Spaces

COMMUNITY PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF CANADA, NOVA SCOTIA

DIVISION (1985). "Women and Community Action." Halifax, Nova Scotia
CPAC/Nova Scotia. (Available from CPAC/NS, 2015 Gottingen Street, Halifax,
N.S.,B3K3B1.)
Series of publications. Continues community development around municipal
affairs, child care and housing, which were issues of immediate concern identified
in the survey project noted above. Actions and publications were funded by a
1985 CEIC Canada Works grant, with supplementary funds from the Secretary of
State Women's Programme.
Method: Community Development
Time: 1985
Space: Halifax-Dartmouth
COOK, Ramsay and MITCHINSON, Wendy (Eds.) (1976). The Proper Sphere:
Woman's Place in Canadian Society. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 335 pp.
Collection of documents which provides an historical record of the changes in the
roles of women in Canadian society.
Method: Historical research
Time: Mainly 1870-1918
Space: Canada

COOLS, Anne (1980). "Emergency Shelter: The Development of an Innovative

Women's Environment." In G. R. Wekerle, R. Peterson, and D. Morley (Eds.),
New Space for Women (pp. 311-18). Boulder: Westview.
Describes the structure and philosophy behind the operations of an emergency
shelter for women and their children.
Method: Case study
Time: Early 1970's
Space: Special purpose home — emergency shelter in Toronto

CORBETT, Ron (May 1986). "The Incidence of Single Parent Families by

Settlement Type in Atlantic Canada." Sackville, New Brunswick: Rural & Small
Town Research and Studies Programme, Dept. of Geography, Mount Allison
University. 33 pp., bibliography, tables, maps, figures.
Reports findings of first of three phases of a project examining one-parent
families and their housing needs. Phase One looks at spatial location and
concentration, Phase Two at profiles of those families, and Phase Three at
relevance of existing government housing policies and programmes. First phase
findings include showing that there is not a strong relationship between the
incidence of one-parent families and urban centres in Atlantic Canada, which
contrasts with some central Canada findings; and that many small towns and
villages have incidence rates higher than most of the larger urban centres. In
absolute numbers, over 60 per cent of single-parent families live in small towns
and villages.
 Bibliography 193

Method: Analysis of 1981 census data, using census divisions and subdivisions
Time: 1981-86
Space: Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island
CROSS, D. Suzanne (1984). "The Neglected Majority: The Changing Role of
Women in Nineteenth Century Montreal." In Gilbert A. Stelter and Alan F. J.
Artibise (Eds.), The Canadian City: Essays in Urban and Social History (pp.
304-27). Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Examines the growth in female population and employment opportunities for
women in nineteenth-century Montreal and indicates some sources for the study
of women in the field of social and urban history.
Method: Historical research
Time: 1850-1900
Space: Montreal
CSIERNIK, Rick et al. (1985). An Overview of the Impact of the Recession on
Women in Hamiton-Went\vorth. Hamilton: Social Planning and Research
Council. 133 pp.
Documents changes in the economic situation for women in Hamilton-Wentworth
1981 to 1984 using data on demographics, various aspects of work (full-time,
part-time, unionized, volunteer, house) and lack of work outside the home,
together with training and education opportunities, day care, housing, and
mental health. Four subgroups receive special attention: native women, immi-
grant women, women in conflict with the law, and senior women.
Method: Analysis of existing statistics
Time: 1981-84
Space: Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth, Ontario
DAGENAIS, Huguette (1980). "Les femmes dans la ville et dans la sociologie
urbaine: les multiples facettes d'une meme oppression." Anthropologie et
Societes, 4(1), pp. 21-35.
A study of the subordinate place of women in cities and in urban sociology. The
specific nature of women's oppression must be recognized if conditions and
analyses are to change.
Method: Literature survey, analysis
Time: Current
Space: —
DELGATTY, Margaret (1977). Report on the YWCA Single Parent Housing Survey.
Winnipeg: YWCA, 60 pp.
Investigates the housing and support service needs of families who have recently
become single-parent families.
Method: Partially-structured interviews
Time: Late 1970's
Space: Winnipeg
194 Life Spaces

DOYLE, Cassie and McCLAIN, Janet (1984). "Women, the Forgotten Housing
Consumers." In Jill McCalla Vickers (Ed.), Taking Sex into Account: The Policy
Consequences of Sexist Research (pp. 219-42). Ottawa: Carleton University
Press.
Demonstrates that the current position of women as consumers, and their specific
housing needs, were not identified in the analysis, planning, and programme
development that preceded housing policy changes in Canada in the 1970's.
Method: Literature review; analyzing existing statistics
Time: 1970's
Space: Canada
DUVALL, Donna (January-February 1985). "Emergency Housing for Women in
Canada." Ekistics, 52, pp. 56-61.
Describes the type of help and different shelters available for women in Canada.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1980's
Space: Special purpose homes — emergency shelters
EVANS, J. and COOPERSTOCK, R. (Winter 1983). "Psycho-Social Problems of
Women in Primary Resource Communities." Canadian Journal of Community
Mental Health, Special supplement no. 1, "Psycho-Social Impacts of Resource
Development in Canada: Research Strategies and Applications," pp. 55-66.
Reviews forty-three studies related to the psychosocial impacts of resource
development upon women resident in isolated single-industry communities.
Identifies the indicators that ideally would be used in such studies and discusses
the reports' findings against these indicators. Argues that sufficient community
case reports have been developed which both establish the need to quantify data
and provide the heuristic tools for this next stage of study.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1970's and early 1980's
Space: Mainly Canadian resource communities
FAROE, Brenda Doyle (Winter 1986). "Women's Leadership in Co-ops: Some
Questions." Women and Environments, 8(1), pp. 13-15.
Reports on survey conducted at the Co-operative Housing Foundation of
Canada's 1985 annual meeting. Designed to learn if existing findings on women's
involvement in co-ops in Toronto could be generalized across Canada and what
the motives are and gains derived from involvement.
Method: Structured questionnaire; literature review
Time: 1985
Space: Housing co-operatives; Canada
 Bibliography 195

FLETCHER, Susan and STONE, Leroy O. (1982). The Living Arrangements of

Canada's Older Women. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. 74 pp.
Provides a review of the living arrangements of Canada's older female population
focusing in particular on the differences in living arrangements between older men
and older women, and between different age groups of older women. The
relationship between living arrangements and ease of accessibility to services is
also discussed.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics
Time: Mainly 1970's with projections to 2021
Space: Canada

FOWLER, Pauline (Fall 1985). "Reclaiming Architecture: Women's Cultural

Building." Women and Environments, 7, pp. 14-17.
Describes an architect's proposal for a women's cultural building, highlighting the
differences between women's and men's architecture.
Method: Observations by author
Time: 1985
Space: Community Centre
GILBERT, Anne and ROSE, Damaris (Eds.) (1987). "Espaces et femmes." Cahiers
de geographic du Quebec, 57(83). Special issue.
Whole issue looks at women and built environments. Articles in both French and
English.
Method: —
Time: 1980's
Space: International, with an emphasis on Quebec
GILL, A. M. (1984). "Women in Northern Resource Towns." In Social Science in
the North, Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies, Occa-
sional Publications No. 9. pp. 61-73.
Examines role of women in northern communities, including as "stabilizers" of
the male work force, and their responses to these environments. Findings from
research in Thompson and Leaf Rapids, Manitoba, show among other things
that women have more negative images of northern communities than men.
Method: Literature review; structures questionnaire survey using rating scales
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Thompson and Leaf Rapids, Manitoba

GOLIGER, Gabriella (1983). "Constance Hamilton Co-op: Housing by Women for

Women." Habitat, 26, pp. 22-26.
196 Life Spaces

Describes the first housing co-operative in Canada created by and for women,
located in Toronto.
Method: Case study
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Co-operative housing
GOOD, D. B. (Lin) (1975). "Women in Planning: A Citizen's View." Plan
Canada, 75(2), pp. 68-71.
Compares role of women in planning in 1925 and 1975 and suggests that progress
has been less than breathtaking. Describes attitudes towards women in the field
and the usual spheres in which women contribute.
Method: Personal observation
Time: 1925-75
Space: Canada
GRIFFITHS, Nan (Editor and Workshop Coordinator of the NCC Women's Task
Force) (1975). Women in the Urban Environment: Proceedings of a National
Workshop. Ottawa: National Capital Commission. 41 pp.
Proceedings of a national workshop on the concerns of women in shaping the
urban environment. The proceedings cover the identification of the specific needs
of women, planning recommendations and proposals to meet these needs and,
finally, strategies for ways of improving women's input into the planning process.
Method: Position papers and reports prepared by participants; discussion
among the participants
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Canada
GURSTEIN, Penny and HOOD, Nancy (1975). Housing Needs of One-Parent
Families. Vancouver: YWCA, 65 pp., Appendices A to I, 31 pp., and videotape
(available at CMHC Canadian Housing Information Centre, Head Office,
Ottawa).
Aims to determine user needs for these families with a view to improving the
adequacy of housing itself and housing-related programmes and services.
Method: Questionnaire survey, personal and telephone interviews, group
discussions, information exchange sessions, video
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Vancouver
HALE, Sylvia M. (Fall 1985). "Integrating Women in Development Models and
Theories." Atlantis, 11(1), pp. 45-63.
Addresses the critique posed by feminist theory that women's issues have been left
out of macro analyses of national development. Attempts to integrate women's
issues into contemporary development models while considering mechanisms to
 Bibliography 197

promote change. Five models are considered: (a) the social welfare approach; (b)
the grass roots networking and participatory democracy approach; (c) the culture
of poverty thesis; (d) entrepreneurship; and (e) neo-imperialism. Draws on data
gathered during field work in villages in North India.
Method: Field research; argumentation
Time: 1980's
Space: Developing areas
HARRISON, Brian R. (1981). Living Alone in Canada: Demographic and
Economic Perspectives 1951-1976. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. 60 pp.
Analyzes the increase, from 1951 to 1976, in one-person households and
determines some of the fundamental causes for the increase.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics
Time: 1951-76
Space: Canada
HARVEY, Andrew S. and CLARK, Susan (1975). Descriptive Analysis of Halifax
Time-Budget Data. Halifax: Dalhousie University, Institute of Public Affairs,
Regional and Urban Studies Centre. 37 pp.
Determines the factors affecting participation in, and duration of, activities, for
married men and women.
Method: Analysis of time-budget data
Time: 1971-72
Space: Halifax
HOBBS, Margaret and PIERSON, Ruth Roach (Winter 1986). " 'When Is a Kitchen
Not a Kitchen?' " Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de lafemme, 7(4), pp.
71-76.
Examines the Canadian Home Improvement Plan introduced by the federal
government in 1937 as a remedial programme to ease unemployment by
encouraging especially working-class homeowners to do improvements. Authors
look at importance of this programme in defining and reinforcing appropriate
sex-typed roles in society.
Method: Historical research
Time: 1936-40
Space: Houses; Canada
JACOBSON, Helga E. (1977). How to Study Your Own Community: Research from
the Perspective of Women. Vancouver: Women's Research Centre.
JACOBSON, Helga E. (1978). Women's Perspectives in Research. Vancouver:
Women's Research Centre.
JOHNSON, Laura Climenko (1977). Who Cares?: A Report of the Project Child
Care Survey of Parents and Their Child Care Arrangements. Toronto: Social
198 Life Spaces

Planning Council of Metro Toronto, 287 pp. and appendices.

Aims to provide the empirical data needed to recommend policies on day care
provision, including whether it should be provided through the private or public
sector or in combination. Surveys the child care arrangements that parents of
children up to six years of age used over a one-year period.
Method: Questionnaire survey
Time: 1976
Space: Metro Toronto
JORDAN, Elizabeth (November 1981). The Housing Needs of Female Led One
Parent Families. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. 42 pp.
Looks at the housing needs of female-led one-parent families, highlighting the
problems and making recommendations for further study. The Canadian
situation is compared with that in the United States, Great Britain, and
Scandinavia.
Method: Literature review
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Canada, and other countries.
KJELLBERG, Judith (Ed.) (1983). Women and Planning: Proceedings of a
Conference, Toronto, May 1982. Edited by Judith Kjellberg. Toronto: Women
in/and Planning. 73 pp.
Proceedings of a conference on the professional issues for women in planning,
architecture, and related professions and academic disciplines, and on the
environmental issues for women generally.
Method: —
Time: 1982
Space: Canada
KLODAWSKY, Fran and ROSE, Damaris (1985). Employment Opportunities for
Women in Architecture and Urban Planning: Problems and Prospects. Ottawa:
Labour Canada, Women's Bureau. 65 pp. (English), 67 pp. (French).
Describes the employment opportunities for women in the fields of architecture
and urban planning and assesses the prospects for the future for women and for
the fields.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics; partially structured interviews
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada
KLODAWSKY, Fran, SPECTOR, Aron N., and HENDRIX, Catrina (January
1984). Housing and Single Parents: An Overview of the Literature. Bibliographic
Studies No. 15. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University
of Toronto. 48 pp.
 Bibliography 199

Reviews the Canadian literature on housing and single parents and compares this
research with recent American and British work. An annotated bibliography
makes up half of the document.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada, United States, Britain
KLODAWSKY, Fran, SPECTOR, Aron N., and ROSE, Damaris (1985). Single
Parent Families and Canadian Housing Policies: How Mothers Lose. Ottawa:
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, External Research Program. 348
pp.
Deduces the housing and demographic characteristics of single parents, and
examines some existing Canadian housing programmes in terms of the needs of
single parent families and in comparison with programmes in other countries.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics; policy analysis; literature review
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada, United States, Europe
LEACH, Belinda, LESIUK, Ellen, and MORTON, Penny E. (Spring 1986).
"Perceptions of Fear in the Urban Environment." Women and Environments,
8(2), pp. 10-12.
Describes a representative survey of women students at Carleton University who
were asked to identify locations on the campus that they perceived as fearful and
to explain why. Links this study to others regarding women's perceptions of
danger in urban environments and proposes recommendations.
Method: Structured questionnaire survey
Time: Circa 1985
Space: University campus
LETTRE, Solange (1985-86). "Des cooperatrices du secteur cooperatif d'habitation
et leur participation au mouvement des femmes." Cooperatives et developpement,
77(1), pp. 159-73.
Studies the links between cooperative housing and the women's movement by
studying a group of residents of cooperative housing. Concludes that the
influence of feminism can be seen not only in the social involvement of the
women but also in their day-to-day life and that cooperative housing can represent
a feminist model of development.
Method: Interviews
Time: 1980's
Space: Sherbrooke, Quebec
LI, Selina (1978). Options for Single Mothers. Project Child Care. Working Paper
No. 4. Toronto: Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto. 44 pp.
200 Life Spaces

Conducts secondary analysis of data gathered by Project Child Care in order to

understand why some single mothers work outside the home while others do not;
what the sociodemographic differences are between employed and welfare-
recipient single mothers; and some of the problems encountered by employed
single mothers.
Method: Sub-sample of eighty-seven employed mothers with children under
seven years drawn from larger project Child Care sample; data is from
structured in-depth interviews; not statistically generalizable
Time: Late 1970's
Space: Metropolitan Toronto
LIGHTMAN, Ernie S. and JOHNSON, Laura C. (1977). Child Care Patterns in
Metropolitan Toronto. Toronto: Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto,
Project Child Care Working Paper No. 2. 48 pp.
Locates and identifies various types of informal child care arrangements and
their frequency and patterns of use. Draws on a statistically representative
sample.
Method: Questionnaire survey — stratified cluster sampling. (Detailed descrip-
tion of sample design available in Project Child Care. Sample Design
Report, March 1976 from SPC — Metro Toronto.)
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Metro Toronto
LUXTON, Meg (1980). More than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of
Women's Work in the Home. Toronto: Women's Press. 260 pp.
Describes the work that women do in the home, shows how their work has
changed over three generations, and isolates the various forces that shape and
change domestic labour.
Method: Interviews, participant observation
Time: 1920-70
Space: Flin Flon, Manitoba
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1981). Women and the Reproduction of Labour Power in
the Industrial City. Working paper 23. Brighton: Urban and Regional Studies,
University of Sussex. (Available for £3.00 from Urban and Regional Studies, Arts
Building, University of Sussex, Palmer, Brighton, England, BN1 9QN.)
Tries to understand the relationship between women's social position and the
processes of urban landscape transformation, examining the change in womens'
position which arose with industrialization and the way in which women's
response to this change influenced and was articulated in the transformation of
Toronto's landscape between 1880-1910.
Method: Historical analysis
Time: 1880-1910
Space: Toronto
 Bibliography 201

MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1984). "Editorial Introduction." Antipode, 16, pp. 3-10.

Provides an historical and conceptual context for the papers presented in this
special issue of the journal on the theme women and the environment. The focus
of the special issue is on socialist-feminist perspectives.
Method: Literature review; argumentation
Time: Historical; and 1980's
Space: Non-specific
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (Fall 1984). "Catching Up With Ourselves: Ideas on
Developing Gender-Sensitive Theory in the Environmental Disciplines." Women
and Environments, 6, pp. 16-18.
Argues that we must assimilate social changes involving the changing roles of
women into the theory and methodology of the environmental disciplines rather
than merely empirically acknowledging women as a population subgroup.
Method: Argumentation
Time: Mid-1980's
Space: —
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1985). '"No One Seems to Go to Work Anymore': Women
Redesignating and Redesigning the City." Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers
de lafemme, 6(2), pp. 5-8.
Speculates on neighbourhood spaces and homes that women might create which
are sufficiently flexible to accommodate both domestic and salaried activities.
Method: Imaginative essay
Time: Future
Space: Non-specific urban
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1986). "Feminist Geography." The Canadian Geographer/Le
geographe canadien, 30(3), pp. 268-70.
Describes the transition from the special interest field of the "geography of
women" to a feminist geography, with an independent theoretical and method-
ological basis. The latter, she argues, involved breaking down the categories
"women" and "environment" so as to be able to ask these types of questions:
how do changes in modes of appropriating the environment alter the activities
defined as appropriate to "women" and "men" and therefore alter gender
categories? How do changes in gender affect modes of environmental appropriation?
Method: Argumentation
Time: 1980's
Space: —
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1987). "Women's Responses to Economic Restructuring:
Changing Gender, Changing Space." In Roberta Hamilton and Michele Barrett
(Eds.), The Politics of Diversity (pp. 81-100). Montreal: Book Centre.
202 Life Spaces

Argues that changes in the use of environments and changes in gender relations
are inextricably connected and cannot be fully understood in isolation from each
other. Examines relation between gender and environment in Canadian cities over
time, focusing especially on current period of economic restructuring and
evidence of changes in women's use of home and community space. Uses data
from interviews with homeworkers in Trail-Nelson and Kingston.
Method: Argumentation; questionnaire survey
Time: 1980's
Space: Communities in Trail-Nelson, B.C., area and Kingston, Ontario;
Canada generally
MACKENZIE, Suzanne and ROSE, Damaris (1982). "On the Necessity for
Feminist Scholarship in Human Geography.0 Professional Geographer, 34(2),
pp. 220-23.
Explains that geographers concerned with built environments must bring an
understanding of changing gender roles to bear on traditional views of separated
spheres of waged work and domestic work in order to inquire into the ways women
are meeting the conflicts of dual roles.
Method: Literature review and analysis
Time: 1980's
Space: Non-Specific
MACKENZIE, Suzanne and ROSE, Damaris (1983). "Industrial Change, the
Domestic Economy and Home Life." In J. Anderson, S. Duncan, and
R. Hudson (Eds.), Redundan t Spaces in Cities and Regions?: Studies in Industrial
Decline and Social Change (p. 155-200). London: Academic Press.
Attempts a synthesis of the analytical separation between the spheres of
production and reproduction by outlining the historical relationships between the
major activities that go on in the work place and in the home. The historical
information is European in origin.
Method: Historical research
Time: Historical; and 1980's
Space: Britain
MASSON, Dominique (December 1984). "Les femmes dans les structures urbaines:
apercu d'un nouveau champ de recherche." In Canadian Journal of Political
Science, 77, pp. 755-82.
Reviews the literature on women and the city in the field of urban politics,
showing the trends toward theory-building in the area of gender politics, and of
continuing investigations of this question in the context of more traditional
approaches to urban politics.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada, United States, Europe
 Bibliography 203

MCCLAIN, Janet and DOYLE, Cassie (1984). Women and Housing: Changing
Needs and the Failure of Policy. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company and
Canadian Council on Social Development. 82 pp.
Analyzes the housing needs of Canadian women and reviews previous housing
policies, confirming that women as housing consumers were not considered in
pre-1980's policy and programme development.
Method: Literature review; analyzing existing statistics
Time: 1970's
Space: Canada
MCINNIS, Pat (Winter 1986). "Cabin Fever: Northern Women and Mental
Health." Women and Environments, 5(1), pp. 4-6.
Reports on research on women's health needs in fifteen northern Ontario
communities which identified common mental health problems across the
communities. These findings emerged while conducting workshops not specifi-
cally designed to focus on mental health.
Method: Workshops
Time: 1983-85
Space: Northern Ontario communities
MEDJUCK, Sheva (Fall 1985). "Women's Response to Economic and Social
Change in the Nineteenth Century: Moncton Parish 1851 to 1871." Atlantis,
77(1), pp. 7-21.
Attempts to document the everyday lives of the ordinary women of Moncton
Parish and to show from the records how women dealt with the economic and
social conditions of their times. Includes analysis of marriage and fertility rates,
participation in paid work (which shifts from decade to decade), and women
heads of households. Argues for an approach to historical analysis that attempts
to understand how women affect historical conditions.
Method: Analysis of census records 1851, 1861, 1871
Time: 1851-71
Space: Moncton, New Brunswick
MELLETT, Cathy J. (1982). At the End of the Rope: A Study of Women's
Emergency Housing Needs in the Halifax/Dartmouth Area. Ottawa: Canada
Mortgage and Housing Corporation. 53 pp.
Provides information on the numbers of women contacting area agencies with
serious housing needs and determines the need for emergency shelters.
Method: Structured questionnaire (mail); partially structured interviews;
needs assessment
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Halifax/Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
204 Life Spaces

MENZIES, S. June (April 1976). New Directions for Public Policy: A Position
Paper on the One-Parent Family. Ottawa: Advisory Council on the Status of
Women. 29 pp.
Suggests new directions in public policy which assist the one-parent family to
become an economically viable family unit.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Canada
MICHELSON, William (1973). The Price of Time in the Longitudinal Evaluation of
Spatial Structures by Women. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community
Studies, University of Toronto, Research Paper No. 61. 39 pp.
Explores the extent that behavioural expectations in housing choice are confirmed
by subsequent experience and whether the time-budget is sufficiently versatile to
measure this. Included in the findings is that women know they are making a
major compromise in moving to suburban homes and they are least satisfied in
the way they spend their time of all movers studied.
Method: Time-budgets
Time: Early 1970's
Space: Toronto inner city and suburbs

MICHELSON, William (October 1983). The Logistics of Maternal Employment:

Implications for Women and Their Families. Toronto: University of Toronto,
Centre for Urban and Community Studies. Child in the City Report No. 18.
155+ pp.
Assesses from individual level data on families' daily conditions and experiences
what logistical differences, reflecting extra-familial factors, are found in the
everyday lives of employed and single mothers. Also assesses the implications of
these additional responsibilities for children, and for policies and practices
relating to employment, women, and families.
Method: Stratified representation sample; structured questionnaire survey;
time-budgets
Time: 1980
Space: Metro Toronto

MICHELSON, William (1985). From Sun to Sun: Daily Obligations and Commu-
nity Structure in the Lives of Employed Women and Their Families. Totowa, New
Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld. 208 pp.
Presents the problems and outcomes which can arise for families when mothers
are employed outside the home and assesses the implications for policies and
practices relating to employment, women, and families.
 Bibliography 205

Method: Time-budgets; field research; structured questionnaire (personal

interview)
Time: 1980
Space: Toronto

MICHELSON, William, LEVINE, Saul, and MICHELSON, Ellen (1979). The

Child in the City: Today and Tomorrow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
272 pp.
Elaborated and expanded proceedings of a lecture series based around the Child
in the City Project and exploring various aspects of urban life in industrialized
countries for children.
Method: —
Time: 1970's
Space: Cities; non-specific

MICHELSON, William, LEVINE, Saul V, SPINA, Anna-Rose et al. (1979). The

Child in the City: Changes and Challenges. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
520 pp.
Provides eight research papers on aspects of children's lives in urban environ-
ments including community services, shared child-rearing and urban physical
form and content.
Method: —
Time: 1970's
Space: Cities; non-specific

MICHELSON, William and MICHELSON, Ellen (Eds.) (1980). Managing Urban

Space in the Interest of Children. Toronto: Child in the City Programme,
University of Toronto. Canada/MAB Committee. 255 pp. (English), 262 pp.
(French).
Method: —
Time: 1970's
Space: Cities; non-specific

MILROY, Beth Moore (1984). Women and Housing: Policy Statement. Prepared for
the Social Planning Council of Ottawa-Carleton. Ottawa: Social Planning Council
of Ottawa-Carleton. 11 pp. (Available from The Council, 256 King Edward,
Ottawa, KIN 7M1.)
Draws on empirical evidence to provide the rationale for insisting on gender
specificity in matters relating to housing. Argument is based on the principle that
women's and men's housing experience differs with respect to (a) acquiring and
paying for it, (b) living in it on a daily basis, (c) moving between it and jobs and
services, and (d) gaining access to emergency housing.
206 Life Spaces

Method: Policy development

Time: 1980's
Space: Ottawa-Carleton area
MOMSEN, Janet Henshall (August 1980). "Women in Canadian Geography."
Professional Geographer, 32, pp. 365-69.
Compares the status of women in geography departments, as students and faculty,
in Canada and the United States.
Method: Questionnaire survey
Time: 1978-79
Space: Canada, United States
MOMSEN, Janet Henshall (Summer 1980). "Women in Canadian Geography."
Canadian Geographer, 24, pp. 177-83.
Discusses the status of women in geography departments of Canadian universities.
Method: Questionnaire survey
Time: 1978-79
Space: Canada
MORRISON, Carolyn (Winter 1982). "Options for Women in Geography: Some
Experiences Shared." Canadian Geographer, 26, pp. 360-66.
Studies the non-academic career fields chosen by female M.A. students of
geography, gauging their attitudes about geography as a discipline and as
preparation for a career.
Method: Unstructured interviews
Time: Circa 1981
Space: Canada
Nadeau, D. (March 1982). "Women and Self-Help in Resource-Based Communi-
ties." Resources for Feminist Research, 11(1), pp. 65-67.
Assesses the programming and organizational structure of a northern B.C.
initiative, the Women's Self-Help Network, which functions in rural and
resource-based communities.
Method: Observation
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Northern B.C. communities
NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WELFARE (April 1976). One in a World of Two's: A
Report by the National Council of Welfare on One-Parent Families in Canada.
Ottawa: National Council of Welfare. 41 pp.
Exposes the hardships faced by one-parent families.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Canada
 Bibliography 207

NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA WOMEN'S TASK FORCE (1977). Report on

Single Industry Resource Communities. Vancouver: Women's Research Centre.
100 pp. (Available for $3.00 from Women's Research Centre, Ste. 301, 2515
Burrard Street, Vancouver, V6J 3J6.)
Uses case studies to describe everyday problems of women in resource towns
designed primarily for male workers. Kitimat, Fraser Lake, and MacKenzie are
covered. Argues that women should be involved in planning and design because,
as currently built, these towns reinforce marginal roles for women.
Method: Case studies
Time: Mid-1970's
Space: Northern Canadian communities

NOVAC, Sylvia (October 1986). Women and Housing: An Annotated Bibliography.

CPL Bibliography 178. 26 pp. Chicago: Council of Planning Librarians.
(Available for $9.00 from 1313 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinios, 60637.)
Covers five years prior to publication of literature on housing for women from a
feminist perspective. Restricted to Western nations and does not cover specific
issues such as housing for the elderly, emergency, or transitional housing.
Method: —
Time: 1980-85
Space: Houses

NOZICK, Marcia (Winter 1986-87) "Women Embrace Their Own Economic

Development." City Magazine, 9(1), pp. 7-9.
Describes two community economic development initiatives for and by women.
One is "Community Economic Options," a project of the Women's Skills
Development Society of British Columbia, which is engaged in consciousness-
raising workshops and helping to identify skills and start projects. The other is
"Women's Economic Development Corporation" of St. Paul, Minnesota—a
non-profit organization which helped launch 546 businesses owned and run by
women. Draws out the contrasting features of the two approaches.
Method: Mini case studies
Time: 1980's
Space: Communities in British Columbia and Minnesota

PEDERSEN, Diana (Winter 1986). " 'Keeping Our Good Girls Good': The YWCA
and the 'Girl Problem,' 1870-1930." Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la
femme, 7(4), pp. 20-24.
Examines the YWCA movement, in which thirty-nine branches were established in
Canadian communities between 1870 and 1930, as early attempts to create public
space for women. Focuses on efforts to protect young women from the
insalubrious city as they acquired some independence. Argues that the approach
to gaining public support for YWCAs helped to reinforce views that women were
temporary workers; that women's sexuality, not men's, needed supervision; and
208 Life Spaces

reproduced both the oppressive and positive features of the mother-daughter

relationship among women of different classes.
Method: Historical research
Time: 1870-1930
Space: YWCA buildings; Canada
PEDERSEN, Diana (February 1987). " 'Building Today for the Womanhood of
Tomorrow': Businessmen, Boosters, and the YWCA, 1890-1930." Urban History
Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine, 15(3), pp. 225-42.
Argues that women reformers had their own distinct perception of the city and
definition of urban reform but, lacking capital and political power, had to depend
on support of male reformers. Study examines relationship between the YWCA
and Canadian businessmen as manifested in fund-raising campaigns.
Method: Historical research
Time: 1890-1930
Space: YWCA buildings; Canada
PETERSON, Rebecca (1986). "Women as a Special User Group in a Changing
North American Cultural Context." Environments, 18(3), pp. 64-73.
Reviews changing family form and work roles of North American women since
1950's and links this to a critique of built environments from the perspective of
women as a special user group.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1950-86
Space: North America
PETERSON, Rebecca, WEKERLE, Gerda R., and MORLEY, David (December
1978). "Women and Environments: An Overview of an Emerging Field."
Environment and Behaviour, 10, pp. 511-34.
Discusses how changes in women's sense of themselves, in their relations with
men, and in their social roles are expressed in the relationship between women
and their environments. A broad organizing framework is developed for study in
this area.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1970's
Space: Canada, United States
PICHE, Denise (Summer 1979). "L*appropriation de Tespace par les femmes."
Atlantis, 4(2), part 2, pp. 189-99.
The author discusses the question of women's appropriation of their environment
and arrives at the conclusion — after discussing the little and probably
diminishing control women have over their environment and the reasons for
wanting to appropriate space — that it is urgent for women to work towards a
feminization of the planning process in order to work for a better environment.
 Bibliography 209

Method: Analysis, literature review

Time: 1970's
Space: non-specific
PINARD, Yolande (1983). "Les debats du mouvement des femmes a Montreal,
1893-1902." In Marie Lavigne and Yolande Pinard (Eds.), Travailleuses et
feministes: les femmes dans la societe quebecoise (pp. 177-98). Montreal: Boreal
Express.
A study of the first women's movement in Montreal, focusing particularly on the
Montreal Local Council of Women (MLCW). The study looks at the work of the
MLCW in the context of the urbanization of Montreal in the early twentieth
century and the social problems arising from the rapid urbanization.
Method: Literature survey, archival material
Time: 1893-1902
Space: Montreal

ST. MARTIN, I. (1981). "Women in Schefferville: Research Notes." In J. Bradbury

and J. Wolfe (Eds.), Perspectives on Social and Economic Change in the
Iron-Ore Mining Region of Quebec-Labrador, McGill Subarctic Research Paper
No. 35. Montreal: Centre for Northern Studies and Research, McGill University.
Discusses some aspects of the experience of women in Schefferville as wage
earners, mothers, and homemakers at the point when the mining company was
winding down its operation.
Method: Questionnaire survey; analysis of existing data
Time: Late 1970's
Space: Schefferville, Quebec
SIMON, Joan C. (Winter 1986). "Integrating Housing and Economic Develop-
ment." Women and Environments, 8(1), pp. 10-12.
Identifies the opportunities for women afforded by housing cooperatives. From a
secure home base, women are learning management and housing sector skills that
can be used in seeking paid work beyond the cooperative.
Method: Field research
Time: 1980's
Space: Canada, United States

SOCIAL PLANNING COUNCIL OF METROPOLITAN TORONTO (April 1984).

"Lone Parent Families in Metropolitan Toronto." In Social Infopac, 3. 1 pp.
Examines the characteristics of one-parent families and discusses the implications
for policies, benefits, and programs in meeting the families' needs.
Method: Analyzing existing statistics
Time: 1980's
Space: Toronto
210 Life Spaces

SOPER, Mary (1980). "Housing for Single-Parent Families: A Women's Design."

In G. R. Wekerle, R. Peterson, and D. Morley (Eds.), New Space for Women
(pp. 319-32). Boulder: Westview.
Describes an experiment to involve women in the planning of a federal
demonstration housing project for women who are sole-support mothers.
Method: Case study
Time: 1975
Space: Special purpose homes; single-parent families
STAMP, Judy (1980). "Toward Supportive Neighborhoods: Women's Role in
Changing the Segregated City." In G. R. Wekerle, R. Peterson, and D. Morley
(Eds.), New Space for Women (pp. 189-98). Boulder: Westview.
Explores how women are changing neighbourhoods to meet the needs of their
changing lifestyles.
Method: Informal observation by author
Time: 1970's
Space: Suburbs; inner-city residential areas
TARDY, Evelyne (1982). La politique: un monde d'hommes! Une etude sur les
mairesses an Quebec. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH. I l l pp.
A survey of women mayors in Quebec, using a control group of men mayors, in
order to compare socioeconomic factors, prior social and political experience and
attitudes. Emphasis is put on the obstacles to women's political participation.
Method: Interviews
Time: 1970's and early 1980's
Space: Quebec
TRUELOVE, Marie (Fall 1984). "Constraints for Subsidized Daycare Users."
Women and Environments, 6, pp. 12-13.
Examines the distance to, and choice in, subsidized day care for approximately
5,000 children and suggests the appropriate roles for municipal governments.
Method: Case study
Time: 1980's
Space: Metro Toronto
WEKERLE, Gerda R. (1981). "Women in the Urban Environment." In Catherine
R. Stimpson et al. (Eds.), Women and the American City (pp. 185-211).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Provides a review of the literature in the women and urban environment field,
grouping these works into three major categories: those exploring the private-
public dichotomy; those examining the fit between the urban environment and
women's changing roles; and those focusing on environmental equity in the sense
of women's right to equal access to public goods and services.
 Bibliography 211

Method: Literature review

Time: Mainly 1970's
Space: Canada, United States, Europe
WEKERLE, Gerda R. (1984). "A Woman's Place Is in the City." Antipode, 7(5(3),
pp. 11-19.
Discusses some of the recent research on women's urban experience, highlighting
work in the areas of transportation, housing, supportive neighbourhoods, and
women's activism around urban issues.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1970's and early 1980's
Space: United States, Canada
WEKERLE, Gerda R. (April 1985). "From Refuge to Service Center: Neighbor-
hoods that Support Women." Sociological Focus, 18(2), pp. 79-95.
Focuses on recent research into women's needs in the urban environment which
criticizes the images of the neighbourhood as refuge or as non-place network, and
suggests that the appropriate focus for research and urban policy is the image of
the neighbourhood as service centre.
Method: Literature review
Time: Contemporary
Space: Urban neighbourhoods; Canada, United States, Europe
WEKERLE, Gerda R. and CARTER, Novia (1978). "Urban Sprawl: The Price
Women Pay." In Branching Out, 3, pp. 12-14.
Discusses research showing how women are inconvenienced living in suburbs.
Method: Literature review
Time: 1970's
Space: Canada
WEKERLE, Gerda R. and MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1985). "Reshaping the
Neighbourhood of the Future as We Age in Place." Canadian Woman
Studies/Les cahiers de lafemme, 6(2), pp. 69-72.
From a review of demographics of age, incomes, and current dwellings, considers
future housing and neighbourhood needs of older women.
Method: Literature review; interpretation
Time: 1985 and beyond
Space: Canada
WEKERLE, Gerda R., PETERSON, Rebecca, and MORLEY, David (Eds.) (1980).
New Space for Women. Boulder: West view. 332 pp.
Brings together papers which address specific problems encountered in homes
and office buildings, in urban and suburban areas, and in neighbourhoods, and
272 Life Spaces

which assess the institutional barriers to change that have prevented women's
needs from being adequately addressed in the environmental decision-making
process.
Method: —
Time: 1970's
Space: Canada, United States
WELLMAN, Barry (1984). Domestic Work, Paid Work and Network. Research
Paper No. 149. Toronto: Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of
Toronto. 63 pp.
Analyses the community networks of a large sample of individuals in a Toronto
borough according to their involvement in paid and domestic labour. Compares
mainly producers ("working men"), reproducers ("housewives"), and double
loaders ("working women") with further comparisons to singles and retired
people.
Method: Questionnaire survey; small set of in-depth interviews
Time: Early 1980's
Space: Toronto
WOMEN'S RESEARCH CENTRE (1979). Beyond the Pipeline: A Study of the
Lives of Women and Families in Fort Nelson, B.C. and Whitehorse, Y.T.
Vancouver. Women's Research Centre. 251 pp. a 5 appendices a 17 pp.
bibliography. (Available for $5.00 from Women's Research Centre, Ste. 301,
2515 Burrard Street, Vancouver V6J 3J6.)
Outlines how women view their lives and how they expect them to change because
of resource development, specifically the Alaska Highway gas pipeline. Gives
descriptions of the two communities, the community's planning and housing,
and women's work from the perspective of the women who live in Fort Nelson and
Whitehorse.
Method: Modified participant observation; in-depth interviews
Time: 1979
Space: Fort Nelson, British Columbia; Whitehorse, Yukon
WOMEN'S RESEARCH CENTRE (1980). A Review of Munroe House. Vancouver:
Women's Research Centre. 35 pp. a 5 appendices and bibliography. (Available
for $3.00 from Women's Research Centre, Ste. 301, 2515 Burrard Street,
Vancouver V6J 3J6.)
Documents the development and operation of a second stage house for battered
women, including its policies; gives a description of Munroe House from
perspective of residents; and assesses its benefits and limitations. Appendices
provide instruments for data collection, eight case histories, policy statements,
and composite profile of residents.
 Bibliography 213

Method: Modified participant observation; open-ended interviews

Time: 1980
Space: Housing for battered women
WOOD, Diane (April 1976). "Women in the Urban Environment." Community
Planning Review, 26, pp. 3-6.
Provides a summary of the National Capital Commission's 1975 conference on
women in the urban environment.
Method: —
Time: 1975
Space: Canada

THESES/DISSERTATIONS

ATKINS, J. Louise (1979). "The Status of Female Planning Practitioners in

Canada." Master's Thesis, University of Waterloo.
AULD, Catherine Margaret (1980). "The Self-Help Potential of Single Parent
Housing Tenants." Master's Thesis, Community Planning Department, Univer-
sity of Manitoba.
BEATTY-GUENTER, Patricia P. (1980). "Women's Roles and the Urban-Rural
Continuum." Master's Thesis, University of Victoria.
BENNET, Judith Mackenzie (1981). "Gender, Family and Community: A
Comparative Study of the English Peasantry, 1287-1349." Ph.D. Diss., University of
Toronto.
BERNIER, Jean-Marie (1976). "Etude descriptive des usagers de quatre garderies a
but non lucratif." These de maitrise, Service Social, Universite de Montreal.
BOURGEOIS, Manon (1977). "Aspects sociaux de 1'evaluation d'un centre
d'hebergement pour femmes." These de maitrise, Sociologie, Universite de
Montreal.
DESCARRIES-BELANGER, Francine (1978). "La production de la division sociale
des sexes." These de maitrise, Sociologie, Universite de Montreal.
ELIAS, Brenda Mary (1978). "Residential Environment and Social Adjustment
among Older Widows." Master's Thesis, University of Guelph.
GILL, Alison M. (1982). "Residents' Images of Northern Canadian Resource
Communities." Ph.D. Diss., University of Manitoba.
HARRISON, Brian Reginald (1979). "Living Alone in Canada: A Sociodemographic
Analysis." Master's Thesis, Carleton University.
HOOD, Nancy Elizabeth (1976). "One-Parent Families: Their Housing Needs."
Master's Thesis, University of British Columbia.
JOO, Andrew (1977). "Characteristics of Families Using Child Day Care Centres."
Master's Thesis, University of Calgary.
LANGIN, Susan Esther (1981). "Resource Development and New Towns: A
Women's Perspective." Master's Thesis, University of British Columbia.
LEWIS, Elaine (1978). "Conjugal Roles in Urban Environments: A Selected
214 Life Spaces

Comparison." Master's Thesis, McGill University.

LUXTON, Margaret Joan (1978). "Why Women's Work Is Never Done: A Case
Study from Flin Flon, Manitoba, of Domestic Labour in Industrial Capitalist
Society." Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto.
MACKENZIE, Suzanne (1983). "Gender and Environment: The Reproduction of
Labour in Postwar Brighton." D.Phil. Thesis, University of Sussex, Brighton,
England.
MARRA, Glenna Lee (1977). "When Mothers Work: Their Needs for Child Care
Services." Master's Thesis, Department of Education, Dalhousie University.
MARTINEAU, Diane (1980). "La personne agee et 1'environnement construit."
These de maitrise, Psychologic, Universite de Montreal.
McINTYRE, Eileen Lifsha (1979). "The Provision of Day Care in Ontario:
Responsiveness of Provincial Policy to Children at Risk Because Their Mothers
Work." Ph.D. Diss., Department of Social Work, University of Toronto.
MEADOWS, Mary Lea (1981). "Adaptation to Urban Life by Native Canadian
Women." Master's Thesis, University of Calgary.
MITCHINSON, Wendy Lynn (1977). "Aspects of Reform: Four Women's Organiza-
tions in 19th Century Canada." Ph.D. Diss., York University.
MOSOFF, Fern (1978). "A Feminist Appraisal of the Organization of Residential
Environments." Master's Thesis, Department of Urban and Regional Planning,
University of Toronto.
RADIO, Vera Nadya (1974). "Community Development, Social Movements and
Feminism." Master's Thesis, University of Alberta.
RIDINGTON, Jillian Botham (1978). "Women in Transition: A Study of a
Vancouver Transition House as Agent of Change." Master's Thesis, University
of British Columbia.
SANGADASA, A. (1981). "Married Female Labour Force Participation and
Fertility in Canada." Ph.D. Diss., University of Alberta.
SHAPIRO, Lorraine, (1978). "The Housing Needs of Working Women." Master's
Thesis, University of Waterloo.
SHAW, Susan M. (1983). "The Sexual Division of Leisure: Meanings, Perceptions
and the Distribution of Time." Ph.D. Diss., Carleton University.
SIDDIQUE, C. Muhammad (1980). "Work and Family in a Contemporary
Urban-Industrial Society: An Analysis of Canadian Data." Ph.D. Diss.,
University of Toronto.
VAN VLIET, Willem (1980). "Use, Evaluation, and Knowledge of City and
Suburban Environments by Children of Employed and Non-Employed Moth-
ers." Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto.
WARNER, Nancy (1976). "Planning Implications of Women's Increased Participa-
tion in the Work Force." Master's Thesis, Department of Urban and Regional
Planning, University of Toronto.
WENSEL, Joan Marlene (1977). "The Alberta Women's Bureau: A Community
Development." Master's Thesis, University of Alberta.
YOUNG, James (1978). "An Exploratory Study of the Relative Convenience of City
and Suburban Public Housing Projects for Sole Support Mothers." Master's
Thesis, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Toronto.