History of women in Canada

The History of Canadian women comprises half the population, but until recent years only a tiny fraction of the historiography.

Quebec

The history of women in Québec was generally neglected before 1980. The advent of the feminist movement, combined with the "New social history" that featured the study of ordinary people, created a new demand for a historiography of women. The first studies, emerged from a feminist perspective, and stressed their role as the terms who had been reduced to inferiority in a world controlled by men. Feminists sought the family itself as the centerpiece of the patriarchal system where fathers and husbands oppressed and alienated women. The second stage came when historians presented a more positive and balanced view. Research has often been interdisciplinary, using insights from feminist theory, literature, anthropology and sociology to study gender relations, socialization, reproduction, sexuality, and unpaid work. Labor and family history have proved particularly open to these themes.

Class issues have been of particular interest. In Montréal and Québec City and other urban areas most women were housewives in the 1820s. However some were employed, chiefly as domestic laborers, and unskilled workers, prostitutes, Catholic nuns, and teachers; a few were governesses, washerwomen, midwives, dressmakers or innkeepers. The great majority of the province's women lived in rural areas, where they worked at home, or as domestic servants until they married and became housewives.

Upper-class Anglos dominated high society in Montreal, and their women constructed and managed their identity and social position through central events in the social life, such as the coming out of debutantes. The elite young women were trained in intelligent philanthropy and civic responsibility, especially through the Junior Leagues. They seldom connected with the reform impulses of the middle class women, and for and were paternalistic in their views of the needs of working-class women.

Maritimes

In the 19th century middle-class Anglo women across Canada, especially in the Maritimes, transformed the interior decoration of their homes. Instead of austere functionality, they enlivened their living spaces with Plush furniture, deep carpets, handmade fancy-work, hanging plants, bookcases, inexpensive paintings and decorations. They gleaned their ideas from ladies' magazines and from each other. They were taking more and more control of their "separate sphere" of the home, which they transformed into a comfortable retreat from the vicissitudes of a competitive masculine business world.

From the late 19th century to the Great Depression, thousands of young,single women from the Maritimes Provinces migrated to better paying jobs in New England. their family needed the money, and most work as household servants or factory workers in the textile mills and shoe factories. after 1900 some came to work as professional women, especially teachers and nurses. Most returned home permanently to get married.

Ontario

From the late 19th century to 1930 250,000 women immigrated from Europe, especially from Britain. Ontario women especially welcomed domestic workers, many of them Irish, as the rising income of the middle class created a rising demand for servants that was greater than the local supply.

In the 19th century, few women were sole proprietors of businesses or professional services like law and medicine. However, many did work closely with their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons in operating shops and stores. The reform of married women's property law in the 19th century made it legally possible for wives to run businesses independently of their husbands. In reality, however, the interpretation of the courts made the wife a dependent partner in the marriage who owed her labour and services primarily to her husband. Therefore most of the women running businesses were widows who had inherited their husband's business.

The Prairie provinces

Gender roles were sharply defined in the West. Men were primarily responsible for breaking the land; planting and harvesting; building the house; buying, operating and repairing machinery; and handling finances. At first there were many single men on the prairie, or husbands whose wives were still back east, but they had a hard time. They realized the need for a wife. As the population increased rapidly, wives played a central role in settlement of the prairie region. Their labor, skills, and ability to adapt to the harsh environment proved decisive in meeting the challenges. They prepared bannock, beans and bacon, mended clothes, raised children, cleaned, tended the garden, helped at harvest time and nursed everyone back to health. While prevailing patriarchal attitudes, legislation, and economic principles obscured women's contributions, the flexibility exhibited by farm women in performing productive and nonproductive labor was critical to the survival of family farms, and thus to the success of the wheat economy.

Nursing

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women made inroads into various professions including teaching, journalism, social work, and public health. These advances included the establishment of a Women’s Medical College in Toronto (and in Kingston, Ontario) in 1883, attributed in part to the persistence of Emily Stowe, the first female doctor to practice in Canada. Stowe’s daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school.

In the Prairie provinces, the first homesteaders relied on themselves for medical services. Poverty and geographic isolation empowered women to learn and practice medical care with the herbs, roots, and berries that worked for their mothers. They prayed for divine intervention but also practiced supernatural magic that provided as much psychological as physical relief. The reliance on homeopathic remedies continued as trained nurses and doctors and how-to manuals slowly reached the homesteaders in the early 20th century.

After 1900 medicine and especially nursing modernized and became well organized.

The Lethbridge Nursing Mission in Alberta was a representative Canadian voluntary mission. It was founded, independent of the Victorian Order of Nurses, in 1909 by Jessie Turnbull Robinson. A former nurse, Robinson was elected as president of the Lethbridge Relief Society and began district nursing services aimed at poor women and children. The mission was governed by a volunteer board of women directors and began by raising money for its first year of service through charitable donations and payments from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The mission also blended social work with nursing, becoming the dispenser of unemployment relief.

Richardson (1998) examines the social, political, economic, class, and professional factors that contributed to ideological and practical differences between leaders of the Alberta Association of Graduate Nurses (AAGN), established in 1916, and the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), founded in 1915, regarding the promotion and acceptance of midwifery as a recognized subspecialty of registered nurses. Accusing the AAGN of ignoring the medical needs of rural Alberta women, the leaders of the UFWA worked to improve economic and living conditions of women farmers. Irene Parlby, the UFWA's first president, lobbied for the establishment of a provincial Department of Public Health, government-provided hospitals and doctors, and passage of a law to permit nurses to qualify as registered midwives. The AAGN leadership opposed midwife certification, arguing that nursing curricula left no room for midwife study, and thus nurses were not qualified to participate in home births. In 1919 the AAGN compromised with the UFWA, and they worked together for the passage of the Public Health Nurses Act that allowed nurses to serve as midwives in regions without doctors. Thus, Alberta's District Nursing Service, created in 1919 to coordinate the province's women's health resources, resulted chiefly from the organized, persistent political activism of UFWA members and only minimally from the actions of professional nursing groups clearly uninterested in rural Canadians' medical needs.

The Alberta District Nursing Service administered health care in the predominantly rural and impoverished areas of Alberta in the first half of the 20th century. Founded in 1919 to meet maternal and emergency medical needs by the United Farm Women (UFWA), the Nursing Service treated prairie settlers living in primitive areas lacking doctors and hospitals. Nurses provided prenatal care, worked as midwives, performed minor surgery, conducted medical inspections of schoolchildren, and sponsored immunization programs. The post-World War II discovery of large oil and gas reserves resulted in economic prosperity and the expansion of local medical services. The passage of provincial health and universal hospital insurance in 1957 precipitated the eventual phasing out of the obsolete District Nursing Service in 1976.

Women's clubs

Starting in the late 1870s the Ontario Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) wanted the schools to teach "scientific temperance," which reinforced moralistic temperance messages with the study of anatomy and hygiene, taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Although initially successful in convincing the Ontario Department of Education to adopt scientific temperance as part of the curriculum, teachers opposed the plan and refused to implement it. The WCTU then moved to dry up the province through government action. They started with "local option" laws, which allowed local governments to prohibit the sale of liquor. Many towns and rural areas went dry in the years before 1914, but not the larger cities.

The Calgary Current Events Club, started in 1927 by seven women, rapidly gained popularity with professional women of the city. In 1929 the group changed its name to the Calgary Business and Professional Women's Club (BPW) in response to a call for a national federation of such groups. Members traveled to London, England, in 1929 to make the case for recognizing women as full legal citizens. In the 1930s the group addressed many of the controversial political issues of the day, including the introduction of a minimum wage, fair unemployment insurance legislation, the compulsory medical examination of school children, and the requirement of a medical certificate for marriage. The national convention of the BPW was held in Calgary in 1935. The club actively supported Canadian overseas forces in World War II. At first most of the members were secretaries and office workers; more recently it has been dominated by executives and professions. The organization continues to attend to women's economic and social issues.

Labour unions

In Nova Scotia, United Mine Workers took control of the coal miners in 1919. Women played an important, though quiet, role in support of the union movement in coal towns during the troubled 1920s and 1930s. They never worked in the mines but they provided psychological support especially during strikes when the pay packets did not arrive. They were the family financiers and encouraged other wives who otherwise might have coaxed their menfolk to accept company terms. Women's labor leagues organized a variety of social, educational, and fund-raising functions. Women also violently confronted "scabs", policemen, and soldiers. They had to stretch the food dollar and show inventiveness in clothing their families.

Feminism and woman suffrage

See also: Feminism in Canada and Canadian Women's Suffrage Association

The first wave of feminism started in the late 19th century. This early activism was focused on increasing women’s role in public life, with goals including women’s suffrage, increased property rights, increased access to education, and recognition as “persons” under the law. This early iteration of Canadian feminism was largely based in maternal feminism; the idea that women are natural caregivers and “mothers of the nation” who should participate in public life because of their perceived propensity for decisions that will result in good care of society. In this view, women were seen to be a civilizing force on society – which was a significant part of women’s engagement in missionary work and in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Religion was an important factor in the early stages of the Canadian women’s movement. Some of the earliest groups of organized women came together for a religious purpose. When women were rejected as missionaries by their Churches and missionary societies, they started their own missionary societies and raised funds to send female missionaries abroad. Some of them raised enough to train some of their missionaries as teachers or doctors.

Woman's political status without the vote was vigorously promoted by the National Council of Women of Canada from 1894 to 1918. It promoted a vision of "transcendent citizenship" for women. The ballot was not needed, for citizenship was to be exercised through personal influence and moral suasion, through the election of men with strong moral character, and through raising public-spirited sons. The National Council position was integrated into its nation-building program that sought to uphold Canada as a White settler nation. While the woman suffrage movement was important for extending the political rights of White women, it was also authorized through race-based arguments that linked White women's enfranchisement to the need to protect the nation from "racial degeneration."

Women sometimes did have a local vote in some provinces, as in Ontario from 1850, where women owning could vote for school trustees. By 1900 other provinces adopted similar provisions, and in 1916 Manitoba took the lead in extending full woman's suffrage. Simultaneously suffragists gave strong support to the prohibition movement, especially in Ontario and the Western provinces.

The Military Voters Act of 1917 gave the vote to British women who were war widows or had sons or husbands serving overseas. Unionists Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden pledged himself during the 1917 campaign to equal suffrage for women. After his landslide victory, he introduced a bill in 1918 for extending the franchise to women. This passed without division, but did not apply to Québec. the women of Québec gave full suffrage in 1940. The first woman elected to Parliament was Agnes Macphail in Ontario in 1921.

First World War

The first world war opened up many new jobs for women, as so many men had volunteered for service.

About 3411 women became nurses with the services. When war broke out [Laura Gamble] enlisted in the [Canadian Army Medical Corps], because she knew that her experience in a Toronto hospital would be an asset to the war efforts. Health care practitioners had to deal with medical anomalies they had never seen before the First World War. Poison gas caused injuries that treatment protocols had not yet been developed for. The only treatment that soothed the Canadian soldiers affected by the gas was the constant care they received from the nurses.

On the Canadian home front, there were many ways which women could participate in the war effort. [Lois Allan] joined the [Farm Services Corps] in 1918, to replace the men who were sent to the front. Allan was placed at [E.B. Smith and Sons] where she hulled strawberries for jam. Jobs were opened up at factories as well, as industrial production increased. Work days for these women consisted of ten to twelve hours, six days a week. Because the days consisted of long monotonous work, many women made of parodies of popular songs to get through the day and boost morale. Depending on the area of Canada, some women were given a choice to sleep in either barracks or tents at the factory or farm that they were employed at. According to a brochure that was issued by the [Canadian Department of Public Works], there were several areas in which it was appropriate for women to work. These were:

1. On fruit of vegetable farms.
2. In the camps to cook for workers.
3. On mixed and dairy farms.
4. In the farmhouse to help feed those who are raising the crops.
5. In canneries, to preserve the fruit and vegetables.
6. To take charge of milk routes.

In addition many women were involved in charitable organization such as the [Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club], which helped provide the needs of soldiers, families of soldiers and the victims of war. Women were deemed ‘soldiers on the home front’, encouraged to use less or nearly everything, and to be frugal in order to save supplies for the war efforts.

Sports

Sports are high priority in Canadian culture, but women were long relegated to second-class status. There were regional differences as well, with the eastern provinces emphasizing a more feminine "girls rule" game of basketball, while the Western provinces preferred identical rules. Girls’ and women’s sport has traditionally been slowed down by a series of factors: girls and women historically have low levels of interest and participation; there were very few women in leadership positions in academic administration, student affairs or athletics; there were few women coaches; the media strongly emphasized men's sports as a demonstration of masculinity, suggesting that women seriously interested in sports were crossing gender lines; the male sports establishment was actively hostile. Staunch feminists dismissed sports as unworthy of they are support. Women's of progress was uphill; they first had to counter the widespread notion that women's bodies were so restricted and delicate that vigorous physical activity was dangerous. These notions where first challenged by the "new woman" around 1900. These women started with bicycling; they rode into new gender spaces in education, work, and suffrage.

A women's ice hockey team in 1921

The 1920s marked a breakthrough for women, including working-class young women in addition to the pioneering middle class sportswomen. The Women's Amateur Federation of Canada (WAAF) was formed in 1926 to make possible new opportunities, particularly in international competition. The WAAF worked to rebut the stereotype that vigorous physical activity and intense competition was "unwomanly". One tactic was to set up a system of medical supervision for all women athletes. The WAAF forged an alliance with supportive men who dominated the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada; this allowed women to compete in the Olympics and the British Empire Games.

Many barriers fell in the 1920s: the Edmonton Grads became the world champions of women's basketball; the first Canadian women participated in the Olympics; and women sportswriters such as Phyllis Griffiths were hired to cover their feats on the sports pages.

The 1930s brought setbacks, as critics recommended non-competitive athletic activities as the recreation most suited to women. During the 1930s, a team of women from the small town of Preston, Ontario, overcame the difficulty of obtaining adequate ice time for practice, and the challenge of raising adequate funds from their small fan base. The Rivulettes dominated women's ice hockey, winning ten provincial championships and four of the six Dominion championships. With money short during the Great Depression; after 1939 the hyper-masculinity of the Second World War blocked women's opportunities. Women's hockey largely disappeared during the Second World War.After the war, the back-to-the-family conservatism Women's sports in the shadows. The feminists of the 1970s rarely helped promote women's breakthroughs in sports. Nevertheless, more and more women engaged in aerobics and organized sport. Figure skater Barbara Ann Scott was the outstanding female athlete of the 1940s, as the 1948 Olympic champion, a two-time World champion (1947–1948), and a four-time Canadian national champion (1944–46, 48) in ladies' singles. She was very heavily covered by the media. However, it focused less on her sportsmanship and athletic achievements and more on her beauty and her "sweetheart" image.

Change for women in sport began slowly, but then accelerated after 1980. The Fitness and Amateur Sport Act of 1961 (Bill C-131) and the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 marked major advances. Perhaps the most critical development came in 1974, when Marion Lay and the federal government’s Fitness and Amateur Sport Branch (FASB) sponsored a National Conference on Women and Sport. it brought together coaches, academic administrators, and athletes to talk over the issues raised by the the Royal Commission, and to chart a way forward. Even so there was no way to monitor the process and implement the recommendations. The 1980s accelerated the movement forward. The Sport Canada’s Women’s Program in 1980; the Female Athlete Conference in 1981; the Women in Sport program in 1981; and the Constitution Act of 1982. In 1981 Abby Hoffman, a former Olympian, wwas named director general of Sport Canada. Its "Policy on Women's Sport" called for equality. The AAU of Canada now became more supportive. Court cases nail down the women's right to participate. In the provinces, human rights commissions addressed dozens of sport-related equity cases for women. Gender barriers in sports became a political topic, as shown by the Minister’s Task Force Report in 1992 and the landmark decision of the Canadian Sport Council to include gender equity quotas in their operating principles. By the 1990s women proved eager to enter formerly all-mail sports such as ice hockey, rugby, and wresting. Their activism and their prowess on the playing field eroded old stereotypes and opened up new social roles for the woman athlete on campus and in her community. New problems emerged for sportswomen trying to achieve equal status with sportsmen: raising money, attracting popular audiences, and winning sponsors.

Harrigan, (2003) reviews the emergence of women's athletics in higher education during 1961-2001. The establishment of the National Fitness and Amateur Sport Advisory Council helped women's intercollegiate sports to gain momentum. simultaneously there was a rise in the proportion of women in the student bodies, which enhanced the visibility of their sports. To overcome institutional inertia, women concentrated on organizing their sports and raising the consciousness of both male and female students. In 1969, the Canadian Women's Intercollegiate Athletic Union was formed to oversee events and sanction national championships; it merged with the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union in 1978. Women increasingly became more active after 1980.

Second World War

The Canadian Women's Army Corps was a non-combatant branch of the Canadian Army for women established during World War II to release men from non-combatant roles and thereby expand Canada's war effort. Most women served in Canada but some served overseas, most in roles such as secretaries, mechanics, cooks and so on. The CWAC was finally abolished as a separate corps in 1964 when women were fully integrated into the Canadian armed forces.

The CWAC and similar organizations paved the way for women’s future involvement in combative roles. With tens of thousands of women involved in these organizations, it provided Canadian women across the country with the opportunity to do their part in a global conflict. Although their involvement was critical to the allied victory, it did not change the power dynamics within Canada regarding military involvement. Sexism returned with full force following the Second World War, forcing women in Canada, and across the world, back into their homes and kitchens. "Women's admittance to the army in World War II had not brought about a change in the distribution of power between the sexes in Canada." The freedom they had experienced during the war was over—it was time to return to their "normal" and "proper" domestic duties.

The Second World War provided women with the first large-scale opportunity to leave the homes of their parents, husbands, and children to engage in paid labour. Never before had this happened at such a high rate for women. This mass exodus of women from Canadian households allowed the women to forge new identities as military service women and munitions workers because of their new found ability to earn a paycheque doing work in the public sphere.

Prostitution

Main article: History of prostitution in Canada

Following Confederation in 1867, the laws were consolidated in the Criminal Code. These dealt principally with pimping, procuring, operating brothels and soliciting. Most amendments to date have dealt with the latter, originally classified as a vagrancy offence, this was amended to soliciting in 1972, and communicating in 1985. Since the Charter of Rights and Freedoms became law in 1982, the constitutionality of Canada's prostitution laws have been challenged on a number of occasions.

Up to the 1880s prostitution was tolerated in The Prairie provinces. Before 1909 there were few arrests and even fewer fines for prostitution, in part because those caught were encouraged to leave town rather than be jailed. As the population became more settled, however, public opinion regarding this resource for itinerant men turned hostile. For example, a smallpox epidemic in the red light districts of Calgary ignited a crackdown as demanded by middle class women reformers. Local chapters of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union]] vigorously opposed both saloons and prostitution, and called for woman suffrage as a tool to end those evils.

See also

• Feminism in Canada
• History of Canada
• Women's history

Further reading

• Bradbury, Bettina. Working families: Age, gender, and daily survival in industrializing Montreal (1993)
• Bruce, Jean. Back the Attack! Canadian Women During the Second World War - At Home and Abroad. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1985.
• Clio Collective, Micheline Dumont and Michele Jean. Quebec Women: A History (1987)
• Cohen, Marjorie Griffin. Women's Work, Markets, and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. (1988). 258 pp.
• Danylewycz, Marta. Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987)
• Forster, Merna (2004). 100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces. Toronto: The Dundurn Group. ISBN 1-55002-514-7.
• Frager, Ruth A., and Carmela K. Patrias, eds. Discounted Labour: Women Workers in Canada, 1870-1939 (2005) excerpt and text search
• Hall, M. Ann (2002), The girl and the game : a history of women's sport in Canada, Broadview Press excerpt and text search
• Gossage, Carolyn, and Roberta Bondar. Greatcoats and Glamour Boots: Canadian Women at War, 1939-1945 (2nd ed. 2001)
• Halpern, Monda. And on that Farm He Had a Wife: Ontario Farm Women and Feminism, 1900-1970. (2001). excerpt and text search
• Hammill, Faye. Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada 1760-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. excerpt and text search
• Kealey, Linda, ed. Pursuing Equality: Historical Perspectives on Women in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1993). 310 pp.
• Kechnie, Margaret C. Organizing Rural Women: the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1910]' (2003). excerpt and text search
• Marsden, Lorna R. Canadian Women and the Struggle for Equality (2008) excerpt and a text search
• Noël, Françoise. Family Life and Sociability in Upper and Lower Canada, 1780-1870. (2003) 384pp excerpt and text search
  • Noël, Françoise. Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: The Interwar Years (2009)
• Parr, Joy, ed. A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945-1980. (1996). 335 pp. excerpt and text search
• Pierson, Ruth Roach (1986). They're Still Women After All: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart. ISBN 978-0771069581.
• Prentice, Alison et al.. Canadian Women: a history (1996, 2nd edition)
• Smith, Judith E. Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 (2004). 444 pp. excerpt and text search
• Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson Swayer Publishing Ltd, 1980)
• Wine, Jeri Dawn (1991), Women and social change: feminist activism in Canada, J. Lorimer, ISBN 1-55028-356-1 {{citation}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |1= and |coauthor= (help)

Historiography

• Bullen, John. "Orphans, Idiots, Lunatics, and Historians: Recent Approaches to the History of Child Welfare in Canada," Histoire Sociale: Social History, May 1985, Vol. 18 Issue 35, pp 133–145
• Cook, Sharon Anne; McLean, Lorna; and O'Rourke, Kate, eds. Framing Our Past: Canadian Women's History in the Twentieth Century (2001). 498 pp. essays by scholars
• Forestell, Nancy M., Kathryn M. McPherson, and Cecilia Louise Morgan, eds. Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada (2003) 370 pp. excerpt and text search
• Gleason, Mona, and Adele Perry, eds. Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History. (5th ed. 2006) 407 pp.; 24 essays by scholars online review
• Parr, Joy. "Gender History and Historical Practice," The Canadian Historical Review (1995) 76:354-376
• Pedersen, Diana. Changing Women, Changing History: A Bibliography in the History of Women in Canada (3rd ed. Carleton University Press, 1996).
• Prentice, Alison and Trofimenkoff, Susan Mann, eds. The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women's History (2 vol 1985), essays by scholars
• Robbins, Wendy, et al. eds. Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies in Canada and Québec, 1966–76 (2008) excerpt and text search
• Strong-Boag, Veronica, Mona Gleason, and Adele Perry, eds. Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women's History (2003)

Primary sources

• Kelsey, Marion (1997), Victory harvest: diary of a Canadian in the Women's Land Army, 1940-1944, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997) excerpt and text search
• Light, Beth, and Alison Prentice, eds. Pioneer and Gentlewomen of British North America, 1713– 1867 (Toronto: New Hogtown, 1980)
• Light, Beth, and Joy Parr, eds. Canadian Women on the Move, 1867–1920 (Toronto: New Hogtown and OISE, 1983)
• Light, Beth and Ruth Pierson, eds. No Easy Road: Women in Canada, 1920s– 1960s (Toronto: New Hogtown and OISE, 1990).