Discounted Labour: Women Workers in Canada, 1870–1939 (review)

In 1974, the Toronto Women's Press published Women at Work: Ontario, 1880–1930, an inaugural, key text of 'second wave' women's history. Over thirty years later, women's labour history has been considerably enriched by an impressive corpus of research on the lives of wage-earning and working-class women, even if certain topics, regions, and groups of women have been studied less than others. Providing a succinct summary of the research to date is thus a difficult task, particularly if one tries to take into account the categories of region, ethnicity, and race, as well as gender and class.

Ruth Frager and Carmella Patrias have done an admirable job of tackling this difficult challenge, creating an accessible and readable text for students who are new to the history of women and labour. Taking the period from the 1870s to the beginning of the Second World War as a whole, they have produced a good summary that introduces students to some basic concepts, such as the malleable but persistent gendered division of labour, as well as to some of the themes that have emerged in women's labour history, such as the moral regulation of labouring women or the feminization of clerical work. They are able to strike a nice balance between providing their readers with some overall patterns and generalizations, while still offering specific examples and illustrations that humanize the story, making it memorable and concrete for the reader. The text is therefore constrained by what has already been published, and the authors occasionally point to some gaps in the literature, such as the paucity of research on women in the emerging CIO unions of the 1930s (128). Historians have also produced more material focusing on central Canada, a fact that the authors try to compensate for by offering examples from other regions to illustrate their points. Choices undoubtedly had to be made about what to include: for example, their overview includes the stories of professional women, such as teachers, nurses, and social workers, though it has less on unpaid labour and social reproduction, and given the interests of students as well as the authors' attempt to construct a coherent narrative, this choice seems a good one. Frager and Patrias are also conscious of the need to integrate a discussion of race and ethnicity into the narrative; here, they draw effectively on secondary writing, including excellent studies they themselves have produced in previous scholarly venues. In this regard, however, one might have liked some statistics on race and ethnicity, showing the actual (and changing) ethnic and racial contours of the female workforce over this period, which unfortunately clearly reflected Canada's 'white' immigration policy.

The authors also made a decision to use a thematic rather than a chronological approach. This has clear benefits, drawing the reader into particular issues, preventing the repetition of themes that reappear in every period, and probably enhancing the use of the book, which will be used, chapter by chapter, by students. The inevitable drawback is that differing contexts and change over time can become murky: referring to the Knights of Labor Leonora Barry on the same page as a Communist commentator tends to homogenize different economic, political, and social contexts shaping women's resistance (116). These issues and problems, however, are inherent in the nature of the project. A short overview simply has to distill; it does not have the luxury of space for a discussion of historiography or for a detailed chronology of change. Space also seems to be the reason that the writing of other scholars is not acknowledged with endnotes. While this is standard practice in textbooks, it might be a good idea if this text is to be used by undergraduates, to set an example of citation for them, which they certainly will be expected to use in their own essay writing.

This is the first Canadian attempt to tackle a synthesis of women's labour history. As a...