Rethinking the Canadian Working Class

Reviews Rethinking the Canadian Working Class WORKING-CLASS EXPERIENCE: RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF CANADIAN LABOUR, 1800-1991. Bryan D. Palmer. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. SWEATSHOP . STRIFE: CLASS, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER IN THE JEWISH LABOUR MOVEMENT OF TORONTO, 1900-1939. Ruth A. Frager. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992. ' IT' S A WORKING MAN' S TOWN: MALE WORKING-CLASS CULTURE IN NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO. Thomas W. Dunk. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. This essay takes up Bryan Palmer's call for others to contribute to the collective project of rethinking Canadian working-class history.' Six aspects of that history are highlighted in Palmer's and the two other books being reviewed: gender, ethnicity, region, culture, resistance, and class. Before turning to these themes, a few words on each book is in order. The second edition of Working-Class Experience incorporates another decade's scholarly research on the Canadian working class, devotes considerably more attention to the twentieth century than the first (1983) edition, and addresses some of the questions of gender and ethnicity, and new approaches to labour history embraced in the decade since the book first appeared. It offers an unapologetically argumentative and provocative survey of Canadian labour history from a Marxist standpoint. While it reveals great flashes of interpretive insight and an important agenda of issues worth pursuing, the second edition also suffers from being overwritten, and remains curiously tentative in many places (the double negative is a not infrequent stylistic 214 affectation). Ruth Frager's Sweatshop Strife is a superb, close-grained historical case study of Jewish garment workers in Toronto that tackles key issues in Canadian labour history, such as the sources of radical labour movements, the consequences of ethnicity for class relations and working-class formation, and the failures of the labour movement to take gender into account. Thomas Dunk's It's A Working Man's Town is an insightful ethnographic case study of male workers' culture in Thunder Bay, at its best when it stays close to the ethnographic materials which are well-presented and ring true, bu~ burdened with a top-heavy interpretive apparatus. 1. Gender Much of the past decade's rethinking of labour history has concerned gender, as feminist historians have moved from reminding readers that women were part of the working class and that reproduction needs to be examined as much as production, to more radical considerations of the ways in which social constructions of gender affect class formation and class conflict. __P_almer leaves~himself most open to cnt1c1sm on the issue of gender, since he starts finnly from the priority of class and is unwilling to follow some feminist historians into the farther reaches of discourse.2 Nonetheless, gender is more prominent here than in the first edition. Added to earlier emphases on the discourse of manhood among craft workers are new investigations of the limits of the Knights of Labor's thinking on gender relations, the "gendered radicalism" of the World War I era, the implications of mass culture for workinclass women's gender and class identitie~ and changes in women's economic roles i~ ~he twenthieth century. Unfortunately, msufficient attention is paid to gender in the labour movement in the last few decades, as, for example, women's caucuses in unions and union action on issues such as sexual harassment, domestic violence and pay equity - much of which is dismissed in his critique of social Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 30, No. 3 (AutomtU! 1995 Fall) unionism as merely window dressing on bureaucratic industrial unionism.3 The inadequacy of a purely class analysis is the starting point for Ruth Frager's Sweatshop Strife, in which she takes on the difficult task of examining the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity in the Jewish labour movement of early 20th-century Toronto. Although over half of the labour force in the Toronto garment industry was female, there were few women activists, and women were less organized than men. Women faced formidable obstacles to union involvement: they were vulnerable as lowskilled workers, they had less job experience than men, they were burdened with domestic responsibilities and the disapproval of kin, they were subject to male unionists...