“Wages for Housework”: Mothers’ Allowances and the Beginnings of Social Security in Canada

"Wagesfor Housework": Mothers' Allowances and the Beginnings ofSocial Security in Canada VERONICA STRONG-BOAG When poverty was 're-discovered' in the 1960s and 1970s, sole support mothers were easily recognized as its prime victims. The Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 identified these citizens as among the most disadvantaged in the country.I For all the indignation which such announcements provoked, the poverty of femaleheaded families was not new. The experience of such mothers and children traditionally has been precarious and marginal. Indeed their plight, more than that of any other group, has called forth numerous efforts at remedy throughout Canada's history. One of the most notable occurred in the early decades of this century when social critics and feminists employed the predicament of mother-led families to initiate Canada 's first experiments with formal income support programmes. The enabling legislation, variously referred to as mothers' pensions and, more often, mothers' allowances represented a critical stage in the history of child welfare in this country. Its emphasis on the reconstruction of the nuclear family as the unequalled environment for optimal child development entailed a significant break with much of previous practice. In the past, institutions such as orphanages, refuges and industrial schools were designed to compensate for the shortcomings of inadequate, usually poor, families . Increasingly, however, more advanced social thinkers and those in the new profession of social work condemned such large aggregations of children as injurious to youth and harmful in the long run to the community. The mother, not the matron, was the best employee the state could hope for. 24 I. The Campaign for Mothers' Allowances By the First Great War thoughtful Canadians were informed as never before about the threat which family instability, juvenile delinquency and impoverished maternity posed to national survival . Men and women such as Nellie Mcclung, Stephen Leacock, James Shaver Woodsworth, Elizabeth Smith Shortt and J.J. Kelso came to agree that the state should actively encourage and protect a better type of motherhood and family life. In concert with other political and economic reforms such intervention would enforce the moral, physical and material standards which the middle class held dear. The assault on laissez-faire liberalism emerged from two distinctly different ideological perspectives . The guiding principles of liberal suffragists like Nellie Mcclung were egalitarian and practical. They emphasized not female weakness, but the community's failure to give full rein to women's maternal qualities. The potential for nurture was women's particular strength. The state's recognition of the value of childbearing would demonstrate society's commitment to the set of more humane values which women as a sex more clearly espoused.2 Leacock, the anti-feminist McGill professor, on the other hand, found supporters among 'red tory' conservatives when he insisted that Social policy should proceed from the fundamental truth that women are and must be dependent. If they cannot be looked after by an individual. ..they must be looked after by the State. To expect a woman, for example, if left by the death of her husband with young children without support, to maintain herself by her own efforts, is the most absurd mockery of freedom ever devised .3 According to this view, women warranted special attention so that the preservation of the race (not to mention sexual differences) would be guaranteed . Naturally not all conservatives sought state intervention. Many, certainly the majority of the clerically-influenced right wing in Quebec, resisted such a solution as modernist and secularist. Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. l (Printemps 1979 Spring) In their minds voluntary philanthropy retained its traditional favour.4 Nevertheless, in English Canada, the West in particular, mothers' allowances supplied a cause which brought together a broad spectrum of articulate, middle-class Canadians . Their agreement about the value of state assistance underlay a concerted campaign to introduce mothers' allowances legislation in every province in the first decades of the century. Such a campaign found sympathetic audiences because , then as now, mothers and children were judged more often the victims than the authors of misfortune. Accounts of their suffering could be counted on to open purse strings and hearts. This made it almost inevitable that...