More Sugar, Less Salt: Edith Hancox and the Passionate Mobilization of the Dispossessed, 1919–1928

On 1 June 1919, Edith Hancox debuted in front of 7,500 pro-strikers in Victoria Park. Thrust onto the Labor Church's stage, the mother and shopkeeper won "round after round of applause," for "scor[ing] the Committee of 1,000," the shady antistrike organization of Winnipeg's élite, and comparing "their contemptible actions with the splendid conduct of the strikers." Hancox is the only woman known to have addressed these massive Winnipeg General Strike congregations. In fact, in spite of their pivotal roles in the confrontation, whether as telegraph, bakery, or retail workers who walked off the job, as housewives of strikers who stretched their household budgets, as operators of a free kitchen for picketers, or as rioters who bullied strikebreakers or allegedly set fire to the street car on Bloody Saturday, the pro-strike heroines of those tumultuous six weeks have largely remained anonymous.¹

Edith Hancox is among those lost to what E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity."² And yet, emboldened by Canada's workers' revolt, Hancox would spend the next decade as one of the most formidable and visible activists in a city notorious for being a hotbed of radicals.³ Her journey traversed the multiplicity of postwar leftist organizations, including the Labor Church, the Women's Labor League (wll), the One Big Union (obu), and the Communist Party of Canada (cpc). Between 1919 and 1928, scarcely a single Winnipeg working-class demonstration took place in which Hancox did not figure as a public speaker, participant, leader, or organizer. She composed dozens of letters to and articles for the mainstream and radical press. She persistently disrupted political spaces and twice ran for public office. Some of the most significant socialists of the era made a point of making her acquaintance.⁴ As a champion of working-class women, children, immigrants, and the unemployed, Hancox's chosen "family" were liberal capitalism's dispossessed.⁵ Her community comprised those frequently overlooked by a left that, in spite of its ethnic and gender diversity, prioritized male, Anglo-Canadian, unionized workers. At the apex of her political career, Hancox was secretary of the first national unemployment association in Canada. Whether in the street, in government offices, in smoke-filled labour halls, or in the press, Hancox exposed the plight of unemployed men and women and stressed the value of their indignation and collective agency to foment revolution.

Hancox's absence in the historical record is hardly unique. Bedevilling their historians, the source materials on early 20th-century socialist feminists' political struggles are biased, incomplete, and hidden by the very repressions of the capitalist patriarchy they challenged. Despite these obstacles, in the past 40 years, feminist scholars have complicated reductionist portrayals of "first-wave feminism" as maternal in content and white and middle class in composition. We now understand that many feminisms emerged in this period, that identifying with motherhood or its rejection was pregnant with radical and reactionary possibilities, and that class and race were themselves contested categories within women's circles.⁶ This article is based on considerable, but nonetheless fragmentary and prejudiced, newspaper reports, Hancox's journalism, obu and cpc archives, government records, family documents, and conversations with Hancox's granddaughter, Edith Danna. Edith Hancox's activism is a reminder that Canada's interwar left was not monolithically male and that we ought to re-examine the diversity of women who, notwithstanding considerable restraints, thrived there.

Hancox's gendered subjectivity and her commitment to those marginalized within the labour movement only partially explain her concealed history. Her greatest contribution to post-1919 social movements was in providing the emotional content and support for radical change. The indispensability of affective labour has rarely been central to the study of the Canadian left, even though organizers, like Hancox, have intuitively recognized it as a dynamic aspect of their work.⁷ Following Arlie Hochschild's observation that capitalism commodifies the emotional labour of women, feminist scholars, in what has been called the "affective turn," have...