Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (review)

Joan Sangster’s book is a welcome addition to the growing body of research on women’s work and family lives in the three decades after the Second World War. Its main aim is to explore the changing landscape for working women in Canada in a period in which, despite the prevailing social assumptions that women’s lives were largely bounded by domesticity, married women entered the labour force in far larger numbers than before. Some women entered work covered by the Fordist accord in which they were unionized and had some legal protection, whereas others, usually recent immigrants or Aboriginal women, found themselves in employment that was far more flexible, low paid and insecure. All of them worked in the context of the Cold War, which created a climate in which dissent of any kind was treated with suspicion. A theme running throughout the book is the contradictions faced by women workers in this period; for example, many who were supporting families from their paid labour did so in a context in which the ideal of the male breadwinner was still pervasive. Within the trade union movement, labour beauty contests were a validation of women’s role as organized workers, but at the same time promoted contemporary ideals of femininity that were based on attractiveness and appearance. This can be contrasted with more serious representations of the male worker and confirmed women’s subordinate position. The book explores these contradictions and analyzes the different and very complex ways in which women responded to and interacted with them. Women themselves of course were not an undifferentiated group and throughout the text it is argued that race and ethnicity, intertwined with class and gender, affected the options, pattern and place of women’s labour.

These issues are examined using a number of case studies that exemplify the experiences of different groups within the workforce. After a discussion of the representation of women’s work in this period, and the varied reactions to it, there are chapters on the textile workers of Dionne, retail work and union protest in the department store of the paternalist Dupuis Frères, and Aboriginal women’s work in prairie communities. Other chapters look at women’s role within the labour movement during the Cold War and the grievances lodged by women workers in meat packing, the Bell telephone company, and public sector employment. It is argued that the contradictions bet ween representation and reality, present in the postwar years, became more visible and contentious by the late 1960s. Women’s paid work was now at the centre of social debates and organizing, with some women within unions, and feminists outside the labour movement, pressing for change. The evolving and competing discourses about women’s waged work were exemplified in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1968, which is the subject of the final chapter.

Although there is a wealth of detail in this book about women’s working lives, its real strength lies in its conceptual approach and its stimulating new insights. Indeed, the analysis is multi-layered, engaging the reader on many different levels. The conceptual frame-work that holds the book together is one that is familiar to those who know Joan Sangster’s work. She roots her analysis in a materialist feminist perspective which, while taking on board the insights from post-structuralist and linguistic theories, assumes “a dialogue between social being and social consciousness” in which human agency and lived experience are still significant. (13) Throughout the book, therefore, there is an attempt to bring to the fore the voices of working women as well as to provide an analysis of official discourses and concerns. Imaginative use is made of a range of sources, including grievance files, evidence from Aboriginal women to committee hearings, and personal letters to the Royal Commission. These provide fascinating details of individual lives, revealing three dimensional human beings and their concerns rather than women who are ideological constructs of the...