Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920 by Linda Kealey (review)

288 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 uses criminal records from the Alberta Attorney-General=s department to show how inhabitants of the Vegreville bloc in Alberta negotiated sex and gender between 1915 and 1929. Sherry Edmunds-Lett analyses the demographics and work experience of the close-knit community of AfricanCanadian women on Vancouver Island. In a final chapter, Ann LegerAnderson takes one of the central issues of Saskatchewan history, the cooperative movement, and sees how the political was personal: she examines the attitudes, perceptions, and behaviours of Gertrude and John Telford, a married couple who pursued the co-operative ideal. All the papers save three are previously unpublished and show the range of subjects on which historians of women and gender have been working. The editors= introduction notes that history writing in Canada cannot be conducted in isolation or in one voice, and this volume shows how multiple voices can be interesting, important, and entertaining. There are many more people and regions of Canada whose history at these multiple levels is still to be heard. (MARY KINNEAR) Linda Kealey. Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890B1920 University of Toronto Press 1998. x, 336. $60.00, $24.95 A published account of Vancouver=s first socialist picnic, held in 1902, included the following prescient passage: >The socialist movement in Vancouver has been a men=s movement in the past but the gentler sex will have to be reckoned with in the future B and a socialist movement which does not attract the women cannot live.= Readers who ponder this quotation in Linda Kealey=s engaging study can, with the benefit of about one hundred years of hindsight, insert virtually any urban locale in place of Vancouver. Moreover, they can replace the generic phrase >socialist movement= with more specific references to left parties or trade unions in many of these same cities. Thanks to Linda Kealey, a historian at Memorial University, students of Canadian politics and society will be able to understand a great deal more about the early tensions on the left involving women=s activism than we did before this book was published. Kealey=s main focus involves the contributions of women to Canadian trade union and socialist movements in the period before 1920, when working-class norms prescribed a rigid but elusive model known as the male breadwinner household. At the same time, organizations on the political left preached an ideal about equality of the sexes that was far from current either inside those groups, or in the lived experiences of working women at home and on the job. Kealey details the struggles of female activists on the left to earn a living, improve the lives of other workers, and challenge the boundaries of political engagement as women. Her book provides useful insights into what feminist researchers HUMANITIES 289 term double militancy, meaning the effort to advance on issues of wages, hours, working conditions, and the creation of a vibrant left politics, and, at the same time, to agitate for the equitable treatment of women in unions and parties. Kealey=s study suggests double militancy presented a difficult challenge in the early twentieth century. The burdens of industrial capitalism weighed heavily on the shoulders of working-class immigrant women in the sweatshops of Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Male trade unionists often held discriminatory attitudes towards female workers, viewing them as threatening, low-wage competitors who belonged in the private sphere. The interest of the former in organizing large numbers of the latter was thus limited. Middle-class feminists in such groups as the National Council of Women of Canada were anxious to recruit immigrant women to domestic work, away from industrial jobs where working-class consciousness might develop. Ethnic tensions in burgeoning cities further complicated matters; according to Kealey, anti-Semitism was so powerful that the Eaton=s boycott of 1912 hardly extended beyond Toronto=s Jewish community. From a contemporary perspective, the sections of Enlisting Women for the Cause that address hierarchies of gender and class are especially compelling. Linda Kealey shows how gender issues including votes for women remained subordinate in the standard left pecking order, such that revolution and class solidarity...