Discounted Labour: Women Workers in Canada, 1870-1939 (review)

'How and why,' Ruth Frager and Carmela Patrias ask, 'did women become confined to low-wage jobs?' What impact did differences of class, ethnicity, and/or race have on the opportunities open to women for waged work? 'Was there a sisterhood' that, at least sometimes, joined together to 'struggle against harsh working conditions' or challenge the gendered division of labour that usually resulted in restricted opportunities, lower wages, and these harsh working conditions for women? Discounted Labour explores these and other questions about the nature of women's work in industrial Canada and, in doing so, provides a highly readable and well-grounded discussion about women's changing relationships to waged employment between 1870 and 1939.

As Frager and Patrias illustrate in their introduction, a division of labour based on gender did not suddenly emerge with the arrival of industrial capitalism. Although 'women's work was indispensable' to the pre-industrial family economy, this was, with the exception of Quebec, never recognized in law or in custom. Moreover, the emergence of a domestic ideology relegated women to the world of hearth and home, and those relatively few women who worked for wages were often a source of social anxiety and concern. The emergence of industrial capitalism did increase the waged work available to the nation's women. But as Frager and Patrias demonstrate, deeply rooted cultural assumptions about women's innate (in)abilities and the lesser value of their work persisted. Part 1 of Discounted Labour, 'Image versus Reality,' explores women's actual work experiences – in factories, in the service industry, and in the nascent professions of nursing, teaching, and social work – and explains not only how women were relegated to the bottom of the labour pool but also how many tasks associated with women's work were assumed to require less skill and were thus less remunerative. Part 2 of Discounted Labour, 'Confronting the Disjuncture,' considers how social reformers, the state, factory owners, and workers themselves responded to this 'disjuncture between notions of proper womanhood and the actual treatment of women workers' and highlights some of the ironies and paradoxes confronted by working women. For example, various attempts to improve working conditions for women also tended to confirm their second-class status in the workforce and reinforce assumptions of dependence. In the end, Frager and Patrias conclude that although working conditions did improve, and individual women did manage to make real gains, 'the story of Canada's women workers in the years from 1870 to 1939 is ... a grim tale.'

Discounted Labour is much more than a recounting of that familiar story of how gender affected women's working lives in the decades bridging the turn of the twentieth century, however. Lively vignettes illustrate how individual women actively tried to take advantage of the new opportunities for work that emerged during this period. More significantly, Frager and Patrias illustrate that the answers to the questions of 'why' and 'how' women's work was discounted are complex and often contradictory. Issues of a woman's ethnicity, race, and class had direct and differing impacts on what work was open to her and her experiences in the work place. Moreover, the 'problems' of and about working women changed over time, and differed from one region of the country to another, and with respect to particular circumstances and events – like the coming of war in 1914 or the decade of the Depression. Discounted Labour is not the story of a sisterhood of workers. Rather, it illustrates the complications that hierarchies of race, class, and ethnicity created within that category of Canadian womanhood and among working women.

Discounted Labour is welcome addition to the 'Themes in Canadian History' series. Well-crafted and well-written, this short and accessible overview brings together much of the newest literature on women's work, and on issues of race, ethnicity, and class in this crucial period of the nation's development. The text is without notes and there were times...