Nancy Christie | By Necessity or by Right: The Language and Experience of Gender at Work | Labour/Le Travail, 50 | The History Cooperative

Commentaries
Labour/Le Travail: A Canadian Retrospective — Class, Gender, and Nation

By Necessity or by Right: The Language and Experience of Gender at Work

Nancy Christie

THIS ASSESSMENT of the way in which the historiography of women's work has reshaped and altered what might be called the "masculinist" interpretive trajectory of industrialization and the labour protest tradition it engendered, begins with the life-story of Valentine Chartrand. A French Canadian spinner who had emigrated with her family to Lowell, Massachusetts, she spent a life-time working in textile mills. Ordered to leave high school by her father, a builder who suffered through persistent periods of unemployment, Valentine reluctantly relinquished her personal ambitions for the wider interests of the family for whom her pay-packet was a necessity. As Valentine told her interviewer: "My mother was always at home with a big family, twelve children. She never had a chance to work outside; she had all she could do." In describing her work experience, Valentine seldom questioned accepted cultural norms, even though she became a labour activist later in life. For example, she accepted as natural that children in the French Canadian dominated mill all worked at a young age, that there was a gender division of labour (in fact much of her protest revolved either around the issue of higher wages or that she had to do the heavy work of men), and deemed work after marriage to be part and parcel of the rhythm of women's lives. Indeed, although we catch only fleeting glimpses of her weaver husband, it is clear that Valentine was by necessity often the principal breadwinner. Significantly, despite both her skill and long experience, Valentine Chartrand still considered her work "extra money." When widowed early in life, Valentine became a union organizer until she retired at the age of 68, but for the women at Lowell workplace protest did not always take the form of the collective strike. Just as frequently Valentine recounts addressing employers on a one-to-one level about wage concerns, or, more commonly, frequently changed jobs to better her wages. ¹ 1

     What the life-course of this female worker conveys is that the process of industrialization was itself a gendered one; that women workers may have both accepted the gendered division of labour but at other times protested alongside male workers for better wages; and that despite the dominance of laissez-faire individualism that formed the centrepiece of the modern marketplace, Valentine Chartrand's concept of her wages and her work were encapsulated within a strongly familialist context, and framed in reference to her position both as a daughter and wife. While her sense of herself as a worker remained fundamental to her throughout her life, she also placed a strong value on her religious and ethnic ties, and her role as mother. There were important facets of her life-course that governed in turn her attitudes to the workplace and her advocacy of a right to a better wage therein. 2

     Strikingly apparent in Valentine Chartrand's account of work in the textile mills of Lowell is the degree to which the industrial workplace was one defined by a rigid hierarchy of skill, gender, age, and experience. It is the purpose of this article to uncover the ways in which these fissures and divisions within class and organized labour either furthered or truncated the political ideal of class unity in Canada's past. How has the consideration of women's work and the problem of how industrialization reinforced cultural constructions of gender outside the workplace offered by historians over the past 25 years in Labour/Le Travail (L/LT) either contributed to or altered the conventional views? Such "traditional" perspectives reify the male worker and see him as the primary protagonist within a narrative of class formation defined largely through "the prism of the strike" and in turn interpolated into the wider culture and community? ² How did the shifting discourses of gender shape both the industrial process and how work itself was defined and experienced by men and women? How did this history of the gendered workplace contribute to the elaboration of class politics over the past two centuries? How does placing gender in labour history lead to a reexamination of work identities beyond the nexus of factory culture? ³ 3

Gendering the Workplace

From its inception, contributors to L/LT have recognized the gendered complexion of the labour culture about which they wrote, even though, as later critics observed, gender did not form the central category of analysis. Thus, in the first issue of the journal, Bryan Palmer wrote of the 19th century artisanal critique of capitalist social relations: "For this was a male culture, and it was often at women's expense that the artisan articulated his implicit contempt for a genteel aristocracy or a pious bourgeoisie." ⁴ In a similar vein, Craig Heron gave due attention to the divisions that complicated the creation of broader class solidarities, namely the exclusivist outlook of the skilled tradesmen in the steel industry, in which the rhetorical link between skill and manhood was pivotal in the making of political ideologies by which the authority of craftsmen on the shop-floor was pitted against the incursions of technological change introduced by capitalists. ⁵ In his assesment of the mobilization of the journeymen master bakers in Halifax, Ian McKay astutely observed the degree to which their vision of working-class respectability and campaigns to defend the status of their trade rested firmly upon excluding the job concerns of those below, women and boy apprentices who were subordinated by gender and by age. ⁶ While it must be recognized that issues of gender may not have played a part in all aspects of labour protest, as some would like to postulate, and it is unwise to assign too much interpretive weight to one historical catagegory, there have been occasions where the issue of the introduction of women workers or the deployment of a breadwinner ideal built upon gendered notions of paid labour and the unpaid labour of women in the home, formed active ingredients of labour ideology and have been signally ignored. ⁷ 4

     If Palmer, Heron, and McKay were not unaware of the ideological parameters of the emerging labour movement, fashioned around a distinctive gender ideology of a unified "brotherhood," it was left to the historians of women's work, namely Joan Sangster, Veronica Strong-Boag, Margaret E. McCallum, Graham Lowe, Marta Danylewycz, and Alison Prentice to elaborate a narrative of an increasingly feminized work culture. Like Palmer, Heron, and McKay, these historians understood the 20th century workplace as one distinctly segregated and hierarchical, but where the former emphasized divisions by age and skill within male dominated trades; women's historians demonstrated how capitalism itself created hierarchies ordered by gender. From its earliest issues, therefore, L/LT contained two parallel narratives: one built around the evolution of trade union solidarities formed largely around an analysis of skilled labour, and a second, less optimistic, account of the way in which the opposing needs but overlapping gender attitudes of capital and organized labour increasingly marginalized and proletarianized women. 5

     In her pathbreaking analysis of the Bell Telephone Strike of 1907, Joan Sangster not only demonstrated how the demands for cheap labour together with prevailing cultural attitudes about the "natural" functions of women within the home, combined to impell business to shift away from the employment of male adolescents to a policy of hiring exclusively women as telephone operators. Although Sangster chose to analyse a strike by women in order to argue against the historiographic convention that women were passive workers, her article served as a benchmark for future analysis. In her treatment of why the strike failed, Sangster provided a nuanced and complex explanation of variables beyond mere economics, to account for the marginalization of women workers even within industries where women formed the majority. Not only did employers believe that women could be paid less because they were intermittent workers. Capital also successfully built a system of welfare paternalism because the workforce was female. Even those sympathetic to the 1907 strike, such as the medical experts who testified before the tribunal called into being by the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, promoted better work conditions through gendered arguments, namely that women's maternal nature required protection, an outlook that in turn fit with that of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which sought means to exclude women as members. Not only was Sangster alert to the cross-class attitudes towards the gender division of work, but she posited an interconnection between discursive and materialist derived conceptualizations of gender. She suggestively linked gender to class mobilizations by showing how the very feminization of the workplace propelled organized labour to articulate arguments about the family wage that were so critical to forging working-class unity. It is not insignificant, therefore, that the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), in the very year of the Bell Telephone Strike, where women were so active, developed arguments for the exclusion of women that in turn fed into a broader elaboration of a breadwinner ideal, a foundation of the potent campaigns for a living wage. And it was to this ideal, as Sangster makes clear, that so many of the single female workers at Bell themselves subscribed. ⁸ 6

     Thus, the modernizing of the industrial process involved a proletarianization of women, and an increasingly rigid hierarchy within workplaces along gender lines, a process that Graham S. Lowe, Marta Danylewycz, and Alison Prentice have shown occurred even in ostensibly white-collar occupational enclaves. However, what these historians would describe as new forms of job segregation, Veronica Strong-Boag characterized as gendered continuities, raising the spectre that though capitalism may reaffirm patriarchal relations in new contexts, patriarchy or gender subordination had long functioned in other social environments before the advent of industrialization. Strong-Boag's evidence reveals that while during the 1920s, single women, especially in the 16–24 age group, flooded into the workforce, they largely entered jobs already culturally prescribed as female. ⁹ The predominant form of women's work remained domestic service, and in contrast to male workers who were moving into larger industries during what Craig Heron has termed our second industrial revolution, ¹⁰ women workers remained confined to smaller work units and unskilled occupations. ¹¹ According to this analysis, it was the very character of women's work, rather than their "natural" passivity, that precluded collective organization. Change was occurring in the modern workplace, as Lowe, Danylewycz, and Prentice contend, but its effects were felt only by single women. ¹² If, as Strong-Boag concluded, "sexist discrimination remained an integral feature of economic organization" its impact was determined largely by a woman's marital status. ¹³ For the most part, the lives of married women were largely unchanged by industrialization, for their work was intermittent, confined to the home for both paid and unpaid labour, and it consigned them to the realm of unskilled work. Historians such as Craig Heron would describe the periodization of industrial transformation and technological change, in terms of changes within factory organizations, but Strong-Boag shows that for the lives of girls and women, their work experiences were for the most part little affected by these new labour processes. 7

     As Strong-Boag and Margaret E. McCallum have demonstrated, however, the increasing visibility of women in the workplace, even if they were largely single women who intended to turn to marriage as an escape from low pay and dead-end jobs, challenged skilled labourers as much as changes within the labour process that led to deskilling through new technologies. Though the National Council of Women advocated minimum wages for women in 1913, it was the TLC that was the main driving force behind inviting the state in to uphold male wages, which it believed were being eroded by the supposed competition of female workers. In reality, female workers took jobs that men would not have been competing for, but the incidence of an expanding unskilled female workforce became a powerful touchstone in propping up the broader legislative campaign for a living wage for all workers. Organized labour believed that because this policy applied to women workers who were not full legal subjects, its application would uphold male wage levels. Equally organized employers reacted in tandem. Businessmen endorsed gendered legislation because it obviated the principle of a living wage for all adults, relegating women to the same legal status as children in the workplace. While McCallum concluded that this accord between businessmen and organized labour rested upon a shared view of women's work — and to a certain extent this is true — their objectives may have overlapped but sprang from quite different perspectives regarding wage contracts. ¹⁴ Like Strong-Boag, McCallum shows how industrialization itself was increasingly characterized by gender inequalities. 8

     McCallum's article is similarly suggestive in showing the degree to which the feminization of work was a central engine behind labour mobilization, which in this period was built increasingly around the notion of the male breadwinner as the exclusive provider for his dependents. If during the first industrial revolution labour protest focussed upon the intrinsic link between masculinity and artisanal skill, the second industrial revolution produced a shift within the political rhetoric of labour towards a firmer equation between male citizenship rights and the ideal of a single male breadwinner. The work of Sangster, Strong-Boag, and McCallum has carefully elucidated the way in which the presence of women in the workplace and the consequent reaction of both capitalists and male workers created a gendered division of labour. We need many more case studies, however, which are in turn linked to the political agenda of organized labour, to ask whether male workers were simply excluding women to protect their skill, ¹⁵ and when their critique of capitalism shifted to an argument for higher wages founded upon the sole breadwinner ideal. ¹⁶ As both Anna Clark and Sonya Rose have argued in the British context, during the early phases of industrialization notions of respectable manhood were just as often defined in opposition to male youth and unmarried men, as against women. But as they go on to argue, once male workplace rights became directly connected to their status as household heads (which depended in turn upon new notions of working-class domesticity), once fluid gender relationships became more rigid. ¹⁷ These changing notions of masculinity and their links with changes within working-class families must also be considered in the Canadian context. When and how, for example, did concepts of masculinity, which may have adhered around work, family, and church, much like those of women, begin to cohere around the primacy of work? ¹⁸ Under what conditions and at what point did class politics crystallize overtly around gender faultlines? 9

     McCallum's focus is bounded by the more narrow economic imperatives that flowed from the conflict of business and labour; it is clear that the notion that women "by nature" did not have dependents and could not be breadwinners was a position that had much greater cultural purchase, and one shared both across classes and across the gender divide. As McCallum makes clear, working-class women were not themselves at the forefront for policies that might raise their wages, presumably because they, like the textile worker Valentine Chartrand, saw themselves as secondary wage-earners. ¹⁹ It is working women's relative imperviousness to mobilization around the wage politics of the workplace that forms a second trajectory of analysis in L/LT. How did working-class women and women on the left of the political spectrum address the tension between women's individual right to paid work for equal pay with men and the aspirations of a movement culture that was at the same time embracing a newer conception of the family wage calibrated on the earnings of a single male breadwinner? 10

     In their respective treatments of the "woman question" among Canadian socialists and communists, both Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster have proffered the argument that these movements generally failed to challenge "capitalist patriarchy." ²⁰ Although these radical political movements evinced a commitment to the right of women to economic independence through work, this position remained secondary to what they deemed the more important ideal of a family wage, for the latter they believed contributed better to the achievement of a unified working-class politics of resistance. In a corrective to the historiographic focus upon middle class reform, Kealey has examined the way in which socialist women formulated a critique of capitalism between 1900 and 1914, concluding that Helena Gutteridge remained an exceptional figure in so far as she fostered the notion of work for all women and was largely alone in criticizing the family wage concept for its tendency to marginalize the rights of women both within the home and the labour force. While Gutteridge skilfully linked socialist principles, feminism, and a commitment to the labour movement, the majority of radical women supported protective legislation for working women which continued to exalt the primary role of women as wives and mothers and in this way tended to reinforce the reformist agenda of middle-class female reformers, though, as Kealey makes clear, the sensibilities of working-class women emanated from very different economic familial strategies. ²¹ 11

     In the end, as Kealey suggests, socialist women remained caught between the opposing imperatives of familialism and the concept of the individual wage, a dichotomy, which according to Joan Sangster, continued to constrain both socialists and communists well into the Great Depression. Although the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation [CCF] and the communists took up the issue of women's equality, they too foundered on the issue of equal pay for women because of the hold exerted by the breadwinner ideal even within groups representing unskilled labouring families that could never live up to this ideal. Here cultural and political aims overrode the reality of working-class material conditions. Thus, although there was support for unionizing wage-earning women, for the most part this applied only to single women and, as Sangster demonstrates, housewives were relegated to roles as wives supporting their husbands' goals in labour struggles. ²² Like Strong-Boag and Kealey, Sangster has uncovered long-standing divisions between women based on marital status, thus showing how conflicts among women intersected with gender conflicts over questions of family and work roles. ²³ However, like Kealey, Sangster does make clear that working-class women found empowerment in their role as mothers and housewives, and effectively used what might be castigated as a conservative position for radical ends. Thus while the Communist Party of Canada endorsed a maternalist ethos, it also advocated birth-control. ²⁴ 12

     Sangster has effectively suggested that while the political left may have recognized the crucial role that women could play in developing a broader critique of capitalism, its commitment to a wage for men as heads of families blinded them to the reality that this very domestic ideology was a primary site of women's oppression. But as Margaret Hobbs makes clear, women's groups continued to be split over the question of individualist, equalitarian rights for women and their supposed biological differences, which rendered work for women a necessity and not a right. ²⁵ In their analysis of the "radical agrarian feminist" Agnes MacPhail, ²⁶ who endorsed the right for both women and men to work as a means to personal fulfilment, Margaret Hobbs and Terry Crowley show how "the equal rights tradition proved more resilient than one might assume." ²⁷ Even during the Great Depression, when the high rates of male unemployment revivified the discourse that prescribed that women (and most notably married women) should work only out of necessity and should relinquish their jobs for the preeminent right to work of men, the legacy of the equalitarian argument survived. Although it is true that equal rights claims were not wholly eliminated from public discourse during the 1930s, because of the overriding concern with the demasculinization of the workforce, to have any public currency they had to be embedded in the language of necessity. As Hobbs concludes, however, the view that women worked only when necessary did not represent a retreat from feminist principles, and indeed, after the 1940s, equalitarian arguments resurfaced with greater impact, largely, one suspects, because of the weakening hold of familialist economic strategies and a greater emphasis upon individual rights within the broader political and economic culture of postwar Canada. ²⁸ 13

Household and Workplace: Resolving Dichotomies

However much Kealey and Sangster conceptualized working-class women's commitment to maternalism as a source of radicalism, their emphasis had been on the equation between left-wing political action and women's paid employment as the primary means for achieving equal citizenship rights with men. In this view, capitalism had created the economic divisions of labour between men and women that in turn induced labouring men to erect barriers against the competition of women to their wages and skill. Hence the emancipation of women lay in overriding the inequalities created by capitalism through seeking equal employment rights with men. As early as 1980, Wayne Roberts argued for a less self-contained approach to the industrial world by calling for analyses of the private world of working-class family life and the wider community culture that connected lower middle-class, skilled and unskilled workers together. ²⁹ 14

     The most innovative work that drew together the previously separate worlds of unpaid and paid labour, however, was that by Bettina Bradbury, who radically transformed our reading of gender divisions within the workplace by expanding a conception of work to include the unpaid labour of women within the home and by focussing upon the proto-industrial family. As Bradbury maintained, "to understand the family economy of the working class in this period of early industrial capitalism, it is necessary to go beyond a simple consideration of the sufficiency of wages, to put aside the equation of work with wages labour, and to examine other ways in which survival could be ensured or enhanced." ³⁰ Further, she interrogated previous assumptions that the sexual division of labour was created only within the economic relations of capitalism by elucidating the gendered patterns of labour within the family prior to the arrival of a mature industrial capitalism. Moreover, by showing how working-class families in Montréal, Canada's most industrialized city, used various strategies beyond simply wage labour to sustain the household economy, such as gardening and taking in boarders, Bradbury suggested that industrialization was not a wholistic and all-encompassing process, but that traditional family economies persisted alongside industrialization and these practices were not simply absorbed into or eviscerated by this juggernaut. Indeed, by focussing upon the family economy, Bradbury revised earlier trajectories of industrialization which placed undue emphasis upon paid labour, and that concluded that the separation of the home and workplace was irrevocably established by the 1850s. ³¹ By suggesting that "wage dependence became almost total by the end of the century," Bradbury has paved the way for new understandings, beyond the mere presence of women in the workplace, of the reasons why the breadwinner ideal surfaced within organized labour at this time. ³² Also, her work reaffirms the view that the working-class family had evolved its own visions of domesticity which were created by economic realities beyond the mere cultural emulation of the middle-classes. ³³ 15

     Above all, the critical analysis that Bradbury has brought to the study of working-class families has created a historical space for those women who by virtue of either their father's or husband's occupation considered themselves members of the working-class, but who did not enter the world of paid employment outside the home. Thus, for women, conceptions of class may function differently than for men and are not simply bounded by production in the workplace. By redirecting historical scholarship away from women in paid labour or union/radical activists, Bradbury has called on historians to focus on the lived experience of the majority of working-class women and, in this way, has exhorted historians to discard the "naturalized" theoretical dichotomies between paid and unpaid labour for women. This means taking the working-class household economy as the primary site for gender analysis in order to understand the broader marginalization of the majority of women within labour historiography. ³⁴ More than previous women's historians, Bradbury has thus forcefully challenged the emulation of paid labour as the touchstone of class experience and indeed the masculinist labour paradigm itself. 16

     In an equally seminal article, Gail Cuthbert Brandt shows the important role that families played first of all in placing members in the workplace, but more significantly, she posited explanations that did not rely upon essentialist notions of women's passivity as to why women were not more active in labour unions. By using the life-course as a conceptual framework, Brandt shows how girls entered the cotton mills in Québec around fourteen years of age, and upon marriage they left work only to return after their childbearing years and when their children were older. While not dismissing the impact of the cultural conception of women's work as secondary, a designation that allowed employers to pay women less, Brandt also highlights the intermittent nature of women's work patterns that were dictated by family needs, be it the parental or conjugal family. She also demonstrates the interconnectedness of women's labour to family economic strategies, challenging the often oversimplified view of the link between earning wages and personal autonomy. ³⁵ Significantly, her analysis illustrates the persistence of the family wage concept until the 1940s. ³⁶ Rather than drawing distinctions by gender alone, between the familialism of women and the individualism of the male breadwinner, Brandt shows the seamlessness of the idealization of the male breadwinner that was in turn suspended upon the experience of familial economic interdependency. ³⁷ 17

     Building upon the foundational work of both Bradbury and Brandt, Yukari Takai has further developed the historiographical trajectory emphasizing the degree to which industrial wage-earning was a continuation of traditional familial strategies. In her analysis of the life-course of wage earning among single French Canadian immigrant women in the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills, Takai emphasizes the degree to which women's lives were constrained not by capitalism itself but by the system of familial obligation. Like Bradbury and Brandt, Takai cautions historians against too easily concluding that the liberal individualism of the market economy directly altered the mind-set of workers once they entered the industrial workplace. As Takai makes clear, though one might be paid individual wages by the late 19th century, whereas previously children's wages were paid to the head of the family, women workers did not perceive work in individualistic terms. Rather, the family economy determined their entry into the workforce, they continued to live at home, and their wages were given over to their parents. In families where widows headed households, the primary wage was contributed by children and it was in these families in particular where the lack of marital choice was peculiarly gender specific, as daughters of widows often remained unmarried and continued to work. Because of their longevity of work in the factory they more often moved into skilled positions, despite the persistence of gendered conceptions of labour. ³⁸ 18

     Similarly influenced by the positioning of the household as a primary site of working-class identity, Magda Fahrni, through an investigation of the relationship between mistresses and their female domestic servants, has shown how class boundaries were created within the home and not simply by the labour processes of industrialization and, further, that women were active in upholding those class relations. While on the one hand Fahrni demonstrates how working-class and middle-class notions of respectability were not rigidly defined within the parameters of household service, she has also argued that the more harmonious class relations that were encompassed by paternalism were radically altered by industrialization. She thus concludes that by the late 19th century in "a society where dominant conceptions of respectability largely excluded poor women, immigrant women, and often single women," servants were especially marginalized. ³⁹ Much of Fahrni's evidence for this conclusion rest upon sources such as court records, which tend to overdetermine "deviance," and thus her conclusions about industrialization as a modernizing and marginalizing force must be read alongside other findings, such as those of Takai, which emphasize substantial areas of continuity and tradition in the way work and family roles framed the experience of single women. What Fahrni's evidence indicates, however, is the degree to which domestic service was an important vehicle for middle-class consciousness, and it is in this context that the protests of mistresses must be read. ⁴⁰ As Fahrni has made clear, the household was a primary site where inequality was both experienced and negotiated. Following on this, it is evident that the "deviant" behaviour of young, female servants that Fahrni outlines, suggests that working-class resistance was conditioned by the form of one's workplace relations and that the form of female protest and resistance to forms of exploitation may have been as a result more individualistic. While collectivist forms of protest have been given a great deal more attention by historians, this "personalizing of class" is also crucial. ⁴¹ When the majority of women continued to work in domestic service well into the 20th century, it is of the utmost importance to consider these gendered avenues of protest beyond "the prism of the strike." ⁴² 19

     As more women (and especially those who were married) have entered the workforce in ever greater numbers since the late 1950s, unpaid labour for women has become even more hidden and subject to a pejorative public discourse. ⁴³ When combined with a feminist-activism that equates paid work with social and political equality for women, this has created a presentism and a gendered blindness, making the recovery of other forms of empowerment by women in the past particularly difficult. Such a conceptual difficulty is aggravated by the fact that as union activism becomes more unified and occupies a wider political space, the printed sources such organizations generate likewise privilege paid labour; politicized class mobilization can exist only through the wage nexus. For the most part homework has thus been relegated to the realm of the pre-industrial, and despite historians such as Brandt, Bradbury, and Takai who allude to the persistence of hidden work in the home, historians of 20th-century labour have for the most part seen housewives as the "other" and as constituting the ultimate obstacle to a form of class solidarity that is non-gendered. Nancy M. Forestall and Marilyn Porter have recovered women's self-perceptions of their family and work roles through an analysis of oral history evidence. ⁴⁴ In carrying the household-workplace model into the 20th century, Nancy Forestall argues that the majority of the women interviewed in her study wished to leave work to be married, and indeed were glad of it. Yet these women continued to supplement the earnings of their husbands by taking up part-time unskilled labour such as sewing and cleaning, which on the surface, tended to preserve the gender division between workplace and the home: paid labour was undertaken within the household space and it was engaged in on the assumption of the primacy of male breadwinner support. 20

     While some feminist historians might conclude that these women were merely passive and lacked political consciousness, the work of Marilyn Porter reaches divergent conclusions. In her study of the fishing economy of Newfoundland, where gender divisions were at their most extreme, and where male authority in the family was clearly dominant, women ironically experienced little marital violence. How, Porter asked, did this come about? In part, Porter relies upon the older argument that women did indirectly contribute to the economy of the household and thereby preserved a modicum of power, but more tellingly she has attributed the strong belief of Newfoundland women that they were independent and that the gender status within the family was egalitarian to a rigid sex segregation within the economy, cultural life, and the family. Gender control was a function of single-sex sociability and women used separate spheres to express their autonomy. Thus, Porter concludes, the women of outport Newfoundland "have used their vital roles in initial settlement and in the fish producing economy not to destroy the sexual division of labour but to establish its boundaries in such a way as to confirm their control over at least their own spheres." ⁴⁵ 21

Patriarchy and Capitalism

     In accounting for what they call the double inferiorization of women in Montréal between the wars, Marie Lavigne and Jennifer Stoddart wrote in 1977: "La division sexuelle du travail confie aux hommes le soin de gagner un salaire tandis que les femmes sont destinées au travail domestiques non-salaire. Quand les femmes doivent assumer un travail rémunéré, leur spécialisation obligatoire dans la travail domestique justifie une inégalite systématique part rapport aux travailleurs." ⁴⁶ Where Lavigne and Stoddart emphasize the way in which women's unequal status vis-à-vis men was formed within social relations outside of economic structures, Margaret E. McCallum, in her analysis of sex segregation within the Ganong Brothers confectionary factory, places greater emphasis upon the wage system itself as the determining factor in creating continuities in the gender division of labour. ⁴⁷ Michelle Martin, however, in her analysis of job segregation within Bell Telephone, concludes that female subordination within the workplace was an extension of structures of female subordination which had been previously institutionalized within the family. As she observes, it was this prior subordination of women that allowed and indeed created the expansion of capitalist economic relations and not vice versa. ⁴⁸ 22

     A similar debate ensued internationally over whether patriarchy or capitalism created unequal gender relations. Much of this interpretive contrast remains blocked in an unproductive analytic impasse, in so far as defenders of both positions accuse each other of essentialism. While it has been valuable to criticize the dual systems approach for not interpreting economic systems as sex-blind, it did nevertheless underscore the fact that patriarchy and its attendant gender relations (which were both conflictual and interdependent) were present prior to capitalism. And while it was important to place gender at the centre of class analysis if one wished to situate family and work within an integrated analytic framework, it is also true as Leon Fink has maintained, that those who advocate the combined treatment of gender and class have often been vague as to how this should be done. For heuristic reasons it may be the case that sometimes these two variables must be kept separate. ⁴⁹ 23

     The discussion has been no less vociferous and no less inconclusive within Canadian historiography. Thus, Robert McIntosh has observed in his study of female needleworkers that "[c]apitalist social relations adapted, used and exploited — but never subsumed — patriarchal attitudes and practises." In this way he sees capitalism and patriarchy as distinct but overlapping. ⁵⁰ For his part, Jacques Ferland has asserted that there existed "a persistent process of interaction between patriarchy and capitalism with a much greater emphasis on the role of men ... in maintaining women's inferiority in the labour market." In delineating the reasons why women participated in strikes, however, Ferland seems to emphasize the differing technological and spatial organizations erected by capitalism rather than the ideological system of patriarchy to explain the gendered structure of labour militancy. Thus he concluded that in those cotton mills where there was less spatial segregation by sex and less dominant craft unionism, there was less gender conflict and more mutuality of class interests. The interests of male employers did not necessarily coincide with those of male employees. Women's protest, he argues, was much like that of other unskilled and semi-skilled workers. ⁵¹ Within capitalist relations, depending on the particular complexion of the workplace, gender conflict does not necessarily ensue, and therefore there is no ironclad or monolithic argument to be made that posits that capitalism and gender always reinforce one another. While historians like Shirley Tillotson have rightly criticized Ferland for underconceptualizing the way in which male workers came to define skill in specifically gendered ways, others, like Christina Burr have sought to decentre the very notion of class by demonstrating that "capitalist organization" in and of itself sought to preserve the gender domination of men over women and that the interests of businessmen for the cheap labour of women were reinforced by the gender exclusions at the core of campaigns for unionization among skilled workers. ⁵² Capitalism, in this scenario, is ineluctably defined by patriarchy and will by necessity create gender conflict. ⁵³ While it is true that such case studies of skilled trades are important in elucidating the way in which the sexual division of labour came about, are they representative? Were printers, as Patrick Duffy has recently shown, peculiarly attached to the promotion of patriarchy above class interests because of the degree to which they connected their high status to their skill? How did the gendered perceptions of work and skill elaborated within the printing trade compare with that within male-dominated workplaces such as steel making? More importantly, the studies of Burr and Tillotson must be read alongside the findings of Ferland in order to concretely situate the way the interplay of technology, skill levels and the labour process itself functioned to produce particular conflictual relationships. 24

     While the conclusions of Burr do not radically dissent from those of feminist historians such as Joan Sangster and Veronica Strong-Boag, Burr has conceptualized her work as a critique of the dual systems approach even though her argument that within the industrial workplace "gender interests prevailed over those of class" seems to create dichotomies where she had hoped to foster an historiographical integration of patriarchal gender relations and those of capitalism. While it is necessary to be mindful of a multiplicity of variables to explain historical processes, and to be attentive to the various environments in which gender hierarchies are created and entrenched, Burr has totalized the experience of men, even those whose economic interests were diametrically opposed, namely employers and employees. One of the problems with a unitary patriarchal-capitalist approach, then, is that it conflates outcomes — namely the marginalization of women workers — with the processes, in which workers were attempting to forge political strategies to oppose capitalist domination. Where British historians have simply concluded that industrialization was itself a gendered process, historians in Canada have attempted to privilege either gender or class, and by doing so have reified gender and have substituted a teleology of gender conflict for the very approaches to class of which they have been so dismissive. If one wishes to assert the existence of multiple identities that gender historians and historians of discourse analysis have advocated, it is necessary likewise to apply these theoretical constructions not simply to deconstructing essentialist notions of class, but to likewise destabilize overly-monolithic concepts of gender. Most importantly of all, as Ellen Scheinberg has postulated, it is absolutely crucial to disentangle the interests of male employers and those of male employees. In a nuanced article that goes beyond both the dualist and unitary approaches, Scheinberg has used the case study of textile workers during World War II, an era when female labour was in high demand, to show how under particular historical circumstances capitalists were willing "to abandon, at least tempoarily, the gender-based work structure when economic conditions rendered it a less profitable option" and how as a result class conflict overrode the gender interests of employers and employees. ⁵⁴ 25

     Although it could be argued that the wartime economy was an aberrant one and thus does not represent the "normal" intersection of gender and class, Scheinberg's work has foreshadowed more recent analyses of gender at work that have focussed not simply upon the way in which either male employers or male employees built ideological and organizational structures that excluded women, but have investigated more specifically the way in which gender identities shaped the very meanings that working men and women placed upon work and family. The focus of Kathleen Canning's investigation of gender in German factories has closely scrutinized how women themselves "intepreted, subverted or internalized" prevailing gender discourses both in the family and at work. In so doing, Canning has effectively placed the cultural and material experience of everyday life within the context of overlapping and competing discourses between social reformers, industrialists, feminists, social democrats, and union men. ⁵⁵ In a similar vein, Joan Sangster seeks to open up previously teleological narratives of class formation by studying the interface of both resistance and accommodation to capitalism in her subtle investigation of the way in which the employers at Westclox in Peterborough were able to use gendered attitudes to women's work to further their paternalist employment policies and how the women themselves understood, negotiated, and sometimes rejected the values of deference and loyalty. Paternalism, as Sangster observed, was "entwined with and aided by gender hierarchy found in the family, wider community and the workplace." And although Sangster conceives of family and workplace as interlocking hierarchies of dominance, she does not see them as necessarily unified structures, for as she has demonstrated they must be interpreted from the perspective by which ordinary workers ascribe meaning to them. ⁵⁶ More significantly, Sangster explicitly frames her investigation of workplace cooperation and conflict within the context of the broader community of Peterborough, and it is the context of community ties that will be most valuable in the future for explaining levels of conflict and resistance rather than limiting one's focus merely to the nexus of capital and labour. For it is through this larger interpretive framework that considerations of family, ethnic relations, and the role of religion can be highlighted and explored. ⁵⁷ 26

     It is this historiographic trajectory, of combining gender discourse with the gendered outlook of workers themselves that forms the basis of Susanne Klausen's analysis of the women who worked in the plywood plant in Port Alberni during the World War II. Although Klausen intended to attribute the persistence of the sexual division of labour to gendered structures inherent in capitalism itself, which saw women merely as a reserve army of labour during the war, her assessment of the actual experiences and outlooks of the women that worked there showed that most women did not question such gendered perceptions of the workplace despite new work experiences. They preferred the single-sex environment which this created, and indeed often turned down promotions that would have given them higher pay and job status but, which would have placed them within a distinctly male work environment. Indeed, it was the very sexual division of labour that formed the basis of the radicalism of these women workers, even though this translated into protests more individualistic than the more collective male-dominanted vehicle of the strike. ⁵⁸ Indeed the interpretive framework constructed by both Sangster and Klausen accords with that of Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, who has recently offered a nuanced explanation as to why the sexual division of labour persisted: "The resulting picture of women in labor politics, is not, then, one of domineering men who built class solidarity on the reification of sexual hierarchy, but rather one of worthy women and men who, for the most part, collaborated to this end because it reaffirmed powerful notions of working-class family, masculinity, and womanhood." ⁵⁹ 27

     In many respects Sangster's analysis has moved distinctly into the realm of gender history, but one that measures the structured discourses within various institutional loci, namely the family, the workplace, and the union, against the sense of self-identity that ordinary workers had created for themselves as means to survive. One trajectory of this new gender perspective has been influenced by discourse analysis in so far as it interprets class and gender as unstable categories constantly redefined and renegotiated, and thus framed within historically specific linguistic structures. From this perspective, historians have demonstrated the ways in which the discursive has constrained and confined behaviour. Through their examination of a warplant newspaper Helen Smith and Pamela Wakewich demonstrate that the new work patterns for young women during wartime remained enmeshed in a "mechanism of ideological continuity." Robert A. Campbell has delineated the ways in which the language underlying the debate on beer parlours in Vancouver served to create a discourse that marginalized groups on the basis of class, gender, sexuality, and race. ⁶⁰ 28

     Those who have taken as their focus the deconstruction of masculinity have been particularly innovative, not the least because in alerting historians to hierarchies within male culture, namely divisions and conflicts by virtue of age, skill, and socio-economic status, they have shown how the behaviour of men is not "reducible to the patriarchal desires of working men." ⁶¹ In investigating a wide range of interpretations of the link between masculinity and work these historians have been able to further expand our grasp of the ways in which sub-divisions within gender intersected with class. More specifically, these gender analyses have been adept at showing not how gender divided class, but the way in which gender itself was utilized to serve and uphold the class interests of working men. Where Christina Burr may have seen gender conflict as destructive of class unity, by disaggregating different meanings of masculinity both within the working- and middle-classes, the new gender historians have shown how gender was implicit in underwriting policies and agendas, and thus have ironically reintroduced the notion of class to a historiographic terrain now characterized by subtle subdivisions by age and skill. As Deborah Stiles has noted in her discussion of the life of a 19th century tanner, class was crucial to the formation of gender identity. ⁶² 29

     If this new gendered interpretation of class is much less wholistic and universalist than previous incarnations, now that it has been reconceptualized as a category with internal gradations which are themselves defined and created by other cultural practices and identities — namely ethnicity, race, religion, community, and family — it is, as Todd McCallum has suggested, no less politicized or engaged. For as his dissection of the political discourse of the One Big Union has shown, it was the very gendered aspect of its concept of work citizenship that gave the movement its political potency. When read beside the findings of Rusty Bitterman, Joy Parr, and Jack Little, who have revealed through their analyses of work during early industrialization, that occupational identities for men were extremely fluid, constantly shifting between farmer and industrial worker, such perspectives enrich our appreciation of how gender and class mesh. In the case of Daniel Spencer Gilman, studied by Little, it was common for male work patterns, especially among the unmarried, to be regularly interrupted, and for their family roles to be ones characterized by dependency upon established household heads. ⁶³ 30

     From this perspective, the work experience and family roles of single men and women in the 19th century appear similar and this fact alone challenges the persistent tendency within labour historiography to view the variable nature of women's work as aberrant. But also, the work of Bitterman and Little points to the need for historians of class to carefully historicize when and under what circumstances concepts of socio-economic gradation became reinterpreted into more distinct work identities and when occupational identities become talismanic for class politics. In other words, if working for wages was seen "as an empowering experience" for both men and women and thus formed the foundation of "class and gender solidarity," — as Robert A. Ventresca has found for the Italian Canadian workers he interviewed, and Julie Guard has revealed in her study of female labour activists in postwar Canada ⁶⁴ — the central questions that must be asked of both gender and class is how historically specific were they and how did particular hegemonic views of work take root in particular spaces and time? While today the paid work of women, even of married women, may no longer be interpreted as exceptional, and women have now achieved a more activist voice in unions, thus effectively placing on their agendas questions of equal pay for equal work, historians of labour must be cautious to avoid mythologizing female militancy. There is a need to be open to those voices that may not fit comfortably within contemporary paradigms of work, such as those Italian men and women who did not feel comfortable with going on strike, whom Ventresca mentions, but whose experience he does not fully incorporate into his analysis, because it calls into question his conclusion that ethnicity and gender reinforced class interests. Historians may be more comfortable when they read studies of the familial determinants that informed the work choices of women in the early phases of industrialization, but the blurring of boundaries that historians like Bettina Bradbury, Gail Cuthbert Brandt, and Yukari Takai have revealed between family, community and the workplace must form the basis of theoretical approaches for the 20th century as well, even though the paid work of women was becoming increasingly normative. Guard's analysis of a particular workplace is excellent in utilizing gender as the primary conceptual framework, and for showing how gender was a catalyst in the creation of class. Historians of the gendered aspects of work in postwar Canada, however, will need to also place their findings in the context of changing family relations and ask how changing patterns of consumption stimulated the creation of the dual breadwinning household. They need to ask in turn how the increasingly dominant pattern of married women in paid work altered gender relations within the home. How did the normative character of women's work further marginalize and hide labour, both paid and unpaid, which was engaged in within the home. Here, too, the issue of how automation, by erasing distinctions between heavy and light work, altered traditional notions of the gendered division of labour must be more fully addressed. Indeed, the way in which technological change was itself a catalyst for creating the division of labour by sex is itself an understudied topic within Canadian labour history, as Jacques Ferland's work suggests. 31

     It is only through an attention to historicism that we can avoid what Steven Maynard has called the "lurking essentialist or fixed understanding of gender" and of class. ⁶⁵ What this calls for in turn is a broad synthesis of the changing gender meanings ascribed to work and an overview that measures and contextualizes work identities through a long period of time, thereby overcoming the tendency to view the particular relations among labour, capital, and gender as either timeless or representative of the whole. Due attention, however, must be also given to the fact that gender is only one element in the way in which men and women perceived both their work and the way in which work related to other social identities. ⁶⁶ The study of changing conceptualizations of work must by necessity examine public discourses within a range of institutions, including the state, labour unions, business, and voluntary associations. It would have to address a sweeping array of social relations, with due attention to the conflictual and consensual contacts with or conceptions of various classes and social groups. Indeed, the way in which people perceive social inequality is not always through class and gender, and it is not always circumscribed by these distinct categories, which may blur into or intersect with others. The concept of class, however, must not be eviscerated from the historical record for the distribution of wealth is a powerful means by which power is exerted in society. ⁶⁷ 32

     The ideal vantage point for explaining and contextualizing gender and class conflicts must thus be broadened. Many of the articles appearing heretofore in L/LT valorize workplace politics, yet to broadly contextualize this important sphere we need more intensive studies of the totality of working-class life, for only through the prism of family can one adequately trace the interplay between self-identities and collectivist action. ⁶⁸ Only if we can understand the way that gender relations are played out within institutions outside the labour process itself (which includes paid and unpaid labour inside and outside the domestic sphere), can we adequately examine the way in which these valuations of social relations which gender informs are either further elaborated, negotiated or constrained within the realm of work and the politics that emerge from it. ⁶⁹ In this way, we can better isolate and weigh the various discourses and material conditions that change the more inert continuities of gender and class and move them towards collective mobilizations and conflicts. ⁷⁰ Such a broad synthesis will locate gender and class within wider community and social/cultural relations, revealing a more integrated range of historical experience, never simply reducible either to gender or class. By taking a longer chronology and wider spatial perspective than most labour studies have undertaken, we can incorporate both the views of Christina Burr and Julie Guard, and explain why at certain moments gender appears to be destabilizing for class unity and at others becomes the impetus for class mobilization. It also involves positing conceptual boundaries that will frame aspects of class identity, which have been shown by new historical research to overlap or intersect with other social identities, be they family, religion, politics, or race, and class consciousness or labour politics, which by virtue of their own imperatives must be constructed upon the language of unity and inclusion. Class conflicts will not simply then be interpolated into culture outside the workplace, culture will not be seen as merely epiphenomenal of economic relations, and in turn other social solidarities, be they characterized by race, religion, or neighbourhood, can also be interpreted in terms of how they undermined or contributed to class organization and politics. By thus theoretically separating class identity from a concept of class consciousness, one can better analyze the various ways in which they intersect, and thus read the relationship in ways that transcend a troubling analytic tendency toward unidirectionality. 33

     To date labour historians have largely imbricated gender into class identity, for they have begun with the notion of class, however defined, as their primary conceptual framework. Gender has, despite the postmodern tendency towards defining a multiplicity of identities, been cast as a sub-set of occupational or workplace identities and for this reason is still set within a masculinist framework. ⁷¹ I would postulate that from a hermeneutic perspective, gender and class (and race) are foundational ways in which people constitute their self-identities, and that they must be then historicized and analyzed with reference to other social identities such as religion, ethnicity, politics, and national consciousness, thus circumventing the criticism that the concept of a multiplicity of identities is too agnostic. ⁷² So to follow the observation of the British historian Keith Snell, the politics of religious congregations will be conflictual along class lines only if there is a prior dynamic of class conflict that already exists in a particular community. ⁷³ To be sure, that one was a committed Christian would restrict the range of an individual's political choices. ⁷⁴ Yet, the fact that a Catholic machinist may work alongside a Baptist may not fissure their mutual commitment to the concept of a living wage, but it could well mean that for such individuals there was more or less continuity between workplace and leisure, between one's public behaviour and the private, insofar as the respective realms of sociability might be quite distinct. ⁷⁵ It is into these complexities of the "moral economy of labor" that gender analysis must delve. ⁷⁶ 34

     Such a trajectory would in turn entail much closer analysis of inter-class relationships and a rigorous study of the middle-classes beyond merely those who owned the means of production. ⁷⁷ And while the question of the ways in which industrialization and unionization were both gendered processes has received a great deal of historical investigation in Canada, gendered attitudes to work and gendered work patterns in the pre-industrial era are all too little understood. It is only through the formation of an historical narrative that brings these two eras into analytic conjuncture, that historians can adequately resolve the debate as to how gender divisions were either created or reinforced by industrial capitalism. 35

     Outside of capitalism and organized labour, the experiences of workers themselves must be seen as pivotal if we are to anchor concepts of both gender and class. As important as public ideologies and hegemonies both within the workplace and within labour politics are for understanding the gendered division of labour, gender functions differently within various economic, social, and cultural contexts. ⁷⁸ If, as historians have shown, interpretations of gender and class were variable, then this must logically lead to an investigation of how these cultural perspectives were appropriated by people whose experience was forged within considerably different material realities. The way inequality was confronted and negotiated by individuals occurred in the workplace, but its implications were experienced first and foremost within the household economy. The weight that individuals ascribed to their roles both within and without the workplace must be fully explored, for only in this way can we resolve the conundrum of Valerie Chartrand. Though she actively fought alongside male workers for better working conditions and wages, and thus for all intents and purposes perceived her rights in much the same way as men, implicitly challenging gendered understandings of the status which accrued to breadwinners, when situating her work within the context of her familial role as wife and mother, Chartrand regarded paid labour not as a right but as a necessity. In thus privileging the primacy of her unpaid work as mother and wife, she positioned herself as the secondary breadwinner. It is these overlapping conceptualizations of work as both necessity and right that were shared in differing degrees by women and by men which may provide one way to understand how gender became embedded within the interconnected but separate realms of individual class identity, and collective workplace activism and labour politics. 36

I would like to thank Michael Gauvreau and Jim Struthers for their comments upon an earlier version of this article. I particularly wish to thank Bryan Palmer, not only for generously inviting me to contribute to this volume, but also for his valuable editorial suggestions.

Notes

¹ Mary H. Blewett, The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910–1960 (Amherst MA 1990), 45–53. On the use of autobiography for uncovering class identities and class consciousness see Mark Traugott, The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley 1993); Alfred Kelly, The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization (Berkeley 1987); Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life-Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill 1995); and David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (London 1981).

² Craig Heron and Bryan Palmer, "Through the Prism of the Strike: Industrial Conflict in Southern Ontario, 1901–14," Canadian Historical Review, 58 (December 1977), 423–58.

³ There is a long list of critics of the telelogical narratives of class formation. See for example Joan W. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," and Bryan D. Palmer, "Response to Joan Scott," International Labor and Working Class History, 31 (Spring 1987); Mari Jo Buhle, "Gender and Labor History," in J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (Dekalb IL 1989), 56, 58, 65; Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, "Farewell to the Working Class?" International Labor and Working-Class History, 57 (Spring 2000), 1–30; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley 1995), 1–5; John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (New York and London 1986), in which he investigates the intersection of class and community as a means to explore both consensus and conflict; Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge 1987); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1840–1914 (Cambridge 1991); Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge 1994), in which he argues that work based cultures are not ubiquitous and class is as much a moral and political category as it is a material one, 12–17; Marc W. Steinberg, "'The Labour of the Country is the Wealth of the Country': Class Identity, Consciousness, and the Role of Discourse in the Making of the English Working Class," International Labor and Working-Class History, 49 (Spring 1996), 3–7, Steinberg stresses the need to integrate language and material life, and thereby create a "moral economy of labor" which includes class, gender, community and political rights; David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York 1999); Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca and London 1996), 6, 12; and Ruth Frager, "Labour History and Interlocking Hierarchies of Class, Ethnicity and Gender: A Canadian Perspective," International Review of Social History, 44 (August 1999), 217–48.

⁴ Bryan D. Palmer, "Most Uncommon Common Men: Craft and Culture in Historical Perspective," Labour/Le Travail (henceforth cited as L/LT), 1 (1976), 10. For a critique of the tendency to seek a unified cultural experience without naming it a masculinist one see "Introduction", in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History (Toronto 1992), xvii–xviii.

⁵ Craig Heron, "The Crisis of the Craftsman: Hamilton's Metalworkers in the Early Twentieth Century," L/LT, 6 (Fall 1980), 7–48.

⁶ Ian McKay, "Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionary Industry During the Last Half of the Nineteenth Century," L/LT, 3 (1978), 86–91.

⁷ For example, although he notes references in the nine hour movement to the "responsibilities of Fathers and Citizens," John Battye ignored the gendered complexion of this language. See "The Nine Hours Pioneers: The Genesis of the Canadian Labour Movement," L/LT, 4 (Fall 1979), 29. Although there was a vociferous campaign by the Imperial Munitions Board to hire large numbers of women during World War I, Myer Siemiatycki makes no mention of this as a crucial factor informing wartime labour protest. See Myer Siemiatycki, "Munitions and Labour Militancy: The 1916 Hamilton Machinists' Strike," L/LT, 3 (1978), 131–41. Even if women workers were not present in particular industries, the fear of women workers in related industries was potent. See Nancy Christie, Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (Toronto 2000), 80–9.

⁸ Joan Sangster, "The 1907 Bell Telephone Strike: Organizing Women Workers," L/LT, 3 (1978), 111, 118–19, 121, and 129. Sangster, in positing a connection between feminization and the persistence of paternalistic business practices, has ably revised the view of H.C. Pentland who believed paternalism was operative only in small-scale industrial enterprises. See H.C. Pentland, "The Canadian Industrial Relations System: Some Formative Factors," L/LT, 4 (Fall 1979), 9–24. Here attention to gender would have greatly enhanced his analysis, in so far as he focusses upon the Master and Servant Act, whose basis was founded upon the relationships prevailing in the pre-modern household, but which in the Canadian context meant a form of largely feminized domestic service.

⁹ Veronica Strong-Boag, "The Girl of the New Day: Canadian Working Women in the 1920s," L/LT, 4 (Fall 1979), 132.

¹⁰ Craig Heron, "The Second Industrial Revolution in Canada, 1890–1930," in Craig Heron and Robert Storey, eds., On the Job: Confronting the Labour Process in Canada (Montréal and Kingston 1986), 52–3.

¹¹ Strong-Boag, "The Girl of the New Day," 137–8.

¹² Graham S. Lowe, "Class, Job, and Gender in the Canadian Office," L/LT, 10 (Fall 1982), 11–37; and Marta Danylewycz and Alison Prentice, "Teachers' Work: Changing Patters and Perceptions in the Emerging School Systems of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Central Canada," L/LT, 17 (Spring 1986), 59–80.

¹³ Strong-Boag, "The Girl of the New Day," 163.

¹⁴ Margaret E. McCallum, "Keeping Women in their Place: The Minimum Wage in Canada, 1910–1925," L/LT, 17 (Spring 1986), 36–7.

¹⁵ Craig Heron, "Factory Workers," in Paul Craven, ed., Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto 1995), 516–20.

¹⁶ The periodization for the institutionalization of the breadwinner ideal is contested. For Britain see Wally Seccombe, "Patriarchy Stabilized: The construction of the male breadwinner norm in nineteenth-century Britain," Social History, 11 (January 1986), 65; H. Land, "The Family Wage," Feminist Review, 6 (Fall 1979), 55–77; and Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850 (London and New York 1998), 5, 147. In a revision of the concept of gender conflict, Carol E. Morgan has demonstrated how both working-class men and women endorsed the concept of the sole breadwinner. See "The Domestic Image and Factory Culture: The Cotton District in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England," International Labor and Working Class History, 49 (Spring 1996), 26–46. On the need to examine working-class male domesticity see Lynn Abrams, "'There was nobody like my Daddy': Fathers, the Family and the Marginalisation of Men in Modern Scotland," Scottish Historical Review, 78, 2 (October 1999), 219–42. On the way the interests of the state, middle-class reformers, organized labour and business intersected to promote the breadwinner ideal in Canada see Nancy Christie, Engendering the State. For New Zealand see Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch 2000).

¹⁷ Sonya O. Rose, "Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The Language of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers' Strike of 1878 in Britain," Gender and History, 5 (Autumn 1993), 384–9; Anna Clark, "The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s," Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 62–88; and Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffray: Rural industry and the sexual division of labor in a French village, 1750–1850 (Cambridge 1986), 199. The strength of Gullickson's work is that she examines the notion of gender conflict in terms of broader community patterns of work. In Canada, considerations of gender at work must also be seen in terms of the broader structure of work, much of which was in extractive and heavy industry, and thus largely male. By contrast, in England, the process of industrialization was itself gendered because of the dominance of textile industries, which drew in large number of women. There was a similar pattern in the United States. See for example Mary Blewett, "Deference and Defiance: Labor Politics and the Meanings of Masculinity in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England Textile Industry," Gender and History, 5 (Fall 1993), 398–415. In the early 19th century the central fissure in the shoemaking industry was between home and factory workers. On this point see Mary Blewett, Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana and Chicago 1988). Laura L. Frader in "Engendering Work and Wages: The French labor Movement and the Family Wage," in Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca and London 1996), 146, Frader has argued that unlike British workers, the French did not as uniformly use their role as breadwinners to define their right to higher wages. This in turn paved the way for family allownces in France. On this question see Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France 1914–1945 (Cambridge 1993). Generally speaking the trend in working-class historiography is to view gender conflict as much more episodic than historians previously assumed and points to the need for specific contextualization which takes into consideration greater emphasis upon different workplace environments. In addition, capitalism itself must not be viewed as monolithic. On this point see Chris Middleton, "Women's labour and the transition to pre-industrial capitalism," in Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London 1995), 181–206.

¹⁸ For very different views of working-class masculinity over time see Pat Ayers, "The Making of Men: Masculinities in Interwar Liverpool," in Margar