| This thesis focuses on women's relationship to employment, unemployment, and social policy in Canada in the 1930s. This decade, popularly dubbed the "dirty thirties," has been mythologized perhaps more than any other in North American history, largely through masculine images imprinted on the popular imagination: images of men "riding the rods," for example, or standing in bread lines. Women have either been absent from these images, or they have been straightjacketed as dependents of men in two roles, that of the "martyr mother" and the "dutiful daughter.";The presumptions of female dependency that have marked the historical imagination were profoundly influential during the decade itself. The economic crisis, understood by economists, politicians, and the vast majority of the public to be caused by staggering levels of male unemployment, was accompanied by a crisis of social relations, a "gender crisis," signified especially by the revival of a broad-based anti-feminism aimed at reinforcing the family wage ideal. Social policy responses to the Depression bear the unmistakable imprint of these social and economic tensions centering on gender identities and roles. In these years, as governments slowly and reluctantly accepted more responsibility for the income security of Canadians out of work, the groundwork was laid for the emergence in the next decade of the more substantive policies associated with the arrival of the modern welfare state. By looking at the social and economic context of the Depression we see the conditions under which Canadians committed themselves to a welfare state fully divided along gender as well as class lines.;After an introduction that reviews some of the key debates taken up in the thesis, particularly those involving the gendered development of modern welfare states, I look at the right to work debate that framed much of the policy response to the Depression, exploring first the nature of the opposition to women workers and then, in a separate chapter, the arguments of the few who supported women's right to earn. The next several chapters engage in a gendered analysis of the relief policies and other initiatives intended to forestall both economic and social disaster. The thesis shifts from here into the related area of unemployment statistics, looking in one chapter at the gendered assumptions embedded in the very concepts of employment and unemployment and their codification in government statistics. Finally, I spring from this conceptual discussion into an analysis of the shifting nature of the female labour force in the thirties to come to some conclusion about the impact that discriminatory attitudes and policies had on women's actual location in the labour force. |
