Social policy and the women's movement in Canada: Why the women's movement has not been able to place the issue of family-based social programming on the political agenda

The initial assumption of this thesis is that family-based social programming is harmful to women--i.e. it reinforces their status as economic dependents and as secondary workers in the labour force--and therefore social programs should take a disaggregationist approach by employing the individual, and not the family-household as the basic unit of application. Why then has the women's movement in Canada not been successful in placing the demand for disaggregation on the political agenda? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that there has been a lack of concensus within the women's movement concerning the value of this approach in improving the lives of women. But the part of the explanation that I focus on is the transformative effect that the process of engaging in social welfare questions has had on the women's movement. In engaging in social welfare issues, the women's movement has been drawn into the world of the social policy community, and therefore into a meaning system or "universe of political discourse" that is thoroughly embedded in the ideology of the family. Feminism has been integrated into the social welfare discourse, but in a way that has not challenged its familialist underpinnings. The prevailing discourse on poverty, which is the substance of social welfare discourse in Canada, relies on a family-based notion of poverty, and therefore reinforces the familialism that is pervasive elsewhere in the discourse. In this ideological context a reform such as disaggregation, that entails an individually-based notion of poverty, would not be recognized and no reasonable actor would come forward with such a demand.