Employment, Relief and the Breadwinner Ideal: A Historiography of the Great Depression in Canada

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Hollingsworth and Tyyska discuss the employment of women in their article, both wage work and work performed outside of the “paid labour force.” (14). They also look at work discrimination of women based on gender and marital status. They argue that disapproval of married women working for wages during the Depression was expressed not only by those in position of power, such as politicians, but also by the general public and labour unions. They suggest that the number of women in the workforce increased as more young wives stayed working until the birth of their first child and older women entered the workforce in response to depression based deprivation. Hollingsworth and Tyyska also give examples of work that married women did that was an extension of their domestic duties such as babysitting for working mothers or taking in laundry. They also state that some women took in boarders, sold extra produce from gardens, or ran make-shift restaurant operations out of their homes. Baillargeon also mentions the work that women did in order to earn money to help care for their families. The women she interviewed did many of the same things mentioned by Hollingsworth and Tyyska at home, only a few were employed outside the home. In several cases the husbands of the women did additional work on top of their regular jobs. Srigley looks at women’s employment in terms of the effects of intersecting factors of race, ethnicity, marital status, gender and class. She argues that: “Anglo-Celtic dominance created both privileges and disadvantages for female workers who had differing access to employment.” Srigley states that: “Canadian feminist historians . . . have paid significantly less attention to race than to gender as an analyti... ... middle of paper ... ...r 1998):466-491, accessed February 23rd, 2014, http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libproxy. uwinnipeg.ca/ehost/detail?vid=4&sid=ad10fcc5-3639-419d-a39f 901114630 86e%40 sessionmgr4002&hid= 4106&bdata =# db=ahl&AN=1093421 Katrina Srigley, “‘In case you hadn’t noticed!’: Race. Ethinicity, and Women’s Wage-Earning in a Depression-Era City,” Labour/ Le Travail, Vol. 55 (Spring 2005): 69-105, accessed February 23rd, 2014, http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libproxy. uwinnipeg.ca /ehost/detail?vid=8&sid=ad10fcc5-3639-419d-a39f-90111463086e %40 sessionmgr4002&hid=4106&bdata=#db=ahl&AN=44182314 Eric Strikwerda, “‘Married Men Should, I Feel, be Treated Differently’: Work, Relief, and Unemployed Men on the Urban Canadian Prairie, 1929-32,” Left History Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring/ Summer 2007): 30-51, accessed February 23rd, 2014, https://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/lh/issue/current

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