Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism by Joan Sangster

Author:Joan Sangster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UBC Press

Anderson had a personal and political understanding of the need for child care for working mothers. The life story of daycare activist Pat Schultz offers a final glimpse of transformations in post-war culture and women’s lives. Schultz came from an immigrant, working-class background, though one steeped in a sense of pride in the dignity of labour. It was a short step to socialist politics: in 1952, at eighteen, she joined the CCF but within a few years moved leftwards, becoming active in a revolutionary socialist group, the League for Social Action. In 1972, she joined the feminist Toronto Women’s Caucus.

Asked in a documentary film to describe life in the 1950s and early 1960s, she recalled both the political repression of the Cold War and the overwhelming assumption of male superiority, simply taken for granted and internalized by women. “Heterosexuality” was also assumed to be the only conceivable choice; she did not see bisexual and lesbian relations in the realm of possibility. Women imagined themselves “as second best” she remembers; even if they secretly thought women should be equal, “our important relationships were with men … In fact, it was better to be a man. Why relate to women when they were second best?”99 As she and others recall in the documentary, there was tremendous social pressure for women to stay home with children: they were told that was “right and proper” even if it drove them literally “crazy.”

As a single, working mother, Schultz’s experience of workplace subordination bore a striking similarity to the complaints of many women who wrote to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. As a clerical worker, she remembers, “we trained men who were paid more than us, then became our supervisors.” Feminism made her realize just how much women were getting “screwed,” how angry they should be: it “made me feel angry about all the things in my life that I didn’t like but didn’t know I was angry about.” The film memoir makes it clear that feminism was profoundly transformative for her, both politically and personally, though she remained a socialist feminist committed to “human” liberation and working-class struggles and especially to the issue for which she became best known: quality, accessible child care for all working parents.

Schultz, Brown, Anderson, and Jewett came from different backgrounds – immigrant, racialized, working class, middle class – yet they shared a sense of suffocating gender prohibitions of the fifties. Others too recall the punishing double standard, the overwhelming assumption of heteronormativity, the limited, gendered job prospects, the dampening of ambition in girls. The sought-after honour in my high school in the sixties was to be crowned beauty queen; high-achieving girls became nurses, never doctors; and “good” girls did not have “premarital sex” (a term we would see as quaint today), not the least because birth control and abortion were illegal, a glaring injustice addressed by the RCSW.

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