Gender Segregation in the Canadian Workplace

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer refers to papers that help to explain gender segregation in the Canadian workplace in the 20th century and subsequent developments including the Canadian Labor Movement's gradual attention to women and developments seeing women more often in unionized environments that lessened gender divisions. The writer notes that all of the articles are helpful to an understanding of topics broader than matters of labor and women for they allow glimpses of a Canadian society and culture quite transformed. The writer maintains that each paper should probably be read with consideration of all that the Canadian state did not provide to generic citizens or workers, imagining the orientations of workers, and employers, to what was acceptable or desirable, and possible, in a post-colonial economy of much alteration between the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century.

Outline:
Introduction
Graham S. Low on Clerical Work, 1901-1931
Craig Heron, Changes to 1945 and Beyond
Into the Present - a Reflection

From the Paper:

"Women were associated with family roles, first and foremost and as was true for another generation, those able to pursue professions usually did not marry. The under-reported women doctors graduated by several Ontario universities after the 1880s, for instance, chose their vocations ahead of family life, a convention then respected. Low's clerical workers of the business sector did not expect or particularly want advancement, but learnable jobs providing income and some security so as to maintain their household roles, too."
"By the end of World War I, women attended business colleges where they learned stenography. Low's article is of a kind focused on women's labour in relation to capitalism, of course, so unless a reader is curious, there can be no wider awareness of women who were performing differently in the public sphere, not the least of which were more than 4,000 Canadian military nurses serving on the Western Front and in the Middle East through the course of World War II. Of course, Low's point is to indicate how women became expected as office workers of particular kind, low paid and without advancement. Their situations were common but by no means general from 1901 to 1931."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Heron, Craig. (1996). The Giant Tamed, in The Canadian Labour Movement - a Brief History. 2nd edition. Toronto: James Lorimer, 58-84.
• Laxer, R. (1976). Ontario Teachers Set the Pace, in Canada's Unions. Toronto: Lorimer.
• Low, G.S. (1986). Women, Work and the Office - the Feminization of Clerical Occupations in Canada, 1901-1931, in V. Strong-Boag and A.C. Fellman. Eds. Rethinking Canada - the Promise of Women's History. Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 107-122.
• Montero, G. (1979). Madeleine Parent - Valleyfield's Textile Workers, 1946, in We Stood Together - First Hand Accounts of Dramatic Events in Canada's Labour Past. Toronto: Lorimer, 113-136.
• (1979). Grace Hartman - Organizing Public Service Workers in the Sixties, in We Stood Together, 183-203.

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