AFemale Economyanalyses how women disposed of their labour during the century from 1870 to 1970 in one of Canada’s prairie provinces Manitoba. It describes women’s work both paid and unpaid, within family and without. Although the book arises out of the work women in a diverse community situated in the geographic centre of Canada, it allows us to see in miniature what women were doing in Western industrializing economies from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Naturally the history of Manitoba has some features peculiar to itself. A pre-industrial fur trade lingered into the twentieth century, and industrial-scale agriculture dominated...

Who were the women of Manitoba?

Manitoba in the late nineteenth century was a society undergoing kaleidoscopic change in size and composition. Even its geography was unstable. In 1870 it was a small southern rectangle of about 14,340 square miles, known as the “postage-stamp province.” Not until 1912, were the boundaries fixed, extending up to Hudson Bay in the northeast and by then encompassing 250,000 square miles.¹ In 1870 the recorded population was 2,4,000, but by 1901 immigration had increased it tenfold. There were a few small towns and one major city, Winnipeg, with a population of almost 50,000. Immigrants...

“Women are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying,” wrote Harriet Taylor in 1833.¹ Her future husband, John Stuart Mill, was therefore repeating a commonplace when he stated financial dependency and household work were women's lot life.² But the boundaries and structure of the household have not been constant through history. In the nineteenth century the work of richer men's wives involved substantial management responsibilities few tasks of manual labour. In families with fewer resources, however, the wife often needed to earn cash in addition to looking after her family.

In the past, women’s work often...

Formal education provided the foundation for a woman’s future worrk. Successive generations of girls enjoyed varied education opportunities the century 1870–1970. The quantity and quality of a girl’s schooling depended much on her native wit and proximity to trained teachers. important factors in the early years of the period were her ethnic her family’s religion and form of livelihood, and how long she lived in the province. Education was also related to the dominant approach of provincial governments. The issue of equal opportunty in education for boys and girls was rarely raised publicly before 1970.

One milestone in Manitoba...

Domestic economy for John Stuart Mill meant “keeping the family regularly supplied with what its wants require, and securing, with any amount of means, the greatest possible quantity of physical comfort and enjoyment.”¹ Making a home for her family was the first call the labour of the typical adult woman. As the Winnipeg alderman, Margaret McWilliams, declared in 1934: “A married woman’s first job run her house and family, and not until she has learned to do that smoothly that her absence for a meal does not upset the comfort of home, should she take an outside job.”² Almost all...

For most of the century 1870-1970 in Manitoba, most people lived in rural areas, and most of them lived and worked on farms.¹ But women’s work on farms suffered the same fate as women’s work in the household. Transparently obvious, it was invisible to official recorders who fell “victim to male bias” in their indifference to depicting women's work in agriculture.²

The agricultural work of First Nations women suffered from another sort of bias in the accounts of historians recording their society before 1870. Observers noted that First Nations women in southern areas of Canada, such as the Ojibwa (or...

Most women who worked for pay in Manitoba before 1970 did so maids, saleswomen, office workers, factory workers, teachers, or Over time, women’s options increased, even though many features of the early twentieth-century labour force remained familiar.

In 1968, in Canada, Sylvia Ostry noted that “the adult male is expected to work throughout most of his adult life ... Few women, however, work throughout their lives ... The working life of most women characterized by discontinuity: they may enter and leave the labour several times over the course of their lives.”¹ Such discontinuity characteristic of women in the labour force...

“Opportunities for Women in Public Service” was the title of a speech at Banff in 1938 by Margaret Me Williams. The only woman alderman on Winnipeg City Council, she had been invited to address nineteenth annual convention of the Quota Club International, a women’s organization committed to community service and international peace. While paying tribute to the traditional strength of women voluntary associations, she identified increasing employment opportunities for women in “all work which is done directly for human persons” and also exhorted women to be bolder in entering “the elected services.” Public service was the touchstone of a new...

In 1870 everyone agreed that all women’s work related, in one way or another, to motherhood. Motherhood was situated within a family. The most elementary division of labour was for the woman to do her mothering while the father fulfilled the patriarchal role of provider. Girls knew that when they grew up they would leave the parental family to marry and form a new household with a husband. This behaviour was learned and transmitted from one generation to the next in the family and in countless other institutions and ways of behaving.

It was understood that there would be times...