"Substitute Mothers," "Rehabilitative Mothers": Historical Framings of State-Funded Homemakers in Ontario, Canada, 1950s-1970s

• In Event: 20881 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Labor in Global Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, I draw upon archival newspapers, provincial Hansard, Toronto municipal records, and submissions to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women to analyze how “homemaking” is constructed/work, worker, recipient are devalued/invisibilized during the first decades of the state’s funding of “homemaking.” During the early and mid-late twentieth century, state-funded “homemaking” was constructed as a “paid mother” in contrast to domestic work, social work, and nursing. I argue that during this period, paid “homemaking” was a gendered racial project (Omi and Winant 2015) within a settler-colonial context in which state-funded, not-profit agency employed “homemakers” were constructed as “good” white mature women whose work either maintained “good” nuclear families (1950s-1960s) or disciplined “problematic” households (1960s-1970s). This frame perpetuated earlier white women’s organizations’ social gospel orientation towards volunteer homemaking and home nursing, and reinforced a distinction between “homemakers” and domestic workers with the advent of gendered and racialized immigration programs such as the Caribbean Domestics Scheme introduced in 1955. During this early period of the Homemakers and Nurses Services (HMNS) program, the workers are visibilized through maternalist discourses (Boris and Kleinberg 2003), yet the material conditions of their work are framed as voluntary sacrifice. This paper is part of a broader project analyzing how the devaluation of the work is connected to the devaluation of both the worker and the recipient.

Author

• Patricia Roach, University of Toronto