Book review/Compte rendu

Mary Kinnear. A Female Economy: Women’s Work in a Prairie Province 1970-1970. Montréal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 215.

Reviewed by Nancy Sheehan

Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 11:2 (Fall/automne 1999)

In Mary Kinnear’s own words,

I take women who had historical lives and see how they experience the past through their work—the women themselves are at the centre of my analysis. I describe first who the women in Manitoba were and then the cultural, economic expectations they were supposed to meet. I assess women’s education and training, their domestic and farm work, their participation in the paid labour force, and their volunteer public service.

Kinnear defines “work” as any activity culminating in a service or product, whether or not that activity is paid. Beyond the orthodox criterion of payment, work thus includes farming, child-rearing, housework and volunteer public service. Kinnear relies on Nancy Cott’s definition of feminism—belief in equality with men, a conviction that gender roles are socially constructed, and recognition of gender consciousness—but makes it clear that prairie women in this period were especially affected by ethnicity, class, marriage, geographic location, and immigrant status. Although prairie society was predominantly British, attitudes were coloured by cultural norms from Eastern Europe. Women sometimes kept their marital status a secret, and some women of Jewish extraction hid this part of their identity. Kinnear’s use of definitions helps to show links between these various factors.

Kinnear emphasizes one essential difference between rural and urban living. Contrary to the popular assumption that farm wives had a more difficult role than women living in urban areas, she argues that rural women saw themselves as equal partners with their husbands, who well knew that the family could not survive economically without women’s work. Although urban areas saw greater mechanization of household tasks coupled with higher standards of cleanliness, women who stayed at home while their husbands went out to waged occupations were not considered equal partners.

Education and training were crucial to women who wanted to improve their status and gain access to the paid economy. Kinnear cites a number of milestones: the introduction of compulsory education (with English as the single language of instruction) in 1916; curriculum development during the interwar years to include courses in vocational education, domestic science, and home economics; and post-World War II expanded accessibility and greater standardization of educational opportunity. Most young women did get an elementary education, but few went on to the secondary level. Career opportunities for independent women consisted chiefly of nursing and teaching—both poorly paid and conducted under strict male supervision. As the economy changed, women were able to take up other employments: sales jobs in stores like Eaton’s and Simpson Sears, and clerical work, as type-writing became prominent and acceptable.

Kinnear stresses the gendered nature of work. Women were housekeepers and mothers first, even when employed outside the home. Women were considered to be dependent on their fathers and their husbands. That there were single women and single mothers was viewed as simply unfortunate.

By 1968, much had changed. The Royal Commission on the Status of Women treated women as independent agents who deserved improved opportunities to be self-supporting. It argued that women were responsible for dependents and entitled to allowances, pensions, and income from social security programs. But Kinnear argues that despite the Royal Commission of 1970, most women were still viewed as housekeepers with secondary occupations outside the home. They were teachers, working under male principals and boards of trustees, nurses doing what male doctors ordered, salesclerks in stores managed by men, or domestic servants in homes supported by a male breadwinner. As Kinnear notes, it has taken the rest of the century to achieve equal status for women—and even now that status may not be as widely accepted as one might wish.

One flaw in this otherwise comprehensive study of women’s work is that the section on professional occupations, particularly medicine and law, is very brief. It may be argued this is appropriate, given the lack of opportunities for women to enter those occupations before the last quarter of the century.

A Female Economy is a well-written and well-documented examination of women’s work in one Canadian province over a century, but whose insights have far wider application. As the first woman in the University of Manitoba’s History Department, Mary Kinnear realized early that women had not been written into history and how their contributions, economic and otherwise, were neglected. In some ways this book presents her quest to understand the role of women in the paid and unpaid economy. It is a superb effort.

Nancy M. Sheehan
University of British Columbia

Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 11:2 (Fall/automne 1999)