Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate in Canada, 1970–1995

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

Since the early 1970s, a segment of the women’s movement in Canada has
tried to improve the lot of all women by shifting entitlement from
family units to individuals, while at the same time highlighting the
social individual and attending to the value of the unpaid caring and
domestic work that women disproportionally do. Wendy McKeen charts the
course of this strategy as it played out in the context of the
diminishing support for the welfare state between 1970 and 1995. Relying
on discourse analysis, notions of agency, and policy community theory,
she explores the meso-terrain of policy development, primarily at the
national level.

She argues that by the late 1970s the women’s movement agenda had
become preoccupied with issues of women’s poverty, and in particular
the poverty of single mothers—which, in turn, was narrowed to child
poverty in the mean-spirited climate of the 1990s. Over the same period,
mainstream women’s advocacy groups such as the National Action
Committee (NAC) and the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women
(CACSW) moved from the margins to the centre of the federal
policy-making community and back again to the margins. NAC, with its
emphasis now on challenging the neo-liberal agenda, makes its alliances
with organizations outside of the political mainstream, while the CACSW
was disbanded by the Liberal government in 1995.

McKeen is clear about her own position on these developments. She
argues that the decision to settle for half a loaf that yielded targeted
funding of the “truly needy” left the women’s movement struggling
to find a language to advance gender equality and social justice. She
maintains that social programs “should offer women a genuine
alternative to marriage and the family through the ability to form
autonomous households,” and it is this position that drives her
analysis. While there will be those who will disagree with McKeen about
the goals and strategies of what has always been a movement
characterized by diversity, they will find this a rigorously argued,
thought-provoking, and useful analysis of feminism in Canada over the
past few decades.