Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920-1960

Rebecca Murdock is a lawyer with the Toronto firm Ryder Wright Blair &
Doyle, Barristers and Solicitors.

Anyone versed in contemporary women’s issues will grasp the themes in
this book with a sense of familiarity and frustration. Women’s
relation to waged labor has not changed much since 1920. We are still
fighting for a decent wage and better working conditions, issues at the
forefront of the 1937 Dominion Woollens strike in Peterborough, Ontario.
Similarly, the struggle for equal pay for work of equal value continues
today as it was launched by female workers at Canadian General Electric
in the years following World War II. Occupational gender segregation
persists, although its causes are viewed differently today than they
were by pre- and postwar factory owners.

Earning Respect is at its strongest when Sangster places political and
social trends decisively within the small-town context. For instance,
she comments that “the geographical proximity of worker and manager in
some neighbourhoods and churches ... created an illusion of organic
community”—an illusion that could also foster “an acceptance of
class inequality [and] a class-divided city.” Against this backdrop of
ambiguous community relations, Sangster recounts the small and large
acts of resistance undertaken by female workers struggling to achieve
“dignity and personal autonomy” in their places of work. These were
elusive goals in a factory environment that infantilized all workers,
but especially those of the “weaker” female class.

The heart of the book is Chapter 7, “Resistance and Unionization,”
wherein Sangster describes a secretary’s decision to obey her boss’s
order to spy on her co-workers. The secretary follows the order but
manages, with brilliant duplicity, to assist her co-workers in escaping
entrapment. Women resisted collectively by filing group grievances over
working conditions and over seniority and pay issues; by organizing
“getaways” to discuss such common interests as child care, family
support, and harassment at work; and by organizing sit-ins and
participating in labor strikes. These topics are well-traveled territory
for any student of modern labor history.

A subsection of Chapter 7, entitled “Attempting to Organize Women in
the Union,” offers a historical yet timely perspective on the barriers
Peterborough women faced in becoming union members and leaders. The
relationship of women to male-dominated union administrations was not
resolved in the postwar years and continues to be a hotly debated topic
in today’s union culture. In this discussion and elsewhere, Sangster
applies a feminist analysis that elucidates the conditions of women’s
waged labor in a manner that preserves the integrity and agency of her
historical female subjects.