A Female Economy: Women's Work in a Prairie Province, 1870-1970

Valerie J. Korinek is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Mary Kinnear’s latest history of Manitoba women begins and ends with
references to Daisy Goodwill, the heroine of Carol Shields’s novel The
Stone Diaries, to highlight the fact that it is a history of ordinary
women. Employing Marilyn Waring’s inclusive definition of women’s
work—“any activity culminating in a service or product, regardless
of whether that activity is paid”—Kinnear charts the history of
women’s experiences with education and training, homemaking, farm
work, paid labor, and public service work. Kinnear is careful to note
that it is impossible to write about a collectivity called “women.”
Instead, throughout the book, she continually highlights the regional,
class, religious, and racial factors that differentiated women’s work
experiences in the period she studied.

In the beginning, most women in Manitoba expected to work in and around
the home as wives, mothers, and unpaid farm workers. Only the very
elite, educated professional women (teachers, nurses, missionaries) and
urban working-class women expected to work away from their residences,
while the working poor and newly arrived immigrant women had to content
themselves with domestic work. Regardless of whether or not they held
paid employment, women in Manitoba put in a double work day, performing
the unpaid “labor of love” for their families. As the 20th century
progressed, it became commonplace for most single adult women to work
between leaving school and marriage. Later, many of these married women
would either return to paid work after their children were in school,
or, by the 1960s and 1970s, continue to work while their children were
still young. Overall, women’s labor force participation increased
substantially between 1870 and 1970.

Ultimately, Kinnear intends that this community study will redress some
of the continuing historical silences about the multiplicity of
women’s work. While it remains to be seen whether the Manitoba
experience translates to other regions, or how other histories of
“ordinary women” will further elaborate the critical challenges
working women have faced with labor unions, with the state, and with
corporations, A Female Economy is a useful addition to Canadian
women’s history. Kinnear’s attention to detail, her awareness of the
interconnections between women’s paid and unpaid labor, and her
obvious sympathies to the negotiations women made to keep themselves,
their families, and their communities afloat make this book an asset for
scholars and students.