Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times.

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

Bezanson offers a critique of the neo-liberal policies of the Mike Harris government in Ontario (1995–2003) from the perspective of a scholar who had witnessed the impact of similar initiatives while living in Latin America, where the poor, and poor women in particular, bore the brunt of the structural adjustments. As a researcher attached to the Speaking Out Project, which was designed to document the impact of Harris’s so-called “Common Sense Revolution,” Bezanson helped to track 127 members of 41 households (selected with an eye to a range of incomes and characteristics) across Ontario from 1997 to 2000. Not surprisingly, this study reveals that “reforms” to equity, labour, and social assistance programs and legislation, and the substitution of the market for the state as the vehicle for sustaining human well-being, had much the same impact in Ontario as they did elsewhere. Low-income households suffered disproportionately the effects of the “revolution” and women were hard pressed to pick up the slack for reductions in public services.

Although this book reflects its origins as a thesis, it does so in a good sense. The theory and method are clearly stated (in the text and supporting appendices) and the analysis is tightly honed. Anyone doubting the depth and scope of the “adjustments” associated with the Harris government would do well to read Chapter 3, in which the extensive legislative and regulatory changes are summarized. While critics will argue that welfare reform was necessary to ensure that Ontario could compete in the global context, it is difficult to refute the conclusion reached here that social policy changes deepened the vulnerability of low income earners, and women’s unpaid work associated with social reproduction—birthing and raising children, nurturing and caring for young and old, maintaining the daily household routine—became more demanding. Coping strategies—increased debt loads, deferred educational pursuits, less family time—only exacerbated stress and highlighted the growing tension between capital accumulation and social reproduction. Since this tension is increasingly a global phenomenon, Bezanson concludes that a global strategy is required to restore a much-needed balance among men, women, communities, markets, and states.