The Feminist Challenge to the Canadian Left, 1900-1918

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and the
editor of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800.

The history of women in left-wing political organizations has received
more academic attention than that of their sisters in the Liberal and
Conservative parties. While this focus perhaps reflects the interests of
contemporary scholars, it is also testimony to the fact that socialist
parties were often more preoccupied, at least at a theoretical level,
with the “woman question” than were mainline parties. Janice Newton
has tracked down obscure sources, read between the lines, and brought
academic rigor to bear on the role of women in three early socialist
organizations (the Canadian Socialist League, the Socialist Party of
Canada, and the Social Democratic Party of Canada) that sprang up in
Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. The result makes
fascinating reading, in part because so many of the issues addressed
here are still the subject of debate.

Like liberal feminists, women on the left were concerned with the
plight of working women, the problem of prostitution, and the vote. Also
like their less radical contemporaries, many socialist women focused
their attention on women’s unpaid domestic labor. While this tends to
bring them into the maternal feminist sphere, which has had a rather bad
press among recent scholars of the women’s movement, Newton argues
that there is nothing inherently conservative about the maternal
feminist agenda. Women in the home worked without the benefits of an
eight-hour day, a paycheque of any kind, or recourse against a violent
boss, points regularly raised by the few women whose voices survive from
the presses and papers of left-wing organizations of the period.

Socialist feminists were no more successful than their liberal
counterparts in bringing their perspective to bear on the larger
political agenda either before or after the granting of suffrage. Most
men on the left resisted notions of socialized housework, and gave
little more than lip service to redressing the balance of power between
women and men in their unions, party organizations, or society at large.
Thus, this book chronicles the rise and fall of an interesting idea
rather than an idea whose time had come.