Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada

Elaine G. Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

Engendering the State gives the historical background necessary for
understanding why the family allowances were axed in 1992 with so little
opposition. The original legislation (1944), which followed a
half-century of public policy debates based on various interpretations
of women’s and men’s rights and responsibilities to family and
state, represented a compromise between competing political and social
interests: it offered symbolic recognition of family needs while largely
buttressing a capitalist economy.

Christie argues that a “complementary roles” model, which
acknowledges women’s unpaid work in child rearing, predominated during
World War I and immediately thereafter. The liberating potential of this
maternal view of women’s economic rights failed to give women
entitlement as individuals. Instead, mothers’ allowances easily
morphed into family allowances, which gave men exclusive rights to
social policies as the family breadwinner. Male flight from family was
used by policymakers as the rationale for shoring up the private family,
which maintained economic interdependency at the family level.

Among the shibboleths that Christie overturns is the “moral
regulation” view that working-class women simply followed middle-class
ideals. She also argues that hegemonic views of the state and monolithic
notions of feminist, religious, or class-based interests are
oversimplified. Her central point is that family–state models
advocated by contending leaders of social and political groups were
leavened by the Great Depression and two world wars but still emerged
from the bread-winner role. Her provocative theses are supported with
evidence from a wide variety of sources. She also explains the
circuitous route through which a vitiated version of the Beveridge
Report (1942), with its gendered assumptions, became an important key
social policy instrument for the post-World War II period. For social
scientists with an interest in historical policy issues, her book
provides ample food for thought.