No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit: The Moral Regulation of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997

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

In 1920, the Ontario government passed the Mothers’ Allowance Act,
after three-and-a-half decades of work by middle-class women’s
organizations, church groups, charities, the medical profession, and
labor. This book touches on the history leading up to the act only long
enough to establish the bases for moral regulation written into it.
Although the care of poor single mothers had shifted to the state,
legislation reflected the values of private charity. The act’s
implementation and its subsequent changes contained societal biases
against women, especially women of non-Protestant non-Euro-Canadian
background. Poor single mothers were held accountable to the standard of
the middle-class nuclear family ideal.

Demonstration of the persistence of moral regulation of poor single
mothers between 1920 and 1995, despite changes in political regimes and
swings in the economy, forms the basis of this book. It is telling that
initial recipients (poor widows) were looked at with the same level of
suspicion now reserved for the unmarried, deserted, and divorced mothers
who eventually became eligible for the program. The case studies that
Little has unearthed from earlier periods and her interviews with
program recipients in the 1990s reveal the wide sweep of punitive state
scrutiny. By 1995, poor single mothers were still being judged on the
criteria of cleanliness, abstinence from alcohol consumption, sexuality,
and fraud, but now were also required to engage in full-time employment.

Little, a feminist historian, seeks to show that women tried to take
control of their lives within the contradictions and constraints of the
program. She discusses the tactics women learned to become eligible for
and maintain themselves in the program. In the early period, this meant
showing the appropriate deference and penitence to the investigators and
program administrators. The surveillance of the state through
caseworkers and the biases of community members are powerful forces to
overcome and Little hints that only entitlement programs will begin to
mitigate them.