Toeing the Lines: Women and Party Politics in English Canada

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

Canadians have waited longer than people in most western democracies for a comprehensive study of women’s participation in political life. Toeing the Lines admirably fills the vacuum, at least for women in English Canada. What makes this monograph so impressive is the extent to which Professor Bashevkin roots her findings from 1965 and 1979 survey data in their historical and cultural contexts. The first chapter in the book is, quite simply, the best account in print of the political history of Canadian women. By focusing on class, cohort, and occupational categories, the author makes sense of women’s political choices, which hitherto have been too often dismissed by glib references to women’s traditionalism. Professor Bashevkin also explodes the widely held misconception that women are not politically active. She notes that at the constituency level, 74 percent of the secretaries are women; only in the upper echelons of party hierarchies are women underrepresented. To help understand the process by which women are excluded from power, the author examines attempts by the Ontario NDP to increase female participation as well as bids by various women for leadership in the mainline political parties. Bashevkin concludes that there are still psychological and structural barriers to increased female participation. Among the latter are the auxiliaries and special committees, which serve to distance women from party hierarchies.

Professor Bashevkin’s chapter on women’s political involvement in other western democracies highlights the most obvious features of the Canadian experience. The suffrage movement in English Canada was linked with the wider cause of social reform typical of Protestant cultures, a fact that helps to explain the centrist and reformist leanings of anglophone Canadian women in the twentieth century. Bashevkin concludes her book with a call for further research on the impact of the new feminism on women’s political choices as well as on the potential difficulties for political structures of the continued exclusion of women. She also suggests that more study is needed of the extent to which the presence of women actually makes a difference in the direction taken by a political party. The latter suggestion is a direct challenge to feminists, as is the author’s conclusion that the non-partisan route is not likely to be successful in the Canadian political system, where so much power is focused in political parties. The question of independence versus partisanship will not be laid to rest by Toeing the Lines, but the book will be the starting point for all further research on women in Canadian politics.