Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada

Margaret Kechnie teaches women’s studies at Thorneloe College,
Laurentian University, and is the editor of Changing Lives: Women in
Northern Ontario.

This collection of six articles is a welcome addition to the existing
literature on women’s work.

At a time when the status of women in Canada is improving, the rights
of foreign domestic workers are declining; this theme is central to
Sedef Arat-Koc’s “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant
Workers.” Patricia Daenzer’s article “An Affair Between Nations:
International Relations and the Movement of Household Service
Workers,” examines both the policies of the 1970s and the reforms of
the Live-in Caregiver Program of 1992, which regulated the work lives of
immigrant domestic servants in Canada. In “Little Victories and Big
Defeats: The Rise and Fall of Collective Bargaining Rights for Domestic
Workers in Ontario,” Judy Fudge examines attempts to organize
immigrant women, and the resistance organizers face when they undertake
this task.

The book, which includes an introduction by the editors and a useful
bibliography and index, is part of a larger study on immigrant women.