Feminism, Political Economy & the State

Feminism, Political Economy and the State: Contested Terrain edited by Pat Armstrong M. Patricia Connelly Canadian Sc...

Author: M. Patricia Connelly

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Feminism, Political Economy and the State: Contested Terrain

edited by Pat Armstrong M. Patricia Connelly

Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.

Toronto

1999

Feminism, Political Economy and the State: Contested Terrain edited by Pat Armstrong and M. Patricia Connelly First published in 1999 by Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. 180 Bloor Street West, Ste. 1202 Toronto, Ontario M5S2V6 Copyright © 1999 Pat Armstrong, M. Patricia Connelly, the contributing authors and Canadian Scholars' Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher, except for brief passages quoted for review purposes. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Programme for our publishing activities. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Feminism, political economy and the state: contested terrain (Studies in political economy) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55130-148-2 I. Feminism. 2. Women's rights. 3. State, The. I. Armstrong, Pat, date. II. Connelly, Patricia, date. III. Series: Studies in political economy (Toronto, Ont). HQ1206.F44241999

305.42

C99-931292-8

Page layout and cover design by Brad Horning

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

Contents

Chapter 1 Pat Armstrong and M. Patricia Connelly Introduction: Contested Terrain 1 Chapter 2 Terry Wotherspoon The Incorporation of Public School Teachers into the Industrial Order: British Columbia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 23

Chapter 3 Jerry White Changing Labour Process and the Nursing Crisis in Canadian Hospitals 57 Chapter 4 Jane Aronson and Sheila M. Neysmith The Retreat of the State and Long-Term Care Provision: Implications for Frail Elderly People, Unpaid Family Carers and Paid Home-Care Workers 91

Chapter 5 Mariana Valverde The Mixed Social Economy as a Canadian Tradition 125 Chapter 6 Margaret Little The Blurring of Boundaries: Private and Public Welfare for Single Mothers in Ontario 155 Chapter 7 Lois Harder Depoliticizing Insurgency: The Politics of the Family in Alberta 177 Chapter 8 Katherine Scott The Dilemma of Liberal Citizenship: Women and Social Assistance Reform in the 1990s 205 Chapter 9 Wendy McKeen The Radical Potential of the European Community's Equality Legislation 237 Chapter 10 Phil Ryan Duet for Peasant and Socialist Revolutionary, with Obbligato Feminism: Lessons of the Nicaraguan Case 257

Chapter 11 Jo-Anne Fiske The Womb is to the Nation as the Heart is to the Body: Ethnopolitical Discourses of the Canadian Indigenous Women's Movement 293 Chapter 12 Lorna Weir and Jasmin Habib A Critical Feminist Analysis of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies 327 Chapter 13 Navsharan Singh Of GIFTS, GAMETRICS, Victim Women and Surplus Peoples: New Reproductive Technologies and the Representation of "Third World' Women 345

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Feminism, Political Economy and the State: Contested Terrain PAT ARMSTRONG M. PATRICIA CONNELLY

t has become fashionable to critique feminists for desperately defending the very state institutions, policies and programs they once so vigorously denounced. Such representations, however, fail to comprehend the complex nature of feminist political economy and praxis. Liberal theory stresses individual rights, leading to demands for the same treatment for everyone — gender neutrality in the current discourse. In contrast, radical feminist and postmodern theory emphasizes differences, demanding rights based on group claims and particular identities. Political economy sees it both ways. The focus is most often the structures and relations that create, reflect and sustain class, race, gender and other inequalities, although ideas and discourse also play central roles. Both similarity and difference, as well as recognition of the contradictory nature of state practices, are the basis of claims in relation to the state. Carol Bacchi1 has eloquently explained how feminists can defend, in theory and in practice, demands arising from claims of both similarity with and differences from men. The analysis is based on a recognition of contradiction, rather than on a position that is contradictory. Feminists can have it both ways, when they understand the contradictory nature of the world. Women often experience their world as contradictory, and contradictions are

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FEMINISM, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE STATE

integral to social structures and social relations. In keeping with this approach, many feminist political economists, in theory and in practice, have placed themselves simultaneously in and against the state.2 Indeed, the notion of contradiction has been at the core of post-war feminist political economy although the questions of similarity and difference still constitute contested terrain. As Rosemary Hennessey and Chrys Ingraham point out in Materialist Feminism,3 the "historical links between marxism and feminism were forged in the contradictory situation of first-world women under monopoly capitalism and played out in the insights and oversights of nineteenth-century socialists." Back in the 1960s, in an article that established the parameters for current debates, Peggy Morton4 made the contradictions between domestic and wage labour central not only to her analysis of women's position but also to the notion of liberation. Homes and households, Margaret Benston5 made clear in "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," are critical to understanding the contradictory nature of women's class relations. When Canadian feminist political economists began to think through the theoretical and practical implications of the state, it was not surprising that many made contradictions, rather than simple dichotomies, central. From the beginning of these efforts, it was recognized that states could simultaneously benefit and undermine women's efforts to end subordination and inequality; and that they could benefit some women while reinforcing the subordination of others. Feminists of all persuasions found themselves looking to the state for employment, services and protection while attacking the same state for reinforcing patriarchy and the unequal relations among women through these same processes. This led feminists to work at times within the state, while remaining both distant and critical. It is this complex and contradictory relation to the state that Nancy Adamson, Linda Briskin and Margaret McPhail describe so clearly in Feminist Organizing for Change.6 It is the state, more than feminist political economy, that is contradictory. For many feminist political economists, the state is understood both as an instrument of class rule and as a contested terrain where struggle can make a difference. The complex relations involved in

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governing occur at a variety of levels and in a variety of ways well beyond formal government structures. The broader public sector, for example, where one-third of employed women work, is critical to social reproduction as well as to resistance. Each aspect of the state can be shaped by women's concerns, although victories can become losses or may even simultaneously represent victory and defeat. And projects for some women can serve to undermine the position of others. Pay equity legislation in Ontario illustrates this contradictory aspect quite well. A coalition representing thousands of women was successful in incorporating many of their demands into pay equity legislation. But the legislation primarily served to benefit the women who were already most privileged —the unionized workers in the broader public sector. As a result, pay differences among women increased. At the same time, women's pay gains were an important catalyst for state and corporate action to undermine women's work through downsizing, contracting out and privatization. The case of pay equity demonstrates that there is no inevitable outcome of either state action or struggle within and against the state. Nor is there a universal result or a lasting one. Time, context and particular relations matter, as do global and national forces created by capitalist relations. The Conservative government in Ontario, for example, has used the deficit and a new discourse of eliminating red tape and global competition to justify direct attacks on pay equity legislation and wage gains in the state sector. There are, in other words, choices, but such choices are framed not only by time and place but also by power and the search for profit at all levels of activity. Although feminist political economists identify capitalism, the state and patriarchal relations as driving forces in women's subordination, feminist struggles have been fought more in relation to the state than in relation to either corporate capital or maledominated structures and patriarchal ideas more generally. Canadian women have focused more attention on the state in part because they have enjoyed some success in making change at this level and in part because the state so clearly makes a difference, for good or ill, in their lives.7 Caroline Andrew shows how women participated, albeit unequally, in the creation of the post-war welfare

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state. It is mainly women who deliver the public services that have flourished in this period and who use the state services.8 And with a majority of state sector workers belonging to unions, women have managed to make these among women's best jobs. In response to women's demands, the state has also initiated regulations in the private sector of the formal economy and in the private realm of the household. Maternity leave provisions, for example, have allowed many pregnant women to keep their paid jobs, and sexual assault legislation has provided ways for women at home to resist. Such regulations are often double-edged, however, simultaneously providing protection while separating women from men and ensuring subordination. Firms may resist hiring women precisely because they do have to allow for maternity leave, and Native women may find themselves in direct conflict with other members of their nations as a result of new rules on rights. Moreover, victories can be turned into losses. Hard-won legislation in education can limit teachers' freedom, and a fight against the medicalization of daily life can end up with women doing much more work for no pay at home. State services and social assistance have offered a social wage that has compensated to some extent for the benefits women lacked as employees and as unpaid household workers. They have meant some independence and some support for a variety of women. As Jane Ursel9 has pointed out, however, supports such as family allowance and mother's benefits have been based on, and have reinforced, women's unequal position as wife and mother. They have perpetuated a patriarchal ideology, while providing food, clothing and shelter for women. In short, many feminists have not focused their efforts on the state because it was seen simply as either the main enemy or saviour. Rather, they have looked to the state in the belief that it did and should have power and that they could influence that power. At the same time, they have understood both their actions and those of the state as contradictory. This has been particularly the case with the welfare state. Just as the welfare state had gender-specific consequences, so too does the movement away from the welfare state model. While flexible labour practices are new to the men who enjoyed the benefits

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of the Fordist model, they are not new to most women. And the move away from redistribution, state provision of services and the regulation of corporate capital necessarily has a greater impact on women, given that the redistribution was to a large extent from men to women, in that women were paid by the state to provide the services they now increasingly have to provide without pay in the home, and that state regulation was often the only protection women had from employers. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that women would continue to defend a welfare state they have so roundly attacked in the past. Much has been written about the global forces transforming the nation state. Less has been written about the role women's struggles and state successes have played in these forces. Women enjoyed some victories in obtaining regulations, services and rights, especially in the public sector. And state interventions have been successful in increasing access to some services and rights for some workers, albeit often in an unequal manner. The redistribution that happened under the welfare state helped strengthen many women and their claims against both the state and employers in the private sector and their partners at home. Reforms represent a direct attack on these victories and can be understood to represent, at least in part, a response to them. Equally important, state services offer an opportunity for profitmaking to the corporate sector, a sector that has been facing declining rates of profit as it ran out of places to invest. But such investment can be lucrative only if women's gains in terms of pay, benefits and regulations are undermined. Although justified as necessary to reduce the deficit, and to improve services as well as protect access, state reform has been mainly about disciplining workers and opening the state sector to profit. Many women necessarily lose in the process. The emerging state claims to be a smaller state, a less invasive state, a more effective state driven by market forces. Yet, as Salter and Salter10 point out in the case of communication policy, the new supply-side economy requires a different kind of state, not less state. Indeed, the new state involves more regulation of individuals and groups, as well as more intervention, to ensure rights for

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corporations making profit and for individuals defined as the fittest. This new state incorporates much of the old feminist discourse at the same time as it fundamentally undermines women's gains. How this new state is to be understood is very much a contested terrain. And this contestation is the subject of this book. Three articles in this text take up the question of the state as employer. All three illustrate the contradictions inherent in state practices, the resistance that helps structure various aspects of the state and the importance of understanding states within specific historical contexts, in terms of the impact on particular groups of people. Terry Wotherspoon explores how the "changing relations between capital and the state contribute to periodic modifications in the nature of both schooling and teaching." Neither the state nor capital have held static positions on schooling or teachers. And the alteration in relations between the state and capital made a difference to both demands placed on teachers and teachers' forms of response. Developments in the economy and the state, Wotherspoon makes clear, "produced variations in regulation over, and resistance by, the teaching labour force." His analysis of how the 1903 deficit crisis led to a restructuring of teaching work will remind many of current claims by conservative regimes, although the specific relations of capital and labour in current times influence the particular nature of state reform strategies today. In the late 1920s and 1930s, an emphasis on science promoted by corporate funding was used by some teachers to enhance their "wages, working conditions and professional status." However, these teachers did so not only at the expense of some other teachers but also in ways that served the corporate emphasis on scientific objectivity. The cleavages among teachers tended to follow gender lines, with the predominantly male leadership pushing for science and professionalism in ways that disadvantaged many of the women who taught. Wotherspoon stresses that teaching is organized "in both technical and moral/subjective terms around the changing processes of labour power reproduction. It is this dual nature that enables teaching to make progressive contributions to human development at the same time that it remains vulnerable to external constraints

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on the occupation's possibilities/7 Put another way, the work is contradictory in itself. Teaching, he argues, must be conceptualized as reproductive labour, labour different from that involved in the kind of productive work dominated by men. Wotherspoon's article challenges us to think through these differences more systematically, especially in terms of their implications for the gendered nature of divisions among and between different workforces. Such paid reproductive work has, until recently, been organized primarily on a non-profit basis by states as well as by religious, charitable or other non-governmental organizations heavily supported by the state. In Canada, service, rather than profit, was the stated goal. The means of achieving this goal were understood as different in some ways at least from those in for-profit concerns. The redistribution that Jessop described was not simply about income, it was also about the provision of services directly or indirectly by the state, mainly by women. States constructed enormous infrastructures to provide health, education and social services, infrastructures that did more than provide support for individuals and paid work for women. These infrastructures also provided a healthy, educated and available workforce at the taxpayer's, rather than at the corporation's, expense. But the strength of this workforce also grew alongside the state investment in massive infrastructures and the social wage. And the provision of reproductive work through non-profit organizations limited possibilities for profit. In the period immediately following World War II, corporations had many avenues for profit expansion and the Fordist compromise helped control labour. However, as profits fell and worker power grew, corporations looked to the state both to discipline workers and to provide new areas for profitmaking. Non-governmental agencies and state organizations share many practices with the corporate sector, but there have until recently been at least some differences that benefited those paid to do reproductive work. Health care provides a telling example. The overwhelming majority of workers in this sector are now unionized and have made some impressive gains in wages, benefits and control over working conditions. Equally important, the delivery of Canadian health-care services is mainly in non-profit hands. And, unlike production work,

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very little of the reproductive work can be moved out of the country to take advantage of cheaper labour and unregulated conditions. Although the public debt and new technologies have certainly played roles in recent health-care reform, the demands from capital to open health-care delivery to profit-making and to do so in ways that discipline workers and reinforce market values have been as important in transforming care delivery. Jerry White's article on the nursing crisis analyzes how these forces are played out for women providing hospital care. For the most part, hospitals remain in non-profit hands, but they are increasingly pressured to act like for-profit firms. Under the new state, for-profit managerial techniques are defined as the way to make health care efficient and effective. Debts and deficits, as well as poor care, are blamed in part on old public service philosophies and the failure to become a business like the rest.11 The labour process in the hospital is being transformed by these for-profit techniques; nursing is intensified while the scope and content of nursing work is fundamentally altered. White's analysis of nurses' responses to these changing practices is based on the particular nature of women's reproductive work. Although the specific strategies vary from organization to organization and woman to woman, the nurses White interviewed were not motivated to resist primarily by their own economic interests. Rather, the "nurses feel that delivering care and doing a day's work that is productive and useful is at stake." They are concerned not only about their own jobs and pay but also about the kind of care they can provide to their patients. Such concerns are much less likely to motivate the men who make cars, not because the men are less caring but because they are involved in a very different kind of work. Nurses' responses differ from those of men who make cars not only in terms of their content but also in terms of their form. People in both kinds of work use strikes and people in both kinds of work resist by quitting. But, according to White, nurses also often try to shift to part-time employment as a means of resisting the increasing work pressure and the decline in the quality of care. Women's involvement in unpaid reproductive work can make this an option open to more women than men. However, it is a strategy that seldom works. The "attempt to gain control over one's work life is

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a major impetus to the selection of part-time work, but it generally fails to improve the part-timers' lot" or the quality of care. What White leaves unexplored is how nurses use public concern about quality care to pressure the state about working conditions for nurses. In other words, does it make a difference to women's power if reproductive work is public sector work? The question is important because, as Jane Aronson and Sheila Neysmith point out, the state is busy privatizing both the costs and work involved in care. Their focus is the frail elderly, a majority of whom are women and are cared for by women. For the frail elderly, the shift to the private domain is accompanied not only by claims that global forces and overspending made us do it but also by dire warnings about an aging population and by more positive messages about how the elderly prefer care at home. As is the case with hospitals, the claim is that business practices will mean better care at lower costs, a claim Aronson and Neysmith argue is, "in large part, a deception." The consequences of the deception are shrinking entitlements and growing insecurity for the elderly, greater care work and expense transferred to unpaid family caregivers and "unrewarded skills and labour" for those doing the paid reproductive work. That such deception is necessary suggests that it does matter whether or not reproductive work is a state responsibility. To stay in power, governments have to convince us that there are no choices to make and that these are the best choices. It is indeed a contested terrain. As Aronson and Neysmith make clear, the "recognition that other liberal welfare states, faced with similar fiscal pressures, have pursued alternative policies in LTC [long-term care] exposes the actions of the Canadian state as accumulated political choices rather than neutral inevitabilities." States can make a difference and can help the frail elderly receive care that exploits neither them nor their providers. Aronson and Neysmith understand that the Canadian state has often failed women in general and some women in particular, as both workers and service recipients. And they are quite aware of the flaws in liberal assumptions about individual choices and the separation of public and private spheres. Yet, "Despite the mixed and contradictory effects of state intervention, analysis of its history can remind us of its capacity to disrupt

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capitalist and patriarchal power." A more active and refrained state, they argue, could be used "to ensure equitable outcomes for the unequally positioned actors." It would still have contradictory consequences, but ones that create better possibilities for women than the current forms. The state is equally deceptive when it comes to claims about what the private sector has and does provide. The reform agenda is couched in terms of a return to a time when charitable and voluntary organizations, families and churches, small businesses and large corporations filled the need for support without state intervention. Using evidence from Ontario, Marianne Valverde links the pre-welfare to the post-welfare state by examining the complex web of relationships between the public and the private realms. She argues that despite the liberal rhetoric of separate and autonomous private and public spheres, there has been continual public funding and regulation of private social service agencies since the late nineteenth century. There has always been a mixed economy of social service provision. Despite the political rhetoric of the nineteenth century indicating that all social services were privately funded, evidence shows there was some government funding and some governmental control. With the rise of the welfare state carne more fully publicly funded and managed programs that all individuals could access if they met the criteria. Non-government agencies continued to receive some public funding, but this was obscured as the focus remained on the fully funded programs and payments to individuals. Today neo-liberal politicians have rediscovered the importance of non-governmental agencies as they try to justify social welfare cutbacks through the rhetoric of family and community self-help. As the services no longer provided by the state are done by women in the family, voluntary organizations with a high percentage of women members and other private agencies, the government is able to use non-government criteria to determine which individuals or agencies are worthy of receiving help. At the same time, the government is increasing regulatory control over those who receive its decreasing funds. Valverde argues that it is important to understand that what we have today is not a smaller, less involved state, as politicians

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claim, but rather a different form of state, one that uses many of the same financial and administrative practices of an earlier time. To the extent that progressive scholars accept a separation between civil society and the state, particularly the view that the private and the public are autonomous, they are prevented "from seeing and understanding the mixed social economy." According to Valverde, we need more sophisticated analytical tools to understand the nature of the state. Her deconstruction of the binary opposition between public and private, state and civil society is a contribution to this enterprise, although the particular consequences for women need to be further explored. Margaret Little also makes the point that it is necessary to understand the complex relationship between the state and civil society in order to adequately theorize the welfare state. By examining the Ontario Mothers Allowance (OMA), she shows how state welfare and charity-run welfare do not function autonomously. At the turn of the century charitable, religious and women's organizations lobbied for social welfare legislation reflecting their Christian moral values and based on the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. By 1917 the Ontario government bowed to public pressure and began to consider introducing mothers' allowance legislation. In the absence of large government bureaucracies, charitable leaders based on their experience were considered "experts" on how welfare policy should be formulated and administered. They argued for a joint public-private welfare policy based on frequent supervision for widowed mothers who demonstrated their moral and financial need. Single mothers who were not widowed were considered morally dubious and not eligible for the allowance. As the "experts," private welfare leaders worked both inside and outside the OMA bureaucracy to ensure that recipients were monitored. During the post-war era, welfare policies became universal and a right of citizenship rather than privilege. Social work became professionalized, and the administration of welfare was considered to be objective, scientific and impartial. Yet charitable leaders continued to play a significant role alongside the state. They did this in three ways. First, by promoting a moral crisis around desertion, illegitimacy and the fragility of the nuclear family and

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positioning themselves as the saviours of the moral fibre of the nation. Second, OMA (renamed the Family Benefits Act) administrators relied on charitable organizations to scrutinize the daily activities of the newly eligible OMA recipients, which included the "morally dubious" deserted and unwed mothers. Third, private welfare agencies continued to supplement the generally inadequate welfare payments during this period. Since 1980, OMA policy has become more inclusive so long as applicants are deemed deserving. With the current emphasis on policing welfare fraud and on establishing workfare programs, the definition of deserving is narrowing. There is a move away from the notion of welfare as a right towards the charity definition of welfare as a privilege. As fewer people meet the definition of deserving and as the amount of welfare payments are decreased reliance on private charities increases. Evidence shows that charities today as in the past continue to use moral criteria to determine who is worthy of receiving support. As the state cuts back funding, the balance between public and private welfare is shifting once more. Little argues that to understand and respond to the growing demands for a leaner, meaner state we must explore the long and complex association between public and private welfare. Neo-liberal strategies are about more than the substitution of private for public services. They are also about the redistribution of power among various levels of the state, a redistribution that has an impact on the form and nature of resistance and clearly demonstrates the need to understand the state within their specific historical context. As Bob Jessop (1993) explains, there has been a complex displacement of power within national borders, with some power transferred to international bodies, some to the regional or local levels inside the national state and some restructured in ways that link regions in several societies. For Jessop, the national state nevertheless remains crucial as an institutional site and discursive framework for political struggles. Several articles in this volume focus on the changing role of the state in relation to political struggles. Unlike Jessop, these authors also make the struggle over sameness and difference a central part of their analysis. The first of these, the Lois Harder and Katherine Scott articles, consider the changing discourse and contested terrain at the Canadian provincial

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state level, while Wendy McKeen looks at the European Community level. In many ways, Alberta has taken the lead in state reform, transforming relations within the province while pressuring the national state to follow their lead. Lois Harder argues that in the context of the neo-liberal discourse surrounding economic restructuring and cutbacks in Alberta, feminist claims to equality were refrained by conservative groups focused on family values. This refraining was made possible by the fact that feminists had to confront at least two theoretical and practical contradictions. The first contradiction was over the question of whether to articulate women's needs in terms of equality with men or on the basis of their difference from men. Choosing to argue for equality implies that women should be treated equally with men even though women's experiences and position within a gender division of labour and social life put them at a disadvantage. The major difficulty with a strategy of difference is that it could institutionalize the gender division of labour and women's subordinate position within it. In response to this dilemma, feminists in Alberta have chosen to focus on difference and have campaigned to revalue and share women's socially assigned work and care-giving roles. As Bacchi explained, feminist are often forced to make such choices for strategic reasons, although it is both theoretically and practically possible to embrace the contradiction rather than to choose one side. The second contradiction Harder discusses has to do with women's relation to the household. The household is seen by feminists both as the central location of women's oppression and the site of meaningful and rewarding family life for women. The continued importance of family life to women and the feminist emphasis on difference rather than sameness provided a way for the provincial state to use the family to depoliticize Alberta's organized feminist groups. The 'traditional' family is invoked as the solution to all of society's current ills. Thus, women should stay at home to look after the family, and their unpaid labour in the family household can compensate for the caring work abandoned by the state. This fits nicely with the state's neo-liberal argument

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that the deficit must take precedence over all other social concerns. However, Alberta feminists continue to resist the appropriation and reframing of their discourse by the provincial state for neoliberal ends. They struggle to keep from having more of the gains made under the Keynesian welfare state undermined. This continues to be contested terrain, both in terms of concrete benefits and in terms of how equity is conceptualized. Katherine Scott also discusses the sameness versus difference debates, this time in relation to the other province that has taken a lead in promoting the neo-liberal agenda. In her article, the context is social assistance reform under the Liberal, NDP and Conservative governments in Ontario. She argues that historically women were written into the Canadian welfare state either as wives or mothers and received lower benefits than men. With a neo-liberal state and economic restructuring, Ontario has instituted welfare reform and created a new model of a gender-neutral worker-citizen. Under the reforms women are entitled as individuals to seek assistance on the same grounds as men, and they are expected to participate in employment preparation activities in the same way as men. This is happening at the same time as entitlement claims in general are being curtailed and as economic restructuring requires an increasing number of flexible workers. These initiatives on the part of both Alberta and Ontario have been made easier by the federal government's abandonment of national standards for social assistance, standards of the sort that the National Action Committee on the Status of Women has strongly supported and that Jessop's analysis promotes.12 In Scott's view, the gender-neutral model of welfare provision helps to create more flexible workers and thus undermines the strength of women in particular. As feminists have long pointed out, treating women and men in the same way obscures the structural inequalities that continue to shape women's lives both inside and outside the labour force. In the current context, women are being treated like men, but they are starting from a disadvantaged position at home and in the labour force. They thus become the most flexible workers. In the name of equality, the Liberal and NDP governments' reforms in Ontario resulted in greater disadvantage for women. The Progressive Conservatives

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"workfare" program officially recognizes neither similarity nor difference claims, but still has a particularly negative impact on women because it fails to take women's particular position into account. Scott argues that moving from entitlements recognizing difference to those based on equality with men should be a longterm goal, but the goal should begin with a recognition of difference. Examining a higher level of the state, Wendy McKeen offers another perspective on the sameness/difference debate in her article on equality policy in the European Community. She first points out that feminist reactions to the EC equality initiatives are divided between those who think such initiatives will lead to advancement for women and those who feel the reforms are too narrow in scope, focusing only on labour market equality. McKeen argues that both sides of this debate overlook the far-reaching aspect of this legislation, that is, that entitlement to social benefits are placed on an individual basis. Once again, we see contestation around sameness versus difference, particularly in terms of women's relationship to the family household. Some feminists argue that because the EC policy focuses only on the labour market and is modelled on the notion that the same treatment is equal treatment, it is seriously flawed. The policy must acknowledge the world of unpaid work and recognize that women and men are different but equal. McKeen, on the other hand, argues that the policy opens up new political space within which the women's movement can operate. The policy provides political legitimacy and creates strategic space for a more open and intense struggle in the political arena. She is not simply taking one side of the sameness debate but rather is arguing that it makes sense to promote individual rights in terms of the struggle for women at this point in time, in this context. McKeen uses the case of Holland to make her point. The Dutch social security system was blatantly discriminatory against married women. In the wake of the EC equality directive, the Dutch government was forced to adjust their system by eliminating direct forms of discrimination. Although the government continued to indirectly discriminate against women, in the process the Dutch women's movement was sensitized to the issue of family-based social programs. The women began advocating a transformation from a family-based to an individualized system. As a result the

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parameters of the political discourse on social security widened, feminist organizations were given recognition as political actors and an individualized system was an option considered suitable for political debate. These articles demonstrate that time, context and power relations make a difference to the strategy chosen for struggle. And they make a difference to the outcome for women. These articles also show how the position taken on the sameness/difference debate has a profound impact on both the possibilities for struggle in any period and place. Sometimes activists are forced to choose sides in the debates; sometimes they choose a side that works best in these times. Often, the outcomes are contradictory, reflecting the contradictions inherent in the state. Equally important, the articles show that states can and do have choices. While Scott and Harder consider the provincial state and McKeen looks at the suprastate level, Phil Ryan considers the nation state. He approaches the issues of sameness versus difference and place of the family household from the context of the Nicaraguan socialist state. For Ryan, part of the reason the socialist project failed in Nicaragua was that the state insisted on collectivizing the countryside in an effort to modernize even though the peasants wanted to own their own land. As a result, the peasants supported the contras rather than the revolution. According to Ryan, the socialist state made the additional mistake of not recognizing the differences among the peasantry based on gender or ethnicity. Rather, the state saw the peasants as a homogenous group much like the Alberta and Ontario governments saw social assistance recipients as equal individuals. Although seen as homogenous, the peasantry were male-oriented and male-dominated. The needs of women were never explored by the state. This failure was not, in the end, simply a problem for women. Gender is important, Ryan argues, because women and men relate quite differently to productive and reproductive activities. Women were in favour of collectivized child care and domestic work that would allow them to meet their practical day-to-day needs. Had peasant women been organized with a voice they might have changed the direction of the socialist project and given the revolution a greater chance of

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success. In Ryan's view, the fault does not lie exclusively with the state, however. If rural women had organized to demand the transformation of the structures of production and reproduction, the political stance of the peasantry as a whole might have been altered to root the demands for change within each family. Without women at the centre, Ryan argues, the socialist project failed. A recognition of difference, as well as organized struggles based on this recognition, could have provided what the revolution needed to maintain power. Jo-Anne Fiske focuses on the Canadian nation state as a means of looking at the sameness/difference question as it relates to race. As was the case in Nicaragua, the struggle for Aboriginal selfdetermination was male-dominated, but in Canada women successfully organized to resist this domination. Fiske shows how Aboriginal women are excluded from participation in constitutional reform aimed at self-determination—excluded by both Aboriginal men and by the state. She focuses on women's struggle for inclusion in the reform process. In so doing, she illustrates how women can place themselves simultaneously in and against the state as well as in and against the Aboriginal struggles for self-determination. Fiske demonstrates how Aboriginal women's groups successfully appealed to the federal court by arguing that their exclusion was contrary to the Charter of Rights. The appeal court found the Canadian government and the male-dominated Aboriginal associations at fault. Thus women found support from the state to continue their fight against gender and Aboriginal subjugation; subjugation they saw as rooted in the state itself. Women were also contesting their subjugation by the male-dominated Aboriginal associations, and this was defined by those associations as a threat to self-determination and Aboriginal nationhood. The women's appeal to an authority outside the Aboriginal nation was seen as weakening the collectivity in favour of the individual rights of women. Fiske argues that by defining the issue as collective versus individual rights the masculinist discourse is able to conceal the fact that the collective rights being defended were the rights of individual men. She maintains that Aboriginal women's agenda can not be reduced to individual rights. Women are united in their concern for collective issues of community, national well-being and

18


achieving self-determination. Within a feminine discourse the nation is to be nurtured, and the most important national issues are social issues of immediate concern to the family/household. Like Ryan, Fiske argues that women should be central to the theory and practice in relation to the state. The feminine nationalist discourse put women at the centre of the struggle to define Aboriginal nationhood and allowed women to embrace a contradictory position that recognized both similarity and difference. Lorna Weir and Jasmin Habib also show how the state is a contested terrain where struggle can make a difference. They do this through their examination of Proceed with Care: The Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. Their article illustrates that there is no inevitable outcome of either state action or feminist struggle. The Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs) was initiated by a coalition of feminist groups who saw it as an access point to the state. Although they did not control the commission as they had hoped to do, Canadian feminists had a significant influence on the final report and its recommendations. Without much expertise to begin with, feminists developed a more thorough and detailed knowledge about NRTs through the process of working on briefs to the Royal Commission. The Royal Commission created the conditions for the women's movement to learn about changes in scientific knowledge and to formulate a clear position on NRTs. Although the Royal Commission reacted positively to many of the main feminist recommendations, it essentially placed issues within a biomedical and legal framework, paying little attention to the social and cultural changes associated with human reproduction. Weir and Habib argue that this framing is important because the cultural understanding of the sexed body may be changing. With the report's emphasis on gender neutrality and understanding human reproduction in terms of genes, it is a short step to seeing women's and men's relation to reproduction as identical and equal. From classical antiquity to the eighteenth century, there was a onesex interpretation of the body based on divine law. Female bodies were seen as simply less perfect versions of the male body. In the eighteenth century there was a shift to a two-sex body designed by nature and part of the natural order that could be scientifically

CONTESTED TERRAIN

19

investigated. Weir and Habib argue that currently it appears that a new one-sex body is being negotiated. If this is the case, this new model will be based not on divine law, as in the past, but on the use of new scientific processes. And it may well be profoundly sexist in nature. Feminists have reacted to this emerging discourse of a one-sex body by arguing that the two-sex body is part of the natural order and therefore NRTs are a transgression of the laws of nature. Weir and Habib state that this argument is based on a binary conception of nature and culture, with the sexed body as part of nature. They see this as deeply problematic and call for a new feminist theory of the body and a new feminist politics that can deal with the similarity and difference between women's and men's bodies in a historically and culturally specific way. In other words, they accept the contradictory nature of women's struggles, arguing that women can have it both ways because women are simultaneously similar to and different from men, part of culture and part of nature. As is the case with reproductive and productive work, biology and culture are both the same and different rather than binary alternatives. Navsharan Singh discusses NRTs in a way that allows her to compare nation states, demonstrating not only that there are choices but also that the nature of the choices may depend on the women involved. She examines the differential impact of NRTs on women in the West and women in the Third World. She critiques Western feminist analysis of NRTs and their (mis)representation of Third World women, showing how three levels —the global corporate, international bodies and nation states —use NRTs as an instrument of class rule and corporate profit. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Western feminists debated the implications of NRTs for their emancipatory and disempowering potentials for women. The issues for Western feminists revolve around how NRTs increase options for women and how women are affected, treated and represented. When Western feminism finally came to take Third World women into account, they saw them as victims of their own state policies, of corporate capitalism and cultural traditions. They saw Third World women as exotic or different, placing them in an unchanging culture. Singh argues that seeing women as passive victims denies them agency and ignores their struggles against oppressive

20


traditions, the state and corporations. Moreover, privileging culture leads to disregarding the context of historical and cultural structures that create and sustain class, race, gender and other inequalities. Singh goes on to show how Third World women experience reproductive technologies very differently than Western women. During the 1950s, an international 'population community' consisting of demographers, philanthropists and public and private organizations committed to curbing population growth emerged. At the same time, the modernization of non-Western, 'backward' societies was on the international agenda. The population community targeted population growth as a cause of underdevelopment. Birth rate reduction and family planning were seen as tools of economic development. International organizations promoted the use of contraceptives and the multinational corporations marketed them by adopting the language of choice from the women's movement. However, for Third World women the choice must be family planning to reduce fertility in order to control population growth. The family planning discourse considers Third World women to be 'backward/ 'illiterate' and 'passive.' Once again little notice is taken of Third World women's mobilization against invasive technologies and their fight for gender justice against powerful state and corporate interests. According to Singh, it is on this issue that Western feminist analysis and the family planners' views converge. She argues that control of reproduction is an area where tremendous possibilities for dialogue between feminists of different contexts exist. Feminist theory must acknowledge the importance of theorizing from the point of view and context of marginalized women. Women's agency, not victimization, must be put at the centre of feminist understandings of power and resistance. For Singh, then, differences among women must be recognized as coexisting with similarities; and the contradictory nature of these similarities and differences be acknowledged, not only among women and between women and men but also among states at various levels. This collection is designed to raise questions rather than to provide definitive answers. Indeed, a major focus is the contestation around how states are to be understood and how struggles in or against the state should be shaped. While the articles do not agree

CONTESTEDTERRAIN

21

on either theory or practice, they do agree on two major issues. First, gender, states and theory matter. Second, states and struggles make a difference, although both states and struggles vary with time, place and context. When states reform, they present new contradictions and provide new grounds for contestation.

ENDNOTES 1

Carol Bacchi, Same Difference (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990). Hilary Wainwright et al., In and Against the State (London: Pluto, 1980). Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p.3. 4 Peggy Morton, "Women's Work is Never Done." In Women Unite (Women's Press: Toronto, 1972), pp. 46-68. Margaret Benston, "The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," Monthly Review XXI, 4, (September 1969):13-27. Nancy Adamson, Linda Briskin and Margaret McPhail, Feminist Organizing for Change: The Contemporary Women's Movement in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988). 7 Caroline Andrew, "Women and the Welfare State," Canadian Journal of Political Science XVIL, 4, (December 1984): 667-683. 8 Pat Armstrong and Mary Cornish, "Restructuring Pay Equity for a Restructured Workforce," Gender, Work and Organization 4:2 (April 1997): 67-86. 9 Jane Ursel, Private Lives: Public Policy (Toronto: Women's Press, 1992). 10 Liora Salter and Rick Salter, "The New Infrastructure," Studies in Political Economy 53, (Summer 1997):67-102. 1 * Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, "Health Care as a Business: the Legacy of Free Trade." In Wayne Anthony and Les Samuelson, eds., Power and Resistance Second Edition (Halifax: Fernwood, 1998), pp. 218-234. 12 Sylvia Bashevin, Women on the Defensive (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p.40. 2


CHAPTER 2

The Incorporation of Public School Teachers into the Industrial Order: British Columbia in the First Half of the TwentiethCentury TERRYWOTHERSPOON

ublic school teachers are centrally implicated in current demands for educational reform. Claims that they must be held accountable for their contribution to declining educational standards and the lack of relevance in schools, however, are not new. Nor do teachers lack the means to respond. Over the past several decades, teachers and their organizations have become sophisticated in their engagement in the complex dynamics of collective bargaining, political lobbying and the delivery of professional services. Yet, despite teachers' central roles in the crucial state endeavour of public education, relatively little sustained attention has been given to the analysis of teaching and teachers' work. Several historical accounts have provided us with important insights into the lives and experiences of Canadian teachers during the development of public education systems.1 Less clearly understood, however, are questions about how teaching has become incorporated into a changing state apparatus and how the process of incorporation has been shaped by contending views about both public education and teaching. This paper investigates the emergent relationship between teachers and the state in British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century. This was a period in which public schooling

24


throughout Canada matured from a relatively haphazard collection of local school units to a consolidated mass education system that had responsibility for, and allocated labour market credentials to, nearly all of the nation's children. Accordingly, the occupational development of public school teaching over this time period is commonly analyzed in evolutionary terms that highlight the strides made by teachers away from state control towards relatively secure, respectable and autonomous professional status.2 Marxist and revisionist theoretical traditions, by contrast, have challenged the degree to which teachers have gained occupational autonomy, emphasizing the subordination of teachers within the state sector. Teachers, according to this alternative conceptualization, carry out the interests of the corporate state by selecting and subjugating the population into distinct positions under class and patriarchal domination.3 While there is a simple appeal to explaining the development of public school teaching in terms of some apparent dichotomy between professionalization and proletarianization, the reality is somewhat more complex. Teachers and states are not strictly separate social forces, nor mere accomplices in the maintenance of pre-given forms of social reproduction. Several writers informed by critical pedagogy and feminist analysis, including Grace, Ozga and Lawn in the United Kingdom, Apple in the United States, and Warburton, Curtis, Danylewycz and Prentice in Canada, stress that changing relations between capital and the state contribute to periodic modifications in the nature of both schooling and teaching.4 Apple in particular emphasizes that teachers, as distinct classed and gendered subjects, are subject to, and develop organized forms of resistance around, both technical control procedures and subjective regulation.5 Relatively little attention, though, has been paid to the processes by which teaching has been constituted historically around technical and subjective regulatory forms.

THE CONTESTED ORGANIZATION OF TEACHERS' WORK

I argue in this paper that the political economy of teaching must take into account the peculiar character of teaching as reproductive

THE INCORPORATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLTEACHERS

25

labour. Teaching is inherently contradictory, involving both technical and moral/subjective elements that arise from the occupation's central involvement in the reproduction of labour power. Labour power, as Marx observes, is reproduced in commodified form under capitalism, but unlike other commodities it also contains a "moral and historical" element.6 Like other paid employees in advanced capitalist nations, public school teachers are expected to perform prescribed technical functions under external supervision. These tasks include constructing lesson plans, transmitting curricula, supervising and disciplining pupils, grading and record-keeping. In addition, however, teachers' work involves intersubjective relations. Teachers, like other tertiary sector workers, are not engaged in a strict sense in the production of material commodities; rather they contribute to the reproduction of active human subjects. Curtis stresses that teaching is constituted as "pedagogical practice aimed at character formation and moral regulation."7 Conceptualized as reproductive labour, then, teaching is oriented to the multidimensional, changing, and potentially contested process of shaping human subjects. Teaching itself is given shape by distinct regulatory structures and practices and teachers' collective resistance to these—processes that emerge under particular material circumstances.8 This paper examines how, from 1900 to the late 1940s, problems in the creation of a suitable workforce and stable population within British Columbia's fluctuating, resource-based economy produced variations in regulation over, and resistance by, the teaching force. I emphasize how, as schooling gained a central place in the state's growing involvement in social reproduction, teacher-state relations became increasingly formalized through legislation and other regulatory measures. This simultaneously circumscribed teachers' role in the education system and allowed teachers new "professional" freedoms. The "new" educational agenda of the twentieth century involved, what appeared to educational authorities as, a commonsense response to modern needs and problems organized through the state.9 Schooling was to be remade as the primary reproductive institution, organized for the common good, rather than an adjunct of more fragmentary sites like home and industry.

26


School officials sought to balance, in a rational manner, the need to meet technical, industrial requirements with more indefinite moral/ subjective concerns associated with the quest for personal happiness and social harmony. As in the nineteenth century, teachers were to be concerned with both the production of a social subject and the nurturing of a moral subject.10 However, such production was to be targeted to a wide range of social roles, and morality was to be derived from the scientific, industrial order as opposed to earlier ideals of dedicated Christian service to the community. Within this material context, the establishment of a school system modelled on educational progressivism was modified by political and economic contingencies, notably serious economic crisis in the 1930s and Canada's subsequent participation in World War II. These events, detailed below, contributed to educational consolidation and closer integration of teachers into a state education system focused on ideologies of individualism and progressivism. In the process, major concessions to the rational ideals of professionalism undermined efforts to unify the teaching force as competing structural positions and occupational interests, divided especially along urban/rural and gender lines, emerged.

EDUCATIONAL REORGANIZATION AND PROVINCIAL DISPARITIES, 1900-1920s

British Columbia's social and economic outlook in the early years of the twentieth century was dismal. By 1903, deficit financing had emptied the provincial treasury and foreign investors grew wary of dealing with the province.11 This section outlines three major consequences of economic crisis in the early 1900s for British Columbia's education system. First, the climate of social and economic instability encouraged business and political leaders to look to the school's potential value in tempering the population and providing useful work-related skills. Second, school operations were made more efficient and economical to allow for continued existence and expansion. Third, the province's school system and teaching force experienced growing regional and internal disparities.


27

As provincial economic fortunes faltered, political agitation mounted and labour unrest burgeoned. A series of strikes, focused around the mining and transportation industries, prompted the appointment in 1903 of a federal commission to investigate industrial disputes in the province. The commission report conveyed a clear sense of alarm at rising working-class consciousness and the threat of class conflict, stressing that the industrial unrest in the province was a deterrent to outside investment and constituted a dangerous threat of moral breakdown.12 Promises of social stability and the development of an efficient citizenship offered by school promoters in this context were in line with the expressed interests of both the federal commission and the industrialists who appeared before them. The newly elected McBride government, as part of its agenda to restructure provincial operations, began in 1903 to reorganize educational administration and finance. School districts were consolidated and designed to be governed like business enterprises.13 School inspector A.C. Stewart argued that, with the consolidation of schools in any given rural municipality, it is safe to assume that the teaching staff could be reduced by about 40 per cent, or taking the municipality in question, the work now done by 12 teachers could be done by 7. Taking a higher standard of salaries than now obtain in rural schools, and allowing a fair remuneration for the principal of such a school, and after making provision for fuel and a permanent janitor, out of the amount now contributed by the Province for education in this municipality, there would be available nearly $3,000 to be applied for the purpose of conveying the children from a distance to and from the central school.u

Educational managers, employing technical analysis of school district operations adopted from scientific management, defined, measured and rearranged necessary tasks to increase productivity and thereby reduce the size of the teaching force and overall system costs. The technical reorganization of schooling was more easily accomplished in urban man in rural areas. Vancouver, Victoria and New Westminster, as the primary centres for trade, commerce and

28


government business, had sufficient populations and revenue bases to support different school programs and large, complex systems of school organization. School administrators developed rational managerial practices like timetabling and grouping of school classes and grades in order to process greater numbers of pupils and supervise a large teaching force more efficiently. Principalships and high school teaching positions became available for the best qualified and most experienced men and, on rare occasions, women.15 While city districts became organized around formal or technical procedures, frequent personal intervention and petty disputes created greater unpredictability in rural school operations. School inspectors criticized trustees who ignored inadequate heating, ventilation and other problems with school facilities. Regular disputes among parents, teachers and trustees resulted in repeated withdrawal of children from schools, and some parents reportedly attempted to force the closure of local schools to retaliate against neighbours or officials with whom they were in conflict.16 School officials viewed such actions as educationally unsound. Often they blamed teachers, whom they felt lacked commitment to the educational project, calling them "incapables" or "birds of passage."17 High rates of teacher attrition, though, most likely reflected poor working conditions, isolation and social and financial instability, especially in remote areas and single industry resource towns.1 In 1924, for example, the median period of tenure for teachers in British Columbia public schools was 2.14 years, but only 1.62 years for teachers in rural and provincially assisted school districts; the total average teaching experience in the province was less than six years.19 Rural school problems led local and provincial school officials to tighten their personal control over teachers. Hiring practices favoured the appointment of young female teachers who were less costly and presumed to be more amenable to discipline than men. Trustees and community leaders pressured teachers to adhere to local standards in order to retain a teaching position or even to ensure a paycheque. Local school boards imposed harsh rules governing the personal conduct of teachers both at school and in non-school time. This control was especially rigid over female teachers, whose contributions to community stability depended upon their own reliability and righteousness.20 Indeed, classroom


29

duties did not comprise the whole of a teacher's responsibilities, and the unpaid labour performed by the teacher in a broader range of activities was often of even greater value to the community. Moral/subjective regulation, in the form of local paternalistic control over teachers, was further secured through the common practice of boarding teachers in the homes of school trustees or in homes selected by school officials. Unlike farmhands whose wages included board, boarding costs were commonly deducted from teachers' "miserable monthly pittance."21 Rural teachers, subjected to near constant surveillance, needed perseverance and both mental and physical toughness to survive. School inspectors acknowledged that the combination of low salary and high job stress was "destructive of nervous energy" for teachers.22 Consequently, school authorities often had to compromise on teacher qualifications and regulation in order to find or retain teachers in local schools. Between 1906 and 1922, in municipal districts, teachers' rights were also highly constrained by legislation. School boards could dismiss a teacher at any time following 30 days' notice, while teachers who submitted 30 days' notice after January 1 of a given school year were not permitted to resign until the end of the school term. Therefore, it was possible for a district to enforce a reduction in a teacher's salary for a period of several months before the teacher could legally withdraw services.23 The tenuous nature of teacher security was heightened by teaching contracts that often set a specified term of service of six months or a year, with extension contingent upon a new agreement between the board and the individual teacher.24 These unstable conditions created an incentive for provincial education authorities and teachers to take action to upgrade the quality of both the school system and the teaching force.

DIVIDED LOYALTIES—TEACHER TRAINING AND TEACHER FEDERATION

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, school system officials and teachers offered distinct visions of teaching that variously complemented and conflicted with one another.

30


Educational administrators promoted systematic pre-service training for teachers as the solution to problems of teacher attrition and educational instability. Teachers, while receptive to formal training as a means of enhancing professional development, looked towards the formation of their own occupational organization as a necessary vehicle for the improvement of their welfare and working conditions. The establishment of both Normal Schools for teacher training and the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) in the early twentieth century simultaneously contributed to the advancement of teachers' rights and status, furthered the incorporation of teaching into state governance of education and sharpened occupational divisions within the teaching force. Formal teacher training had the contradictory impact of providing teachers with knowledge, credentials and practical work skills that could offer them enhanced occupational status and independence, while it drew them further under the paternalistic guidance of school authorities. Teacher training reflected, in part, a growing demand for schools to contribute to character formation and skill development. School superintendents and inspectors also recognized that their own careers and opportunities for promotion within the state service depended upon their ability to operate an efficient school system and effectively manage the teaching force. Ideally, from this perspective, all teachers would be subject to supervised training in the art and science of teaching. Most crucial, however, was the apparent need to reach the growing number of "raw, untrained" female teachers who were entering the provincial teaching force at the turn of the century.25 The first provincial Normal School program for teacher training opened in Vancouver in 1901 after enrolment growth, especially in city primary schools, contributed to a shortage of qualified teachers. The purpose of the school, according to its first principal, was "to shorten, as far as possible, the time occupied in apprenticeship, and thus prevent waste of time and mental energy by both teacher and pupils, which must otherwise be unavoidable."26 Teacher training programs were oriented to the presumed circumstances and needs of young, unmarried women, especially from the working class. Normal School initially required little investment of time and money. Direct admission was possible after completion of some high school


31

courses. The first teacher training programs were only of six weeks' duration. Tuition and, for out-of-town students, transportation, were free, and inexpensive room and board was available. In the 1901-02 school year, out of 212 Normal School graduates, there were 28 men and 4 married women, while the remainder were single women.27 Teacher training was intended to provide a basic foundation in the practice of teaching as a trade, which teachers could apply to any given teaching situation in order to reduce the time "wasted...over useless exercises" and rules.28 Teachers in training were not examined formally, but were evaluated on their overall aptitude for teaching. Management, discipline and practical ability were to compensate for a shortage of quality educators. Many teacher trainees had failed high school courses in subjects they would be called upon to teach, and training time in the teacher education programs was often devoted to such courses as paperfolding, cutting and weaving.29 In 1904, inspector David Wilson reiterated the words of an American school official who had condemned "the dense ignorance displayed by the teaching profession," contrasting this with the contributions that "progressive, earnest, thinking teachers" could make to intellectual and moral development.30 Under the paternal guidance of school administrators, teachers were to become professionals who would assume the parental task of preparing children for life in the modern world. The Normal School principal advised teachers at the 1905 provincial convention that they must "train parents by assuming that [parents] are anxious to have their children do the right thing in all matters." They should "never allow parents to dictate to teacher on professional matters."31 Schools would facilitate development of a stable industrial society by protecting the child from the regressive effects of the family. Trained professional teachers would have the flexibility to shape the child into a happy, reliable adult ready to perform socially necessary tasks. In practice, extensive obstacles prevented the full realization of such goals. The rapid and uneven growth of school populations contributed to teacher shortages in many localities. This, along with pressure from trustees to fill teaching vacancies quickly and cheaply,

32


led to a reliance by rural school districts on teachers with temporary certificates and no special teacher training. Problems in teacher training revealed conflicting orientations to the development of schooling and teaching in the province. Highly educated and more experienced male teachers and school system officials maintained an image of teaching as a craft that required competent practitioners skilled in their supra-parental educational roles. By contrast, untrained teachers and new recruits with limited formal credentials enabled school districts to operate schools cheaply. Such teachers were in no position to question local policies and programs. In the absence of sufficient public funding and local commitment to support a costly, status-minded professional teaching force, professional development had to take a back seat. The formation of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation in 1917 reflected the problems of a segmented teaching force. Local teachers' associations were formed as early as 1885, and on several occasions teachers debated plans to develop a province-wide organization, ranging from an apolitical professional body to a more militant union modelled after Britain's National Union of Teachers. The BCTF eventually materialized as a compromise, or "federation" of local associations, to advance the common ground that set teachers apart from administrators and state officials. The BCTF's founding objectives were to promote and improve public education in the province and to seek improvements in the welfare and status of teachers.32 The BCTF was committed from the outset to a "professional" vision that sought to raise the standards and character of the teaching force. Its effectiveness as an advocate of teachers' rights, though, was put to an early test when local strikes over salary matters were mounted by teachers in Victoria in 1919 and New Westminster in 1921. While the teachers, with the support of the BCTF and the public, made modest wage gains through the strike action, the federation leadership was more comfortable promoting a non-confrontational approach.33 For most of the province's teachers, immediate action to redress seriously overcrowded classrooms, low wages, inadequate school facilities and teaching resources, and the often despotic rule of local school officials, was more important than the promotion of the


33

virtues of public education. BCTF membership, which was voluntary until 1947, rarely grew beyond 50 percent of the province's teachers in the 1920s. Whereas most teachers were women, spread across the province in small rural school districts, the BCTF was dominated by urban men who were well-educated and whose backgrounds and educational objectives more closely paralleled those of educational administrators than of junior teachers.34 Consequently, by the mid-1920s, educators' goal of creating a well-trained complement of professional teachers was still far from being realized. Disparate teaching realities that reflected gender, regional and other social differences were becoming increasingly institutionalized through uneven economic development among school districts, state regulations for the governance of teaching and education, and teachers' own divided interests.

VOCATIONAL EFFICIENCY AND SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY— THE REORGANIZATION OF SCHOOLING IN THE 1920S

An impetus to coordinate and centralize educational planning emerged as a consequence of the strengthening of the relationship between the state and industrial capital, particularly from about World War I. Political and economic leaders, in concert with education system officials, promoted educational reform with a new vigour and consistency as they sought to stabilize socially diverse populations and respond to changing demands for labour power. Schooling was to be harnessed to a new vision of industrial harmony that would transcend class strife and social upheaval. In the process, the previous moral emphasis on habit formation was supplanted by a more flexible concern for the human subject in a changing industrial world. "Vocational efficiency" became the rallying cry, and scientific rationality legitimized direct state and corporate involvement in education and other social services. Federal government concern was illustrated by a 1913 royal commission on vocational and technical education that condemned Canada's lack of progress in organizing schooling according to the requisites of "industrial efficiency." The report stressed the need for a nationally coordinated war "against ignorance, helplessness,

34


poverty, disease, vice and ill-wills/' The school was presented as the primary battlefield in which "vocational efficiency" could be instilled through: a program of general education to promote the preservation of health; well-rounded growth in work and leisure; the instilling of "good habits...of obedience, courtesy, diligence and thoroughness;" and the development of character and "high ideals."35 The report, like other prominent commissions of the period, warned of the dangers of class conflict, and even included a condemnation of the overt exploitation of uneducated workers by unscrupulous employers. What was to be nurtured instead was the love of work, both for personal satisfaction and the social good (i.e., the state interest). Particular attention in the report's detailed proposals for specific school expectations and instructional methods was paid to the role of women. According to the report's authors, women required special training in recognition both of their valuable domestic role in the household (since "the housekeepers and the homemakers are always the mainstay of advancing civilization") and of the increasing replication of those duties as women entered the paid workforce. In British Columbia, official recognition of the need to develop a rational, science-based education system accompanied the province's uneven economic diversification. The provincial economy remained heavily tied to the resource industries, but consolidation and mechanization contributed to varied labour power requirements across the province. Immigration, urbanization and the establishment of enterprises and communities in previously undeveloped areas changed the character of the population and created new social "problems." Many of the concerns of policymakers and reform advocates, such as their fear of Asian immigration, had their origins in the nineteenth century. However, by the 1920s, with a stronger and more diverse economy, rising educational costs and fears of social problems associated with cultural and racial "impurities," the province was increasingly inclined to place education at the centre of a systematic process of social reform. Earlier expediencies of settlement and economic development meant that little official attention had been paid to the overall cohesion of the school system. By 1921, British Columbia public


35

schools employed over 2700 teachers, with pupil attendance rates averaging over 80 percent of school age children and schooling compulsory for all children from the ages of seven to fifteen.3 Despite the highly centralized character of educational legislation and regulations, however, the provincial school system was more a collection of diverse school districts than a highly integrated unit. BCTF leaders and school system officials expressed public concern about the absence of any systematic vision and organizational principles in the provincial school system. The province's education department responded in 1924 by appointing a commission of inquiry, chaired by prominent educators J.H. Putman and G.M Weir, to investigate British Columbia's schools. The commission report, the 1925 Survey of the School System, heavily influenced the subsequent direction of public education in the province. The Putman-Weir report offered a comprehensive account and critique of the province's education system that included several wide-sweeping recommendations. The authors repeatedly condemned "conservative" and "reactionary" educational doctrines that produced "intellectual torpor" through an outmoded, narrow focus on academic discipline and habit. Putman and Weir espoused "modern" aims rooted in a "progressive" educational philosophy. They viewed active child participation in life experiences as necessary to foster deferred values that would carry into adult life.38 Educational progressivism in various forms had guided reforms in the United States directed at making schools more efficient and responsive to planned social development. Characterized by its child-centred orientation of nurturing the innate worth of each individual, it also placed faith in the application of scientific management to educational administration. Putman and Weir considered that progressive educational principles were essential to the development of a complete person, oriented to social harmony and altruism. The properly educated individual would make rational choices in the interests of the wider society, given that, "Any well-rounded system of education, while emphasizing individual development, should stress in greater degree the paramount duty and importance of harmonizing such development with social needs and obligations."40 on

36

FEMINISM, POLITICAL ECONOMY ANDTHE STATE

The authors recommended school programs that would emphasize "life needs/' intellectual stimulation and practical activities and would replace rote learning and strict academic preparation for university. Six years of elementary school and three years of middle (junior high) school would precede three years of high school, which, in turn, would have four ''streams" linked to a general graduation diploma, commercial training, teacher training and university preparation.41 Implementation of several of the recommendations by the province began almost immediately, hastened in 1933 by the appointment of Weir, newly elected as a member of the governing Liberal party, as education minister. In 1929 the province adopted the "6-3-3" plan of school organization, and, by 1938, a completely revised curriculum package consistent with the report's objectives was in place, or ready, for each of the three levels.42 The school system reforms had significant implications for teachers. The survey itself was instigated in large part through pressure from BC Teachers' Federation leaders, which had recommended actions such as reorganizing the school system, revising the curricula, improving teacher training, and strengthening job and income security.43 Putman and Weir stressed that scientific principles were crucial to the reorganization of schooling and teaching. The scientifically organized school would contribute to social engineering by allowing individuals to lead efficient and productive lives within industrial societies. Nothing was to be left to speculation or chance. Teaching was no longer a "trade" concerned with "definite methods" of technique and instruction. Teachers had to perform their classroom responsibilities in an informed, professional and relatively autonomous manner after extended training in a scientifically grounded psychology and "the laws of learning and educational tests and measurements."44 Curriculum construction, Weir emphasized, needed to abandon its origins in unscientific "arm-chair analysis" or mere opinion. New pedagogical methods of controlled "job analysis,... in which a job or activity is observed and its elements listed as partial determinants of the proposed curriculum," were borrowed from scientific management in industry.45 Increased Normal School admission


37

standards and program requirements, IQ tests to determine school placement, physical education courses to foster productive use of leisure time, and psychiatric assessment and special school classes that would provide a "scientific solution" to problems of crime, poverty and the high economic cost created by "mentally defective" youth were among the initiatives undertaken by Weir and other leading reformers to give schooling a scientific basis.46 The promotion of science and progressivism in British Columbia emphasized a significant shift from school inspection, which stressed evaluation, reporting and close personal scrutiny of teachers, to a supervisory relationship oriented to educational development and professional growth.47 A regime of personal, paternalistic authority, in which school trustees could, for instance, arbitrarily reduce teachers' salaries or in which school inspectors could reprimand or demand the removal of teachers whose classroom appeared dirty, was counterproductive to a system that relied upon teachers' expertise and energies to educate well-rounded individuals. Teaching's contribution to moral/subjective development would continue, and in fact expand, under educational progressivism, but it was a new morality infused with dedication to the industrial order and corporate state rather than to purely Christian virtues. Within this order, the teacher was valued more for his or her trained capacity to make rational pedagogical judgments than for any personal qualities manifested outside of the working relationship. Teachers' shifting position in the school system was not a simple matter of professionalism or proletarianization. Increased formal training, competency in a broadened sphere of curricular activities and enhanced status as pedagogical experts would enable teachers to make claims of professionalism and enjoy increased independence from direct intervention by educational officials. However, teachers' autonomy and expertise were circumscribed by a rationality centred within corporations and the state, defined and organized in the interests of capital to coordinate regulation of production processes with labour and commodity markets. Within the new rationality, the individual would not be regarded as a totally self-sufficient entity, but rather as a subject carefully cultivated in accordance with harmonious social goals. The corporate state's role was to

38


coordinate this new individualism in a setting sheltered from the baser motives of industry, unions and other overtly political forces. Despite these ideals, the practical development of a rational education system was beset with difficulties. Officials in the education bureaucracy did not take kindly to criticism and suggestions for progressive reforms from Putman and Weir. Provincial business leaders were less impressed with progressive rhetoric than the promise of a cost-effective school system that could produce graduates qualified to step immediately into existing jobs. BCTF leaders saw an immediate appeal in harnessing educational progressivism for the advancement of the teaching profession, just as progressivism sought to activate teachers as agents of the wider agenda. However, there was little in the new education plans to rectify serious problems encountered daily by most teachers. Reforms to lengthen the school day and add new courses to school programs increased workloads so that teachers were commonly overburdened with large classes and excessive demands on their time in and out of class. The problem was most acute for teachers in rural multigrade classrooms who had to learn, prepare for and teach new materials across the entire new curriculum.48 Teachers' mounting frustration with a lack of responsiveness from both BCTF leaders and educational administrators to inadequate teaching and working conditions led to the formation of two new organizations in 1935. These were the Rural High School Section of the Secondary School Teachers' Association, which merged with its rural elementary school teachers' counterpart in 1940 to form the Rural Teachers' Association (RTA), and the Vancouver Secondary School Teachers' Association (VSSTA). These new associations brought together teachers who sought democratic input into educational decision-making and better wages, pensions and classroom conditions for teachers. The VSSTA, led by urban male classroom teachers, promoted affiliation with organized labour and politicized crucial teaching-related issues. The RTA was a much looser coalition that invited membership from any teacher concerned with rural conditions or problems. Key members of both organizations, openly critical of what they saw as paternalistic and oligarchic control by BCTF officials, advocated local teachers' rights and mobilized the general teaching force. Active RTA and VSSTA

THE INCORPORATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS

39

supporters eventually gained sufficient support within the BCTF for more representative membership policies, tougher stances on collective bargaining and affiliation in 1943 with the Trades and Labour Congress.49

THE ONSET OF ECONOMIC CRISIS AND EDUCATIONAL RETRENCHMENT, 1929-1933

Economic crisis in the 1930s and the 1940s exacerbated educational problems. Teachers' reliance on the central state increased while at the same time their need for a unified strategy based on a clear assessment of their occupational interests became more apparent. School finance remained a perennial problem. In the 1920s, education had overtaken public works as the highest single category of provincial expenditure. However, the government continued to shift the burden of school spending onto municipalities. The provincial share of school funding declined from 35.1 percent in 1925 to between 28.4 and 31 percent in the interval between 1930 and 1940, while school expenditures as a proportion of total government spending declined from 15.1 percent in 1925 to 9.9 percent in 1939.50 These fiscal trends were hastened by the provincial experience, beginning in 1929, of the international economic crisis. The province's export-dependent resource economy was devastated as the value of provincial production declined by over 50 percent between 1929 and 1932, and the net provincial debt climbed to over 147 million dollars in 1937. The rate of unemployment swelled to over 27.5 percent of the workforce in 1931 as jobs were lost and transients migrated into the province. Civil unrest was generated by the unemployed, the dispossessed, trade unions, government employees and political agitators in massive organizational drives and protest rallies.51 The Conservative government's response to the crisis was straightforward — it increased taxes, cut expenditures, took remedial measures to deal with the dispossessed and appointed a committee of prominent businessmen to investigate government finance and administration. As part of the government program of action,

40


provincial funding of education was cut from 3.8 million dollars in 1928-29 to 2.6 million dollars in 1933-34. Municipal educational expenditures declined from 7.4 million dollars to 5.6 million dollars over the same time period, and a new tax for educational purposes was imposed in 1932 on land outside school district boundaries.52 Governments were also able to use fiscal crisis as a rationale with which they could consolidate their control over public expenditures. Teachers, who had limited contractual protection, were especially hard hit. In some districts, school boards, claiming fiscal hardship, laid off their entire teaching staff. As a consequence of these actions, teachers suffered wage reductions of 30 percent or more while, in many districts, local authorities suspended incremental salary schedules.53 Despite these measures, the impact of the Depression upon schools and teachers was less severe than it might have been. Teachers, who had recently gained pension benefits, job security and a strengthened association between school and work training, had a more stable occupational foundation than did employees in other sectors. Teachers were also saved by political fortune from the harsh treatment outlined for them in the ill-fated Kidd Report on government in 1932. The report, drafted by a committee of representatives from the province's major industrial and commercial interests, headed by BC Electric Railway Company president George Kidd, offered a direct statement of business's vision of economic planning in the provincial setting. The commissioners expressed alarm at what they saw as the uncontrolled growth of government and its extravagant spending. They recommended a significant reduction in the scope and size of government activity and a cut in the annual provincial budget from 25 million dollars to 6 million. Education was a prime target for an overall downsizing of government, with proposals to limit free public schooling to children between the ages of 6 and 13, raise fees to cover the total cost of Normal School education, eliminate the government grant to the University of British Columbia, cut teachers' salaries by one-quarter and abolish school boards altogether.54 The details of the Kidd Report astounded even members of the government which, though it had commissioned the report under pressure from the business community, failed to implement any of


41

the recommendations. The BCTF dismissed the report as a vehicle "made solely in the interests of the moneyed classes in the province/' engineered as "a calculated attempt to set up a class barrier as far as education is concerned."55 BCTF secretary general Harry Charlesworth, an educational progressive, lamented: It is rather a sad commentary on the efficiency and genius of our government, financial and commercial leaders, that when the systems they had elaborately built up in prosperous times collapsed so completely and brought us to our present position, they have had no alternative to offer as a constructive remedy, other than the temporary expedients of curtailing or eliminating services, and of reducing salaries or wages, neither of which policies will help us over our fundamental difficulties, but, by additional unemployment, and further restriction of purchasing power, will rather add to, and prolong them.56

Several other groups provided an equally harsh indictment of the document. Public hostility, stirred in debate over the report, extended into fractiousness within the governing party, contributing to a Liberal victory in the 1933 provincial election. The new government (including Weir as education minister) emphasized increasing state social responsibility and economic regulation.57

THE BCTF'S SUPPORT FOR SCIENCE-BASED EDUCATION

The events of the late 1920s and the 1930s provided a clear insight into the alignment of various social groupings with regard to educational policy. The provincial bourgeoisie, positioned to benefit from the social provision of a trained workforce, saw that public investment in formal training beyond minimum levels was superfluous when low-cost labour was plentiful; profit-making could be facilitated by more direct state investment programs. By contrast, public support for teachers on strike in New Westminster in 1921, widespread revulsion at the Kidd recommendations in 1932 and the CCF's 31.5 percent of the provincial vote in 1933 suggested

42


that the working class was beginning to rally behind educational causes and even attempt to assert, in conjunction with many teachers, its own independent vision. On a much broader scale, unlike provincial businesses and workers with their typically parochial economic interests, international capital required long-range social and economic planning to facilitate the accumulation of profit. Systematic corporate planning, in a context of restricted markets and constraints on growth within single firms, could be organized cost-effectively and efficiently through the state, and could be carried out by scientifically trained professional experts. Ideological and organizational foci for a new order, which could legitimize corporate intervention into civil society, were offered by science. State provision of public services such as education and health care provided for the socialization of both the costs and the techniques of social reproduction on a massive scale. Amidst expansion of social services and clerical and service work, educational progressivism complemented the corporate agenda. Progressivism attempted to undermine old educational ideals that stressed efficiency for efficiency's sake. Weir and other progressives were quick to point out how necessary it was for education to stay abreast of and guide social change. Harry Charlesworth observed that, "Newspapers, businessmen — advertisers, railways and governments—instantly seize upon new schemes or inventions to serve their ends—whether with pictures, puzzles, moving pictures, or radio—while teachers too often continue in the old dull paths."58 BCTF leaders and educational administrators, however, were concerned to protect the primacy of educational services against instrumental economic planning, distancing themselves from what they saw as the new corporate order conveyed in the Kidd Report and similar commissions in the U.K. and elsewhere. In talks to parents, teachers and other educational officials, Charlesworth emphasized schooling's importance in the ''social reconstruction" of a new world where people would be capable of overcoming the "blind acceptance" of "business and national propaganda." He observed that


43

Industry and business today is [sic] rapidly becoming standardized and centralized. Great corporations are being formed. The individual is being merged into the groups — & thus lost. It is a very necessary counterbalance that education should move the other way — away from standardization, centralization & groups - deadening uniformity - to the elevation & development of individuality.59

The apparent paradox that educators would decry the influence of business and centralized corporate interests while rallying around a corporate vision of the social order indicates the contradictory nature of educational progressivism. Educational progressives were concerned to nurture and protect the individual against the encroachment of a standardized and narrowly defined form of education advocated by business interests and typified by the writers of the Kidd Report. Charlesworth's vision, however, did share something in common with the vision of the corporate capitalist interests. Just as they sought a more systematic regulation of social reproduction, so too Charlesworth believed that schooling should be an "investment" to create "improved citizens," leaving fewer unemployed "misfits," and "blind alley workers." Individualism, within progressivism and the corporate state, was not to be based upon ontological freedom. Rather, the individual had need of social guidance in order to cultivate overall learning skills. He or she needed: health education to learn "how to keep well;" knowledge "to make a good home and rear children;" effective citizenship and character development; vocational education to learn "to work efficiently and happily;" and a understanding of how to regulate life "according to the standards of the right thing."60 These priorities had been advanced in the Putman-Weir report, as well as in earlier federal government commissions on work and education, and in initiatives on education proffered by highpowered interests from outside the province. Corporate bodies like the Carnegie Foundation of New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Ford Foundation actively promoted state-centred efforts to coordinate social reproduction processes through the strategic allocation of philanthropic funds. Corporate capital, by offering research grants and funding for selected public services and

44


programs (such as the Carnegie Corporation's commitment to provide start-up funds for public libraries in rural communities),61 was able simultaneously to generate public goodwill and influence the direction of state policy and the organization of social life. Corporate foundations also promoted the rise of professions like medicine, teaching and social work to carry out the reorganization of social life. Philanthropic funding of training programs, research and institutional services for these occupations facilitated the production of "usable knowledge7' and resources for the advancement of the new social order. In the process, the foundations gained and retained nominal and practical control over important aspects of professional work.62 Teacher leaders found their interests could be served by state and corporate attempts to restructure school and society, particularly as it meant the enhancement of wages, working conditions and professional status. These conditions made it imperative for teachers to serve as strong advocates of the place of education in the world at large, but not in such a way as to "descend to some of the well-known methods of securing effective power and influence."63 Individual and occupational success in teaching depended upon the suppression of activities that would challenge existing relations of power and authority. The proper role for teachers was to cooperate with the Department of Education and lobby to enhance their position through legitimate state channels. This cooperative stance was facilitated by the relatively privileged status of BCTF leaders compared to other teachers with respect to qualifications, rank and career options. The Department of Education came to rely upon the BCTF as a channelling device which complemented the traditional pattern of appointing senior teachers and school principals to positions within the educational bureaucracy. The department further enlisted the cooperation of teacher leaders by providing them periodically with information identified as confidential, which they were expected to withhold from other teachers.64 Education minister George Weir's plans to revise the British Columbia school curriculum in accordance with scientific principles, set in motion in 1935, illustrated the contradictory implications of educational progressivism for the teaching force. Weir's objective,


45

in essence, was to complete and extend the implementation of the science-based curriculum he and Putman had outlined a decade earlier. Under the new plan, curriculum-building was to become a rational process based upon principles derived from corporatefunded research and practices established by American and British curriculum designers, notably Franklin Bobbitt, George Counts and Elwood Cubberly.65 Acting quickly to reorganize the curriculum formation process, Weir established new curriculum and planning structures to provide systematic central direction over education. Formerly the domain of school system officials and sometimes teachers, curriculum planning was now open only to educational experts who possessed accredited backgrounds in designated areas. Teachers would remain formally free to deliver the curriculum, but their working relations required scientific training rather than good moral character and pedagogical knowledge. Although the curriculum changes received widespread approval, Weir was criticized from both the political right and left. Conservative business leaders denounced centralized curriculum planning as a "socialist7' measure devoted to preparing youth for adjustment to social change. Radical teachers decried the curriculum's emphasis on scientific objectivity as a dangerous intrusion of the corporate state into education.67

A DIVIDED TEACHING FORCE

Teachers' responses to the curriculum changes revealed the entrenchment of divisions in the teaching force. Cognizant of the growing sympathy of many teachers for a radical labour movement, Weir, like Charlesworth, stressed teachers' responsibility to guide the formation of the masses into enlightened subjects, not by the use of "propaganda" or partisan political views, but with the aid of superior objective knowledge about the world. An editorial in The BC Teacher in October, 1936, indicated the BCTF leadership was in sympathy with Weir's agenda and that the federation would display little tolerance for teachers who criticized the curriculum changes. The editorial observed that "Many teachers are hampered by the inadequacy of their own professional and academic background.

46


Should the Programme therefore avoid anything that the mediocre teacher will find beyond his capabilities?"68 The tension between radical teachers and supporters of the government's new agenda was not merely rhetorical but served as a basis for struggle over the direction of the occupation. Two competing and internally contradictory images of teaching prevailed from the 1920s through the 1940s. One, promoted by educational officials, administrators and teacher leaders who advocated educational progressivism, portrayed teaching as a scientifically trained profession centrally involved in an apolitical endeavour to prepare individuals for life in a changing corporate order. The other, loosely shared by classroom teachers, many school trustees and school officials dedicated to existing educational hierarchies, emphasized that teaching should be more responsive to daily community concerns than to the service of a distant state. As a consequence of conflicting interests among teachers, state officials and local trustees, neither view was entirely cohesive. Teachers' different experiences and, thus, their responsiveness to different teaching ideologies reflected regional and gender divisions. Inequalities associated with these cleavages were exacerbated by the tendency for men to teach in larger urban centres and high school settings while women were concentrated in rural areas and elementary schools. In 1934, for example, 55 percent of the province's 1283 male teachers compared to 83 percent of the 2590 female teachers in the province taught in rural districts. Median salary levels for men were $1,143 in rural districts and $1,776 in urban districts, while for women the comparable levels were $1,020 in rural districts and $1,358 in urban districts. In 1938, over onethird of the province's female teachers, compared to one-fifth of the male teachers, received annual salaries of less than $1000.69 While these figures reflect differences in qualifications, teaching experience, supervisory responsibilities and other factors, they point nonetheless to significant structural differences in the positions of men and women in the teaching force. The reorganization of schools in the wake of the Putman-Weir inquiry extended the general division of labour which previously had characterized school organization. With larger schools and broader program offerings,


47

the number of school administrative positions (principalships and vice-principalships) expanded, providing new opportunities for the most qualified and well-situated teachers. At the same time, the gradual disappearance of small, ungraded schools brought increasing numbers of teachers into direct subordinate roles in the school system under the supervision of in-school administrators. The prevalent ideology stated that women were predisposed to teach school, but within their distinct places under appropriate male supervision. The observation of one school inspector in 1918, that the development of " manly men" required supervision by male teachers just as the development of "womanly women" required female supervision, gave way to the more general notion that classroom teaching "was a woman's job."70 Operating under difficult economic conditions, it was women and rural teachers, and especially women teaching in rural settings, who were most in need of action to redress immediate difficulties. Yet the organizational agenda for the long-term development of the occupation was being set by the predominantly male, city-based leadership of the BCTF. Teachers who were severely affected by educational disparities were often further handicapped by geographical isolation and the harsh discipline of local school boards. In rural areas, the strong paternalism of school trustees who preferred to dictate wages and conditions of employment provided a stark counterpoint to the emergent ideal of the skilled professional teacher employed in large schools organized around formal administrative principles. Nonetheless, even in larger districts and cities such as Vancouver, trustees and administrators did not hesitate to engage in personal regulation by writing unfavourable reports, issuing verbal condemnations and restricting promotion opportunities for teachers who took an active role in advancing teachers' rights.71 Teachers, though, were beginning to have an impact on educational policy in the province. Within the occupation, groups like the RTA and VSSTA contributed to improved teaching conditions and acted as advocates for social democracy within the BCTF and outside it. Teachers' input was most effective in areas where their interests coincided with the interests of others,

48


particularly, but not exclusively, if their interests were in line with those of the provincial government. Just as economic crisis and social unrest had precipitated increased state and corporate interest in social coordination after the turn of the century, so crisis and war in the 1930s and 1940s created circumstances for improving teaching conditions along with greater centralization of economic planning and state activity. In response to the fiscal uncertainties of the depression and new patterns of population growth and economic development, provincial government legislation produced larger, consolidated school districts, funded through an enlarged tax base and a provincial grant formula. The BCTF welcomed these measures, but emphasized that schools remained underfunded and the teaching force underdeveloped. Despite their appeals and the government's promises, teachers' salary increases exceeded the cost of living by a total of only one percent between 1945 and 1948, by which time there were still 188 unqualified teachers who held teaching posts in the province.72 A new relationship among school, state and industry had become firmly established in the first half of the twentieth century. There was consensus that a stable school system required proper learning conditions and good teachers who were adequately compensated for their work. Education officials stressed that schooling was to contain practical content and be made more orderly to fulfil industrial requirements. Political and corporate leaders turned to schooling to prepare individuals to perform diverse social roles in a coordinated manner. The advancement of education as a rational enterprise depended in large part upon the corporate state's uncertain ability to secure alliances with educational authorities and teachers whose immediate material concerns often contradicted the state's broader priorities. In this climate, the changing technical and intersubjective educational expectations both constrained teachers and offered them new opportunities for occupational development.


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CONCLUSIONS

This paper has been concerned with the establishment of schooling as a central site of social reproduction in the first half of the twentieth century. I have argued that notions of educational consensus and teacher professionalism are politically constructed through interrelations among disparate social interests within particular material contexts. Teacher-state relations are shaped by the conscious, often contradictory, activities of educational participants. Teaching is organized in both technical and moral/ subjective terms around the changing processes of labour power reproduction. It is this dual function that enables teaching to make progressive contributions to human development at the same time that it remains vulnerable to external constraints on the occupation's possibilities. Teaching remains a contested endeavour as contemporary education is subject to forces of global corporate realignment. There is a familiar ring to the cavalcade of reform cries—that schools should produce properly educated youth more cheaply and effectively, respond to labour market trends, maintain social harmony, be receptive to minority communities, instil respect for proper values, keep to basics and offer socially relevant curricula. Teachers, as state employees and reproductive agents, are strategically important as both subjects and objects of social and economic reform. Given these complex realities, it is not surprising to find teachers at the centre of periodic calls for state and educational reform. As the British Columbia experience has demonstrated, teaching is shaped by changes in both the technical requirements of work in and out of schools and demands for socially reliable citizenship. The current neoconservative, deficit-reduction agenda echoes earlier proposals, such as those contained in the Kidd Report of 1932, and administrators continue to pursue strategies to rationalize educational practices. Collective agreements and formal procedures, which have made it difficult for school trustees, inspectors and teacher training authorities to exercise arbitrary, paternalistic rule over teachers' work and lives, continue to be heavily scrutinized by persons within and outside the education system. Educational reforms, particularly as they apply to teachers, operate on a terrain

50


that shifts in an apparently haphazard manner between economic prerogatives and humanistic considerations. There has been, however, a convergence of moral/subjective and technical regulation as teaching comes to be incorporated more fully into state structures of governance through the greater integration of scientific curriculum planning, administrative centralization and the ideology of professionalism. Teachers' real gains in professional status and occupational effectiveness do not compensate for the fact that teaching is waged labour regulated by the state. It is important for teachers to develop occupational strategies that avoid uni-dimensional characterizations of their work. The indefinite and contested nature of educational practices and outcomes allows teachers space within which to develop alternative agendas in and beyond the classroom. By virtue of the contradictory realities of their reproductive labour, teachers must be sensitive to the criticisms and constraints that accompany their work. BC teachers, like teachers elsewhere, have fought individually and collectively, with varying degrees of success, for control over pedagogy, improved working conditions, more secure wages and benefits, and social recognition for wider educational issues. They have employed diverse means, including unionization, occupational mobilization, job actions and innovative day-to-day activities, to attain their objectives. In pursuit of their interests, they have engaged periodically in formal and informal alliances with other educators and community groups, organized labour and even particular sectors of capital including philanthropic foundations. As they contend with contemporary efforts to restructure education systems, it is crucial that teachers not lose sight of the historical practices that have shaped their occupation. They must resist, as did many of their predecessors, hegemonic practices that restrict the scope of classroom activities to the production of specified units of output. Teachers, as educators, must strive continually to promote a vision of education as challenge and possibility.


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ENDNOTES 1 would like to thank Arlene McLaren, Hamish Dickie-Clark, Harley Dickinson and three reviewers for SPE from whose comments and discussion this article has benefited. 1

2

3

4

See, for example, Jean Barman, "Birds of Passage or Early Professionals? Teachers in Late Nineteenth Century British Columbia," Historical Studies in Education 2/1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 17-36; John C. Charyk, The Little White Schoolhouse (Saskatoon: Western Produce Prairie Books, 1968); and J.W. Chalmers, Teachers of the Foothills Province (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). See, for example, J.M. Paton, The Role of Teachers' Organizations in Canadian Education (Toronto: Gage, 1962); J. Douglas Muir, Collective Bargaining by Canadian Public School Teachers (Ottawa: Information Canada, 1968); J.W. Chafe, Chalk, Sweat, and Cheers (Winnipeg: Manitoba Teachers Association, 1969); and Douglas Ray, "Professional Associations View Current Teaching," in Rama Ghosh and Douglas Ray, eds., Social Change and Education in Canada Today, second edition (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1991), pp. 28-36. See, for example, Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), pp. 172-186; Rosemary Deem, Women and Schooling (London: Routledge, 1978); Stephen Schecter, "Capitalism, Class, and Educational Reform in Canada," in Leo Panitch, ed., The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 373-416; and Joel H. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon, 1972). Gerald Grace, "Teachers and the State in Britain: A Changing Relation," in Martin Lawn and Gerald Grace, eds., Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work (London, 1987), pp. 193-228; Jennifer Ozga and Martin Lawn, Teachers, Professionalism and Class: A Study of Organized Teachers (London: Palmer, 1981); Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (London: Palmer, 1986); Rennie Warburton, "The Class Relations of Public School Teachers in British Columbia," The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 23/2 (May, 1986), pp. 210-229; Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836-1871 (London, Ont: Althouse Press, 1988); Marta Danylewycz and Alison Prentice, "Teachers' Work: Changing Patterns and Perceptions in the Emerging School Systems of Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Central Canada," Labour/Le Travail 17 (Spring, 1986), pp. 59-80; and Marta Danylewycz, Beth Light and Alison

52

5

6

7

8

9

10


Prentice, "The Evolution of the Sexual Division of Labor in Teaching: A Nineteenth Century Ontario and Quebec Case Study," in Jane S. Gaskell and Arlene Tigar McLaren, eds., Women and Education, second edition (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1991), pp. 33-60. Apple, Teachers and Texts (New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 32-34. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: International Publishers, 1977), pp. 274-275. Bruce Curtis, "The Speller Expelled: Disciplining the Common Reader in Canada West," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 22/3 (August, 1985), pp. 346-368. Terry Wotherspoon, "Immigration and the Production of a Teaching Force: Policy Implications for Education and Labour," International Migration 27/4 (December, 1989), pp. 544-545; Wotherspoon, "From Subordinate Partners to Dependent Employees: State Regulation of Public School Teachers in Nineteenth Century British Columbia," Labour/Le Travail 31 (Spring, 1993). British Columbia, Annual Report of the Public Schools (Victoria, 1904), p. A33, [hereafter PSR]. Bruce Curtis, "Preconditions of the Canadian State: Educational Reform and the Construction of a Public in Upper Canada, 1837-1846," Studies in Political Economy 10 (Winter, 1983), pp. 99-121; Curtis, "The Speller Expelled," pp. 346347; and Danylewycz and Prentice, "Teachers' Work," pp. 60-62; Thomas S. Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1991).

11

Martin Robin, The Rush for Spoils: The Company Province, 1871-1933 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), p. 100. 12 Government of Canada, "The Royal Commission Appointed to Investigate Industrial Disputes in the Province of British Columbia," Sessional Papers 38, 13 (Ottawa, 1904); and Government of Canada, "Report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes in the Province of British Columbia," Sessional Papers 36a (Ottawa, 1903). 13 Province of British Columbia, An Act to Amend the Public Schools Act Province of British Columbia Statutes, ch. 39 (Victoria, 1906). 14 PSR 1903, p. C33. 15 British Columbia Teachers' Federation, "The Old Vancouver High School," The B.C. Teacher 6/4 (December, 1926), pp. 13-16. 17 PSR 1909, p. A27. 17 PSR 1904, p. A65. 18 PSR 1911, pp. A30ff.; J.H. Putman and G.M. Weir, Survey of the School System (Victoria: Education Survey Commission, 1925), pp. 124-125.


19

21

22

23

25

26

27

28

29 30

31

32

34

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Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, pp. 187-188. British Columbia School Trustees' Association, "Rules Required for Teachers in Revelstoke Area, 1915," BCSTA Reports (October 17,1980); compare with a nearly identical statement of regulations governing teachers in the United States, reproduced in Apple, Teachers and Texts, pp. 73-74. PSR 1904, p. 67; J. Donald Wilson and Paul J. Stortz, '"May the Lord Have Mercy on You': The Rural School Problem in British Columbia in the 1920s," BC Studies 79 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 24-58. PSR 1909, p. A27. Donald Leslie MacLaurin, "The History of Education in the Crown Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and in the Province of British Columbia" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, 1936), pp.165-166. Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, p. 315. PSR 1904, p. A65. William Burns, "Progress of Teacher-training in B.C.," The B.C. Teacher 6/4 (December, 1926), p. 21. PSR 1901, p. 277; PSR 1902, pp. Ixxxviii-xc; John Calam, "Teaching the Teachers: Establishment and Early Years of the B.C. Provincial Normal Schools," B.C. Studies 61 (Spring, 1981), p. 33; F. Henry Johnson, A History of Public Education in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1964), p. 78. PSR 1902, p. A16. Calam, "Teaching the Teachers," p. 33. PSR 1904, p. C41. British Columbia Teachers' Federation, "Voices from the Past," The B.C. Teacher 6/4 (December, 1926), p. 29. William A. Bruneau, "'Still Pleased to Teach': A Study of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation, 1917-1978" (unpublished manuscript, Vancouver, BCTF, 1978), pp. 4, 7; Stanley Heywood, "The Early History of the BCTF," (Vancouver, n.d.); Johnson, A History of Public Education, pp. 239-240. BCTF, "Annual Meeting of the British Columbia Teachers' Federation," B.C. Teachers' Federation Magazine 1/1-2 (September-October, 1921), pp. 14-18; BCTF, "The New Westminster Case," B.C. Teachers' Federation Magazine 1/3 (November, 1921), pp. 2-12; BCTF, "New Westminster Settlement," B.C. Teachers'Federation Magazine 1/5 (January, 1922), pp. 3-4; Harry Charlesworth, "Federation News," The B.C. Teacher 7/2 (October, 1927), pp. 5-9. MacLaurin, "The History of Education," p. 329; PSR, 1921-1928.

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3

36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43

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45 46

47 48

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Government of Canada, Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, Report of the Commissioners, Part II (Ottawa, 1913), pp. 75, 160-163. Ibid., pp. 174-179; Government of Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations in Canada (Ottawa, 1919); and Dominion Education Association, Proceedings of the Eighth Convention of the Association (Ottawa, 1913), pp. 19-20. PSR1921. Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, pp. 40-44. Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools, expanded edition (New York: Praeger, 1975); Jean Mann, "G.M. Weir and H.B. King: Progressive Education or Education for the Progressive State?" in J. Donald Wilson and David C. Jones, eds., Schooling and Society in 20th Century British Columbia (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1980), pp. 91-118. Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, p. 38. Ibid. PSR1938, p. J28; Johnson, A History of Public Education, pp. 111-114. BCTF, "Educational Survey Report," The B.C. Teacher 4/4 (December, 1924), pp. 73-96; BCTF, "Educational Survey Report," The B.C. Teacher 4/5 (January, 1925), pp. 105-107; Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, pp. 1, 527539; PSR 1938; William A. Bruneau, "'Still Pleased to Teach,'" pp. 15-16; Johnson, A History of Public Education, pp. 110-111,212-213. G.M. Weir, "Some Research Problems for British Columbia Teachers," The B.C.Teacher 6/3 (November, 1926), p. 5; Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, pp. 200, 227-230, 234. Weir, "Some Research Problems," p. 5. BCTF, "Annual General Meeting," The B.C.Teacher 7/8 (April, 1928), pp. 3134; H.B. Fitch, "Templeton Junior High School," The B.C. Teacher 7/2 (October, 1927), p. 17. Putman and Weir, Survey of the School System, pp. 194-195, 239-240, 269. BCTF, "Editorial," The B.C. Teacher 7/3 (November, 1927), pp. 1-3; Winnifred M. New, "How the City Teacher Can Help the Country Teacher," The B.C. Teacher 6/1 (September, 1926), pp. 41-44. BCTF, "Rural High School Section," The B.C. Teacher 14/10 (June, 1935), p. 24; Jerry Bruce Roald, "Pursuit of Status: Professionalism, Unionism and Militancy in the Evolution of Canadian Teachers' Organizations, 1915-1955," (unpublished D.Ed, thesis, University of British Columbia, 1970), pp. 236-247; RTA, "Rural Teachers' Association of the B.C.T.F.," The B.C. Teacher 20/9 (May, 1941), pp. 406-407; RTA Executive, "Rural Teachers' Association," The B.C. Teacher 22/4 (December, 1942), pp. 92-94,103; John Sutherland, unpublished


55

interview with the author (Tsawassen, B.C., August, 1987); S. Eric Woodman, unpublished interview with the author (North Vancouver, B.C., December, 1987). Government of British Columbia, British Columbia in the Canadian Federation (Victoria, 1938), p. 241; Maxwell A. Cameron, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Educational Finance (Victoria, 1945), pp. 9,12. Government of B.C., British Columbia in the Canadian Federation, pp. 73,191; Robin, The Rush for Spoils, pp. 235-236. Government of B.C., British Columbia in the Canadian Federation, p. 144; Robin, The Rush for Spoils, p. 237. Bruneau, "'Still Pleased to Teach/" p. 18; Harry Charlesworth, "'Wholesale' Dismissal of Teachers," The B.C. Teacher 11/9 (May, 1932), pp. 2,29; A. Sutton, letter to S.J. Willis, 4 May 1936, BCTF Records, Agreements and Salaries— Historical Salary Information file. BCTF, "The Federation and the Kidd Report," The B.C. Teacher 12/2 (October, 1932), pp. 3-19; "Kidd Committee Would Curtail Free Education," Daily Colonist [Victoria] (August 30,1932), pp. 1-2. Ibid. Harry Charlesworth, "Educational Frontiers of the New World," unpublished paper presented to Educational Frontiers from an International Viewpoint, Vancouver, 27 February 1933, University of British Columbia, The Library, Special Collections Division, Harry Charlesworth Papers, v.f. 180, p. 2. Donald E. Blake, Two Political Worlds: Parties and Voting in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), p. 16; BCTF, "The Federation and the Kidd Report," p. 3; Alan H. Child, "The Government and Teachers' Salaries," unpublished manuscript, n.d., BCTF Records, Agreements and Salaries—Historical Salary Information file, pp. 2-3; Robin, The Rush for Spoils, pp. 242-243. Harry Charlesworth, "New Teaching of Geography and its value in fostering International Understanding," unpublished notes, n.d., University of British Columbia, The Library, Special Collections Division, Harry Charlesworth Papers. Harry Charlesworth, "Notes, Speech to Parent-Teacher Federation," unpublished notes, n.d., University of British Columbia, The Library, Special Collections Division, Harry Charlesworth Papers. Ibid. Harry Charlesworth, "An Appreciation," The B.C. Teacher 9/4 (December, 1929), pp. 4-5.

56

62

63 64

65

66

67 68

69

70 71

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Thomas S. Popkowitz, Paradigm and Ideology in Educational Research: The Social Functions of the Intellectual (London: Palmer Press, 1984), pp. 121-124. Charlesworth, "Educational Frontiers of the New World," p. 17. L.A. Anderson, "A Link with History Passes," The B.C. Teacher 42/6 (March, 1963), pp. 247-248. BCTF, "The Easter Convention," The B.C. Teacher 6/6 (February, 1927), pp. 13; see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 226. G.M. Weir, "The Revision of the Curriculum," The B.C. Teacher 14/8 (April, 1935), pp. 20-21. Mann, "G.M. Weir and H.B. King," pp. 111-113. BCTF, "The New Programme of Studies," The B.C. Teacher 16/2 (October, 1936), p. 51. Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Annual Survey of Education in Canada (Ottawa, 1934); Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Elementary and Secondary Education in Canada, 1936-38 (Ottawa, 1938). PSR1918, p. D28; S. Eric Woodman, unpublished interview, p. 1. Wilson and Stortz, "'May the Lord Have Mercy on You'"; John Sutherland, unpublished interview. PSR 1948, p. JJ14; Johnson, A History of Public Education, pp. 127,131; Statistics Canada, A Century of Education in British Columbia: Statistical Perspectives (Ottawa, 1971), pp. 24-25; BCTF, "What's Gone Wrong with the Cameron Report," The B.C. Teacher 27/1 (September-October, 1947), pp. 8-10; BCTF, "Schools Are Only as Good as their Teachers," The B.C. Teacher 27/7 (April, 1948), p. 247.

CHAPTER 3

Changing Labour Process and the Nursing Crisis in Canadian Hospitals

JERRYWHTIE

I. INTRODUCTION

Few issues have sparked such multidisciplinary interest as the crisis in nursing. Health care is seen as a social good in Canada, and we have come to expect a high-quality, low-consumer-cost service. Today, such a service is threatened, and a number of fingers point to a shortage of nurses as the cause. Nurses in our hospitals are leaving the profession, opting for part-time arrangements and/or going on strike. We have beds closing down, delays in operations and reports of increasing workrelated stress in hospitals. The variety of explanations for this situation have added to our understanding of women (the nursing profession is 98.6 percent female) and the organization of work. However, the principal shortcoming of the leading sociological and political economy explanations lies in the fact that they tend to downplay the role of gender and worker resistance in the context of labour process change. This paper attempts to address this problem by drawing on these multidisciplinary debates and using an interview and surveybased study1 to uncover the relationship between gender, class, labour process and militancy. I argue that nurses are no longer playing a passive and subservient role. Nurses individually and

58


collectively have been awakened to resistance by a fundamental change that is taking place in their labour process. There is a serious and growing divergence between how nurses want to do the job— how they feel the care should be delivered —and how the hospital, management and government see nursing delivered under the present conditions. In order to understand the crisis we have to grasp the roots of this divergence and contradiction. Nurses want to provide a different kind of care in the hospital, but can not. Denied more say in how the work is organized, they are instead encouraged to adapt to the new environment. How gender plays itself out through the understandings, desires and expectations that women bring to the job is one focus of this paper. As a result of their own understandings and expectations, nurses want to keep the level and quality of care high. Their job satisfaction is dependent upon it. This has created and fanned resistance among them. The current crisis is the result and manifestation of the resistance of nurses to the changing labour process, changes brought on by a fiscal crisis of the state. Outline The argument begins with a brief discussion of the mainstream explanation given for the crisis in nursing—that there is a shortage of nurses. The concepts used in constructing a less reductionist model for interpreting the current crisis in hospital nursing are then discussed. This includes a model for understanding labour process across its multiple dimensions of space, time and form, incorporating the role of gender as well as an analytical discussion of resistance. In light of the data gathered in the study, I then argue that the crisis is best understood in terms of resistance to managerial initiatives aimed at cost cutting. The three forms of resistance identified are: the strike, the outright resignation from activity in the profession and the move to part-time work. Given that nonlabour process and non-class/gender models place the onus for the current situation on supply and demand relationships (which can be corrected with financial incentives), a follow-up survey that indicates monetary issues are not in fact driving the current staffing problems is very briefly discussed. The final section of the paper

CHANGING LABOUR PROCESS

59

draws together conclusions based upon the theoretical discussions around gender, labour process, class and control.

II. A SHORTAGE OF NURSES?

We know there is a problem recruiting and retaining nurses. This has led some analysts to claim we have a simple supply and demand problem.2 Yet the evidence indicates that there is no absolute shortage of nurses. While there are no increases in people entering the profession, there is a very large pool of trained nurses who have left full-time nursing. In a very real sense we can say that, while at the micro level of the hospital there is unfilled demand based on management-defined needs, there are nurses in the wider labour market capable of filling the demand. They have simply chosen not to work. TABLE 1 Nurses in Ontario 1983-1987

Image not available

Source: College of Nurses of Ontario, Registration Data.

The province with the greatest reported "shortages"—Ontario— has a residual group of voluntarily unemployed nurses approaching 30 percent of the total nursing population. Reports vary on the extent of the actual shortfall in the hospitals; however, Ministry of Health officials report in an interview that, as of mid-1988, Ontario was experiencing a shortage of 1143 nurses.3 Table 1 indicates that it is

60


not a supply-side problem in the traditional sense. Nurses are choosing not to work.4 The number of nurses who have withdrawn from the profession far outweighs demand. Before we leave the general area of labour market explanations, it is important to at least raise the issue of flexibility.5 The move towards the use of more flexible labour is helpful in explaining several hospital management actions over the past years, such as the substitution of RNs for RNAs.6 While this move does affect the demand side, and does exacerbate the apparent shortage of nurses, it could not cause the shortage, nor could it cause the crisis. The move to flexible labour in the hospital is a fragment of the mosaic of management strategies aimed at cost reduction. This certainly is a contributor in the current crisis, but it is not primary. To summarize, there is no shortage of nurses, but for a variety of reasons, which are explored later, many refuse to work. In order to explain this we must develop some new tools or at least reshape some of the ones we have at our disposal. The labour market paradigm does explain certain aspects of unsupplied demand which can account in part for the difficulties that hospitals have retaining full-time nurses. However, the question is not how to deal with the "shortage" of nurses in the sense that the neoclassical economist would see it. To uncover the reasons why so many trained nurses choose not to work requires an examination of the changing work process in the hospitals and the introduction of the concepts of resistance and gender in the context of a revamped labour process analysis.

III. LABOUR PROCESS THEORY AND PRACTICE When we speak of labour process we refer to a dynamic mechanism that has many facets. The labour process consists of purposive human activity, or labour itself, that, with the help of the instruments of labour including both tools and methods of work, brings about changes in the object of the work. Central to the understanding of labour process is the recognition that in the course of work we realize part of our own purpose. We not only change the object of the work but ourselves as well. If work is unpleasant, unchallenging


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or however different from the wishes and expectations we have, then there will be reduced achievement, growth, satisfaction and fulfilment based on our understood abilities.7 As Corrigan comments, "production is both a material and social process, an activity whereby people transform both their circumstances and themselves. Each of its facets, in Marx's view, conditions and constrains the other."8 The work people carry out in a labour process is purposive, conscious and conceptual. This allows several things: workers form relationships at the social level which include values, intimacy and a workplace culture; people who associate share values, norms and knowledge; and people develop a portion of their identity of self through the process of work. These aspects are conditioned by several factors. First are the expectations, ideas and understandings people bring with them into the job. Second, the process itself conditions attitudes and self-identity. Third, forces outside of the workplace, structural influences such as the business cycle or state policy, condition the entire process. Changes in the labour process will alter the organization, social interactions and the actors themselves. It is in the labour process where we find the nexus of structure and human agency, where resistance conditioned by gender and class is promulgated. This implies that if there are labour process changes in the hospital, then there will be a change in the nurses themselves in both their attitudes and their relationship to work.

IV. A MODEL FOR EVALUATING LABOUR PROCESS CHANGE

Working with labour process change as an explanatory concept requires that we be more specific regarding its constituent dimensions. We can understand the labour process along several dime'nsions. First, there is the "time" within which work is done. That is, as we use our physical and mental skills, along with tools, to carry out tasks, within the context of certain power relations (control relations/social relations of production), there is an explicit expectation surrounding what is often called "work intensity." This

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is the amount and the pace of work to be done in a certain period. This is one plane along the "time" dimension. The second dimension is the scope and content of the tasks associated with the particular labour process. This has two planes. One is the "completeness of the task," or the integrity of the task, and includes the technical division of labour and Braverman's idea of the processes of deskilling. The second plane constitutes the definition and boundaries of the total job and involves the conception of the occupation. The two planes affect each other where the realization of the concept of productive job (what the worker imagines or conceives the job to be) and the integrity of the job visa-vis division of labour meet. We can imagine a job being broken down so finely by the technical division of labour that the worker no longer views it as the job for which he or she trained. The third dimension relates to the interaction of tools and people through "space" (which can be understood also as place). This is the configuration of the worker and the tools at their disposal. Integral to this configuration is where the work is done. The implication of this model of labour process is that if there are labour process changes in the hospital, then there will be a change in the nurses7 attitudes and their relationship to work. Based on some preliminary qualitative data, it appears that the nurses found the changes in their labour process intolerable. V. CHANGES IN THE HOSPITAL LABOUR PROCESS This explanation of the crisis in nursing depends on interpreting the responses of nurses to changes in their work in the hospitals. The key areas in which changes occurred included: the tasks themselves; how the nurse approached the tasks; the condition of the patients (greater acuity); the satisfaction gained in caring for people who were recuperating; the speed of the work; the charting; the work scheduling; the "changing tools" (i.e., technology); the changing mix of skills in the work team, etc. If we look at these features of changing labour process in the context of our model of time, place and content, an interesting view of the complex of factors motivating the resistance of the nurses emerges.


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Changes in the Time of Work Changes in "intensification" have taken many forms. The shorter stay of patients, referred to as "turnaround time," has meant that each of the patients is at a greater "acuity," and the range and number of interventions is increased. The changes in acuity have been extreme. Fifteen years ago one-third of the patients might have been severely ill; today that number is closer to 90 percent.9 Patients are sent home to recuperate, with the result that the satisfaction which nurses experienced in the process of caring for recuperating patients has been diminished. At the same time there are fewer nurses being employed for the patient load, which puts a greater burden on those working, forces a quicker movement through the tasks that can be done and means more tasks left undone. The mix of RNs (registered nurses) and RNAs (registered nursing assistants) has been altered, with fewer RNAs to take up aspects of the work. The final change in intensification has been in the monitoring of "productivity," with computers used to keep track of the procedures done and the time it takes to do them. This creates a "for productivity" rather than a "for care" orientation, a step the nurses have found totally unsatisfactory. Changes in the Scope and Content of Job The second dimension discussed in the labour process is the "scope and content" of the tasks performed, or what we might refer to as "job" characteristics. These have changed a great deal. The work of Marie Campbell indicates that nurses are caught in a system where organizational changes in nursing management have pushed them to become part of a government restraint program.10 Through technologies and practices involving workload measurement and control, nurses monitor their own work and thus implement "textually mediated nursing management practices."11 This mediated management practice is a documentary process which classifies patient needs into levels and assigns standard care required by level, thereby eliminating professional judgment and establishing cost efficiency as the criteria for decisions about patient care. Efficiencies can be monitored, through computerized "charting" of

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tasks performed, and controlled, through pre-set budgets. Accordingly, nurses must give what looks like good care on paper and find ways to cope with cuts in funds.12 The introduction of patient classification systems threatens the nurses' labour process in a number of ways. There are several "kinds7' of systems, yet they are all basically categorical systems that seek to allot labour based on some projection of the amount of care that the patient will need. One system has each patient assessed for the amount of care, meds, baths, counselling, feeding, etc., that they might need. Each patient is then assigned a value, which when added to other values gives the head nurse the total number of nurses necessary for that shift. Another system classifies patients according to sickness and known complications. This classification allows certain treatments (actually laying out procedures and times) and a set number of hours/minutes for bedside care. These systems displace the nurse's working skill, understanding and knowledge of the patient. The systems also force nurses to avoid certain procedures that they feel are important because they have not been designated. Growe writes: "The standardized formula may not be providing a scientific basis for what is actually needed as much as a hospital's expected level of production."13 The best way to describe nursing and the quest for efficiency today is the art of "giving fewer and fewer services to more and more patients faster and faster."14 With the demand for nurses to prioritize time, combined with the push for charting, we see a real shift in the work. As we will see below, this work change is not well received. The intensification of work also has direct effects on work content. Nurses in Goldfarb's study indicate that intensification and new monitoring practices mean "no time for patients."15 The new technologies, which are part of the patient classification, and machine-generated "care" plans contribute to a change in what the nurse does. Particularly important is the reduction in the skilled judgments that nurses were trained to carry out. This is exacerbated by a changing division of labour, in which nurses may be given a part of a total nursing care job to do on a repetitive basis. For example, a nurse might be given the task of giving everyone a bath, and not get to participate in, or learn about, the total care of any


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single patient. This is reminiscent of Taylorism's deskilling and technical division of labour. Other fiscally driven, labour process changes not already mentioned include such things as reductions in the number of housekeepers available for dealing with emergency spills, so that nurses must add this job to their work schedules. As well, the cuts in chronic care funding and building over the last few years mean that often one-third, and sometimes as many as one-half, of the patients in a work area are waiting for chronic care beds to open up. Nurses have generally been trained for acute work and the necessity of nursing chronic patients represents an aberration in the labour process for many. Changes in the Location of Work: Working Space The third dimension, which we called "space or place/' has also changed. Nurses often find themselves rotated between several work settings. This contributes to stress because they do not know the patients. They are not aware of the peculiarities of the ward they are on—for example, where machines and supplies are stored or what supplies exist. All these changes contribute to a contradiction that develops at the level of the individual and the collective and changes the content of work, moving it away from what nurses find acceptable within their framework of understanding. There were strong indications of this in the initial investigation, and the results of the more thorough study reported below corroborate the hypothesis that this contradiction has led to resistance. While this discussion does not exhaust the changes in labour process, it does give a clearer view of the basic changes which have caused a high level of resistance. We must remember that nurses experience changes in their labour process as a profound alteration in their professed identities and their personal and collective notions of the meaning of nursing. Adam, who puts forward a notion of system conception of nursing which is congruent with nurses' conception, argues that nurses are worried that new systems, which move toward treating diagnoses and away from treating the patient in a holistic way, will move nursing away from its former system

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conception to a new one. She also places the personal conception within the same bounds as this study, i.e., "seeking to put the patient in the best position for recovery."16 Warburton and Carroll also examine the changing nature of work in hospitals as a source of stress and frustration, attempting to explain how class and gender relations provide the broad framework in which contemporary problems can be understood.17 They situate nurses' work in the context of class relations, in which the nurse is dominated by the medical profession and, more recently, by management. The major implication of the nurses' status as female, employed workers has been their incorporation into hospital settings in subordinate and passive roles under male superiors.18 While important, the problem here is that the effects of gender are reduced to the subordination of women to men, and the continued domestic labour responsibilities which must be shouldered by female nurses. In this framework nurses are seen mainly in a class perspective as producers or reproducers of labour power because of their " repair" function. This is not the primary manifestation of gender. We turn now to a more complete examination of gender as a factor in the nursing crisis

VI. GENDER AND THE NURSING CRISIS

Gender is crucial to an understanding of the current crisis in nursing, not only because nursing is 98.6 percent female but because it is linked back to the very essence of human interaction at work. It weaves its influence through the entire problem in a myriad of ways. Just as "class" in E.P. Thompson's work is the sound and feeling—the experience not just the category—so it is that gender is a structural prism through which the specificities of the problem at hand should be understood. There are three ways in which the role of gender is understood in this study. The first two are the observable and internalized dimensions, and the second is best understood as a more interactive dimension. The gender effects that emerge from the qualitative data operate on both the observable and internalized dimensions. The observable dimensions are often power relationships between women and men such as: 1. Subjugation to males. Doctors and administrators are


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often men. When nurses seek access to the loci of power in their work world, they necessarily confront gendered relations. This subjugation, thus, influences the demand for increasing professional standards. The Canadian Nurses Association sees improved credentials as increasing their bargaining power in the highly "'human capital" conscious hospital setting; 2. Home/work interface. The vast majority of nurses are women, approximately 98 percent in most jurisdictions.19 In seeking to gain control over their lives they must try to facilitate socially imposed family roles. However, women lack the social supports that men have (i.e., wives), and therefore have difficulty doing this.20 This process creates a contradiction over time and scheduling. Goldfarb corroborates this when he reports that "shift work, family responsibilities and lack of accommodation for mothers" are three problems reported by nurses.21 An examination of the internalized dimension involves trying to understand the connection between worker and pride of work. Women's attachment to nursing (which we would argue is a gender mediated attachment) is broken as they are forced to carry out their work in ways that are not commensurate with their understanding of what is necessary. In a previous study, female hospital workers reported that they were very tied to patient contact and care-giving functions. When the process of work changes and, as in this case, the bond with care-giving is broken, the intrinsic rewards are diminished. This causes a reaction because the women have come to the workplace with a notion of what they feel they should be doing there. This breeds resistance to the change.22 In order to adequately begin to move the analysis forward, it is necessary that all three of the dimensions related to gender be understood and that the third —the conceptions of work or the connection between women and the nursing care they provide— be seen as principal. This is the interaction that is "closest" to, and even intertwined with, labour process. We want to look at the effects of changing labour process, while accepting that the whole process is mediated by gender. When we speak of problems related to a change in the labour process, we are referring to problems involving how work is done, its speed, content, form, intensity, etc. As noted above, when people

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engage in a process of labour, they form social relations and develop an identity. This is conditioned by the expectations that they bring to the job, their ideas and understandings. These understandings, ideas and expectations are not innate. The conceptual nature of our species defines us in that we interact with the physical and social structures around us, and develop these understandings and expectations. One of the key activities we engage in is work.23 Our identity is partially forged as we develop our social relations at work and engage in the established labour process.24 These relations are mediated by, and associated with, the expectations and understandings we bring to work. One very important circumstance of this is gender. Gender affects expectations and understandings, influences the relationships, and conditions the interaction between work and worker—act and actor. Gender influences (conditions) what we want from our work and our perception of how to do it. Warburton and Carroll contribute to our understanding of this process when they focus on the external interactions that shape the relationship of workplace change and gender.25 Here, on the other hand, the focus is on the more complex form of interaction between nurse as female and worker and the strategies of change that are transforming work. Warburton and Carroll make one other contribution. They argue that, as nurses resist proletarianization and link their working conditions in the hospitals with a fight for improved health care, they will contribute to a wider labour agenda. Further, Warburton and Carroll indicate that nurses, as members of a feminized semiprofession, could play a role "challenging...notions of women's place ... attacking the sexual division of labour on both the industrial and home fronts."26 There are two problems with this view. First, it looks at present day nurses in the context of resistance to come. Second, it creates some ambiguity in the class analysis by linking the fight in "defence of professionalism in opposition to proletarianization" with the defence of health care and problems in working conditions. These are both seen to make potential contributions on the class front. The difficulty here is that the professionalization issue and proposals to make the baccalaureate the minimum qualification for all nurses should not be seen as part of the more active class response.


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Warburton and Carroll introduce the idea of resistance in a limited way, characterizing it as largely motivated by economic self-interest and never concretizing it. This inadvertently leaves us with nurses accepting a role in their own subordination and then demanding compensation for the responsibility. Resistance is a more complex phenomenon that has much more to do with the current crisis.

VII. RESISTANCE AND THE NURSING CRISIS

What is resistance? In the simplest sense, the term describes an action (or actions) aimed at either passively or actively slowing, reversing, avoiding or protesting management directions or control strategies in the workplace. Opposing actions may arise from structurally induced change in the organization and wider process of work, and may arise in part from the individual or agency level. This paper attempts to look at both the structural elements and the agency involved in these forms of behaviours. Resistance can best be understood in the context of control and in opposition to consent. The coordination of work, or what Edwards refers to as the control of others' labour through the exercise of authority, evokes a response from workers which may be represented along a continuum such as the one pictured below.7 Response to control systems

more consent

more resistance

(compliance)

The linear perspective, however, obscures the fact that the two states (consent and resistance) overlap much in the way Venn diagrams do. There is both consent/compliance and resistance in every situation (with the possible exception of strikes and lockouts where consent is formally abrogated.) The nature, form, elements or outcomes of these responses depend on the control systems in place and the understandings and attitudes (not to mention the strength of the class forces) in the workplace.

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The resistance recorded in this investigation is simply a response to the managerial exercise of control of the labour process, a control which negates the more creative side of nursing work. The consent that Badgely, Brown and Ehrenreich all argue is so astounding among women service workers in general, and nurses in particular, is replaced by resistance,28 a resistance that is reactive and has two manifestations: passive and active. Resistance need not be the stuff of Gurr's rebellions or Moore's injustice.29 Actions can arise on any scale, from workplaces to entire nations. Theoretically, any workplace relation is temporary and represents a combination of resistance and consent. Therefore it can and does change. When faced with change in managerial strategy, the workers sometimes adjust, i.e., re-establish their consensual relations, sometimes they are coerced into consent and sometimes they dramatically resist. Resistance and consent are often seen as opposites, but they share some common points, particularly their origin (or source). Consent, which Thompson calls compliance,30 and resistance are constructed historically and socially by the material interaction and assessment of the actors in the workplace labour process. Their interactions take place over time and are conditioned by both an individual and collective perception of possible gains/losses. Resistance and consent are then both linked to the same historical process that develops a worker's identity. Willmott reaffirms the notion that a link exists between a worker's general identity and resistance.31 Some approaches to the problem of understanding resistance focus on workers' "imagination" of their work: workers "conceptualize the labour as an object" based on concrete experiences prior to the labour. The activity of the work itself forces the worker to confront the difference between the ideal or the imagined and the reality. Changes are then made in the "imagined" so that it corresponds with the reality, and a new set of guiding intentions is created.32 What happens if workers can not adjust their perception of the work to the reality of a new set of conditions? It is here, I would argue, that the relationship between consent and resistance alters and resistance increases. This is the process in which nurses are currently embroiled.


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This analysis is informed by a wide set of contributions to the field. Braverman's initial contribution has generated an incredible amount of thought and comment.33 Important criticisms have been levelled at Braverman's work because he underrated the resistance of the worker in the workplace, both as an individual actor as well as a member of a class.34 He saw scientific management as the key and central control system in advanced capitalism. A number of theorists such as Friedman, Edwards and Burawoy, maintain that the scientific management revolution did not have an enormous long-term impact.35 It was too rigid and ran in contradiction to the aspirations of workers to participate creatively in their work.36 Friedman argued that capital had to develop ways of dealing with this contradiction in the labour process. He proposed that management should attempt to create a "responsible autonomy," in which workers would be encouraged to identify with the aims of management, particularly the necessity of competitiveness, and would thereafter act responsibly with a minimum of supervision.37 Thus, the accommodation struck in the workplace would vary according to the level of pressure the workers could exert through their resistance to management tactics. Edwards developed a typology of evolving forms of control from simple to technical through to bureaucratic.38 The transition of these forms is precipitated by resistance to the control system that is in place. For example, the simple control structure depended on the direct influence of the owner—a form of personal pressure. As workplaces grew, this became untenable and resistance forced experimentation and development of alternatives. Are we in a period where the managements of hospitals are seeking new forms of control aimed at finding an accommodation with the workers? This does not seem the case. Burawoy also sees the movement toward gaining consent as central to control, although his "game playing" and "making out" theory does take a different direction.39 Workers are somewhat atomized and seek to relieve boredom, pass time, reduce fatigue etc. by setting up systems and games in the workplace. This, Burawoy argues, is a form of integration which reduces resistance. In this study, we find that the nurse enjoys her work and is

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stimulated by it. Perhaps, if she were able to forgo such attachment, we would see little if any resistance, but this is not the case. While these past studies of resistance do inform the present study, there are real differences. For example, the hospital is a service setting, a care-giving setting, with a female dominated workforce. Most previous studies were conducted in commodity producing, male dominated settings. Resistance in this setting is not diminishing, but rather increasing. Moreover, nurses have been described as very committed, "what the private sector manager would hope for" in terms of their integration of purpose. The following sections illustrate that the new labour processes in the hospitals are being subjected to collective, albeit fractured, responses—forms of resistance that come from the particularity of the labour process as it intersects with gender and class. Women bring their gender-specific expectations to the workplace and have a conception of what they want over and above wages from work. When a change in the labour process challenges these expectations, there is reaction and resistance. The interview and archival data discussed here indicate that the resistance, which I argue is at the centre of the crisis, is manifested along three dimensions: strikes, moving to part-time work and quitting the job outright.

VIII. STRIKES AS RESISTANCE

A form of direct or active resistance is the job action, which includes the strike. Strikes and job actions are not normally thought of as endemic among hospital nurses. Many things mitigate against strike action: the illegality of the strike (in many jurisdictions); the "Florence Nightingalism" and professionalism of nurses; and finally, the preconception that women are less likely to strike.40 Nevertheless, there have been a growing number of job actions in the hospitals, including strikes, over the past few years. In 1988, Alberta nurses and Saskatchewan nurses went on strike; in 1989, it was BC and Quebec nurses.41 The purpose here is not to describe these strikes in full, but to draw on the consultations and archival data to look at the nurses' key demands. In the Alberta


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and Saskatchewan strikes concerns about health-care quality surfaced in demands around: (1) hours of work; (2) cuts in types of service offered or possible; (3) staff shortages; (4) working in unfamiliar venues or being moved from ward to ward; and (5) working conditions in general. (1) Hours of Work There were a large number of comments concerning the increasing hours of work. An acute care nurse of nine years comments: I can't tell you how many times I had to stay on just to catch things up for the nurses coming on, or haw many doubles [extra shifts] I've had to do. I love nursing but I can not take the extra hours when things are like they are now.42 Judith Firth, an Alberta RN: "Often we had to forfeit breaks and stay after shifts just to complete paperwork/' 43 Nurses were consistent in reporting their experience of problems with long hours. (2) Care Issues One demand, won in 1982, was for the establishment of a Professional Responsibility Committee to allow nurses to discuss their concerns about nursing care in committee with management. Management wanted this right removed in the 1988 negotiations.44 In 1986, the Saskatchewan nurses won the right for the nurse at the bedside to talk to management about patient safety, understaffing and related conditions affecting health-care delivery. The hospitals wanted this clause out. They feared that the clause could be used to make problems in hospital care public. Nurses complained publicly that they were told to cut back on the care given if the workload was too heavy. Heather Smith, of the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) negotiating committee reported: "We were told in negotiations that nurses should stop providing frills—FRILLS—Do you consider a backrub a frill?"45 A Calgary nurse noted:

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We have felt powerless to make changes in our hospitals. When you want to deliver a first rate service and feel good that you have really helped make people well or more comfortable but you can not because someone or something is stopping you then...then you have to take some sort of action.46 A nurse in Regina, Saskatchewan: You can't feel good about the job you do if you take from one pocket to put in the other. All day I let care for one slide so I can take care of someone else...You can't be serious when you ask me why we choose to strike. What is that expression? 'We ain't going to take it any more.' Cathy Cameron, a Saskatchewan nurse: If an elderly patient rings for assistance to get to the washroom at night and you are busy with someone...the person gets up on their own, falls, and breaks a hip. You feel terrible, but it's the shortages of staff. There is a problem in the quality of health care delivered. We want to keep the right to talk about these problems47 (3) Staff Shortages Shortages figured heavily in many assessments of the reasons why nurses were unhappy on the job. One said: "If it takes three people to even partially cover the patient needs, try it with two. That's what we are faced with on too many shifts."48 In Alberta the story was the same: I've been forced to categorize my nursing duties into priorities. Duties such as turning a bedridden patient every two hours to prevent skin breakdown, blood clots...have to be put low on the list of priorities because of staffshortages ,49 There is little doubt there was a shortfall in nurses. But the shortfall created conditions for both strikes and a further exodus from nursing.


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(4) Work Space/Place Questions Nurses also noted that the policy of frequently moving nurses from ward to ward had ill effects. Judith Firth of Alberta notes: "We've been faced with selected ward closures and staff layoffs. Remaining staff are floated to other units in unfamiliar settings with little or no orientation, making patient care unsafe and increasing staff frustration/'50 In a 1988 interview, a Saskatchewan nurse said: "We are expected to cope in unfamiliar areas with minimal or no orientation. It's not unusual to be asked to work on two or three different units a day." (5) Working Conditions Public statements and letters to newspapers tended to emphasize the importance of working conditions in strike demands: "The main issue in the strike is working conditions. Monetary benefits are very secondary."51 "The major disappointment of the settlement is the lack of improvements in hospital working conditions."52 "Working under the severe staff shortages leaves no time for the types of care people require."53 There was a consistency to the commentaries on working conditions. The nurse had an expectation of what the work should be—what it had to be like in order for the delivery of service to achieve a standard that was adequate for the nurse herself. We can see from the above that "working conditions" include much of what we might consider to be the labour process in nursing. Interview and archival material indicate that monetary issues played a secondary role. The strike in BC appeared to contradict this, as wage increases amounting to 33 percent were placed at the forefront of demands, along with a negotiable timetable and more say in health-care delivery. However, when the negotiating committee put forward a package for ratification which included essentially little more than a healthy wage increase, the members rejected it saying that the "wage increase, schedule and various shift premiums didn't make the job stresses worthwhile."54

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The changing nature of work (labour process), resulting in actual or perceived workload increase and the deterioration of job satisfaction, prompted strikes in which nurses hoped they could slow down and/or reverse the worsening situation, or at least raise public awareness of the problems. The desire to gain control of the work, its performance, when it is done and at what level of quality is at the "eye of the storm." A nurse in Saskatoon sums it up: I'll tell you what the issues are. We can not do the job we are trained to do. There are too few of us, patients in hospital are older and more ill than they used to be, managements are cutting every corner because the province does not give them the funds. I speak for a lot of others when I say the stress is burning me out. The increasing crisis in funding and utilization has intensified the work of the RNs. This, in microcosm, is the contradiction. Financial questions push workforce composition changes and labour process changes, which in turn cause critical labour participation declines. It is important to note that there are differences among nurses' organizations with regards to how they should respond to the current situation. The professional associations, such as The Canadian Nurses' Association (CNA), have opted for increased professionalization. If we think of Wright's notion of "contradictory class location," the professional associations, and many managerial nurses, are trying to reaffirm the autonomy of nurses, separating them from the occupations "beneath them" in the medical hierarchy, and placing them closer to the petite bourgeoisie rather than the working class in the overall class structure.55 Through the CNA, professional associations have taken up the demand for an all baccalaureate nursing staff. The hope is that this will bring more respect and greater rewards to the profession. The unions, and to a large extent nurses on the floor, are opting for a different approach based on a different class perspective. It is a mistake to see the union response as only an attempt to evade proletarianization. The nurses feel that delivering care and doing a day's work that is productive and useful is at stake. Where deskilling


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and proletarianization coincide with the challenge to the nurses' conception of the proper labour process, we find a crisis linking class and gender issues.

IX. PART-TIME WORK: A SECOND FORM OF RESISTANCE

The second form of resistance adopted by some nurses involves the move from full-time to part-time work.56 It is a passive form of resistance in the sense that nurses are leaving full-time work in order to avoid a changing workplace and to escape the kind of problems that were mentioned in the strike section. Before we look at the comments of the interviewees on why they went part-time, we should examine how serious a phenomenon the opting for part-time status is. Data indicate that it is very widespread:

TABLE 2 Number of Registered Nurses in Canada; Employed in Nursing, Full-time .57 and Part-time 1970 -19865

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The Canadian data show that there was a shift from 74 percent full-time nurses in 1974 to a low of 55.8 percent in 1984. The seeming reversal in the 1984 to 1986 period is accompanied by an actual drop in the number of nurses employed. One explanation for this is that nurses were leaving the profession rather than moving to parttime status.

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Why are nurses moving to part-time work in such numbers? The study indicates that nurses perceived many dramatic measures being taken to reduce hospital expenditures, such as support staff reductions (orderlies and RNAs), technological changes and more casual staff in the team mix. Two other structural changes were also taking place—an increasing acuity on the ward and a quicker "turnaround" time.58 In the past, a patient might stay five days in the hospital after an operation. Today that same patient may be in and out in three days. Recuperation occurs at home, so people on the ward are, on average, more ill. There is a movement toward putting the very ill, those who previously might have been in an intensive care setting, on the ward. This situation has serious effects. One effect is summed up by an Ontario nurse of 19 years: "What we mean by increasing acuity is a sicker patient and that means the nurse makes more frequent interventions." The increasing acuity also means that "people in the wards today would have been in ICU [intensive care unit] ten years ago."59 Increasing acuity lowers the nurses' job satisfaction. They no longer get to see the results of their work. Where the nurses in times past could look forward to having the patients improve "before their eyes," patients must now convalesce at home. Gone are the smiling chats with people pulled back from the brink of serious illness. There are more interventions and less chance to see the result of those hard hours of patient care. A nurse of 11 years said: As a person recovers from surgery they are interested in yakking and it's part of the job to do it, an enjoyable part. It seems we get a lot less of that now. Patients are gone before you get to know them.... Some of the best parts of my work are gone.

These changes left nurses with two choices: Should I walk out? I could not stand what was happening to MY job, MY responsibilities. Leaving seemed like the only choice, but I could not afford it. Maybe with fewer hours it would be easier to take.


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Nurses reported that they hoped to take the pressure off with shorter hours. They felt that they could have more control over which shifts they would have to work. However, they found that they did not gain control of their work lives. The type of work, the hours they were asked to work and the pace of work on the job remained significantly out of their control. Interview data indicate that the frustration felt by their inability to carry out "traditional bedside duties" was not diminished. A part-time nurse in London, Ontario commented: "I find that my life is often more complicated. With the strange shifts I get [as a FT nurse] I feel I have less control then before." Another nurse found her power to bargain curtailed: Perhaps I was foolish, but I did believe I would get more say about when I would work; but now I have to work [in order to make enough to live] I can't do without the shifts so I can not be as picky [about when to work] as I hoped. Our interviews and other research indicate that part-time work fails to reduce the intensification of labour process. At first I felt a level of relief, almost freedom, as I did not have to get ready for the shifts I was so used to. Very soon I found myself feeling just.. .no.. .even more uptight after the shifts I did work.... I found changing wards and having few patterns affected me.60 In the Goldfarb study, part-time and full-time nurses had very similar responses in terms of their dissatisfactions and complaints, despite the fact that full-time nurses opted for part-time work in order to alleviate the frustration that they felt in the full-time positions.61 Mathera finds that the part-time nurse in an acute setting works more hours and receives fewer benefits.62 This was echoed in our research: "I may work less hours, but at work it seems even more pressure. I use[d] to think it was me.. .not being used to being in harness, but I think our assignments are heavier."63 While many nursing unions have declared the part-time option a right, and have called it a way for women to deal with pressures of home and work, it is often a method adopted by nurses to escape

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the problems at work. The common assumption is that nurses want part-time work to permit them to raise families. From a more patriarchal perspective, they need less money because they are supplementing a spouse's wage. Yet another assumption is that there is no choice, that managements create part-time employment in order to cut the costs associated with full-time workers' benefits. In this case, quite a different scenario is playing itself out. Nurses are choosing part-time work as an alternative to full-time work because they do not want to work under the new conditions. According to the data, the attempt to gain control over one's work life is a major impetus to the selection of part-time work, but it generally fails to improve the part-timer's lot.64 All I have ever wanted to do is have the chance to practice my nursing up to my ability. I do not mean adequate given the time or given the load. I thought part-time would give me that chance. I do not know the patients.... When you do not come in regularly things change, people change, I think it is harder to be the kind of nurse you want to be.65 The full-time nurses find that the workplace deteriorates as more people opt for part-time status. This finding was almost universal in my interviews: "More part-timers, more problems." "You just cannot run a ward with all the part-time nurses. You need more full-time people." "Part-timers change. They get moved from place to place. When you do not know the person who is coming in and they don't know the routines, the equipment locations, the patients or whatever then I get to do too much." The part-timers themselves report to their nurses' unions that they are used to having to fill in on a variety of units without being given any orientation. So while this form of resistance contributes to the crisis by creating a further "shortage" of nurses, it does not benefit the nurses directly. It should be noted that while the unions have defended their members' rights to be able to move to part-time status, they have explained that there are pitfalls and that job sharing may be preferable.


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Part-time work has often been used as a management strategy both in and outside of the hospital. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, hospital administrators increased the numbers of part-time workers and this included nurses. The aim was to save labour costs and create a more flexible workplace (see discussion on numerical flexibility in endnote 5). However, the strategy was abandoned by many administrations as nurses became very hard to get and the agencies supplying temporary nurses began to charge considerably inflated hourly rates. "You can not blame them, it was a supply and demand problem, but we certainly did not encourage part-time nursing from that point."66 I have argued that nurses experienced the changing labour process and related time problems on the job and reacted. Their reaction was to release the pressure by reducing hours and most importantly to give themselves what they perceived as a lever to exert some control. The interview material supports this interpretation but indicates that nurses feel that this passive strategy has failed.

X. QUITTING AS RESISTANCE

As noted at the outset of this paper in discussing the mainstream explanation for the current shortage of nurses, there are adequate numbers of nurses available in the system. However, many nurses are simply unwilling to work under the present organization and conditions of work. Nurses are challenging the changes in the hospital nursing labour process by what is commonly referred to as resisting with one's feet—walking out. If we were to generalize the concerns of the nurses over the changes in labour process, we could say that they are focused on both the increasing workload and a change in the composition of that workload. There have been changes in how the work is done, its speed, content, form, intensity, who it is delivered to, how it is reported and classified as well as how it is evaluated. The changes that have taken place have made it difficult for nurses to deliver the care that a nurse feels is her responsibility. Nurses repeatedly commented on this: "There are times when dressings can not be

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changed. We have no support staff so we have to do everything and we can not." "You certainly can not be proud of the work you do anymore...not that I don't care, heavens if that were the case I would be happier but I do care that is the problem." As Campbell noted, the whole process of assessment and delivery has changed.67 Yet nurses have not acquiesced, they have resisted. Is this resistance aimed at increasing the extrinsic rewards? It is true that nurses on strike have said, in effect, "if you will not change the work conditions then you must pay/' but the qualitative data indicate that monetary issues are secondary. We conducted an "exploratory survey" in order to see if there was support for the contention that monetary issues are secondary to labour process issues in generating conflict.68 The survey indicated that content of the work and issues related to labour process outweighed monetary issues by more than two to one. Asked what factors might influence them to leave nursing, only 25 percent pointed to pay issues while labour process issues were cited by over 70 percent. On the whole the exploratory survey was consistent with and lends support to the qualitative findings.

XI. CONCLUDING REMARKS

In a 1988 article for Healthsharing, Pat Armstrong asked, "Where have all the nurses gone?"69 This paper has attempted to explain why they are absenting themselves from the hospitals. The mainstream scientific explanations, which rely on a labour market, supply and demand framework, simply do not account for the complexities of the current situation. Many policy analysts argue that the way to deal with the nursing crisis is with dollars.70 There are a number of problems with this approach, not the least of which is the fact that the foundational or structural cause of the situation is a fiscal crisis: finding more money when there is already a shortfall will prove very difficult. But even if additional funds could be found, this would not necessarily resolve the crisis. As this investigation has sought to demonstrate, the current crisis has much more to do with the role of the nurse—the time, place and content of her nursing


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work. The expectations of the nurse, or her conceptions of what a nurse is and does, have been challenged. They have been challenged by managerial strategies, provoked by a fiscal crisis of the state, that have created a new regime of work—a new labour process. As interviews reveal, there is widespread feeling that this labour process runs counter to ideas, feelings, understandings and conceptions of nurses, both collective and individual. Nurses told us that they were not able to "to do the job they were trained to do/' not able to use the skills they had acquired. They were confronted with a decision. Should they come to a new consensual relation with the managerial regimes or should their response shift to resistance? Studies of strikes and the exploratory survey demonstrate that the issues involved are work-related, not monetary. The desire to challenge managerial control over the labour process is evident, whether in demands relating to the professional responsibility committees, shape of the work day, realigning the paper/real care divide, the content and form of work, the time of work or even where the work was to be done. Dissatisfaction with all facets of the new labour process was overwhelming. This is consistent with our propositions concerning the roots of the current problems. These problems led to the strikes —that seems very clear. But what of the more controversial forms of resistance identified here? Nurses, confronted with the changing nature of work, had to make hard decisions. The commitment to patients was very high and the organizational commitment, marvelled at in the 60s and 70s was still there, but the problems they confronted made it impossible to maintain such commitment. Some nurses believed initially that perhaps "fewer hours would make it easier to take/7 In the simple model of response to control presented here, nurses were shifting the mix of consent/compliance to resistance in response to managerial strategies. Moving to part-time protected the attachment to care. Nurses hoped for relief from stress and some enhancement of control over time and place of work, if not over the core content. This strategy has not worked. While the move to part-time was initially one managerial strategy aimed at cost reduction, administrators found shortages

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of full-time workers and abandoned the goal of increasing the parttime complement. As well, the Ontario Nurses7 Association began successfully pushing a job-share approach, making it an alternative for those who wanted part-time hours. This did not save the management any wages. Is part-time a preferred option because nurses as women were still responsible for the home in addition to employment? This is a whole question in itself. The issue came up only peripherally in the study, but the interviews, documentary evidence and other commentators indicate that there are no more " appliance nurses" — those who wish to work only a few shifts a week in order to supplement a male income. Nurses want more work and seek stability of employment, more defined hours and greater input into the content of health care.71 Nurses, like other women, work because they want to make a productive contribution and because they must in order to support themselves and their families. The supplementary survey, although hardly conclusive, indicates that part-time work is not chosen primarily to deal with the work/home interface problems, but rather to cope with a changing workplace. The problems of balancing responsibilities at work and home are there as they are for most working women, but they are exacerbated by the problems of a changing workplace. The labour process framework developed here allows us to examine the causes of the problem, while at the same time it allows us to integrate an understanding of the role of gender. All people bring to their work a set of understandings and expectations that are developed through life experience. One's gender has a powerful effect on what the experiences and understandings are going to be, because gender influences the life we lead and how we are treated at a profound level. So it is that women bring their gender-specific expectations to the workplace and have a conception of what they want over and above wages from work. When a change in the labour process challenges these expectations, there is reaction and resistance.


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ENDNOTES

2

3

5

Confidential interviews were conducted with thirty-four nurses from four acute care hospitals in Ontario cities and union officials in two other centres. A small number of nurses were consulted in Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon concerning their respective strikes. The most influential study focusing on the labour market supply and demand for nurses is N. Meltz, The Nursing Shortage (Toronto: Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, 1988). He concludes that supply is the key causal factor in the nursing shortage, as it has not increased at the same pace as demand. The supply shortfall is due to reductions in college spaces for nursing, and that this "...will be solved by the market" (p. 65). He proposes a series of extrinsic rewards including but not restricted to: wage premiums in certain areas, cash in lieu of benefits as an option and increased job ladders. All of these are good suggestions for improving the material lot of nurses and cushioning a deteriorating work situation, but it is our analysis that it misses the cause of the problem. J. McArthur, "Pay is Not the Problem," Toronto Star 16 February 1988, p. A2. This is verified by J. McArthur, "Pay is not...," p.A2. Flexibility is a vast subject. In the simplest terms flexibility is the attempt by management to seek adaptability to product market fluctuation. There are two distinct types of flexibility—one relates to technological manipulation in the workplace such as smallbatching and cluster organization development (the Benetton Model) and has generally been seen to apply more to the private sector where we have production of commodities. However, this need not be so. The second type relates to labour market flexibility. The "flexible firm" seeks to segment the labour force into a small core of permanent full-time employees and a large periphery of part-time, casual, on call, temporary and subcontracted workers. See M. MacDonald "The Flex Spec Debates," Studies in Political Economy 36 (Autumn, 1991); I. Dey, "Flexible Parts and Ridged Fulls: The Limited Revolution in Work-time Patterns," Work, Employment and Society 3/4 (December 1989); A. Pollert, "Dismantling Flexibility," Capital and Class 34 (May 1988); C. Hakim, "Trends in the Flexible Workforce," Employment Gazette (November, 1987); P. Jones, "Labour Market Flexibility," Labour and Society 12/1 (January, 1987). The flexible firm is dependant on the core workers having certain characteristics which include functional flexibility in the labour process through multi-skilling (crossing occupational boundaries) and time flexibility which allows overtime or work intensification. It is possible to see the roots of this flexible firm in the new 'just in time' (JIT) inventory strategies (applied in this case to labour) and the Japanese employment system adapted

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by the British, German, French and Italians to their national situations. See J.P. White," Women, Labour Process and Public Sector Militancy," Address to the 8th Annual Conference on Labour Process, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Manchester, 1988. In the public sector the flexibility model is used to vary labour with demand for service and lower ongoing variable capital costs by shrinking the fixed labour force. 6

In a study done in 1986-87 for CUPE, the author investigated the substitution of registered nurses (RNs) for registered nursing assistants (RNAs). The RNs are more expensive and are therefore not a cost-efficient substitute for the assistants. RNs can, however, do the range of tasks nursing assistants do, as well as perform duties which RNAs cannot. Pat Armstrong, "Where Have All the Nurses Gone?" Healthsharing (Summer, 1988, pp. 17-19), points out that the technology exists to put RNs on part-time rotating shifts. This allows for more management flexibility. This creation of labour flexibility in hospital nursing provides the only possible rationale for the shift to RNs on management's part.

7

K. Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 170.

8

P. Corrigan, H. Ramsey and D. Saver, Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 2; and P. Thompson, The Nature ofWork (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 40. 9 Interview data; J.P. White, Hospital Strike: Women, Unions and Conflict in the Public Sector (Toronto: Thompson Educational Pub., 1990); S. Growe, Who Cares? (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991). 10 M. Campbell, "The Structure of Stress in Nurses' Work," in D. Coburn, ed., Health and Canadian Society: Sociological Perspectives (Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987); and M. Campbell, "Management as 'Ruling': A Class Phenomenon in Nursing," Studies in Political Economy 27 (Autumn, 1988, pp. 29-51). 11 Campbell, "Management as Ruling...." 12 Ibid., pp.36-39. 13 Growe, Who Cares?; interview data. 14 Ibid. 15 Goldfarb Corporation, The Nursing Crisis (Toronto: Ontario Nurses' Association, 1988). 16 E. Adam, To Be A Nurse 2nd ed., (New York: W.B. Saunders, 1991), p. 28. 17 R. Warburton and W. Carroll, "Class and Gender in Nursing," in Coburn, ed., Health and Canadian Society..., p. 371. 18 Ibid., pp. 369-701.


19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28

29

30 31

32

33

34

35

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J. Jenny, Issues Affecting Nurses' Hospital Employment in the 80s (Toronto: Canadian Hospital Assoc., 1982). J.P. White, Hospital Strike..., chapter 3. Goldfarb Corp., The Nursing Crisis. There are many inter-relations between paid and unpaid work that could be considered. Earlier studies of non-nursing staff in the hospitals indicated that women seek things in the labour market that they do not get from domestic work. See J.P. White, Hospital Strike..., pp. 38-41. Women reported that the productive involvement outside of the home increases their identity, independence and power in the family. Women work because they must work, but they seek intrinsic rewards as well. In the previous study, it led to an illegal strike. In the present case, resistance manifests itself along the lines described. Marx, Capital; J. Rinehart, The Tyranny of Work 2nd ed. (Toronto: HBJ, 1987). G. Salaman, Working (London: Tavistock Pub., 1986). Warburton and Carroll, "Class and Gender...," p. 372. Ibid., p. 372. R. Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (London: Heinneman, 1979). R. Badgely, "Health Workers Strike," International Journal of Health Services 5/1 (1975); C.A. Brown, "Women Workers in the Health Service Industry," International Journal of Health Services 5/1 (1975); and B. Ehrenreich and J. Ehrenreich, "Hospital Workers: A Case Study of the New Working Class," Monthly Review 24/8 (1973), pp. 12-27. T.R. Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); and B. Moore, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (London: Macmillan, 1978). Thompson, Nature of Work.... H. Willmott, "Subjectivity and the Dialectic of Praxis: Opening Up the Core of Labour Process Analysis," in D. Knights and H. Willmott, Labour Process Theory (London: Macmillan, 1990). G. Lukacs, Labour (London: Merlin Press, 1980); and P. Wardell, "Labour and Labour Process," in Knights and Willmott, Labour Process Theory. H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). J.P. White, Hospital Strike...; and S. Wood (ed.), The Degradation of Work (London: Hutchinson Press, 1982), p. 15. A. Friedman, Industry and Labour (London: Macmillan, 1977); M. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); M.

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36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54


Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985); and Edwards, Contested Terrain.... Thompson, Nature of Work, p.133. Thompson, Nature of Work; and Friedman, Industry and Labour, p.48. Edwards, Con tested Terrain.... Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent. This preoccupation is increasingly shown to be false. In a study of women and strikes, I argue that propositions painting women as more passive and less likely to strike, are incorrect and grounded in patriarchal stereotypes. See J.P. White, Hospital Strike...; and idem, "Women, Labour Process...." For a discussion of the reasons why women have been gender-typed as more passive, less militant and more stable with regards to strikes and job actions, see R. Milkman, Women, Work and Protest (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); K. Purcell, "Militancy and Acquiescence Amongst Women Workers," in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979); J.P. White, Hospital Strike...; and L. Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1914 (New York: Oxford Press, 1979). In Quebec, close to 40,000 nurses engaged in ongoing illegal strikes, defying the Bourassa government's repeated attempts to intimidate them. Nurses received unprecedented public support and the support of the wider labour movement. Their demands were similar to those across the country. See M. Gagnon, "Reflections on the Public Sector Contract Negotiations," Studies in Political Economy 31 (Spring 1990), pp.173-175. Interview, Alberta, 1988. Letters, "Frustration Caused Strike," Edmonton Journal, 11 February 1988, p. A7. Heather Smith, Interview, Morningside, CBC Radio, October 11,1988. Ibid. Interview, acute care nurse, Calgary, 1988. Heather Smith, Interview.... Interview, Saskatchewan nurse, 1988. Letters, "Frustration...." Ibid. Ibid. J. Boehm, Letter, Edmonton Journal 13 February 1988, p. Bl. Interview, Alberta nurse, 1988. Ottawa Citizen 13 July 1989, p. A3.


55

56

57

58

59

62

64 65 66 67

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See Wright's semi-autonomous contradictory category in E.O. Wright, "Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies," New Left Review 98 (1976), p. 26; E.O. Wright, Class Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978); E.O. Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985); as well as his rejection of the category in E. O. Wright, The Debate on Classes (London: Verso, 1989). For the purpose of this study, part-time nurses are those who are permanent employees available for twenty-four hours of work a week. This corresponds to two twelve hour shifts, or three eight hour shifts. There are a variety of sources used to compile this table: Canadian Nurses' Association, Countdown 1975-85, Table 2, Section A; Health and Welfare Canada, Health Personnel (1986,1987), Table 13.4; and Statistics Canada, Nursing in Canada 83-226, Table 2.The data include a sizable "not stated" category: 7363 in 1984 and 20,512 in 1986. These are largely in the province of Quebec. The percent was calculated by subtracting the "not stated" category from the total and recalculating the percent. This biases the data towards full-time employment because a larger proportion of nurses in Quebec are part-time. P. Armstrong reports that fully 60 percent of Quebec nurses are part-time. J.P. White, "Women, Labour Process..."; and J. Jenny, Issues Affecting..., p. 15. B. Lee," ICU A Real Pressure Cooker," Hamilton Spectator 25 April 1988, p. Bl. Interview, part-time acute care nurse, Hamilton, 1988. Ontario Nurses' Association, An Industry in Crisis (Toronto, April 1988). D. Mathera, "Nurses Pay: How Part-timers are Doing," R.N. December 1985, p. 33. Interview, part-time nurse, London, Ontario, 1988. J. Jenny, Issues Affecting..., p. 25. Interview, part-time nurse, Burlington, Ontario. Interview, administrator, acute care hospital. M. Campbell, "The Structure of Stress...." The survey was conducted in May 1989 at an acute care hospital in a mediumsized Canadian city. On a day chosen at random questionnaires were distributed to all nurses on duty on two consecutive shifts. Sixty-four of sixty-five registered nurses completed the questionnaire. The sample, all female, was 62.5 percent full-time and 37.5 percent part-time. In addition to the survey, three unit managers were interviewed to explore a management perspective and unidentified, numbered exit interviews were provided by the personnel department for review. The survey was conducted to give another indication whether the Meltz propositions about pay adjustments as

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69 70 71


a remedy for the crisis, or the labour process propositions that arise from the interview and archival research had support. P. Armstrong, "Where Have All the Nurses Gone?..." Seeendnotel Interview data; and Growe, Who Cares?.

CHAPTER 4

The Retreat of the State and Long-Term Care Provision: Implications for Frail Elderly People, Unpaid Family Carers and Paid Home-Care Workers JANEARONSON SHEILA M. NEYSMTTH

ver the last 20 years, public policy and debate about health anci social services for elderly people (long-term care/ LTC) have stressed the importance of moving from institution-based provision to community-based care. This shift in Canada mirrors developments in most Western industrialized nations and is, typically, explained in both humanitarian and economic terms: elderly people are thought to prefer being cared for in their own homes, and care in the community is, coincidentally, thought to be less expensive than care in hospitals, nursing homes and chronic care facilities. As governments have been increasingly driven by deficit reduction and cost-cutting objectives, community care has been embraced with mounting urgency. As a matter of public policy, it is presented as an uncontroversial, sensible way of responding to elderly people's needs while also averting demographic and fiscal crisis. The successful rhetoric of the shift to community/home care in public policy in Canada has not been accompanied by a corresponding shift in public resources. As a result, the shift actually signifies the privatizing of the costs and work associated with frailty in old age. It also signifies a refraining of the relationship between elderly citizens and the state; in effect, the Canadian state is revising previously made promises of social security. In this paper, we

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examine the implications of this redistribution of costs and refraining of entitlements for those most vulnerable on the LTC stage: frail elderly people themselves, members of their families who step in to care for them on an unpaid basis, and poorly paid home-care workers. We then look beyond the current distribution of costs to these three groups (each of which is, significantly, made up predominantly of women) and the discourse that justifies it to consider alternative ways of framing the LTC debate and of thinking about the place of the state in ensuring adequate and just social provision for the elderly. This examination of political alternatives can usefully expand and unsettle the confining way that issues are posed and solutions countenanced in Canada in the late 1990s.

THE CANADIAN STATE AND LONG-TERM CARE: AN OVERVIEW

LTC programs for elderly people encompass a wide array of health and social services: from acute, chronic and rehabilitation hospitals for elderly people who are ill, to nursing homes for people requiring fairly constant care and support, to a range of health and social programs (e.g., visiting homemaker services, visiting nursing care, day care, meals on wheels) that allow people with various degrees of health problems and functional limitations to receive care in their own homes. Partly because of the particular history of health policy development in Canada, with early funding earmarked for the building of hospitals and institutions, the response to the health and social needs of old people has been heavily institution-based and has often resulted in inappropriate care.1 Through the Canada Assistance Plan Act (1966) and, later, the Established Programmes Financing Act (1977), federal and provincial governments structured cost-sharing arrangements that permitted some growth in community-based care and some reduction in unnecessary and relatively expensive institutional care. These statutes did not, however, specify criteria and requirements for health and social services in the community in the way that the Medical Care Act and Canada Health Act specified conditions for provinces' receipt of federal funds for physician and hospital insurance.

THE RETREAT OF THE STATE

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During the 1960s and 1970s, provincial governments took up the funding made available by these cost-sharing provisions to offer some community-based services for frail elderly people. In the absence of national standards, however, they took different approaches and various fragmented mixes of public, voluntary and for-profit services resulted. In contrast to the acute-care sector, health and social care for frail elderly people in the community remained a service sector held in relatively low social regard and accorded a weak public resource base.2 In addition to flagging these dimensions of the weak positioning of community-care services in the context of total health-care provision, critics of public policy in the 1970s and 1980s also began to articulate the consequences of this weakness for elderly people's families. In Canada and elsewhere, feminist scholars called attention to the reality that women, usually daughters and wives, provided most of the care for frail elderly people; vague allusions to "family care" obscured the extent, social value and costs of this work.3 This analysis, most developed in the UK and Scandinavia, illuminated the ideological construction of family responsibility and family care that is the assumed backdrop to state intervention—a construction that enforces the morality of private, rather than public, responsibility for people in need and, effectively, limits the citizenship entitlements of elderly people (and other groups deemed dependent). These early critiques of the underdevelopment of community/ home care and its impact on unpaid family caregivers have been elaborated and voiced with mounting alarm in the face of the diminishing state presence and program cuts of the intervening ten or fifteen years. In response to fiscal constraints, health care is now organized to ensure that fewer people with chronic health problems are cared for in institutions and that people with acute problems are discharged as quickly as possible from expensive hospital care.4 This "dehospitalizing"5 and cost-cutting means that increasing numbers of frail older people live in their own homes, often requiring substantial support to do so with security and dignity. While federal and provincial governments' quests to contain the costs of institutional care accelerated and changed in the last

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ten years, the basic planks of policy and funding arrangements for community care did not; rather, the permissively framed, nonmandatory arrangements for cost-sharing, introduced 30 years ago, stayed in place.6 Now, with the prospect of cuts in federal transfer payments and the shift to block funding, it seems improbable that the small fraction of total health-care spending presently allocated to home care—still less than 1 percent—will increase significantly.7

POLICY DISCOURSE PRESSING LONG-TERM CARE INTO THE PRIVATE DOMAIN

This brief description of the development of government activity in LTC in Canada brings us to the 1990s, to a picture of hastening retreat in public provision. This retreat is occurring with relatively little controversy or debate. Rather, it unfolds through a discourse about imminent fiscal crisis and debt reduction that generates a logic justifying sacrifices and cutbacks.8 Cutting back on social programs is presented as an inevitability as Canadian society is buffeted by the winds of the global economy. It is presented as self-evident that survival in the global economy requires the appeasement of international capital and money markets and, thus, the reduction of any costs that constrain capital accumulation. With respect to state responses to the elderly in particular, this presentation of cost-cutting inevitabilities is bolstered by knowledge that population aging will mean higher numbers of old people and, most significantly, of very old people who typically experience greater physical and cognitive impairments. This demographic reality is interpreted to confirm the view that elderly citizens7 entitlements can legitimately be revisited. Such revisiting has already resulted in the scaling back of elderly people's pension entitlements. Universal entitlements to Old Age Security, once a seemingly unassailable right of citizenship, have been eroded and, at the time of writing, entitlements under the Canada Pension Plan are being reviewed. Alongside this renegotiation of previous assurances of economic security, we also see assaults on earlier promises of health security.


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With funding cuts to the provinces and the introduction of the Canadian Health and Social Transfer, the federal government is retreating from its role in framing a national commitment to universal health care. At the provincial level, promises of healthcare security are being questioned as balancing budgets is entrenched as the paramount public policy goal. At the local level, the security of community services is threatened as agencies lose assured base funding and depend, precariously, on short-term project funds, income from charity drives and private sector donations. In the LTC arena, specific forms of instability flow from this general climate of insecurity. For example, the cost of hospital and chronic-care beds is pictured as so unaffordable that cost-savings achieved by early discharges and home-based care are readily embraced. Ironically, the closing of beds has acquired the political capital once reserved for announcements of new hospitals. Policymaking and planning aimed at effecting such cuts and rearrangements in LTC are couched in the language of industry and the marketplace, stressing efficiency and rational management. Ontario's LTC Reform Act, for example, focused on the streamlined coordination of community care for elderly and disabled people.9 Even as the act proclaimed the centrality of the "consumers" of community-based services, it also reaffirmed the importance of costcontainment and of the role of their families in assuring their wellbeing. Thus, like most legislation of its kind, it communicated very oblique commitments to public service provision and to entitlements previously promised to elderly citizens. This kind of obliqueness, along with the logic of cost containment that has become numbingly ordinary in public debate, shrouds the reality that the costs of LTC are being redistributed to the private sphere. Watching a similar process of privatization of care of the elderly in the US, Bergthold et al. caution: "Social costs and disadvantages do not simply disappear; they must be borne by the individuals and families concerned."10 The suggestion in the efficiency-driven policy discourse that costs have been or can be better managed and cut out is, in large part, a deception. Many are not eliminated but, rather, shifted to the "community" — a euphemistic and insubstantial concept. In reality, Western

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industrialized societies are characterized by privatized households and dispersed social connections rather than by local ties and readily available support networks.11 Regardless, the rhetoric of community is invoked and put to use in deinstitutionalization and communitycare polices of all kinds. In LTC, this empty invocation means that the costs of frailty and care are simply hidden from public view in the private lives and homes of old people and their families and in the isolated work worlds of paid home-care providers.

TRACING THE IMPLICATIONS OF PRIVATIZING LONG-TERM CARE

In tracing the way that the economic and social costs associated with frailty and disability in old age are being privatized, we consider the experiences of three groups crucially implicated in the policy shift to community-based care. First, we consider elderly people themselves, the supposed beneficiaries of the policy emphasis on care at home. By providing inadequate or meagre responses to their needs, the costs of frailty are effectively transferred to their shoulders to be endured or dealt with privately or alone. Some of the costs also shift to family members —our second group of concern—who typically step in to provide needed care. And, thirdly, costs are shifted to paid home-care providers who are, for the most part, cheaper, less well-organized and more isolated than their institutional counterparts and, thus, more open to exploitation. Our knowledge of the costs borne by these three groups is uneven. As with patterns in all societal stocks of knowledge, this unevenness reflects power differences and legitimated patterns of attention and inattention. In examining the experiences and interests of each group below, we both review our current state of knowledge and consider the significance of the emphases and omissions within it. Frail Elderly People and the Privatization of Long-Term Care: Shrinking Entitlements and Mounting Insecurity To examine the implications for elderly people of the emphasis on community-based care in the LTC policy discourse, we draw on a


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review of relevant literature and insights generated in our own and others' earlier research. These sources are few in number, but we can distil from them two themes of particular concern: first, the deceptiveness of policy rhetoric that depicts elderly people as either central, self-deterrnining actors or as informed consumers exercising choice in the LTC marketplace; and, secondly, the discrepancy between these rhetorical images of elderly people's positioning and what we know of their actual experiences of needing care and support to cope with frailty and ill health. In the public policy discourse, the shift to community-based care is often explained as a response to elderly people's preference to remain in their own homes. As the language of private economic enterprise has enveloped discussion of social programs, such allusions to preference and choice have become commonplace. We hear less now of the older population's entitlements of citizenship than we do about elderly consumers' rights to exercise choice in the LTC marketplace. Closely examined, these images of choice and involvement—evoked in other comparable welfare regimes as well —prove hollow and misleading.12 Preferences or choices can only be exercised if real alternatives exist or can be demanded and if knowledge about them is accessible. These conditions are not satisfied when, in reality, elderly people face: a shrinking institutional sector, already unattractive by virtue of its forbidding history; fragmented and often meagrely funded home-care services; and, as a result, enforced dependence on the care of relatives, if they have any. Further, they do not "shop" for services as free agents but, rather, are assessed and accorded priority by professional gatekeepers of various kinds, whose decisions are contingent on the shifting availability of resources and funds, rather than on more stable and assured assessments of need. Just as consumer sovereignty proves an ill-fitting image for capturing old people's individual experiences of need and service receipt, it also proves hollow in the rhetoric of consumer participation and community consultation in policy development. While rather ostentatiously invited to participate in narrowed, consultative policy-making processes, elderly people's voices are seldom included in decision-making about the actual design and operation of resources that are provided to respond to their needs.13 The

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Ontario experience in developing an LTC policy in a supposedly consultative and inclusive fashion revealed the conceptual poverty of both "participation" and "community."14 Elderly people negotiate this complex terrain at a time when their relationship with the state is in flux, when, as noted above, assurances of economic and social security are being reviewed and compromised. Unsurprisingly, this climate translates into a sense of disentitlement and instability for many older people. Participants in studies exploring older people's wishes for themselves in the face of frailty reflect this instability—for example: "The economy can't keep all these old people —we're a drag on the younger generation;"15 "Old people come to expect so little.. .we've made a contribution and should be entitled to help now. We shouldn't be swept aside."16 Regardless of the particular degree of submission or protest voiced, such observations are not remotely in accord with the images of consumerism asserted in the policy discourse. Elderly people's own accounts of what it is like to need support or care reflect the insecurity of their dependent positioning. Research suggests that, given alternatives, elderly people do not want to rely on the care of family.17 The help of relatives was, however, recognized among a sample of elderly women as an inevitability and a buffer against less desirable options: "I don't know what I'd do without my daughter—she'll keep me going here. I couldn't bear the thought of a home." "I'm very lucky to have my niece. She comes in regularly and helps out with the things I can't do."18 Relying on family members' help in this way often evoked feelings of indebtedness and flew in the face of closely held ideals about independence and self-reliance. "I don't want to be a burden" was a frequently voiced concern, and subjects spoke of difficult and contradictory efforts to balance their increasingly obvious needs with their pride in not being dependent.19 These observations and anxieties about depending upon relatives of a younger generation capture the realities of only one segment of the frail elderly population. We know rather less about elderly people's experiences of relying on elderly spouses for care and support. Significantly, too, relatively little research attention has been given to people who do not have children, who do not live in heterosexual partnerships or who do not live in Western, nuclear


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family forms—in short, who do not fit in with the homogeneous picture of "family care" painted in the LTC policy discourse.20 Research on the diversity of social ties can both expand the narrowed framing of "family care" that underpins the public policy discourse and highlight groups who face frailty in old age in especially unsupported circumstances. Our knowledge of elderly people's perspectives on receiving paid care at home is also limited, but, again, the powerlessness of their positioning is striking. For example, an older woman imagined how she would feel receiving care at home: When you're an old lady, frail, maybe a little bit helpless, you haven't the gumption to stand up against a person who's coming to do a service and say: "That wasn't good enough." You just let it happen.21 The submission implicit in this statement was also identified in a study of elderly recipients of home-care services in the new British mixed economy of social care. Claiming to streamline people's access to needed community services, a care manager is charged with coordinating individual consumers' packages of resources from the public and for-profit care markets. Recipients of this model of care reported considerable insecurity at what seemed unpredictable services arranged on their behalf and delivered by a bewildering array of providers. Their confusion and passivity points, the authors suggest, to the discordance between the design and provision of needed care and a market approach to supplying uniform services: The problem is not just that care cannot be a standardized commodity, it is not clear that it can be a commodity in the market sense at all It is qualitatively different from a commercial product in that it must carry within it a non-standardized affective component: caring.22 This reference to the individual and particular quality of care relationships is echoed throughout the small literature on homecare recipients' perspectives. Service users report appreciating care providers who have time to listen and talk, who get to know their

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particular needs and with whom they have stable relationships.23 It is sobering to realize, therefore, that it is exactly these personalizing aspects of care provision that are being squeezed out of home-care services as cost-cutting leads to the speed up and intensification of home-care workers' jobs.24 In sum, it seems that the rhetoric of community-based care and consumer choice corresponds very little with what we know of frail elderly people's realities. Rather than choice and security, we see pressure to depend on relatives (if available) and a lack of confidence in increasingly meagre, standardized services.25 In the public discourse on LTC and in the kinds of research it legitimates, these realities and their consequences receive relatively little attention. Seniors' groups certainly express protest at the impact of cost-cutting, for example: "Care and compassion have given way to closing beds, inappropriate discharges, indignities to persons, unnecessary suffering and in some cases premature death."26 However, their voices are fairly small in the face of the dominant public discourse and, until recently, they have not been joined by the voices of seemingly related advocacy movements (e.g., feminist groups, the labour movement, the disability rights movement). This lack of political mobilization can be understood partly as a reflection of the fragility of old age as a basis for collective identity or action and partly as a reflection of the ageism that permeates our wider culture. These forces serve to stifle resistance to policy changes and diminishing citizenship entitlements in the LTC arena. Unpaid Family Carers and the Privatization of Long-Term Care: Ultimate Responsibility for Increasing Work Compared with our knowledge of frail elderly people's positioning, we know considerably more about women's activities in caring for elderly relatives. It is now commonly acknowledged that family members, predominantly women, provide the great proportion of LTC for frail elderly people. It is a proportion hard to specify since it is not counted as work of social value, though the Ontario government recently estimated it to be as high as 90 percent.27 While acknowledged in the public policy discourse and the health policy literature, this division of care between the private sphere of families


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and the public sphere of state activity is still depicted as a selfevident, uncontentious phenomenon. Family members are seen to choose to fulfil natural commitments to relatives in need. As a result, women's unpaid caring work comes into public view only when it breaks down or threatens to do so. Community-based services are provided to buttress and sustain family carers, not to substitute for them. Critical observers of these processes call attention to the politically constructed character of the line dividing family and public responsibility for the care of old people.28 Rather than a natural unfolding of family care and unintrusive state interventions, the line is revealed as a shifting division determined by political and economic interests. Just as the broad rhetoric of "family care" proves a blunt analytic category for understanding diversity in old people's private experience of entitlement and support, it also obscures important differences among family carers. The basis of commitment, for example, between spouses or between children and parents is substantially different, and the capacity to care for an elderly spouse or parent are very differently shaped. Adult daughters' capacities may be limited by the necessity of paid work, child care or geographical distance, while spouses' capacities are likely to be influenced by the limitations that come with their own aging; both may be constrained by their lack of training for the work of caring. The simplifying invocation of "family care" that underpins the LTC policy discourse also leaves no room for appreciating the jeopardies and risks of abuse and neglect hidden within families.29 Regardless of such differences in family carers' material or emotional resources, cost-cutting in LTC presses caring work out of the public domain and onto their shoulders. Cuts in public provision (for example, early hospital discharges, reduced nursing home beds, cuts in home care) shift the work of caring to families, "demonstrating how capitalism reorganizes the labour process to make use of free service labour."30 Claimed as cost reductions in public accounting, such cuts represent cost increases for family carers. In this section, we review what we know of how these costs are actually shifted and of the consequences for those who pick them up.

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Analyses of everyday encounters of elderly people and their families with formal service providers reveal how the line between public and private responsibility for care is actually drawn. Women in a study of care-giving daughters described, for example, how physicians, social workers and other key gatekeepers communicated the assumption that patients and families should fend for themselves; they felt that professionals expected them to appreciate the limits of public resources but to overlook the limits of their own. For example, a woman working full time and with two children at home described how a doctor urged her to take her very frail mother home from an acute-care hospital while she waited for a bed in a nursing home: "I always felt the doctor and social worker were suspicious. I always felt they thought we were going to dump her or...we didn't care about her/'31 From the hospital's vantage point, this woman's mother would be deemed a frustrating and expensive "bed blocker."32 Her daughter's unpaid services could free the bed and enable the hospital to meet its commitments to cost-efficiency. Besides illuminating the way that costs are redistributed from the public to the private sphere, subjects in this study pointed, too, to the ways in which responsibility for caring is distributed within families. Research reveals that responsibility for caring typically falls to women (wives, daughters, daughters-in-law) rather than men.33 Analysis of this pattern highlights its origins in gender socialization and in women's and men's differential participation and rewards in the labour market, and explains general differences in how caring is experienced subjectively —as an obligation for women and as an active choice for men.34 Research suggests, too, that men and women carers meet with different responses from the formal service system as male carers tend to receive more formal support and relief than do women.35 Recognizing women's unpaid caring as an obligation rather than a choice parallels a theme emphasized in our consideration of frail elderly people's positioning in the LTC discourse. There, we saw that the rhetoric of consumer choice obscured the oppressive realities of having to rely on family members or to accept meagre public services. Here, we see women in families pressed into caring by virtue of the absence of alternatives for elderly relatives. In her


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articulation of women's ultimate responsibility for family labour, Saraceno captures this positioning vividly: "It is the woman who, above all, knows and experiences the dimension of inescapable necessity which structures family relations, especially as far as intergenerational relations...are concerned."36 Depending on the extent and duration of women's care for elderly relatives, the inescapable necessity of responding to their needs can come at considerable cost. For reasonably well older people, care might mean practical help with shopping or heavy housework, emotional support and the continuation of an otherwise fairly reciprocal relationship. For elderly relatives with more serious physical or mental impairments, it can involve 24-hour care. With cuts to hospital services and institutional resources for the aged and chronically ill, more and more frail and sick elderly people require increasingly complex and demanding support in their own homes. The costs to women of providing such support are varied and complex.37 Costs in time and energy can result in serious strains and tensions. Caring for an elderly relative can also be a source of emotional stress and lead to social isolation. Such strains can result in physical or mental exhaustion or illness for the carer. Materially, too, caring for an elderly relative may impose immediate financial costs. It can also prompt younger women to withdraw from the labour force or to decide not to seek advancement in their paid work and, ultimately, can lead to diminished income and diminished pension entitlements in old age.38 Theoretically, family carers could be a source of potential resistance to the privatization of LTC: they have inside knowledge of its implications and costs for themselves and for the elderly relatives for whom they care. A subject in the study of care-giving daughters cited earlier alluded, rather tentatively, to the possibility of resistance: In my case, for example, with full-time jobs and a family and children and a home to run, we're under pressure too. I mean, not as badly, we could provide support, but there were limits - there really were limits.. .It sounds awful, but my mother's been a Canadian citizen for umpteen years and I pay a hell of a lot in income tax every year, my husband pays a hell of a lot.. .and now and

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then, when we need some short-term help, I don't think it should be difficult to find.39 That such a claim, from a relatively privileged white, middle-class woman, feels "awful" suggests that resistance will be readily stifled by guilt at appearing undaughterly. In addition, there are few contexts where women like this one can gather to recognize themselves as a collective with common interests. In Ontario, Concerned Friends of Seniors in Care Facilities (an organization of people with relatives in nursing homes) and At Home/Chez Nous (an organization of family care providers) assert a small voice in the LTC arena. Mostly, however, family carers7 resistance tends to be expressed as advocacy focused more narrowly on the interests of their individual relatives. An interesting though, as yet, small body of literature focuses on family carers' efforts to advocate for and secure the best possible treatment for relatives who receive home-care or live in institutions.40 This work highlights the possible political value of their knowledge of the shortcomings of public LTC. However, it also points to the potential for conflict between family carers and key paid providers (like nursing assistants and home-care workers) who are likely to be the targets of family criticism and frustration with inadequate care. In sum, the implications for family carers of public cost-cutting, and the deceptive rhetoric of community-based care take the shape of unpaid work which, even if lovingly and willingly given, is exacted by the lack of publicly provided alternatives and can be costly. Clearly the potential costs of this unpaid caring unfold differently for women in different social locations. Those with more resources, by virtue of class, race or age, will be better able to offset the costs of caring, whether by purchasing private help or by being able to negotiate public resources from a more privileged position. To date, we understand these differences poorly —a result of the feminist caring literature's relatively narrow focus on middleclass, white women providing unpaid care for relatives.41 This focus, reflective of the social positioning of those who generated the literature, has resulted in relative inattention to the experiences of paid care providers in the community who are, typically, workingclass and, increasingly, immigrant women. In the next section, we


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turn to consider the consequences of the ongoing shifts in LTC for this vulnerably positioned labour force. Home-Care Workers and the Privatization of Long-Term Care: Publicly Unrewarded Skills and Labour The shift toward community-based care for frail elderly people accomplishes cuts in public spending by moving the work of caring from hospitals and institutions to cheaper care providers, specifically to unpaid family carers (as discussed above) and to paid workers in home-care services. Home-care services encompass a wide array of health and social services and employ a variety of care providers (e.g., nurses, physiotherapists, social workers, nutritionists and visiting homemakers). We focus our discussion here on visiting homemakers (now commonly referred to as "home-care workers," a term we use throughout the paper), who represent a significant proportion of the home-care labour force and are seen as "the backbone" of home health care.42 As a labour force of low paid para-professionals (drawn increasingly from immigrant populations in metropolitan areas), who do what is understood in our culture as the ordinary activities of women in the privacy of old people's homes, the jeopardy of their positioning merits particular attention. Home-care workers seldom appear as subjects in the dominant policy discourse. Instead, attention is directed to the management and organization of their work and to questions of quality assurance and costing.43 The critical literature on institutional nursing work offers some valuable insights into paid care work in the current political and economic climate, revealing, for example: the complexity and invisibility of the emotional work involved in caring for people's personal needs; the poor employment conditions and devalued status of nursing assistants and aides who are key care providers for chronically ill and frail elderly people; and the negative effects of managerial practices that seek to cut government costs by intensifying and pressing the caring labour process into the standardized form of industrial production.44 While these patterns are likely to unfold in comparable work carried out in the community, there are likely to be some differences too. In particular, home-care workers' ambiguous positioning as public workers in

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the private, isolated work sites of old people's homes structures particular tensions and forms of exploitation. Our observations of the ways that home-care workers shoulder some of the burdens of government cost containment in LTC are derived from a study undertaken in two home-care agencies in southern Ontario.45 The employment conditions of these paraprofessional workers suggest that government costs are, indeed, reduced by shifting care out of institutions. The hourly rate of pay for workers whom we interviewed ranged from $9 to $12 and they had limited benefits —conditions inferior to those of their counterparts in hospitals and nursing homes.46 This visible and proclaimed reduction of government costs is not, however, our main focus here. Rather, we address some less visible ways in which home-care workers shoulder some of the redistributed costs of LTC. First, we found that some aspects of home-care workers' labour and skill go unremarked and unrewarded as a result of the significant discrepancy between their official job descriptions and their own accounts of what they do in the course of helping old people. Official accounts of home-care work underscore its practical character, specifying such tasks as cooking, cleaning, bathing, dressing and laundry. Couched as a list of tasks, the job can be broken down into standard, measurable units of work and is, thus, amenable to the kinds of industrial management practices now commonplace in hospital care. In contrast, workers' own descriptions of their day-to-day work revealed how unstandardized it was and how they constantly adapted their practical activities to clients' individual needs and situations; "every case is different" and "it depends" were frequent qualifiers to descriptions of particular tasks. For example, a worker reflected on the complexity of helping clients with bathing: "When you work in personal care you have to develop a handling of the client. They have to get used to you handling them. You have to get used to how they like to be handled." Home-care workers prided themselves on their ability to personalize their work in this way, on building relationships and on caring well for their clients. They found the attachment they developed with clients an inevitable and, often, rewarding aspect of their work:


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The supervisor might say well you're going in there to do the laundry, do the shopping, do the cleaning...but eventually you find yourself that you're more involved, you know. And they might say, well try not to get involved. Well, you cannot not.. .get involved. If you're going in there regularly and you're seeing the situation, you become part of that person.

Such processes of becoming familiar with individual clients, getting to know their histories and responding to their preferences, also noted in other research, require considerable time and skill.47 Just as homemakers perceived these aspects of their work to be important and valuable, family carers and elderly people are found to do so as well. As noted earlier, elderly care recipients value continuity in their relationships with paid care workers, and family carers report a protective concern that care workers treat their relatives in ways that are affirming and individualizing. These skilled and crucial aspects of caring work are, however, accorded little visibility in home-care workers' job descriptions and in the public discourse on home care. As a result, workers' performance of them goes (publicly) unvalued and uncompensated. This invisibility and the resulting exploitation are made possible by dominant typifications of work that eclipse women's interpersonal caring activities, rendering them the natural outcome of disposition rather than skilled work of social value.48 Socialized in these constructions of work themselves, home-care workers lack a vocabulary in which to claim caring activities as skills or even as real work, and resist the low valuation of their work in the public discourse.49 A second and related aspect of home-care workers' exploitable positioning in LTC emerged in their engagement in unpaid "extra" activities on behalf of their clients. Workers described various ways in which their work seeped out of its formal boundaries. For example, they put in time beyond their official allocations of hours. They also carried out tasks that lay outside their officially defined repertoire (e.g., gardening, cutting toenails, keeping clients company) which they judged would benefit their elderly clients. They sometimes breached the formal, non-reciprocal relationship

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with clients specified by their employers by, for example, giving and accepting gifts or keeping in phone contact with clients in between paid visits or after their assignments were over. Homecare workers' assumption of this kind of extra, personalizing work has been identified in others' analyses of home-care providers.50 Workers' motivations for undertaking such extra, unpaid work warrant particular attention as we try to identify and anticipate the consequences of inadequate public LTC provision. Home-care workers alluded to a sense of moral responsibility for elderly clients that parallels the ultimate responsibility felt by family care providers: ...when you know that the client doesn't have any other person going in it makes a big difference too. You know that you're the only one they see from basically one week to the next a lot of times. The pressure of knowing they were the clients' last resort is likely to be higher for community- than institution-based care workers. In institutional settings, workers share their knowledge of and sense of responsibility for clients with co-workers and supervisors. Isolated in old people's homes, with no co-workers, with little support from supervisors (the result of budget cuts) and, often, with exclusive knowledge of clients' situations, home-care workers are more likely to feel pressed into being responsive. In effect, the context and conditions of their work are ideally suited to extracting labour that exceeds their officially defined jobs. While extra labour was often provided out of moral obligation, it was also extracted by virtue of home-care workers' vulnerable social status. This vulnerability originated, for them all, in their status as workers deemed relatively unskilled and easily replaceable. Conscious of this, they needed to sustain workable relationships with clients, even if that meant responding to unfair demands: "...if I don't have them [my clients] I don't work. I don't have pay. And I need my pay to eat." In addition to this classbased vulnerability, home-care workers who were women of colour or had accents that marked them as not Canadian-born reported a heightened sense of jeopardy. They felt, for example, unable to


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refuse clients' or families' unreasonable demands or to challenge racist and demeaning treatment. If they risked complaining to their supervisors, they were usually supported to some degree. Typically, supervisors transferred them to other cases. They did not deal more directly with clients' and families' racist behaviour as an issue of occupational safety and basic human rights.51 In the private homecare market, we could expect workers to be even less protected. All these oppressive conditions in home-care work are intensifying with managerial practices designed to cut government costs. In our study, cost-cutting was felt in various ways: as reductions in time allotments to clients; in the introduction of split shifts and of unpaid "on call" duties; in reduced support and supervision; and in caseloads of more needy clients being discharged earlier from hospitals or unable to find a place in the shrinking supply of institutional beds. In other jurisdictions, observers describe organizational arrangements designed to intensify home-care workers' labour in even more systematic ways. In schemes tried, for example, in the US,53 the UK54 and Sweden,55 home-care workers are assigned to clients on random or rotating bases so that time-consuming relationships cannot develop and tasks can be accomplished with assembly line efficiency. In other jurisdictions, too, the privatization of home-care services is seen to contribute further to the systematic degradation of homecare workers' employment conditions.56 In New Zealand, for example, where privatization has been a matter of government policy for ten years, home-care workers are cast as independent contractors and home-care services are managed as profit-motivated businesses. No longer entitled to even the most minimal occupational rights and protections, home-care workers' jobs are extraordinarily unregulated and devalued and are, at the time of writing, the focus of legal challenge and union activity.57 In anticipation of such developments here in Canada, home-care workers in Manitoba went on strike in the spring of 1996 to protest the provincial government's plan to shift a large portion of home health care to the private sector. Such a shift is, of course, facilitated by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which paved the way for private providers from the US to enter the Canadian health-care arena in pursuit, implicitly,

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of profit and their shareholders' interests, rather than of the collective health or occupational welfare of Canadians.58 We have documented the implications of governments' cost-cutting and the policy shift to community-based LTC for three crucially affected groups: frail elderly people, unpaid family carers and paid home-care workers. Before moving on to set their perspectives in broader analyses of state responses to elderly people's needs and to women's caring work, it is important to acknowledge that the three groups have permeable boundaries and that their respective jeopardies intersect. Their blurred boundaries emerge when we recognize, for example: that many spouses caring for frail partners are themselves elderly and in uncertain health; that many homecare workers also look after elderly people in their own families; and, of course, that women providing care on paid and unpaid bases (and those who conceptualize what they do) will themselves probably live to be old. It is also the case that the three groups shape each others' realities. For example: the availability of a responsible and generous home-care worker who overextends herself can relieve the stresses of a caring daughter and the jeopardy of her elderly parent; a demanding elderly person can exploit a home-care worker desperate for work as a new immigrant to Canada; a confused elderly person deemed difficult or unmanageable by frustrated family members and paid care workers may live alone at some risk. Effectively, these three participants on the LTC stage are thrown into interdependent relationships crosscut by inequalities and potential conflicts based on race, class and age differences. It is important to understand the origins of such conflicts not as interpersonal problems but as the direct result of shrinking public care provision that entraps and oppresses them all.59

FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN LONG-TERM CARE: THE POSSIBILITIES OF A MORE ACTIVE STATE

In responding to fiscal pressures over the last decade, the Canadian state has resorted almost exclusively to cost-cutting measures,


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pleading an absence of other options. However, recognition that other liberal welfare states, faced with similar fiscal pressures, have pursued alternative policies in LTC exposes the actions of the Canadian state as accumulated political choices rather then neutral inevitabilities. In this final section, we consider first how pursuit of alternatives requires an active rather than a retreating state presence in the development of social policy. Secondly, we discuss how, with such a presence, the discourse on LTC could be reframed to guarantee access to minimum levels of specified services for all elderly citizens and to redistribute the costs of those services more equitably. An Active State Presence in Social Policy Development? In order to develop public policies that assure elderly citizens access to specified LTC services and that distribute their costs equitably, the active intervention of federal and provincial governments is needed. We see, instead, a federal government in retreat, transferring resources to the provinces through block grants that specify neither minimum criteria for entitlement nor national standards of service. We also see both federal and provincial governments simply watching the expansion of the market and informal sectors. The challenge of considering the possibilities of a more active state presence is significant because an interventionist liberal state has been subject to attacks from the left as well as from the right. It has been criticized, with justification, for its frequent support of market forces and organized interests and its failure to promote the interests of oppressed groups. However, assuming an anti-state position in response to these concerns does not challenge the vulnerability of the kinds of groups discussed here and, arguably, it may actually jeopardize them further. Despite the mixed and contradictory effects of state intervention, analysis of its history can remind us of its capacity to disrupt capitalist and patriarchal power.60 We know, for example, that in countries like Sweden and Denmark, where an active state exists, women have registered real gains from policies that recognize the social benefits accruing from child-care and elder-care programs.61 We can identify examples of

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similar gains in Canada; for instance, despite resistance from the market sector, federal and provincial governments initiated pay and employment equity policies, as well as property splitting at divorce, anti-violence programs and welfare schemes that have benefitted different groups of women. The Canada Pension Plan disrupts gender-specific employment assumptions found in most private pension schemes. Similarly, and perhaps most significantly for our consideration of LTC, the Canada Health Act clearly disrupts class privilege. These observations are not presented to idealize past achievements of welfare states or to gloss over their contradictions but, rather, to give some social context to the current debate so that it is less ahistorical and so that we can recognize the possibilities of more active state intervention. Feminist analyses of the liberal state have alerted us to both its positive and negative potential for women's welfare and security. In order to visualize its positive potential in LTC, two particular themes in this now extensive body of work warrant our attention. First, feminist critiques have highlighted how the liberal state focuses narrowly on the individual and "his" freedom of action. Such a state does not recognize that individuals' relationships or group memberships influence their power or positioning and determine their freedom of action and ability to negotiate. Translated to the arena of LTC, this construction of individuals as free and equal actors means, for example, that family carers are seen to do their caring work by choice and that elderly people are seen to choose to rely on them. In a minority of situations choice may, indeed, be exercised. The possibility of choice is greatest where: financial resources are sufficient to purchase services on the market, family structures are such that a spouse is present and in reasonably good health, and the care needs of the elderly person are minimal. These conditions are, of course, exceptional; many of the elderly are widows with limited resources, they do not have readily available kin on whom they want to depend, and most elderly people needing care require more than the occasional bit of help.6* A second significant flaw in assumptions underlying the liberal state concerns the separation of public and private spheres. Social


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policies and the activities of the state are, it is assumed, confined to the public arena and are not seen as affecting the organization of private life. The fallacy of this separation of spheres emerged throughout our discussion of the three groups involved in LTC; home-care policy has a profound effect on their private lives. We saw, for example, how hospitals balance their budgets by releasing patients earlier, and how the necessity of providing care to an elderly family member affects the daily rhythm of a carer's life, her career pattern and future pension entitlements. Yet, the patriarchal model of the liberal state defines such issues as private matters, to be negotiated among family members who freely enter the caring contract as equals. Our earlier discussion of the coercion and lack of choice that characterized the experiences of frail elderly people and their unpaid and paid carers reveals the inaccuracy of this liberal imagery. Long-Term Care: Part of the Broader Renegotiation of Social Security in Canada If, as a result of political mobilization, advocacy, public debate and research, Canadians endorsed the kind of active state presence in LTC that we see reflected in the framing of medicare, what would be some of its key features and how would it be discussed? We identify two related elements in a more interventionist LTC policy: first, it would guarantee citizens access to minimum levels of specified services; and second, it would require the refraining of a pluralist model of state intervention to ensure equitable outcomes for the unequally positioned actors on the LTC stage. Policy attention to assuring access and entitlement to defined LTC services would bring LTC policy into line with the original framing of the Canada Health Act. In that act, access and service are guaranteed but, except for patients' entitlements to choose physicians, "choice" does not loom large in the principles framing the legislation—a stark contrast to the imagery of choice that pervades the LTC discourse. An LTC policy framed in a similar tradition would stress meeting the specified needs of old people. It would not assume that need will be met if elderly people and their caring daughters or spouses just "choose" from an LTC marketplace

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in which there are no clear guarantees of service availability or stability. This framing of LTC policy would transform elderly consumers into elderly citizens with rights and responsibilities. It would also make visible the political nature of need interpretation and of responses to defined need.63 Acknowledged as politically determined phenomena, need definition, services and programs would be revealed as open to contestation, not depicted as the inevitable and undebatable results of market forces. The transformation of elderly consumers into politically positioned citizens requires a refraining of the nature of welfare pluralism in Canada. The four sectors that comprise what is explicitly referred to and debated in Europe as the "mixed economy of welfare" are: the public/state sector, the private/ market sector, the voluntary sector and the informal sector.64 The particular mix and balance of these four sectors has not been the subject of clear public debate in Canada. Rather, growth in the market and informal sectors has happened by virtue of cost-cutting in the public sector. Determining the mix more openly and equitably requires the presence of the state as a key player in the LTC arena—an arena in which the interests of those whose well-being is critically affected by LTC would occupy significant space. This model of state intervention assumes conflict and inequality between the participants in LTC. The realization that an active state would always be formulating policy among unequal participants with conflicting interests eliminates the deceptive concept of an overriding national interest that must take primacy, whether it be deficit reduction or health care.65 This acknowledgment of conflict provides a frame for attending to the inequities embedded in current models of community-based care. With more active state involvement, the oppressive and exploitative potential structured into home-care work and the various conflicts, discussed above, that are now contained in the private world of home-based care but rooted in broader class, race and age inequalities would all be matters for explicit public policy attention. Bringing a more active state into LTC policy-making in Canada clearly represents a huge challenge. Historically, the Canadian state has not been as active a presence in social policy development as have some of its European counterparts. Presently, too, state


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inactivity is fostered and confirmed in the dominant policy discourse in Canada. However, even if an active state —with all its contradictions—seems a distant possibility at this moment, it is still important that it be articulated as an alternative way forward that promises greater security and equity in policies affecting old people and those who care for them. Without the articulation of this alternative, unchallenged marketplace imperatives will move us toward greater insecurity and inequity in LTC and in other social policy domains. At stake are not just the pragmatics of funding and organizational arrangements, as the dominant discourse implies, but the very basis of our future social security in Canada.

POSTSCTRIPT: MARCH 1998

This paper was written some two years ago to trace the implications of privatization for those at the frontlines of long-term care. In the intervening years, the burgeoning of the mixed economy of care (that characterizes LTC policy in most Western countries) and the retreat of the Canadian state from providing leadership within it have continued apace. Several new developments and pieces of information clarify these trends and the tensions they generate. First, recently released data from Statistics Canada shed some further light on the position of unpaid family carers. The 1996 General Social Survey included questions that, for the first time, "counted" help given to others. These GSS indicators of social and community support provide national data on issues previously only addressed in an array of small studies. Specifically, the GSS data revealed that one in eight adults are providing help to family members with long-term health problems. Providing help proved to have significant impact on these caregivers: half cited repercussions on their paid jobs, felt that caring responsibilities took a financial toll or affected their own health. On March 17, 1998, Statistics Canada also released data on unpaid work that were collected for the first time as part of the 1996 census.67 These data show that 19 percent of all women reported providing care to seniors—this, on top of the 42 percent who were providing child care. These figures are accompanied by labour force data showing

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that increasing percentages of women are working the full year in part-time jobs in retail, sales and service occupations and that an increasing proportion are self-employed and working out of their homes. Taken together, these official statistics generate a troubling picture of the strains of providing care to relatives, of balancing paid and unpaid work commitments and, especially for women, of the increasing insecurity of the conditions of paid work. With respect to the positions of paid home-care workers, trends that we identified two years ago have gained momentum: deinstitutionalization and dehospitalization continue in the provinces and the work of caring is shifted to cheaper and less secure providers in the community. The cheapening of home-care labour has hastened as, with danger signals ignored, provincial governments foster the entrance of private, for-profit home-care organizations into the home-care "market." The province of Manitoba, which many consider the birthplace of home-care public policy, has been rocked by its excursion into the contracting out business. After dealing with strikes by home-care workers and nurses, the Ministry of Health awarded a contract to Olsten Corporation, a US for-profit home-care company. Olsten was one of the surprisingly few companies able to bid for the contract at a price lower than the costs of the public sector service delivery already in place. An investigation by the Centre for Policy Alternatives subsequently revealed that Olsten was undergoing several US federal investigations for questionable business and service practices. Furthermore, its problems were found to be characteristic of those that riddle the private home-care industry in the US, namely, high rates of employment of low paid and parttime staff, high staff turnover and jeopardized continuity of care.68 There have been some signs that home care is being taken as a serious policy concern at the national level. In 1997, the National Forum on Health concluded that a national home-care program is needed, with structures and standards parallel to those of the Canada Health Act. The 1997 budget established the Health Care Transition Fund that had as one of its four priorities the examination of how home care could be integrated into Canada's formal healthcare system. These initiatives seem encouraging as they come from a federal government that has been so passive over the last decade.


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That said, the federal government has made no funding commitments to a national home-care program. There is also no guarantee, of course, that such a program will be organized in a way that assures senior citizens and their families equitable access to high-quality, publicly provided services or assures paid care providers fair and well-supported working conditions. Continued and organized claims-making for these assurances will be important in the future. In the last two years, organized claims-making and critiques of governments' retreat and passivity have been voiced with increasing vigour. For example, in Ontario, we have seen public forums on LTC organized by new combinations of concerned groups: seniors, labour, women and social justice lobbies. Seniors' groups have been organizing with a particular focus on LTC; for instance, the Older Women's Network, centred in Toronto, is supporting provincewide workshops and a phone-line to gather and publicize seniors' accounts of the problems and risks to health of getting out of hospital and facing a meagre and disorganized patchwork of home-care services. In Manitoba, a significant alliance of home-care users, their families and home-care workers resulted from the Manitoba Government Employees Union's 1996 strike against the province's initial plan to privatize home care. Such instances of organization and coalition-building can be read as hopeful signs of political mobilization amongst the three groups that are the focus of this paper. Maintaining these alliances will be critically important in the future. The challenges of doing so will be considerable as there are so many pressures that pit old people, their families and paid care workers against each other and diffuse the possibilities of concerted action. Our analysis leads us to conclude that resisting these diffusing and dividing tendencies will be an important part of the larger effort to challenge federal and provincial governments' dwindling commitments to the health and social security of elderly Canadians and to reinsert the social into long-term care.

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ENDNOTES Part of the work reported here was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Women and Social Change) through a project grant (882-92-0015) and a network grant (816-94-0003). 1

2 3

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N.L. Chappell, L.A. Strain and A.A. Blandford, Aging and Health Care: A Social Perspective (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986); P. Manga, "Health Economics and the Current Health Care Cost Crisis," Health and Canadian Society I (1993), pp. 177-203. Chappell et al., Aging and Health Care. J. Finch and D. Groves, A Labour of Love: Women, Work and Caring (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); H. Holter, ed., Patriarchy in a Welfare Society (Oslo: Universitsforlaget, 1984); S.M. Neysmith, "Parental Care: Another Female Family Function?" Canadian Journal of Social Work Education 7/2 (1981), pp. 55-63. H. Brown and H. Smith, "Women Caring for People: The Mismatch Between Rhetoric and Women's Reality?" Policy and Politics 21 (1993), pp. 185-193; L. A. Bergthold, C.L. Estes and A. Villanueva, "Public Light and Private Dark: The Privatization of Home Health Services for the Elderly in the United States," Home Health Care Services Quarterly 11 (1990), pp. 7-33; Economic Council of Canada, Aging With Limited Resources (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1986). N.Y. Glazer, Women's Paid and Unpaid Labour: The Work Transfer in Health Care and Retailing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p.112. National Advisory Council on Aging, The NACA Position on Community Services in Health Care for Seniors: Progress and Challenges (Ottawa: Ministry of Supply and Services, 1995). Ontario Ministry of Health, Ministry of Community and Social Services and Ministry of Citizenship, Partnerships in Long-Term Care: A New Way to Plan, Manage and Deliver Services and Community Support (Toronto: Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1993), pp. 7 and 15; Manga, "Health Economics...," p.198. DJ. Cooper and D. Neu, "The Politics of Debt and Deficit in Alberta" in G. Laxer and T. Harrison, eds., The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada (Montreal: Black Rose, 1995), pp. 163-181; L. McQuaig, Shooting the Hippo (Toronto: Viking, 1995). Government of Ontario, An Act Respecting Long-Term Care (1994). Bergthold et al., "Public Light...," p.27. M. Bulmer, The Social Basis of Community Care (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987).


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J. Baldock and C. Ungerson, "Consumer Perceptions of an Emerging Mixed Economy of Care," pp. 287-314 in A. Evers and I. Svetlik, eds., Balancing Pluralism: New Welfare Mixes in Care for the Elderly (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993); A. Walker, "The Future of Long-Term Care in Canada: A British Perspective," Canadian Journal on Aging 14/2 (1995), pp. 437-446. J. Aronson, "Giving Consumers a Say in Policy Development: Influencing Policy or Just Being Heard?" Canadian Public Policy XIX/4 (1993), pp. 367-378. R.B. Deber and A.P. Williams, "Policy, Payment and Participation: Long Term Care Reform in Ontario," Canadian Journal on Aging 14/2 (1995), pp. 294-318. J. Aronson, "Are We Really Listening? Beyond the Official Discourse on Needs of Old People," Canadian Social Work Review 9/1 (1992), pp. 73-87. Aronson, "Giving Consumers a Say...," p.371. S. Daatland, "What Are Families For? On Family Solidarity and Preference for Help," Ageing and Society 10/1 (1990), pp. 1-15. Aronson, "Are We Really Listening...," p.77. J. Aronson, "Old Women's Experiences of Needing Care: Choice or Compulsion?" Canadian Journal on Aging 9/3 (1990), pp. 234-247. H. Graham, "Social Divisions of Caring," Women's Studies International Forum 16/5 (1993), pp. 461-470; L. Strain and B. Payne, "Social Networks and Patterns of Social Interaction Among Ever-Single and Separated/Divorced Elderly Canadians," Canadian Journal on Aging 11/1 (1992), pp. 31-53. Aronson, "Are We Really Listening...," p. 79. Baldock and Ungerson, "Consumer Perceptions...," p. 311. H. Qureshi, "Boundaries Between Formal and Informal Caregiving Work," pp. 59-79 in C. Ungerson, ed., Gender and Caring Work: Work and Welfare in Britain and Scandinavia (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); M.Y. Stricklin, "Home Care Consumers Speak Out on Quality," Home Healthcare Nurse 11 (1993), pp. 10-17. J. Aronson and S. Neysmith, '"You're Not Just In There To Do The Work': Depersonalizing Policies and the Exploitation of Home Care Workers' Labour," Gender & Society 10/1 (1996), pp. 59-77. R. Phillips, A Second Look at the Clients in the Community Programs for People with Cognitive Impairments in Metro Toronto (January 1-March 31, 1994) (Toronto: Toronto Long Term Care Office, Ontario Ministry of Health, 1995). Mae Harman of Canadian Pensioners Concerned, quoted in K. Toughill, "Health Care Cuts Killing Seniors, Group Says," Toronto Star, 20 April 1995, p.Al. Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, Redirection of Long-Term Care and Support Services in Ontario (Toronto: Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1991), p.10.

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E.K. Abel, Who Cares For The Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); C.T. Baines, P.M. Evans and S.M. Neysmith, Women's Caring: Feminist Perspectives on Social Welfare (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991). S.M. Neysmith, "Power in Relationships of Trust: A Feminist Analysis of Elder Abuse," pp. 43-54 in M. McLean, ed., Abuse and Neglect of Older Canadians: Strategies for Change (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1995). N.Y. Glazer, "The Home as Workshop: Women as Amateur Nurses and Medical Care Providers," Gender & Society 4/4 (1990), pp. 479-499. J. Aronson, "Women's Sense of Responsibility for the Care of Old People: 'But Who Else Is Going To Do It?'" Gender & Society 6/1 (1992), pp. 8-29. D. Grant, "Bed-Blockers Blamed for Emergency Ward Crunch," Globe and Mail, 18 February 1985, p.16. H. Qureshi and A. Walker, The Caring Relationship: Elderly People and their Families (London: MacMillan, 1989); C. Saraceno, "Division of Family Labour and Gender Identity" in A. Showstack Sassoon, ed., Women and the State (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp 191-206. C. Ungerson, Policy is Personal: Sex, Gender and Informal Care (London: Tavistock, 1987). D. Gibson and J. Allen, "Parasitism and Phallocentrism in Social Problems of the Aged," Policy Sciences 26/2 (1993), pp. 79-98. Saraceno, "Division of Family Labour...," p.199. P. Armstrong, "Closer to Home: More Work for Women" in P. Armstrong, J. Choiniere, G. Feldberg and J. White, Take Care: Warning Signals for Canada's Health Care System (Toronto: Garamond, 1994), pp. 95-110. M. Townson, Women's Financial Futures: Mid-Life Prospects for a Secure Retirement (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1995). Aronson, "Women's Sense of Responsibility...," p.13. B. Bowers, "Family Perceptions of Care in a Nursing Home," pp. 278-289 in E. Abel and M. Nelson, eds., Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives (New York: SUNY Press, 1990); M.T. Duncan and D.L. Morgan, "Sharing the Caring: Family Caregivers' Views of Their Relationships with Nursing Home Staff," Gerontologist 34/2 (1994), pp. 235-244. Graham, "Social Divisions...." N.N. Eustis, R.A. Kane and L.R. Fischer, "Home Care Quality and the Home Care Worker: Beyond Quality Assurance as Usual," Gerontologist 33/I (1993), p.64.


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R. Kane and A. Caplan, Ethical Conflicts in the Management of Home Care: The Case Manager's Dilemma (New York: Springer Publishing, 1993); H. Schmid and Y. Hasenfeld, "Organizational Dilemmas in the Provision of Home Care Services," Social Service Review 67/1 (1993), pp 40-54. M. Campbell, "Management as 'Ruling': A Class Phenomenon in Nursing," Studies in Political Economy 27 (1988), pp. 29-51; T. Diamond, Making Gray Gold: Narratives of Nursing Home Care (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); N. James, "Care = Organization + Physical Labour + Emotional Labour," Sociology of Health and Illness 14/4 (1992), pp. 488-509; L.S. Weintraub, No Place Like Home: A Discussion Paper About Living and Working in Ontario's Long Term Care Facilities (Don Mills: Ontario Federation of Labour, 1995); J. White, "Changing Labour Processes and the Nursing Crisis in Canadian Hospitals," Studies in Political Economy 40 (1993), pp. 103-134. Aronson and Neysmith, '"You're Not Just in There...'"; S.M. Neysmith and J. Aronson, "Home Care Workers Discuss Their Work: The Skills Required to Use Your 'Common Sense'," Journal of Aging Studies 10/1 (1996), pp. 1-14. W. Crown, M. McAdam and E. Sadowsky, Caring, April 1992, pp. 34-38; R. Donovan, "'We Care for the Most Important People in Your Life': Home Care Workers in New York City," Women's Studies Quarterly 171/2 (1989), pp. 5665; A. Martin Matthews, Homemakers' Services to the Elderly: Provider Characteristics and Client Benefit, 1989-1992 (Guelph: Gerontology Research Centre, 1992). L.W. Kaye, "Worker Views of the Intensity of Affective Expression During the Delivery of Home Care Services for the Elderly," Home Health Care Services 7 (1986), pp. 41-54; L. Warren, "'We're Home Helps Because We Care': The Experiences of Home Helps Caring for Elderly People" in P. Abbott and G. Payne, eds., New Directions in the Sociology of Health (London: Palmer Press, 1990), pp. 70-86. M.L. Devault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); A. Kaplan Daniels, "Invisible Work," Social Problems 34/5 (1987), pp. 403^15. Aronson and Neysmith, "'You're Not Just In There....'" S.Cunnison, "Gender, Consent and Exploitation Among Sheltered Housing Wardens," pp. 20-46 in K. Purcell, S. Wood, A. Waton and S. Allen, eds., The Changing Experience of Employment: Restructuring and Recession (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 188-205; C. de la Cuesta, "Fringe Work: Peripheral Work in Health Visiting," Sociology of Health and Illness 15/5 (1993), pp. 665-682. S.M. Neysmith and J. Aronson, "Negotiating Issues of Culture and Race Within the Home" (Paper presented at the conference of the Canadian Association on Gerontology, Vancouver, 1995).

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Donovan, "'We Care for the Most Important...'"; R. Donovan, P.A. Kurzman and C. Rotman, "Improving the Lives of Home Care Workers," Social Work 38/5 (1993), pp. 579-585; E. Jones, "The Privatization of Home Care in Manitoba," Canadian Review of Social Policy 37 (1996), pp. 96-98. E.R. Chichin and M.H. Kantor, "The Home Care Industry: Strategies for Survival in an Era of Dwindling Resources," Journal of Aging and Social Policy 4 (1992), pp. 89-105. Qureshi and Walker, The Caring Relationship. M. Szebehely, Vardagens Organisering: Om vardbitraden och gamla i hemtjansten, [The Organization of Everyday Life: On Home Helpers and Elderly People in Sweden] (Lund: Arkiv Forlag, 1995). Bergthold et al., "Public Light..."; J. Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment? (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995); RJ. Owens, "The Peripheral Worker: Women and the Legal Regulation of Outwork," pp. 46-62 in M. Thornton, ed., Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates (Melbourne: OUP, 1995). Cashman and Others v. Central Regional Health Authority, Employment Court Wellington Registry, WEC3/96, W119/95; interview, Luci Highfield, Service Workers Union, Wellington NZ, March 1996. M. Cohen, Free Trade and the Future of Women's Work: Manufacturing and Service Industries (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987). For discussion of the possibilities of care that enhances the rights of both recipients and workers, see: M. Carpenter, Normality is Hard Work: Trade Unions and the Politics of Community Care (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994); L. Sky, Lean and Mean Health Care: The Creation of the Generic Worker and the Deregulation of Health Care (Don Mills: Ontario Federation of Labour, 1995). M. Harrington, "What Exactly is Wrong with the Liberal State as an Agent of Change?" pp. 71-87 in V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist (Re)visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1992). S. Daatland, "Recent Trends and Future Prospects for the Elderly in Scandinavia." Journal of Aging and Social Policy 6 (1994), pp. 181-197; B. Siim, "Toward a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State," pp. 121-145 in K. Jones and A. Jonasdottor, eds., The Political Interests of Gender: Developing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face (London: Sage, 1988). S.M. Neysmith, "Toward a Woman Friendly Long-Term Care Policy," pp. 222-245 in P. Evans and G. WeKerle, eds., Reconstituting the Welfare State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). N. Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).


64

65 66

67

68

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A. Evers, "The Welfare Mix Approach: Understanding the Pluralism of Welfare Systems," pp. 3-32 in A. Evers and I. Svetlik, eds., Balancing Pluralism: New Welfare Mixes in Care for the Elderly (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993). Harrington, "What Exactly Is Wrong...", p. 77. Statistics Canada, 1996 General Social Survey: Cycle II—Social and Community Support. Catalogue 11-OO1E (Ottawa: Statistics Canada,1997), p.5. Statistics Canada, 1996 Census: Labour Force Activity, Occupation and Industry, Place of Work, Mode of Transportation to Work, Unpaid Work (Ottawa: The Daily, 1998), March 17. E. Shapiro, The Cost of Privatization: A Case Study of Home Care in Manitoba (Winnipeg: Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1997); J. Silver, The Cost of Privatization: Olsten Corporation and the Crisis in American For-Profit Home Care (Winnipeg: Centre for Policy Alternatives, 1997).


CHAPTER 5

The Mixed Social Economy as a Canadian Tradition

MARIANA VALVERDE

hroughout the 1980s, the breakdown of Communist systems in Eastern Europe and the emergence of "new" social movements in both East and West led to a renewed interest among political theorists in the nineteenth-century concept of ''civil society/'1 Similarly, within sociology there have been attempts to devise systems of social and economic regulation that take power away from state bureaucracies and give it to either private enterprise or to community-based groups and the traditional voluntary sector. Paul Hirst's recent book Associative Democracy is perhaps the fullest statement of such a plan to demote the state and rely on civil society, a plan which, coming from the pen of a famous ex-Althusserian turned British Labour Party adviser, has particular significance.2 The rise of what could be called "civil society studies" has in turn led neo-Marxists to defend and revise studies of "the state." Rianne Mahon, for instance, has recently made a cogent argument that the analytical pendulum has swung too far in the direction of civil society and that a modified, non-deterministic theory of state formation can address some of today's most pressing questions.3 Both she and her opponents, however, tend to pose the question of state and civil society as a binary opposition. This article seeks to rewrite the terms of the debate by deconstructing the binary opposition between public and private,

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state and civil society (in the field of social service provision) through both empirical evidence and theoretical argument.4 I am interested in a phenomenon that reminds us of the persistence and importance of civil society, and in particular of those aspects of civil society that lie beyond the for-profit marketplace:5 philanthropic social services. And yet, what I focus on is not so much the autonomy of the non-government sector but rather the complex web of relationships Unking the two supposedly separate realms, in other words the sites and processes organized as a mixed economy. Josephine Rekart's recent study of the so-called privatization of social service delivery in British Columbia, Public Funds, Private Provision, is an excellent starting point, among other things because it shows that supposedly voluntary agencies are, under the weight of government contracts for the delivery of statutory services, becoming more rather than less dependent on state priorities and processes. Without explicitly stating it, she demonstrates that the mixed economy at work in British Columbia today could just as easily be described as a "statization" of civil society as the privatization of state welfare. Rekart points out that Canadians have few if any historical studies even describing, never mind analyzing, the mixed economy of social service provision. She writes: "No data are available on how private and non-profit agencies have been linked to the public or government sector.... Particularly difficult to establish is the history of public funding for the voluntary sector/'6 This is precisely what this article aims to do, in however preliminary a fashion. At the outset, it is necessary to note that in studying the relationship between government and non-government agencies in the provision of social services, the terms "government" or "state," "civil society" or "private sector" are inadequate. First, they fail to capture the processes that are common to government and non-government social powers. Secondly, they fail to differentiate between the various stages of the social service process: funding, service delivery, regulation and policy development. In what follows an attempt will be made to be as specific as possible, in the belief that careful historical analysis of institutions helps rather than hinders theoretical development. For instance, it will be pointed out that public funds administered by privately managed

THE MIXED SOCIAL ECONOMY

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services might be experienced by the recipients as charity rather than as state welfare, a phenomenon which puts in doubt the very categorization of the service as either public or private. The non-governmental social service sector/ though by no means new, has been rehabilitated by neo-conservative politicians trying to justify welfare cutbacks through the rhetoric of family and community self-help. Margaret Thatcher gave a number of much-reported speeches praising the heroic efforts of female volunteers, while in Canada former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave a more pragmatic explanation of his interest in civil society's contribution to welfare: One of the major priorities of my government will be a complete revision of social programs in order to save as much money as possible. One way of meeting that objective is to encourage the voluntary sector to participate more in the implementation of social programs. Volunteer work is the most efficient method of work in Canada!' Whether non-governmental agencies have received more resources to allow them to cope with the increasing workload brought by the mixture of government cutbacks and rising levels of unemployment and poverty, no Canadian research can tell us.9 Rekart's British Columbia research suggests that some if not many of the large, traditional charities are increasingly occupied in fulfilling their contracts with government ministries to deliver statutory services, and she suggests that at least those large agencies that tend to get the contracts will probably be less interested in soliciting private funds for innovative programs, so that the neoliberal objective of stimulating private initiative and private donations might actually be undermined by the very mechanisms that supposedly encourage it.10 Be that as it may, the new popularity and political importance of private or mixed public-private forms of service provision, though denounced by critical public-sector unions and by some scholars of the welfare state, is a phenomenon in need of much serious theoretical reflection.11 Through an analysis of the emergence of government funding and inspection of charities in the province of Ontario, this paper

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argues that a re-writing of the history of the symbiotic relation between public and private resources in the management of poverty, crime and "vice" is necessary and timely. In such a rewriting it will be important to note not only the well-known continuities (e.g., the beginning of mothers' allowance programs, unemployment insurance, etc.) but also the less discussed continuities in both administrative practice and political philosophy that link the prewelfare state system to today's post-welfare state. The welfare state brought into being in the period from 1920 to 1945 added important new features to the social welfare landscape; but it did not eliminate some key Victorian administrative practices which were never abolished and are now being rediscovered and utilized by politicians of all stripes working within what one might call a traditional Canadian theory of the relationship between government and civil society. The story told by both liberal and Marxist historians of state formation, namely that nineteenth-century moralistic charity practices were slowly but surely left behind in the historical dust as "the welfare state" rose in majestic grandeur, is not only simplistic but downright misleading, even if—like all myths—the story does have a kernel of truth.12 If the welfare state had in fact replaced charity practices by a democratic sense of entitlement, we would now be seeing general mobilization to defend fully public programs, particularly universal ones, something which unfortunately is not the case. The increasing and seldom challenged tendency to privatize and contract out a wide variety of services, coupled with equally unchallenged state demands that private funding be maximized even by supposedly public institutions such as universities and hospitals, demonstrates that our view of the historical relationship of public to private powers in the area of "the social" needs to be rethought. The phrase usually employed to describe this historical relationship, namely "the emergence of the welfare state," is misleading in that it hides from view a fundamental mechanism of the social welfare sector in many parts of the world, including Ontario.13 This can be characterized as a mixed social economy featuring (a) partial government subsidies to privately operated agencies and (b) government regulation of privately managed


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services. Some services have developed as wholly public, managed as well as funded by the state and provided to anyone who meets the criteria, regardless of total expenditure. These, known as "statutory services," include what is probably the most important current provincial welfare program (general welfare/family benefits). Statutory programs providing payments to individuals were, as James Struthers's excellent recent study shows, developed in Ontario in the interwar period.14 But long before the rise of payments to individuals, Ontario provided large amounts of money to lunatic asylums, central prisons and reformatories, and many other institutions, with nary a complaint about the expenditure from either politicians or public opinion. An effort was also made toward the end of the nineteenth century to provide public funds for "houses of providence" (poorhouses) run by volunteers and county governments. The house of providence system, however, has only been studied as a precursor of the welfare state, a perspective which correctly highlights nineteenth-century public involvement in relief but has the unfortunate effect of making the crucial and continuing involvement of charities and volunteers invisible.15 The extremely important role played, historically and in the present, by services operated through a mixed-economy model, particularly institutional services, has been obscured by a focus on programs that are fully publicly funded and that result in payments to individuals.16 The basic features of the mixed economy model of social service delivery developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century are still recognizable in today's Ontario, and in fact are being utilized as organizational resources for the "downsizing" of the welfare state. Since institutions such as shelters, group homes and for that matter universities are formally charities, and as such have never been directly operated by the state, governments at all levels are now able to cut back on grants, appealing to the institutional equivalent of the deserving poor, namely "the excellent," in order to fund some and exclude others. Although these institutions, in Ontario as in Britain, are considered as public, in fact they are not statutory services but rather charities paradoxically dependent on government support. In the cutback process, the state is utilizing for its purposes the investigatory and reporting practices developed by philanthropies to weed out the undeserving individuals or

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institutions, while also using its own regulatory practices to increase government control over the spending of its decreasing funds. Seemingly benign bureaucratic requirements (filling out forms, providing information, writing reports accounting for grants) shape the daily work and in many instances the priorities of vast numbers of "private" institutions. We shall see that the reliance by the state on philanthropies, together with laws giving the government strong control over both philanthropies and their clients even when the public funds provided in exchange were minimal, is a Victorian "technology of government"17 that has survived the epoch of the welfare state and is today experiencing an upsurge in popularity even in social democratic regimes.

PAUPERISM, CHARITY AND THE STATE AT CONFEDERATION

Unlike other provinces in Canada, Ontario did not see fit to import the British Poor Law. The reasons for this were not made explicit at the time, but historians surmise they had to do with the unpopularity of the Poor Law in England in the 1790s, together with the self-image Upper Canadians had of their land as one in which pauperism need not exist because land was freely available.18 Be that as it may, the absence of a poor law meant that Ontario did not evolve two completely separate systems of relief, one public (the poor law) and one private (philanthropy), as was the case in Britain. The British system, however repugnant to the poor, was theoretically very elegant, since the line of demarcation between civil society and the state was perfectly clear. Individuals wandered between the workhouse and the local charity in search of help, but the two realms remained separate. The government, which did not hesitate to generate knowledge about various aspects of private life from factory production to illnesses, had no information on the private philanthropies. The 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws found it could not research charity activity in quantitative terms because the government had no inspection system, not so much as a list of charities.19 In Ontario, the system that developed in the course of the nineteenth century was one in which political rhetoric suggested


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that virtually all social services, from poor relief to orphanages, were privately funded and operated. An audit, however, would have shown increasing amounts of government funding, linked to increased governmental control through a system of reporting and inspection, but always stopping short of outright government control. This complex system was similar to (and perhaps influenced by) developments in the US, where the substantial government grants to private health, education and social service agencies that have been a traditional feature of American welfare show that the ideology of a self-sufficient civil society has been upheld at the level of rhetoric and to a large extent at the level of service delivery, but not financially.20 In mid-nineteenth century Ontario, the mix of public funds and private management in the social service was consistent with (and perhaps reflected) the colonial government's practice of giving extensive tracts of fertile Crown land to half-pay officers, United Empire Loyalists and other British settlers. From the beginning, the practices of Ontario private enterprise belied the dictates of laissez-faire political economy and introduced a clear disjunction between the liberal rhetoric of free enterprise and the financial reality of subsidies to "private" capitalists and settlers. The invisibility of public funds, in welfare work as in capitalist enterprise, in the social as in the economic, created the illusion that civil society was quite autonomous. This illusion, however, was not an empty "ideology" with merely cultural consequences: the ideal of an autonomous civil society governed the differential access to government subsidies that various Ontario residents could expect to have, and to that extent was practical rather than merely ideological. Subsidies to settlers or to transportation capitalists could be justified under the regulative ideal of "autonomy" because they would supposedly lead to a future state of independence from the state (though this ideal was destined to perpetually fail throughout Canadian economic history). Subsidies to institutions caring for those posing a "public" danger (the insane, the criminal) might be justified by the same logic that authorized expenditures on policing or firefighting, as a necessary cost of safeguarding public order and public safety. Even some subsidies to institutions caring for the merely poor could be justified, but only insofar as they did

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not act as disincentives to charitable giving. The ideal of an independent civil society, therefore, while unrealizable, had important material consequences and helped to shape the intricate structure of the mixed social economy. Upon Confederation, the province assumed full responsibility for inmates of central prisons and of asylums for the insane and partial responsibility (shared with local governments) for inmates of numerous local gaols. Privately run charities in turn controlled virtually all services for the ill, the aged, the poor, the disabled and the morally deviant. The rationale for this division is not obvious from the historical record, but some theoretical guidance can be derived from David Garland's account of the division of labour in Britain between private charities involved in moral reform, on the one hand, and public powers to punish those contravening the law, on the other.21 Garland argues that any liberal political system is unable to overtly control and regulate moral character, since this would contravene the fundamental public/private distinction. Hence, a somewhat artificial distinction evolved separating the moral reform of "private" vices, often delegated to churches or nongovernment social agencies such as the John Howard Society, from state control of "public" dangers such as criminality or insanity. In Ontario, the division of social powers between various levels of government and the private sector does give some credence to his theoretical argument, but the Ontario situation is much more complex than Garland suggests, in that administrative and funding practices often muddied and even belied the politically produced neat distinction between private vice and public crime. If responsibility for crime and criminals was considered public, and responsibility for morally deviant adults was considered essentially private, those whose main problem was sheer poverty were in a grey area. Although there was some recognition that the deserving poor ought to be helped, there was a lingering suspicion that what many poor people needed was moral reform and not money, in which case private agencies were perceived to be more suitable than government.22 Liberal political theory aside, the province, in any case, did not want responsibility for poverty, any more than the federal government. The British tradition of categorizing poverty as a local problem was useful to the provincial


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government, and therefore no alternative was devised, at least at the level of politically visible regulations and institutions. This was in sharp contrast to the area of primary education, in which a centrally controlled system was put into place across the province in the 1840s, long before the introduction of standardized and compulsory schooling in Britain. The poor were thus left to a combination of municipal and private effort organized primarily through poorhouses providing much outdoor relief as well as some indoor relief, supplemented by church and other voluntary charity. Because relief usually came through philanthropic organizations, even if some or (in the cases of Houses of Industry) most of the funds were public, the poor were put in the position of having to be grateful for aid received, at least outwardly. A catechism question used in the York Infant School in the 1830s suggests a certain anxiety on the part of the ruling elites about the potential non-gratefulness of the poor: Question. Who are those who do a great deal to help people, and who wish to make them happy? Answer. Philanthropists.23 The philanthropists7 alleged desire to help people, however, did not suffice to generate sufficient funds even for the erratic poor relief provided in Upper Canada. Rainer Baehre's research shows that as early as 1828 the province began to contribute to the relief of the poor indirectly by giving grants to the Emigrant Temporary Asylum. Further indirect aid to the poor was provided through a practice reminiscent of today's training programs, namely a system providing subsidies to contractors who hired the destitute to build roads. Baehre estimates that the government of Upper Canada spent about £45,000 between 1831 and 1834 on aid to the destitute (mostly immigrants), a figure excluding direct aid to settlers.24 Government help to the indigent continued to be funnelled through private charities in the 1850s and 1860s, although some direct help was provided in exceptional circumstances such as the cholera scare of 1866.25 By the time of Confederation in 1867, primary education, insanity and serious crime were both publicly funded and publicly

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administered by the province. That the education system should be an object of state pride is not surprising, but what is perhaps surprising to us today is the pride taken in the very expensive and architecturally grandiose lunatic asylums.26 As S.E.D. Shortt points out, by 1881 there were 2652 persons in Ontario asylums, most of them very long-term patients, absorbing 16.4 percent of the provincial budget; the proportion stabilized around 19 percent in the late 1880s.27 This expenditure was not begrudged by the otherwise stingy legislators. John W Langmuir, the inspector of asylums and charities, often tried to minimize or disguise welfare expenditures in his reports to the legislature, but he did not hesitate to portray asylums for the mentally and physically handicapped as jewels in the province's crown: Of all the benefits that have accrued to Ontario from the Act of Confederation, none should be more highly prized than the privilege of founding and organizing such Institutions...as are required for the care, treatment, and relief of her mental, physical, and moral defectives without having to consult the wishes or wait the action of a neighbouring province™

The reports of the inspector routinely feature full-page engravings of imposing provincial institutions such as the Brantford School for Blind Children and the lunatic asylums in London, Kingston and Toronto. By contrast with insanity, crime and physical disabilities, poverty and non-criminal forms of immorality ("vice") were not regarded as fit areas for which to claim public responsibility. This did not prevent the government from spending ever-increasing sums to manage these social problems: but the sums were channelled through privately run institutions, and the government seems to have done little to inform its voters of this type of spending. After the failure of Sir Francis Bond Head's effort to institute the British New Poor Law in Upper Canada,29 governments of Ontario consistently avoided taking sole responsibility for poverty and for "vice." Funding levels increased over time, but the responsibility for the delivery of many services continued to be granted to charities run by independent boards (or by Catholic religious orders).


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The myth of a self-sufficient civil society of hardy pioneers and charitable philanthropists, however, was recognized even by the government as a myth. Many private charities wanted, requested and obtained government funding, in the form of small grants from the province and (usually) smaller amounts from municipalities. If Ontario had had a poor law, then of course charities would not have been able to make a claim upon provincial coffers: in Nova Scotia, for instance, a British model developed in which publicly funded poorhouses providing indoor relief only were complemented by outdoor relief given through religious organizations which apparently did not get government funding.30 This mirrored the civil society/state split in British welfare services, a split which saved the dogmas of political economy even though it was completely arbitrary from the point of view of the poor.31 But since Ontario had no comprehensive system for providing relief, and hence no legal paupers for whom the province would have to provide at least a workhouse, private organizations had a claim upon the state. (Two houses of industry were built, in Toronto and in Kingston, but in the absence of a poor law these could not act like English workhouses, and of course the rest of the province was not covered). As politicians undoubtedly realized, if private bodies had not taken initiatives to relieve poverty and reform vice, the province would have had no option but to bring in some sort of "legislative machinery for the manufacture of pauperism/'32 The claim that each charity had on the provincial coffers appears to have been determined in each case by a combination of local needs, expressed through municipal governments as well as through philanthropic boards, and the amount of political capital that philanthropists could draw upon in their lobbying for grants. The grants voted annually to contribute to the operation of hospitals, poorhouses, orphanages and other institutions did not, therefore, bear a direct relationship to the number of people served or the amount of work performed. This "irrational" situation elicited the reforming energies of enlightened Victorian gentlemen interested in fine-tuning the relationship between government and civil society, and in particular the considerable energies of Ontario's father of the mixed economy, J.W. Langmuir.

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THE RATIONALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT GRANTS TO CHARITIES

Phrased as a typically Victorian project to replace "moral darkness"33 by the light of reason, the campaign to rationalize Ontario's charities grant system was led by the inspector of asylums, prisons, and charities, John W. Langmuir. Langmuir was a successful Scots Presbyterian merchant who utilized the most modern US and British methods of social regulation in the service of a profoundly moralistic vision of thrift, industry and correct morals. Described even by the conservative Globe as having "conservative tendencies,"34 the tireless inspector wrote erudite reports on everything from possible causes of insanity to the best methods for teaching blind children. His long inspectorship (1868-1882) is regarded by Richard Splane as the crucial formative period in Ontario's welfare system, and this evaluation is not an exaggeration. In his 1872 report, Langmuir began to present his careful plan to rationalize government grants while providing financial incentives for charities to seek further private funds. "The present method of distributing government aid to hospitals is almost entirely devoid of system," he grumbled. Langmuir recommended, in relation to hospitals, that "the extent of [provincial] aid should be contingent upon, and determined by the amount received from private and municipal sources, and by the relative number of patients received and treated in the hospital/'35 This simple paragraph contains the seeds of two of the key techniques utilized by the state to financially regulate social services: the per diem formula and the matching grant system. ("Per diem grant" was a term used by Langmuir; "matching grant" was not in the vocabulary yet). Langmuir initially justified his campaign by pointing out that charitable hospitals received most of their funding from the province without being accountable to it. But —and this is key to understanding Langmuir's view of the relation between civil society and the state —he did not believe that charities that were more self-supporting ought to be subjected to less government inspection and rationalization. Orphanages, whose per diem grants were much smaller (perhaps because the sentimental idea of childhood meant they were more successful in soliciting private funds), were by no


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means to be left out of the formula granting system. As a successful businessman turned civil servant, Langmuir believed that "the appropriations made by the legislature for these purposes, however small, must always be a proper subject for examination."36 Langmuir realized that even a small amount of money would buy the government a great deal of control. All charities receiving any aid at all were subject to a variety of inspection practices, such as being required to keep their records in specific ways and being occasionally chastised for admitting the wrong sort of inmates. The following year (1873), Langmuir repeated the same argument about the need for rationalization, adding that orphanages should also be funded through a formula including per diem rates and bonuses for success in obtaining other funding. Obviously trying to prepare the legislature for future requests to increase the base rate of the per diem grant, he added that orphanage funding should be increased because reclaiming orphans prevented crime and hence saved money in the long run. (The reformatories for boys, and later for women, were a provincial responsibility, unlike federal penitentiaries). Langmuir's comment was a clever attempt to recategorize orphanage grants as savings rather than as expenditures in order to appeal to the ideal of fiscal restraint while obtaining funding increases — a rhetorical move successfully used by generations of social service providers. The 1874 Charities Aid Act put in legal force Langmuir's system. Langmuir's philosophy (and possibly also his pen) provided the preamble to the act: It is desirable and expedient that all appropriations from the public funds in aid of charitable institutions should be made upon some properly arranged and equitable system, and that municipalities and other corporations as well as private individuals should be stimulated and encouraged to give a liberal support to such institutions....37

The act divided all charities into three groups for funding purposes: schedules A, B and C. Schedule A applied to hospitals, granted ten cents a day per patient plus a bonus for zeal in obtaining other funding; B to poorhouses, which got the princely sum of two

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cents a day under the same conditions, and C to orphanages and rescue homes for women, which got only one-half cent. The per diem grants, initially set unrealistically low, probably to allay fiscal anxieties among members of the legislature, were quickly raised. But what concerns us here is not the amount of funding but rather the way in which the separation of charities into the three schedules institutionalized the previously fuzzy distinction between mostly private and mostly public institutions. Some institutions, notably prisons, reformatories and asylums for the insane and for handicapped children, were categorized as fully public. Others, mostly hospitals, were considered to be private but received most of their funding from government; poorhouses (schedule B) were categorized as private but received some grants; and finally, institutions, whose primary aim was moral reform and "rescue," were forced to rely almost completely on private funding while still remaining within the network of officially regulated institutions. There remained some completely private charities that either did not apply for or did not receive grants, and were therefore not inspected or listed in government reports. There were thus five types of social service agencies: fully public, fully private and the three types of mixed services described here (namely, schedules A, B and C). Although the categorization of the three types of mixed service found in the act may have been devised partially to take into account differential costs (hospitals required more staff and equipment than poorhouses, for instance), purely economic factors do not explain the structure. Rescue homes for single mothers and homeless women, for instance, did not get the same amount as other institutions for homeless and destitute adults, even though their costs were presumably similar. Rather, homes for so-called fallen women were given the lowest amount, along with orphanages, and placed on schedule C rather than on the more generous schedule B. And yet, because of lingering suspicions about the moral guilt of their inmates, rescue homes for women were never able to successfully solicit other funds in the same ways as orphanages.38 This structure suggests that the act was motivated not simply by a merchant's desire for rational accounting but by a combination of theories of the state and theories of morality and gender that


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produced a structure for balancing the relative involvement of provincial, local and charity funds and authority in each type of social service.39 Authority, furthermore, did not necessarily vary directly with investment: even rescue homes, which received only six to ten percent of their funds from the province,40 were subjected to rigorous government inspection, and the province never contemplated distributing its authority to inspect as it distributed its financial responsibility.41 While many institutions benefitted financially from the act, institutions in schedules B and C did not. The year after the act's implementation, expenditures on the most costly provincial social item, lunatic asylums, increased from just over $200,000 to over $218,000. Orphanages and rescue homes for women, by contrast, went down to $8000 from $14,000 the previous year.42 But for the decreased amounts of money provided, the government bought a great deal of control over the "C" institutions. Rescue homes (Magdalene asylums) were, for instance, repeatedly told by the inspector to stop admitting homeless or otherwise needy women and to confine themselves to rescuing women from prostitution.43 All institutions were also compelled to elicit certain facts from each inmate and record the information in standard form. Finally, unlike other inspectorates who were given only the power to inspect and report, the inspector of charities was given "executive authority to remedy defects and supply deficiencies,"44 an authority exercised only selectively but which must have constantly hung over the heads of administrators and boards.45 Langmuir and his successors, however, did not seem content with the power given to them under the act; in addition to these practices of surveillance and standardization, amendments to the act in 1877 and 1887 strengthened the inspector's control, making the funding contingent on a favourable inspector's report and imposing $1000 fines for falsifying the institutional records.46

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE MIXED ECONOMY

The new system for classifying, inspecting, regulating and funding charities did not receive the unanimous support of the legislature.

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Many politicians viewed the act not as the enlightened and rational system in Langmuir's imagination but rather as an intervention into the province's religious politics. Part of the context of the act was the provincial government's alleged pro-Catholic bias.47 The Orange faction in the legislature, though initially not opposed to the bill, was quick to notice that, under the new Charities Aid Act, Catholicrun charities got larger grants than before. When the first inspector's report was introduced in the house prior to voting the appropriations,48 aspersions were cast on the Commissioner of Public Works in particular, one of the very few Catholic members of the legislature. Commissioner Fraser then went through the inspector's reports in great detail and argued that the government was only "paying the money in proportion to the amount of charity these institutions dispense." A heated discussion ensued, but the government had a majority and the motion to approve the spending was carried. However bigoted their motives, the anti-Catholic MPPs had a factual point. A comparison of the grants given before and immediately after the act reveals that in fact many Catholic institutions received hefty increases under the new system, whereas some Protestant ones —perhaps those which had relied on good political connections in the legislature—saw their grants reduced. The act devised by Langmuir (a Presbyterian) was, purposively or not, a significant intervention in church-state relations in Ontario because it removed the Protestant lobbying advantage by taking grants to charities out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administration. Total figures cannot be provided, since many institutions are not clearly identified by religion, but a comparison of four Catholic and four Protestant orphanages reveals the following funding changes:

Catholic Protestant

1874

1875

$1760 $1760

$2793 $1250

The Catholic orphanages thus received a 58.7 percent increase, while the Protestant ones were cut back by 29 percent.


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Complaints about the unsuitability of state funding to Catholic institutions were made not only at Queen's Park but also directly to the inspector. In the only instance of open resistance recorded in his lengthy reports, Langmuir wrote that the "lady managers" of the Protestant Orphans' Home in Kingston decried the provisions of the new Charity Aid Act during his inspection tour. (Their home, which had enjoyed the standard grant of $640, was cut back to $321.85 under Langmuir's formula). The discussion must have been heated: "I reminded them, in a minute made in the visitors' book, that Government aid was only intended to encourage and bring out private and municipal charity."50 The non-political (and hence non-sectarian) system devised by Langmuir nevertheless contained a whole political theory of the proper relationship between the state and civil society. This political theory was apparently common coin, since the only criticisms raised regarded the suitability of different Christian churches to represent civil society in Ontario, not the basic principles of the mixed social economy. The political theory at work in the regulatory system created through the Charity Aid Act was similar to that implicit in the development of public regulation of private utility companies. As Armstrong and Nelles have pointed out, some Canadian provinces, primarily the prairies, chose to nationalize services such as telephone and electricity, while Ontario and some parts of the federal state chose to proceed along mixed-economy lines, with privately owned and managed utilities subject to government regulation.51 And of course, studies of the development of Canadian capitalism have repeatedly pointed out that Canadian capital was accumulated to a great extent through government grants to such institutions as the CPR. This system, which is even in the present day considered as a typically Canadian way of managing the private-public divide inherent in liberal capitalism, seems to rely on an implicit theory of the relation between state and civil society that is fundamentally the same as that involved in the regulation of charities and social services. The theory runs something like this: the appearance of a clear public/private divide must be maintained by both government and business rhetoric, but this liberal ideological requirement is not to stand in the way of public subsidies to supposedly private

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organizations, subsidies which make at least some spheres of the so-called private subject to different types of government regulation and inspection. Subsidies, however, have to be justified as somehow encouraging private initiative and eventual independence of state support. Capitalist enterprise, although in practice often reliant not only on direct subsidies but also on indirect subsidies through tariffs, immigration policy and so on, is generally subject to less regulation and inspection, undoubtedly because capitalists are perceived as by definition having the desire to be independent from state aid, even if they are not in fact independent. Recipients of social services, by contrast, are always suspected of harbouring a desire to give up the fight, stop saving, even stop working, and rely on state support. The Ontario system for inspecting charities suggests that private charities were much more closely inspected and regulated than private businesses, even though the public subsidies to charities probably were but a fraction of the public monies spent subsidizing privately owned manufacturing and transportation.52 Over the decades, Canadian governments have developed more sophisticated mechanisms to maintain control over grant-receiving agencies while enveloping the granting process in a cloud of apparently politically neutral administrative rules. As the desire to cut back on deficits leads today's governments to prune their grants and to re-think the prevailing "common sense" ideas about the size and character of government social responsibilities, it is worth remembering that the mixed-economy system of administering social services and other publicly beneficial programs necessarily involves a specific theory of the relationship between the state and civil society. It also necessarily involves drawing lines separating insanity, crime, vice and poverty, a classification process using often unconscious views about gender, family and morality. In the present day, crime and insanity are still government responsibilities, although by altering the definition of insanity to exclude many former "lunatics," governments have been able to cut back on asylum spending. Responsibility for poverty, to a large extent transferred from private charities to provincial and federal governments during the Depression, is now being renegotiated, with charity coming to play an increasing role.53 Finally, responsibility for the moral reform of what is still often known as


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'Vice" remains in the hands of private agencies such as Alcoholics Anonymous, religious organizations and the private psychotherapy industry.

EXCURSUS ON TAX POLICY: CHARITIES AS "CORPORATE WELFARE BUMS"

The system for inspecting, regulating and partially funding private charitable agencies from provincial coffers still exists today. But the situation has been made much more complex by the growing importance of a federal form of regulation, namely the Income Tax Act. A few rather preliminary remarks on this are necessary in order to avoid leaving the impression that the provincial state exercises total control of charities. From the very beginning of the federal income tax system (in 1917), the income of charities has been exempt from tax. This exemption is an indirect grant to charities. The tax exemption operates, like most exemptions, in a regressive manner, since the richer charities, such as the main Christian churches, enjoy huge tax breaks by comparison with small charities. Apart from charities' own exempt status, the federal government provides, again through the Income Tax Act, deductions for those who contribute to charities. Charitable donations have been deductible since 1930.54 A 1980 report prepared by the Committee on National Voluntary Organizations reveals that Canadians listed over $660 million in charity donations on their tax returns (and this excludes the now-defunct standard $100 deduction).55 Income tax returns, however, do not show all or perhaps even most charity donations, since truly wealthy individuals and families tend to set up trusts and foundations rather than write checks out of their personal accounts, so the total figures for charitable donations are likely to be far higher than the current figures for donations listed on individual returns. But even without the total figure, the point here is that the government is foregoing sizeable tax revenues while allowing money to accrue to official registered charities. These tax advantages for both institutions and donors are not available to community-based groups whose political

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stance makes them ineligible for official charitable status. Charitable tax exemptions, deductions and credits constitute an excellent example of social service spending managed at a distance through the tax system rather than directly through social policy. We saw earlier that the alleged separation of state from civil society is put in question by a mixed economy organized through grants, inspections and regulations. The so-called public-private distinction is clearly further confounded by a system of exemptions and deductions resulting in very sizeable indirect grants to registered charities, for which the charities are in no way accountable. Since the churches are Canada's biggest charities, it could be argued that the government is, through the tax system, indirectly funding church activity, and funding it in such a way as to perpetuate and maximize the differences between large and small churches (since the relative advantages of tax-exempt status are greater for the organizations with higher incomes). This is certainly contrary to the principle of the separation of private religious belief from public government operations. The intricacies of the indirect tax-related grant system can only be deciphered by a tax lawyer, but it is possible to give an illustrative example which would have warmed the hearts of the Orange faction of Oliver Mowat's time. Many nuns get good salaries as hospital nurses or as teachers; but members of religious orders committed to perpetual poverty are not taxed. This might seem fair, since they are not supposed to have personal property; but what is remarkable is that the religious order which gets their salaries does not have to pay income or any other tax on those sizeable monies. This results in an estimated $54 million accruing to the Catholic church free of any tax obligations. The government is obviously foregoing a very large amount of tax income by this exemption alone.56 Like many other administrative mechanisms for establishing politically invisible doors allowing traffic between "the public" and "the private," this large transfer of funds to the Catholic church is found in an obscure section of the Income Tax Act —entitled "Vows of Perpetual Poverty." A cynical observer might note that it is taxpayers, not churches, who are vowing perpetual poverty. The investment and real-estate related income of the major churches is of course also tax exempt.


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Tax deductions, credits and exemptions create a network of indirect grants to Canada's fast-growing registered charity sector and play an important role in maintaining established religious institutions.57 This system of course has not replaced the older system of per diem grants, matching grants and the increasingly popular purchase-of-service agreements. Purchase-of-service agreements, incidentally, while touted by some politicians as an innovation, are not novel: like other features of the post-welfare state, they were pioneered in the pre-welfare state, specifically by voluntary women's homes which in the 1890s began to provide custodial care for the government's female offenders.58 To document the full extent of public/private interaction in the social services—even in the present day, never mind historically— would therefore be a very challenging empirical research project, particularly if one wanted to include indirect tax-related grants as well as direct grants. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if this has not been attempted even on a small scale it is not so much due to empirical as to theoretical difficulties. Civil society has been studied, for instance by historians of charitable institutions, as though it were in fact independent from the state; while the narrative about the "rise of the welfare state" has prevented political scientists from seeing and understanding the mixed social economy.

CONCLUSIONS

In Canada, as in the US and Britain, sociologists and political scientists have paid virtually no attention to the charity sector. This admittedly preliminary historical exploration of the mixed social economy needs to be supplemented and probably revised by further interdisciplinary studies of the origins, structure and workings of various mechanisms of the currently threatened welfare system. This type of study might well reveal that despite major changes in political rhetoric about the social (for example, poor women today tend to be stigmatized through their poverty itself rather than through sexual sins, as in Victorian times), nevertheless the administrative structure reveals that the theories implicit in

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administration are remarkably persistent and may outlive changes in governments and changes in public opinion. It can be concluded here that if we are to understand the complexities of social policy we need to focus less on policy formation and more on administrative mechanisms. An understanding of these mechanisms will only emerge if we discard simplistic ideas about the state and civil society, and particularly the view that there is an absolute division between public and private. Studying the regulation of charities has shown that at least in the social services sector, and possibly in other spheres as well, there is not one public/private split but many, depending on whether we are discussing financing, service delivery or inspection and regulation. Each of these public/private distinctions is subject to major shifts in the relative weight of each pole. "Privatization" is thus a misleading term as applied to social services, particularly if we do not specify if we mean private funding, private service delivery, private management or private policy development. Progressive scholars trying to make sense of both past and present social policy desperately need more sophisticated analytical tools to understand the "technologies of government," that is the financial and administrative realities of specific social economies in their often conflicting relationship with political rhetoric.

ENDNOTES I would like to thank Margaret Little, Lynn Marks, Jim Struthers, Nikolas Rose and William Walters for their input and support. 1

2

John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988); John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (London: Verso, 1988). Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (London: Polity, 1994). The "social" aspect of Hirst's book, as opposed to the economic, is rather weak in that in its rush to denounce state bureaucracies, it is completely uncritical of the practices of traditional charities. It is also written as though the idea for government funding of private charities was a novel one; he does not look at the success or failures of already existing systems for delivering social services through charities and community groups.


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Rianne Mahon, "From 'Bringing' to Tutting': The State in Late Twentieth Century Social Theory," Canadian Journal of Sociology 16/2 (1991), pp. 119-144. For a parallel argument in a different field, see Susan Boyd, "(Re)placing the State: Family, Law and Oppression," Canadian Journal of Law and Society 9/1 (Spring 1994), pp. 39-71. In this endeavour to de-centre both the state and civil society I have been influenced by the Foucaultian concept of governmentality, although I do not discuss this concept in this article. See N. Rose, "Beyond the Public/Private Division: Law, Power and the Family," Journal of Law and Society 14/1 (Spring 1987), pp. 61-73; N. Rose and P. Miller, "Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43,2 (1992), pp. 173205; G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Against Marx's tendency to reduce civil society to the market—or perhaps, more accurately, to class relations—John Keane reminds us that "modern civil societies have comprised not only capitalist economies but an eclectic variety of non-economic organizations." See his "Introduction," Civil Society and the State, p. 19. Much of the work done in both political theory and legal theory on the relationship between the state and civil society, however, still assumes that the civil society is coterminous with the economy. Some theorists, including Keane himself, include "the family" or "the household" within civil society, an inclusion which obscures more than it enlightens; while others, most notably Habermas, group the family together with the political within "the lifeworld" in order to highlight the specificity of the economic. The philanthropic sector, however, is generally left out of theoretical accounts, despite its large economic and social significance. Josephine Rekart, Public Funds, Private Provision: The Role of the Voluntary Sector (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994), p. 57. This is often known as "the voluntary sector," but this term is highly misleading since so many organizations using large numbers of volunteers (e.g., the Canadian Cancer Society, the Girl Guides) are managed and largely run by professional paid staff. These agencies are also often described as "nonprofit," but hardly any social service agency is profit-making, so the term seems uninformative. On an analogy with international NGOs, I prefer to call the sector in question "non-governmental social service sector." The agencies in this sector are almost universally registered charities; however, many registered charities (e.g., symphonies) are not charities in the usual sense. Thus, when I speak of the charity or philanthropic sector, I am in this article referring strictly to social service agencies, not churches or artistic groups or others claiming charitable status.

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8

9

10

11

12

13

14


B. Mulroney, 1983 speech to PC Party, quoted in J.T. Scott, "Voluntary Sector in Crisis: Canada's Changing Public Philosophy of the State and its Impact on Voluntary Organizations" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Colorado, 1992), pp. 189-90. Scott, "Voluntary Sector in Crisis," pp. 360-361. Her impression is that the voluntary sector has not received more resources from either donations or government grants to cope with the increased demands placed upon it. Rekart, Public Funds, Private Provision, pp. 77-81. That the so-called privatization of welfare is perhaps also simultaneously a statization of the voluntary sector is borne out by her finding that many voluntary agencies, increasingly reliant on government contracts, now hire ex-public servants as executive directors— an interesting example of the unpredictable paths of the mixed economy. One of the few thorough accounts of what I call the "mixed economy" of social services is L.M. Salamon, "Partners in Public Service: The Scope and Theory of Government and Nonprofit Relations" in W. Powell (ed.), The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (Yale University Press, 1987). Salamon points out that despite the neo-conservative rhetoric of privatization, the delivery of social, health and educational services in the US has to a large extent always been assigned to private organizations, even when these received substantial public funding. He states that theories of the welfare state are weak in their "failure to differentiate between government's role as a provider of funds and its role as a deliverer of services," p. 100. The best-known liberal, rosy-coloured accounts are D. Guest, The Rise of Social Security in Canada (University of British Columbia Press, 1985); and R. Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario 1792-1893 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965). The political economy school has also produced some historical work on the Canadian state: A. Moscovitch and J. Albert, eds., The Benevolent State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Garamond, 1987); and A. Moscovitch and G. Drover, eds., Inequality: Essays on the Political Economy of Social Welfare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). The laws governing the incorporation and regulation of associations (mainly for-profit ones but also charities) in nineteenth-century Quebec suggest that a mixed social economy also existed there, although I have no information about the funding of charities. See Jean-Marie Fecteau, "Etat et associationisme au XIXe siecle quebecois" in A. Greer and I. Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). I thank Jim Struthers for his kindness in allowing me to read the proofs of the book.


15

16

18

21

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D.C. Park and J.D. Wood, "Poor Relief and the County House of Refuge System in Ontario, 1880-1911," Journal of Historical Geography 18/4 (1992), pp. 439-455. Like other historians of the welfare state, James Struthers describes the persistent private and mixed welfare institutions as constituting a "disorganized and haphazard welfare structure." J. Struthers, "How Much is Enough? Creating a Social Minimum in Ontario 1930-1944," Canadian Historical Review 72/1 (1991), pp. 39-83. This description, by no means unique to Struthers, is symptomatic of a failure to understand the peculiar pre-Keynesian logic underlying the apparent disorganization. Techniques of ruling used by both state and non-state institutions attempting to carry out general policies are termed "technologies of government" by N. Rose and P. Miller, "Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government," British Journal of Sociology 43/2 (1992), p. 183. They use "government" in the Foucaultian sense of ruling practices, inside or outside the state, oriented to the maximization of population-based resources such as health and security. Russel Smandych, "William Osgoode, John Graves Simcoe and the Exclusion of the English Poor Law from Upper Canada" in S. Binnie and L. Knafla, eds., Law, State and Society: Essays in Modern Legal History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming); Richard Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario 17921892 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); David Murray, "The Cold Hand of Charity: The Court of Quarter Sessions and Poor Relief in the Niagara District 1828-1841" in W. Wesley Pue and Barry Wright, eds., Canadian Perspectives on Law and Society: Issues in Legal History (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), pp. 179-206. The diligent commissioners nevertheless undertook a major study of charities, neglected by historians in their single-minded focus on the history of the welfare state: see the Reports of Visits to Poor Law and Charitable Institutions and Reports on Endowed and Voluntary Charities in Certain Places in England, British House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, vol. liv, p. 1 and ff.; vol. xlii pp. 677 ff. (1909). See Powell, ed., The Nonprofit Sector, especially Salamon, "Partners in Public Service." David Garland, Punishment and Welfare (London: Gower, 1983); for Canada see Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1880s-1920s (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991), chapter 6. Garland's insight into the relationship between voluntary services and the government could be usefully taken up by Canadian scholars trying to understand howtitledividing line between statutory services and the voluntary

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sector is drawn; Rekart's otherwise quite insightful study, for instance, can only refer to the rather outdated ideas of the Webbs on the question of the state/philanthropy split, ideas which do not pay due attention to the role of moral regulation in drawing the boundary between state powers and civil society. Rekart, Public Funds, Private Provision, pp. 39 and 144.

See S. Houston, "The Impetus to Reform: Urban Crime, Poverty and Ignorance in Ontario 1850-1875" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1974). Quoted in Houston, "The Impetus to Reform," p. 186. Houston's research describes some of the mechanisms for mixing public relief with private charity, e.g., through the Toronto House of Industry (pp. 241-247), but this is not analyzed from the point of view of state formation. Rainer Baehre, "Paupers and Poor Relief in Upper Canada," Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers, 1981.

Houston, "The Impetus to Reform," pp. 257-267. Barry Edginton, "The Formation of the Asylum in Upper Canada" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, Sociology, 1981). S.E.D. Shortt, Victorian Lunacy: Richard Maurice Bucke and the Practice of Late Nineteenth Century Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 26. Ontario, Report of the Inspector of Asylums, Prisons, and Charities (1877), pp. 12. Hereafter cited as Report of the Inspector of Asylums.

These efforts did lead to the establishment of two houses of industry receiving important provincial funding, but despite Bond Head's efforts these were never English-style workhouses. Baehre, "Paupers and Poor Relief," discusses the setting up of houses of industry but does not highlight the crucial fact that Ontario's poor were not subjected to the process of legal pauperization. See also Edginton, "The Formation of the Asylum," pp. 146-147, for a discussion of houses of industry emphasizing the failure of Bond Head's attempt to export the 1834 Poor Law. Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Victorian Halifax (Halifax: Pottersfield, 1989), ch.7. The theoretical split between the "hopeless" public poor in workhouses and the "reformable" private poor helped by charity never worked in practice despite the strenuous efforts of both government and charity officials, and this lack of fit between political theory and administrative practice was a major issue for both independent social research and for the 1909 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, especially for the classic liberal commissioners such as Helen Bosanquet. See the "Report [of the Majority]," British House of Commons, P.P. (1909) vol. xvii.


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This phrase was used by the conservative newspaper The Globe Feb. 27,1874, to argue against the English Poor Law; quoted in Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario.

In a special report commemorating the tenth anniversary of Confederation, J.W. Langmuir painted a bleak picture of the state of social welfare in Ontario at the time of Confederation, evoking images of "idiots" languishing in private homes rather than in enlightened asylums, blind children receiving no education, and a general administrative chaos equated with "moral darkness." Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1877), p. 2.

See entry for John W. Langmuir in H.J. Morgan, ed., The Canadian Men and Women of the Time (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912). Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1872), p. 69 and p. 67. Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1872), p. 71. Ontario, "Charities Aid Act," Journal of the Legislative Assembly 37 Vic, (1874) p. 145. The main late-nineteenth-century agency running homes for fallen women, the Salvation Army, often complained that donors were particularly difficult to obtain for rescue homes for women (This is based on the author's reading of the War Cry, 1885-1910). This was far more complicated than simply dividing social responsibilities into public vs. private, a misleading dichotomy completely out of touch with the historical evidence but still perpetuated by some political and legal theorists, such as Bryce Weber, "The Public, the Private, and the Ideological Character of the Division of Powers in Sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution Act of 1867," Journal of Canadian Studies 26/2 (1991), pp. 88-102. Percentages calculated for 1878 to 1891 for all homes listed as "Magdalene Asylums" in Report of the Inspector of Asylums. In 1892-93 there were changes in the categorization of some homes and it is difficult to calculate comparable figures. In Britain, most forms of inspection were the responsibility of the central government, and, again, the power to inspect was not necessarily linked to financial contributions. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, local governments and bodies assumed responsibility for school inspection and also for public health and building inspection. Calculated from various figures in Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1874 and 1875). See Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1876), p. 201; (1878), pp. 249-250, 253; (1880), p. 273. Langmuir's criticisms of the insufficiently moralizing work of the rescue homes for women is undoubtedly linked to his enthusiasm for developing Canada's first prison for women, the Mercer Reformatory in

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Toronto, where women convicted of moral offences served much longer sentences than they did in earlier days when only local gaols were available. Report of the Inspector of Asylums, 1880, p. 12. See also Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, pp. 61-62. Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Curtis's insightful conclusions about state formation do not necessarily apply to the large mixed-economy sector which is the subject of this paper. Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, p. 62. On the antagonistic relationship between Mowat's government and the Orange Lodge, see Michael Bliss, "The Protective Impulse: An Approach to the Social History of Oliver Mowat's Ontario," and Hereward Senior, "Orangeism in Ontario Politics 1872-1896," both in D. Swainson, ed., Oliver Mowat's Ontario (Toronto, Macmillan, 1972). See also Margaret Evans, Sir Oliver Mowat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). The Globe Dec. 11,1874, p. 4. Calculated from various figures in Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1874 and 1875). Report of the Inspector of Asylums (1874), p. 149. The following year the ladies were apparently more content, and Langmuir made a point of praising their management of the orphanage in lavish terms in his report. Ibid. (1875), p. 182. C. Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities 1830-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). A comparison of subsidies to business with subsidies to charities would be difficult to carry out because most of the major subsidies to business in the late nineteenth century were federal, while charities were provincially funded. More research into both federal and provincial systems of subsidies to private agencies and businesses would need to be carried out to develop this point. A grotesque neo-Victorian fundraising event held recently in Toronto had 1000 rich people gorging themselves on delicacies in order to raise $150,000 for Second Harvest, a Dickensian organization that collects leftovers from restaurants and serves them to the homeless. Joanne Kates, "Benefit for Hungry Smacks of Irony," Globe and Mail May 1,1993, Arts & Leisure, p. 5. Neil Brooks, "Charities: The Legal Framework" (unpublished paper prepared for the Secretary of State, 1983; held at the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy). Committee on National Voluntary Organizations, discussion paper (Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, 1980).


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Neil Brooks, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, unpublished paper on the history of the deduction for charitable contributions in Canada. (My thanks to Neil Brooks for this and other valuable sources). In 1980 there were about 40,000 registered charities. D. Ross, Some Financial and Economic Dimensions of Registered Charities and Volunteer Activity in Canada (Ottawa: Secretary of State, 1983). On May 3,1993, Revenue Canada informed the author by telephone that there are now 68,000 registered charities. As far as I know there is no secondary literature on this interesting system of private management of offenders, a system now being brought back to life through the privatization of correctional services. See Ontario, "An Act Respecting Houses of Refuge for Females," (1893) 56 Viet. ch. 56. The early Salvation Army, for example, took offenders and ex-offenders into their "voluntary" homes: the financial details of these contracts or quasi-contracts for correctional services are not available from the Salvation Army Heritage Centre, but it is clear that the Salvation Army was providing a service that was "voluntary" only in a very peculiar sense.


CHAPTER 6

The Blurring of Boundaries: Private and Public Welfare for Single Mothers in Ontario MARGARET LITTLE

INTRODUCTION

During the last decade all levels of government have been under tremendous pressure to slash budgets, fire employees and cut programs, most notably in the field of welfare. This has been the result of both attacks from above (through the growing importance of global capital and transnational trade blocks) and from below (through the rise in popularity of social movements working outside the state). As social scientists scramble to analyze these developments and promote new participatory models, it is important that we first step back and ask some very basic questions about how the welfare state functions. In doing so we may find that the relationship between public or state welfare and private or charity-run welfare is blurred and that one does not function autonomously from the other.1 As welfare state programs diminish and citizens increase their dependency on private social agencies, it is even more timely that we explore this relationship and its implications. In an attempt to better understand the relationship of public and private involvement in the provision of welfare, this article examines the administration of one policy, Ontario Mothers' Allowance (OMA), from its initiation to the present day. Part of an

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international child-saving movement, the policy was introduced in 1920 to provide a monthly allowance to poor single mothers who were considered both morally and financially worthy. Ontario Mothers' Allowance is thus one of the first pillars of welfare state legislation in the country. Yet it has so far received very little attention from social scientists.2 Using archival resources, including a large collection of case files, and material collected in extensive interviews throughout the province with current OMA recipients, government administrators and anti-poverty activists,3 this article focuses on the everyday administration of the policy. While one would expect to find paid state officials (as social workers and as administrators) involved in the scrutinizing of applications and the on-going examination of OMA recipients, I found that many other people, neither paid by nor directly accountable to the state, participated in the initiation and the administration of this policy. It is in this context that the blurring of boundaries between public and private provision of welfare becomes evident.

WELFARE STATE THEORY

Welfare state theorists have tended to focus on policy development in the post-World War II period and have generally paid little attention to the development of turn of the century welfare policies. This exclusionary focus has resulted in inadequate and incomplete theorizations of the welfare state and a lack of attention to the boundaries between public and private welfare activities. Feminist social scientists have begun to rectify this omission by examining the development of early child and maternal legislation, exploring how women used a maternal discourse, rooted in women's subordination, to lobby for state involvement in social issues. Maternalists argued that because of their domestic and family responsibilities women were the moral guardians of the nation. As such, they had moral authority to speak on behalf of all those who required care and guidance. These maternalists rallied together and created a forceful international child-saving movement at the turn of the century.4

THE BLURRING OF BOUNDARIES

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While there has been considerable international debate about the role of maternalists in the creation of early public welfare programs, there has been little discussion in Canada.5 By exploring the "maternal origins" of the Canadian welfare state we can examine the important role women played as lobbyists for such policies, and the manner in which women were defined and incorporated into the state as citizens and as clients. Often these state policies grew out of private welfare activities and held many common administrative traits. Moreover, early charity-styled welfare policies tended to rely upon private welfare agencies to help administer the public welfare program. The blending of public and private welfare activities is characteristic of these maternal welfare programs. What is also distinctive and given less recognition is that this fluidity between public and private welfare is not restricted to the early stages of these policies. Generally Canadian welfare scholars have assumed that private involvement in welfare activities ebbed as public welfare policies were developed.6 What this case study reveals is that the mixture of public and private welfare activities continues throughout the twentieth century, although the balance and exact relationship does change over time. It is important to explore the non-economic relations involved in the blending of public and private welfare activities. The state does not simply use economic tools to regulate capital-labour relations. Rather, the state utilizes a number of moral administrative instruments that do not directly benefit capital to regulate the lives of citizens. Private welfare agents, considered experts in the field of morality, have played an influential role both inside and outside the state in the moral regulation of citizens. Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer in The Great Arch have explored the role that the British state played in the moral regulation of its citizens. Moral regulation is conceived as an analytical tool in examining the ongoing process of rule, the methods and procedures implemented to form and to inform the moral character of citizens. Corrigan and Sayer examine how these processes are created, solidified and made to appear normal.7 Whereas they focus on the moral machinations of the state, Mariana Valverde in a recent book on the Canadian social purity movement moves beyond a focus on the state to detail the involvement of charities and social

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organizations in the moral regulation of citizens.8 As Valverde argues, one cannot assume that the state was, or is, the dominant partner in the moral regulation of its citizens. Indeed, there are good reasons why liberal democratic states would prefer to divest themselves of certain moral activities. Liberal democratic states tend to portray themselves as neutral arbiters, maintaining the notion of a strict division between public and private and exempting themselves from interference in those spheres of life deemed private. Yet as Valverde notes, states may have a monopoly over the legitimate use of force, and may therefore be in a privileged position to enforce rules about behaviour, but the state can only make its citizens internalize certain values if it has the full and active cooperation of the family and of voluntary organizations.9 It is the role of these voluntary organizations in the moral regulation of OMA recipients, and the cooperation of the provincial state in this enterprise, which is of particular interest here. Throughout the history of this policy, private charities played a strong role in the moral regulation of needy single mothers. In fact historical evidence will demonstrate that the private sector played a leading role both in the initiation of this state policy and the ongoing scrutiny of its recipients.

CASE STUDY: ONTARIO MOTHERS' ALLOWANCE i) The Emergence of OMA In the case of OMA, the concern about the moral character of single mothers and the need to develop a state welfare policy originated not in the heads of bureaucrats, politicians or other state actors. Historical evidence clearly points to three decades of debate outside the state with regards to a welfare policy for needy single mothers. At the turn of the century, charitable, religious and women's organizations played a significant role in ministering to the poor.10


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Their vision of welfare reflected their Christian moral values and a belief in the necessity to discern between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Leaders of these organizations pursued welfare reform in two important ways. First, they lobbied the state to establish legislation such as compulsory school attendance and restrictive child labour laws to ensure that children had both educational training and leisure time. They also lobbied for social welfare legislation such as OMA. Simultaneously these charities helped to set up their own private organizations, outside the state, to provide both financial help and moral guidance. During this period they helped to establish a wealth of social clubs—Brownies, Girl Guides, Cubs, Boy Scouts, Junior Red Cross, Cadets, Canadian Girls in Training—to properly guide children in leisure pursuits. Two particular private agencies led the lobby for OMA: the Children's Aid Society (CAS) and the National Council of Women. Established in 1890, the CAS and its leaders, particularly John J. Kelso, were concerned about child poverty and the growing numbers of orphaned children. According to historical record, the CAS representatives were the first to advocate mothers' allowance as a method to encourage widows to keep their children.11 The National Council of Women was quick to take up the fight and lobbied the federal and provincial governments to implement this policy. Exasperated by the lack of government initiative, the Toronto Local Council of Women (TLCW) established their own pilot project in 1914. From the beginning the project was not designed to take the place of a government-funded program. Rather, the TLCW believed that "private philanthropy must always point the way for state legislation in matters pertaining to charities or pensions."12 This was a pioneering lobby effort, unique in the international mothers' allowance movement. Applications poured in from needy single mothers in Toronto. Each case was thoroughly investigated and after much deliberation six families, all widows with children, were granted a small monthly allowance. During the life of the project these families were visited regularly by TLCW members. The project functioned on a shoestring budget collected through donations and a variety of fund-raising efforts. After three years

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of operation the project closed, but the state policy was eventually modelled after this private effort.13 In 1917 the Ontario government bowed to tremendous public pressure and began to study the possibility of introducing mothers' allowance legislation. The OMA act reflects the fact that the state relied heavily upon the opinions of charity leaders when formulating the policy. In the absence of large government bureaucracies, private charities, women's organizations and churches wielded much greater influence than their modern-day successors. Charitable leaders had a clear idea, based on their prior work, about how the policy should be both formulated and administered, and they were treated as "experts" rather than as representatives of opinionated "interest groups."14 As "experts" in the field of welfare they believed that they should play a role in the everyday administration of this policy. Accordingly, they called for a joint public-private welfare scheme. They also believed strongly in the importance of continuous invigilation of welfare recipients and argued that single mothers who were not widows, and hence were morally dubious, should not be eligible for the allowance. The original OMA act of 1920 reflected these views. The act established a joint public-private welfare policy which granted allowances to widows who demonstrated their moral and financial need based on frequent supervision.15 U) Early OMA Policy—1920s and 1930s Mothers' allowance was the first modern public assistance program in Canada. For the first time one category of the dependent poor were eligible for a new state-administered social minimum. Or so it appeared. Under the guise of new practices, routines and procedures, the state continued many of the old notions of private or charity-styled welfare. OMA established many barriers to eligibility, just as charitable and women's organizations had proposed. Initially only needy, morally upright widows were eligible. The act clearly stipulated that each applicant had to continuously prove herself to be "a fit and proper person."16 This moral criteria allowed for wide discretionary latitude in determining eligibility. OMA officials were encouraged to conduct


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extremely thorough investigations and to advise an applicant on everything from bedding, care of children, sleeping arrangements and even the use of profane language.17 This type of moral scrutiny was in keeping with turn of the century charity work. The administrative structure of the mothers7 allowance bureaucracy also demonstrated the influence of charitable organizations. The provincial commission, the highest decisionmaking body for OMA, consisted of five paid appointments—two of which were reserved for women. For the most part these positions were held by those who had been leaders in charitable foundations, particularly in the case of the female appointments. The first chairman of the provincial commission, Peter Bryce, a Methodist clergyman who had been the head of the campaign for OMA, had no prior experience as a state administrator. Below the provincial commission were local boards established in each city, town and county. Local boards, also consisting of five members, received applications, conducted inquiries and investigations, made recommendations and submitted quarterly reports to the provincial commission. Members were volunteers who were reimbursed for their travelling expenses. Generally they tended to be prominent members of the political, social and economic elite who had played a leadership role in local charity work. Here again two of the five positions on the board were reserved for women. There was a familiarism, reminiscent of earlier charity work, which characterized the local board's work. For the most part local board members knew, or knew of, the applicants. Discussion of applicants' cases at local board meetings included the most personal details of an applicant's life. Such familiarity with applicants was considered an advantage rather than a liability. The result of this bureaucratic structure was the establishment of a joint public-private welfare administration. Within the state public and private welfare administrators worked together to administer OMA, some as paid bureaucrats and others as volunteers appointed from charity organizations. Outside the state the relationship between public and private welfare administrators continued with the introduction of OMA. There had been a concern that the introduction of this policy might have diminished the need for private charities. The opposite was the case. The introduction

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of OMA actually created more enthusiasm for, and participation in, private charity work.18 New state bureaucrats often turned to leaders in charity and other social organizations for help and legitimacy. Members of various social organizations would often help the OMA administrators in their deliberations over eligibility by providing background not supplied by the applicant, offering meeting space for the local board and overseeing certain questionable mothers. The relationship between the OMA administrators and the Children's Aid Society (CAS) was particularly entwined. The CAS is an example of the complicated web of connection between public and private welfare. Established as a private organization, it received both public and private funds and was regulated to some extent by the state. OMA administrators referred most of the cases they refused to the CAS for adoption purposes and other temporary welfare aid. The CAS representatives often made home visits on behalf of the OMA. In fact, the CAS often acted as the coercive arm of the OMA bureaucracy. As one OMA administrator explained, In some cases the fact of the CAS going in and threatening to remove the children has had the desired effect upon the mother, with the result that the allowance has been continued and the 19 conditions in the home considerably improved.

This historic relationship between the CAS and the OMA administration still continues today. Several single mothers interviewed said that the CAS has been used as a threat by the OMA administrators. Another charity which regularly monitored the homes of OMA recipients was the Kiwanis Club. One annual report explained the club's program for sons of OMA mothers: The boy is enroled at the Public Library, without any expense, and the Kiwanis Daddy supervises the choosing of literature that would be in line with the boy's inclinations as far as possible. To promote the spirit of thrift, a bank account is opened for the boy, in the joint name of the boy and the K. Daddy.... The boys are supposed to visit


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the K. Daddy at his office and at his home at least once every 2 weeks, and the K. Daddy, in his turn, is also supposed to visit the boy in his home and offer suggestions as to the improvement of conditions.20 As a result the Kiwanis Club activity encouraged extensive surveillance of the single mother's home, under the guise of charitable work. Case files reveal that churches were also often involved in monitoring financial and moral aspects of OMA recipients' lives. For instance, in the case of one Frances Long, who was not considered a good financial risk, OMA cheques were made payable to the local minister's wife who endorsed every cheque. In this manner the minister's wife had complete control over every cent that Frances's family spent.21 This type of pubic-private financial scrutiny was relatively common and the monitor was often the minister's wife or a woman from a local charitable organization. The church was also involved in a number of cases where mothers displayed an attitude problem, as with Mrs. Elizabeth Carpenter. Her file records: "Mrs. C. immediately greeted the worker with a long list of her needs and felt the assistance from the Welfare Department was very inadequate and complained at length."22 Her case was approved, but the cheques were directed to the Salvation Army on a three-month trial basis, in the hopes that Mrs. Carpenter would demonstrate more gratitude in the future. These are just a few examples of the role that private organizations played in the life of OMA administration. During the first two decades more than eighteen separate charitable organizations were mentioned in the OMA annual reports as having helped administer this policy. These private welfare agencies included the Masonic Lodge, the International Order for the Daughters of the Empire, Fresh Air Agencies, Canadian Clubs and the Canadian League for the Advancement of Coloured People.23

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in) The Professional Era, 1940-1980 The post-war era has been described as "a watershed in social security developments in Canada/'24 For the first time, Canadians were introduced to the idea of a comprehensive social security system, although it was never fully realized. The welfare policies which emerged during this period were universal in nature, based on a notion of welfare as a right of citizenship rather than a privilege (i.e., Family Allowance, Unemployment Insurance). Most welfare scholars assume that this period of welfare state expansion marked the end of punitive and moralistic social programs.25 My research on OMA suggests that this generalization about the post-war era is not entirely true. It is correct to say that the state administration of welfare during this period appeared less moralistic than that of previous decades, but the state played a role in ensuring that other agencies outside of the state continued to morally regulate welfare recipients. This era of modernization did affect OMA administration. The role of charitable organizations did not diminish during this period, but the site of charitable leaders' activities did. No longer working within the state, they did continue to work outside the doors of the state bureaucracy. For example, representatives of charitable and women's organizations were no longer appointed as unpaid administrators of OMA local and provincial boards. The local boards were disbanded in 1948 and replaced by area offices operated by paid provincial bureaucrats. In 1944 the first civil servant was appointed as head of the OMA Commission, a position previously filled by prominent social leaders. The provincial government demonstrated a commitment to the "professionalization" of social work during this period. Many government reports emphasized the importance of impersonal, scientific social work as opposed to the more personal, hands-on approach of former days. The Ontario government announced a number of grants to schools of social work to provide bursaries and thereby promote the scientific training of social workers. In keeping with this trend the OMA administration hired a number of professionals—doctors, psychologists and counsellors—to work alongside the trained social workers. As well, office work within


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the OMA bureaucracy was mechanized in a manner reminiscent of Taylorism. Time and motion studies were conducted to attempt to extract the maximum possible production from employees and administrative forms were standardized for efficiency.26 This application of Taylorist principles helped create a division, however illusionary, between public and private welfare. Public administration of welfare was considered to be objective, scientific and impartial whereas private/charity administration of welfare continued to be characterized as sentimental and discretionary. The introduction of the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) in 1965 was another major step towards a seemingly objective, scientific welfare state. As the first cost-shared welfare agreement between the federal and provincial governments, CAP provided guaranteed federal funding which allowed the Ontario government to expand eligibility for OMA during this period. Even the name of the policy changed from OMA to the Family Benefits Act (FBA) to reflect this expanded and modern welfare bureaucracy.27 Although eligibility expanded to include divorced and unwed single mothers for the first time, there was no substantial increase in allowance payments. CAP did not require provinces to establish a minimum benefits level, and OMA remained well below subsistence. As a result single mothers who were recipients of OMA continued to rely on handouts from charitable organizations to top-up their state benefits. Despite the OMA bureaucracy's adoption of scientific professional practices and expanded eligibility criteria, reliance on charitable organizations continued during this period. Although the role of the charities moved outside the state, they continued to perform a significant function in the administration of the policy. The relationship of the charitable leaders to OMA recipients was three-fold during this period: they instigated and led campaigns to expand the policy, they influenced the moral climate and attitudes towards a variety of single mothers, and they continued to supplement the income and services of OMA recipients. Charitable representatives led many of the lobby efforts to expand eligibility and improve allowance rates. Through these campaigns charitable leaders were able to assert their authority in a field that was undergoing fundamental change. In 1943 the Canadian Welfare Council (CWC) launched a campaign to increase

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OMA rates. The provincial CWC conducted a survey to compare OMA with other policies in the country. In 1957, following continued pressure from the CWC, the government replaced its flat rate system with one based on individual family need. This involved the establishment of a family budget for each applicant, taking into account the family's specific needs for food, clothing, shelther, utilities and fuel, sundries, life insurance premiums and household maintenance. Although the rate did not meet all the required needs, it did represent a significant improvement. The average OMA allowance climbed from $79 to $117 per month, resulting in a dramatic increase in purchasing power for recipients. This 1957 rate represented 74 percent of that recommended by the Family Budget Guide—an unprecedented high which has yet to be surpassed.28 The private welfare agencies took considerable credit for this major improvement in the financial position of beneficiaries. Charitable leaders also led campaigns to expand the eligibility of OMA. Concern about unwed mothers escalated during the war years when illegitimacy in Ontario climbed from 4.2 percent of all live births in 1935 to 5.2 percent by 1945.29 In 1943 a massive provincial campaign led by women's groups, charities and other notable citizens was instigated on behalf of one particular unwed mother. Stories and editorials appeared in a number of newspapers and magazines supporting the case. Although this particular campaign failed, it did provoke ongoing debate on the topic.30 During the same year as the lobby, the Toronto Welfare Council conducted a thoughtful study of 90 unwed mothers and the "adjustment" of their children. This study was a departure from previous notions of the treatment for unwed mothers and their children and called for individual assessment of each case. The report argued that forcing unwed mothers and children back to the folds of the extended family, a move that had previously been encouraged, reproduced many of the social problems that had caused illegitimacy in the first place. Instead, the council promoted long-term counselling for both the mother and father in the hopes of supporting the fragile family unit.31 Other studies and lobby efforts of a smaller scale continued for the next decade until unwed mothers were included in the OMA Act in 1956. Through such an extended campaign various social agencies were able to assert their expertise


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on the subject, gaining credibility in the eyes of the general public as well as the government. In addition to developing studies and leading lobby efforts, private social agencies played an instrumental role in the promotion of a certain moral climate. During the post-war era there was enormous anxiety expressed concerning deserted and unwed mothers. It was generally believed that both desertion and illegitimacy were escalating at an alarming rate, shattering the very foundations of the heterosexual nuclear family unit. There is little evidence to support this claim. It is true, however, that public awareness of these social issues had grown dramatically. And it is also true that private social agencies played an influential role in promoting this moral hysteria about the fragility of the nuclear family. During the first three decades of this period, charitable representatives, especially those from the CAS, reported a sharp rise in desertion and illegitimacy and promoted the notion that the moral fibre of the nation and of the nuclear family unit was at risk. Various solutions were suggested to control this moral crisis. One newspaper account argued that there was a scientific link between miniskirts and illegitimacy and the former should be banned.32 Various women's and charity groups called for the mandatory sterilization of the poor.33 Despite all this concern, statistics demonstrate that there was no significant increase in unwed motherhood or desertion during this period.34 What had increased was a concern about the moral fibre of the nation, a concern encouraged by charitable leaders. Why did charities and social organizations promote a notion of moral crisis that had little foundation in fact? One explanation is that private welfare organizations needed a new way of inserting themselves into public discussion in a period when the public provision of welfare was expanding. As saviours of the moral fibre of the nation, charities and social agencies found a way of reconstituting a place for themselves alongside the modern welfare state. The role of charity representatives with respect to OMA reflects this concern about protecting the moral fibre of the nation. As eligibility for OMA expanded during this period, the majority of

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recipients were no longer widows as in the past but instead were deserted or unwed mothers. These women were considered morally dubious, and charitable organizations were concerned that they be closely supervised. Representatives volunteered to scrutinize the daily activities of the newly eligible OMA recipients, and this offer of help was welcomed by OMA administrators. During this period a single mother receiving OMA benefits was not allowed to have a man living in her home. Scrutinizing possible abuses of this regulation was a full-time job. OMA administrators generally relied upon a variety of charitable organizations to monitor recipients and report any unacceptable activity. Thus charity organizations continued to play a vital role in scrutinizing the moral behaviour of public welfare recipients. Private welfare agencies continued to fill in the cracks by providing additional relief to supplement welfare payments which remained inadequate during this period. In fact, the provincial state promoted the continuance of a mixture of public and private welfare activities. In most annual reports the work of religious and secular charities was gratefully acknowledged, and there was no desire on the part of the provincial government to alter this arrangement as one annual OMA report makes apparent: Some private interests would apparently prefer to have the total welfare responsibility assumed by governments.... There can be no question that there is an important and essential place for neighbourly and informal endeavours of the smaller voluntary groups within the social welfare program of this Province.35 Thus, private agencies conducted their activities outside the state during this period but continued to play an influential role in the ongoing administration of the policy. iv) Return to Private Welfare, 1980 to the Present Today the OMA policy has expanded to include unwed, divorced, deserted, separated and co-habiting mothers as well as widows and sole-support fathers. All of these parents are eligible provided they can prove they are deserving. The definition of deserving,


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however, is narrowing as the state encounters external and internal pressure to reduce its welfare costs. Since this policy has always maintained a notion of welfare as a privilege rather than a right, it is particularly vulnerable to welfare cutbacks. As the capacity of the welfare state diminishes, single mothers must increasingly rely upon private welfare agencies. As these organizations cope with the escalating demand for their services they, in turn, are also narrowing their definition of deserving. As a result single mothers are under increasing pressure to prove their financial and moral worthiness in order to receive public and private welfare. Recent federal government initiatives have exacerbated this trend. The 1990 cap on the Canada Assistance Plan, the replacement of the universal family allowance policy with a targeted program for the working poor, the free trade agreements with the United States and Mexico, all have had a significant impact on provincial welfare programs. The recent federal budget announced the elimination of the CAP and its 50/50 cost-sharing agreement. In its place is the Canada Social Transfer, which will provide federal funding for post-secondary education, health care and social assistance. With this transfer the federal government has both drastically reduced financial contributions and eliminated national standards. "This proposal will have a devastating impact on the most vulnerable —people on social assistance," says Lynn Toupin of the National Anti-Poverty Organization.36 With virtually no national standards the provinces could greatly reduce welfare rates and also force people to work for their welfare cheques (workfare). In order to cope with diminishing federal dollars, the Ontario government is calling for a reduced welfare state in two significant ways. A provincial cabinet document leaked in December 1992 recommended significant financial penalties for single mothers and other welfare recipients who were not actively seeking work.37 Four months later the Ontario government's "mini-budget" included further reductions to social services (including subsidized childcare spaces) and the establishment of the Enhanced Verification Unit, an administrative branch specifically designed to ferret out welfare fraud. A total of 270 new staff were to be hired to "reexamine every welfare case" in the province.38 This ambitious

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initiative has given the "green light" to both state workers and private welfare agencies to increase their scrutiny of welfare recipients.39 Both these federal and provincial initiatives will have a significant impact on the future of public and private welfare. As the welfare state is under enormous pressure to cut costs, the definition of deserving will become increasingly restrictive. The partial workfare program and a larger welfare police bureaucracy dramatically change the notion of deserving. The former requires recipients to prove that they have a desire to work, the latter that they are morally and financially above reproof. This will move OMA even further away from the notion that the allowance is a right and more firmly entrench it in a charity understanding of welfare as a privilege which must be continually earned. Since there are few jobs and few support services available for poor single mothers, deductions to welfare payments will increase economic hardship and escalate the reliance on private charities to top up monthly allowances. These government initiatives will help to reassert charities as the moral guardians of the nation. All evidence suggests that charities today, as in the past, continue to employ moral criteria to determine who is and is not worthy of help. Two significant sites for charity involvement in the moral regulation of single mothers7 lives today are the foodbanks and the bingo halls. The importance of foodbanks in the lives of single mothers has dramatically increased during the last decade. Today, in Toronto alone, there are now more food banks than Macdonald restaurant outlets, and most of these places discriminate between customers.40 One Salvation Army foodbank in downtown Toronto recently told OMA recipients that they should only attend once every three months. As one single mother explains, "They told us that their food is really for those who are newly unemployed—not for us."41 Other foodbanks require customers to listen to a religious sermon and subject themselves to interviews that are both intrusive and moralistic. In small towns and rural areas, foodbank workers also volunteer to scrutinize the customers' social activities. There have been incidents where families have been rejected because one family member was seen drinking at the local pub or rumoured to be involved in a drug trade.


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Bingo halls are yet another site where charitable organizations are involved in the moral regulation of single mothers. Many bingo games are organized by charities or churches. For poor single mothers bingo represents a way to make some short-term cash and socialize at the same time. Social workers and charity leaders in North Bay and Elgin County have been known to attend bingo events, take account of the winners and then report it to the OMA office. These public and private welfare workers are fondly called the "bingo police/'42 The 1980s and 1990s are marked by a shift in the relationship between public and private welfare. Private welfare agencies are increasingly relied upon by the state to top up inadequate state benefits and to regulate the poor. As such, the welfare state is able to narrow the definition of the deserving poor both through its own bureaucratic mechanisms and by silently permitting charity organizations to do the same. This increasing reliance upon private welfare agencies to serve and regulate the poor threatens the limited rights of all citizens.

CONCLUSION

As welfare state programs diminish and the poor increase their dependency upon private social agencies, it is vital that we, as social scientists, explore this relationship and its implications. Through this case study of the history and everyday administration of OMA it is clear that there is a long and complex association between public and private welfare. Initially it was private welfare agencies which urged the state to establish OMA; and, once enacted, it was again private welfare leaders who volunteered to work both inside and outside the OMA bureaucracy to ensure that recipients were monitored. Over time these charity and social leaders were removed from the corridors of the welfare state but played a significant role alongside the state by topping up the minimal state allowance and by scrutinizing OMA recipients. Today the balance between public and private welfare is shifting once more. As the state cuts welfare programs and weeds out less deserving clients, more and more citizens turn to the private welfare agencies for support. Since

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charitable organizations have always accepted a notion of welfare as a privilege which must be earned, this shift from public to private welfare threatens the rights of Ontario's most impoverished citizens. Any discussion about the type of state we need to lead us into the twenty-first century must include an understanding of how the state functions on a daily basis. This case study of one particular welfare policy suggests that this relationship between state and civil society is more complex than initially assumed. And it is this complexity which must be explored if we are to understand and respond to the growing demands for a leaner, meaner state.

ENDNOTES I would like to thank Lynne Marks and Mariana Valverde for their support and enthusiasm for this subject, the reviewers for their constructive and thoughtful comments and Caroline Andrew for her considerable patience. 1

2

3

There is no terminology which adequately addresses the complexity of this relationship. Political scientists have tended to focus on economic interests when examining the "private sphere." But it is the non-economic social and charitable aspects of the private sphere which are of particular interest in this paper. "Private welfare" suggests that this is welfare funded and administered by non-government organizations. But many of these agencies receive state funding and are subject to state regulations regarding the administration of their services. Similarly, many "public welfare" programs rely upon private or non-governmental welfare agencies to help administer a welfare policy or to compensate for the policy's inadequacies. The few notable exceptions are: Veronica Strong-Boag, "Wages for Housework: Mothers' Allowances and the Beginnings of Social Security in Canada," Journal of Canadian Studies 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 24-34; Lorna Hurl, "The Nature of Policy Dynamics: Patterns of Change and Stability in a Social Assistance Programme" (Paper presented to the Fourth National Conference on Social Welfare Policy, Toronto, October 1989); Jane Haddad, "Sexism and Social Welfare Policy: The Case of Family Benefits in Ontario," Occasional Papers in Social Policy Analysis 8 (1985). Archival resources include: annual reports, provincial government records, media accounts and case files from the City of London, Elgin, Lincoln and Oxford counties. Interviews were conducted in Belleville, Kitchener, London,


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St. Thomas, Toronto and North Bay during 1990 and 1991 and encompass both urban and rural concerns. Feminist interpretations of the maternal origins of the welfare state include: Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Macmillan, 1994), esp. ch. 3; Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). The one Canadian exception is Arnup, Levesque and Pierson. While these authors explore the maternal advice that the federal government gave to new mothers at the turn of the century, they do not explore the maternal nature of various state policies. Katherine Arnup, Andr£e Levesque and Ruth Roach Pierson, eds., Delivering Motherhood: Maternal Ideologies and Practices in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London: Routledge, 1990); and K. Arnup, Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). This linear view is particularly seen in the work of Richard Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, 1792-1893 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); and Dennis Guest, The Rise of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985). Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1885-1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991). For an elaboration of Valverde's analysis of the relationship between public and private welfare see, "The Mixed Social Economy as a Canadian Tradition," Studies in Political Economy 47 (Summer 1995). Valverde, The Age of Light..., pp. 23-24. Lynne Marks has demonstrated, however, that the role of these private welfare agencies during this period was not always as central as originally assumed. She argues that these social organizations performed a greater role in large urban centres than in small towns. Lynne Marks, "Indigent Committees and Ladies Benevolent Societies: Intersections of Public and Private Poor Relief in Late 19th Century Small-Town Ontario," Studies in Political Economy 47 (Summer 1995). John J. Kelso, founder of the Toronto Children's Aid Society was the first to advocate the need for a public welfare policy to aid single mothers in 1895. "Report of the Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children in

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Ontario to the Ontario Legislature," J.J. Kelso Collection, Mothers' Allowances File, National Archives (hereinafter NA), MG 30, G97, vol. 5, p. 1. "The Experiment Made by the Local Council of Women," Mothers' Allowance Collection, Ministry of Labour, 1919, Archives of Ontario (hereinafter AO), R.G. 7-12-0-21. Minutes of May 20 and December 16,1914, December 1915, October 17,1916, and May 15,1917, Toronto Local Council of Women Collection, AO. Valverde, The Age of Light..., p. 20. "An Act to Provide for Payment of Allowances in Certain Cases to the Mothers of Dependent Children," Statues of Ontario, First Session of the 15th Legislature of Ontario, 1920, chapter 89, pp. 384-389. Ibid., Section (3), sub-section (f). "Second Annual Report of Ontario Mothers' Allowance Commission," 192122, p. 30. The fourth annual report stated, "The past four years in the administration of the Act shows, with the splendid co-operation and practical helpfulness of churches, service clubs, etc.... private philanthropy has been greatly stimulated in respect to the care of the widow and the fatherless." "Fourth Annual Report of OMA," pp. 5-6. Letter from Harry Bentley, Chief Investigator, OMA Commission to Miss Elizabeth King, Assistant Secretary, Canadian Council on Child Welfare, July 29, 1929, Canadian Council on Social Development, File 52, Mothers' Allowances 1929, NA, MG 28,1-10. "Second Annual Report of the Mothers' Allowance Commission," 1921-22, p. 10. Ontario, Mothers' Allowance Case Files, 1920-1940, Western Regional Collection, D.B. Weldon Library, London (hereinafter DBW). "Report from Local Children's Aid Society to Local Board," Mothers' Allowance Case Files, 1928, DBW. Other charity and social organizations mentioned in the annual reports include: the Red Cross Society, Masonic Lodge, Salvation Army, Catholic Women's League, St. Vincent de Paul, Federation of Catholic Charities, Patriotic Fund, Local Council of Women, Pentecostal Tabernacle, Rotary Club, Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League. Guest, The Rise of Social Security..., p. 142. In the Canadian welfare state literature liberal scholars such as Guest and Splane have argued that charity-style welfare programs involved in moral investigation were replaced by a rights-based welfare system. Other scholars have focused on questions of federalism, production or the relationship


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between production and reproduction and virtually ignored moral concerns. While several articles in The "Benevolent" State, and the title itself, speak to the punitive nature of welfare programs they do not directly address the question of morality. Guest, The Rise of Social Security..., pp. 45 and 203; Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario...; Allan Moscovitch and Jim Albert, eds., The "Benevolent" State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada (Toronto: Garamond, 1987). Ontario Department of Public Welfare, "Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1954-55," p. 5; and "Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1955-56," p. 45. Please note I will continue to refer to the policy as OMA. Hurl, "The Nature of Policy Dynamics..." Table 4, pp. 17-18. Dorothy Howarth, "Is Law Being Tricked On 'Babies for Sale'?" Toronto Telegram November 24,1956 in AO, RG 29, Series 74, Box 3, File 3.2. "Mothers Allowances" [editorial] News n.d.; "On Illegitimacy," Fort Erie TimesReview January 28,1943; "Unmarried Mother Victim of Legalism," Globe and Matt February 13,1943; "Help is Refused to Unwed Mother," Globe and Matt January 26,1943 in AO, RG 3, Box 333. Toronto Welfare Council, A Study of the Adjustment of Children of Unmarried Mothers (1943), pp. 1-32. "Miniskirts Blamed for Illegitimate Births," [unidentified newspaper] March 21,1969 in AO, R.G. 49, Legislative Office, Press Clippings, Reel #388-1969 While several social agencies proposed various methods of reducing fertility amongst the poor, June Rowlands, on behalf of the Association of Women Electors, made the strongest proposal when she advocated the sterilization of all poor men. "Sterilize Male to Cut Costs of Welfare, Women Urge," Toronto Telegram May 30,1969 in AO, R.G. 49, Reel #388-1969. In regards to desertion, one annual report acknowledged that "desertion does not appear to be increasing but more cases are being brought to light." According to the OMA statistics from 1940 to 1970, the number of deserted beneficiaries averaged 10 percent of the entire caseload. The highest rate of illegitimacy in the province, at 5.2 percent of all live births, occurred immediately following the war when many found family life difficult. But from 1945 the rate had been steadily decreasing. By 1960 Ontario had one of the lowest illegitimate birth rates in the English-speaking world at 3.2 percent. See "Husbands Tracked Down," Globe and Mail January 22,1964 in AO, R.G. 49, Reel #240-1964; "Illegitimacy a World Low in Ontario," Toronto Telegram February 3,1960 in AO, R.G. 29, Series 74, Box 3, File 3.6. Ontario Department of Public Welfare "Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1960-61," p. 3. Press Release, National Anti-Poverty Organization, February 28,1995.

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37

38

39

40

41

42


This is a partial workfare program in the sense that welfare recipients will be forced to sacrifice a significant portion, but not the entire welfare payment, if they are not "actively seeking work." In the Ontario proposal the definition of "actively seeking work" is vague, leaving a great deal of room for discretion in decision-making. "NDP eyes making welfare recipients work," Toronto Star February 29,1993, pp. 1 and 32. The Ontario mini-budget calls for a $173.8 million reduction in caseload and program management of social assistance and an $11.2 million reduction in child-care fee subsidies, both under the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Ontario, minister of finance, "Ontario's Expenditure Control Plan," April 1993. "Investigation of Social Assistance Cases to Improve System," Communique from the Ministry of Community and Social Services, Ontario, March 28,1994. Interview with Michael Shapcott, Basic Action Poverty Group, Toronto, April 18.1991. Single Mothers Workshop, Fight Back Metro Coalition Event, Toronto, April 11.1992. Interview with Low-Income People Involvement, North Bay, November 28, 1991 and interview with Richard D'Arcy, Community Legal Worker, Community Outreach Programs of Elgin County, November 22,1991.

CHAPTER 7

Depoliticizing Insurgency: The Politics of the Family in Alberta

LOB HARDER

*7

i n 1990 the Alberta government, under the premiership of Don w Getty, launched a broad initiative to raise the profile of "the family" in Alberta's public policy and social life. In the moment, Getty's family fervour appeared to be the reaction of a troubled and politically well-placed father to the very public disclosure of his son's cocaine habit. Yet the vigour with which the family initiative was pursued, the ideological context to which the Alberta state was shifting and the economic situation that was encouraging the restructuring of the provincial welfare state suggest that Alberta's family initiative had a rationale that was considerably more coherent than such an idiosyncratic explanation would allow. With the province now under the administration of Ralph Klein, attention to "the family" has become less explicit. Although the statutory, mid-winter holiday known as Family Day persists, the Getty-inspired Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families was disbanded in 1995. Nonetheless, the neo-liberal ideology that underscores Klein's cuts to health care, education and social assistance assumes that Alberta's families, and particularly Alberta women, will fill the void left by provincial retrenchment. This article explores the political and strategic implications of the Alberta state's reclamation of "the family" for feminist organizing in the province. Drawing on the work of Iris Young and

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Nancy Fraser, I argue that the provincial state has attempted to contain Alberta feminists' demands for equality through a rhetorical campaign celebrating the traditional nuclear family and, with the installation of the neo-liberal state, a policy program that relies on the unpaid work of women in the home for its success. The effects of neo-liberalism on the process of feminist claims-making should serve as a cautionary tale for social activists in other jurisdictions in which the neo-liberal state threatens to delegitimize the practice of democratic politics.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The insights of Iris Young and Nancy Fraser address three key questions that frame this paper's argument surrounding the use of "the family" by the Alberta state as a tool to delegitimize the struggles and achievements of Alberta feminists. The first question is concerned with the historical context which precipitated the province's efforts to depoliticize Alberta feminists by reclaiming "the family." The second question asks how discourse has been used in the service of depoliticizing feminist claims-makers. Finally, the third question queries the shift in the strategy of depoliticization from the explicit use of family values discourse in the dying days of the Alberta welfare state to deficit-reduction discourse and program cuts in the emergence of the new neo-liberal state form. The first section of this paper will outline these questions in the context of the insights contained in Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference and Fraser's "Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a SocialistFeminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture," while the remainder of the paper will apply these insights to the Alberta context. For the purposes of examining the use of the family by the Alberta state as a tool to depoliticize feminist claims-makers, Young's work provides three important insights. First, the book provides a careful analysis of the metamorphosis of justice in the context of the contestatory environment of claims-making. Second, Young places the dynamic character of claims-making in a framework of insurgency and containment. She argues that the potential for social

DEPOLITICIZING INSURGENCY

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groups to make their mark on political processes and policies emerges when the state fails to maintain a balance between ensuring the conditions for the accumulation of capital and protecting the collective well-being of citizens. In response to this unsettling of the regime of claims-making, the state and supportive social groups attempt to reclaim the old structures of claims-making and contain insurgent groups within the established process. This framework is particularly useful for understanding feminist struggles with the Alberta state in the period following the crash of world oil prices. With decreasing revenues available to meet the needs of citizens and a growing public perception of government mismanagement, an opportunity emerged for expanding the category of legitimate social actors on the provincial political scene. Finally, Young points to the uses of neo-liberal economic discourse as tools of containment and depoliticization.

DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Young argues that many policy-makers and liberal democratic theorists understand social justice as limited to "the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society's members."1 Her difficulties with such an understanding surround the conceptual limits of distribution itself. Young posits that attention to distribution has tended to focus on the allocation of resources rather than on the political, economic and social systems in which that allocation takes place. Further, when considering the distribution of nonmaterial resources, such as decision-making power, security of the person or the division of labour, the distributive paradigm represents them as static, as unaffected by the social processes through which they operate and are made comprehensible.2 In essence, the distributive paradigm of justice is insufficiently aware of the political realm in which it operates and which, by general acceptance of such a paradigm, it helps to form. Young situates her critique of distributive justice within discussions of a number of state practices and governing principles, central among which is interest group pluralism. Working from a

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liberal conception of the state as a neutral arbiter among a variety of competing demands, proponents of the distributive paradigm argue that all groups have an equal chance to have their demands met by the state. The determination of how resources should be distributed among these groups relates solely to the skill with which competing interest groups can make their claims. This is a conceptualization of arbitration among competing interests, or conflict resolution, that is roughly analogous to the market, in that "various interests compete with one another for people's loyalties, and those that amass the most members and money have the market advantage in lobbying for legislation, regulations, and the distribution of tax dollars."3 Understanding the distribution of state resources on the basis of a market model is inadequate, in Young's view, for several reasons. First, such an understanding is unaware of its own normative framework and consequently is blind to the moral basis on which choices between demands are made. Young argues that "in its process of conflict resolution, interest-group pluralism makes no distinction between the assertion of selfish interests and normative claims to justice or right."4 A successful outcome for an interest group is the result of amassing support for one's position. While justice may be a part of gathering that support, it functions as a discursive and rhetorical tool rather than as the guiding principle on which determinations of state provision are made. Effectively, normative claims for justice are collapsed into the selfish desires of an interest group, resulting in the delegitimation of both the group and its demands.5 While I concur with Young's critique of the liberal version of claims-making, her analysis ends too soon. If one situates her observation regarding the lack of normative awareness in the exercise of distributive justice in a political context, one is forced to consider why adherence to the liberal model is so compelling for politicians and policy-makers as well as for liberal theorists. Young argues that normative standards of justice are, indeed, at work in the process of deciding among competing claims, but the expression of these standards is obscured by an adherence to procedural fairness—the arbitration among competing demands on the basis of the most successful statement of claim. There are considerable


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political advantages in taking up the mantle of procedural fairness in the face of competing claims to justice. First, it masks the state's own interest in the outcome. The state can simply represent itself as the impartial judge and hence is not compelled to provide its own, thick interpretation of justice. Second, liberal justice as procedural fairness avoids the nasty political problem of articulating a clear position on what justice is. Because the state is the most identifiable site from which justice is meted out, its interpretation of justice forms the standard for society. Other interpretations of justice whose normative frameworks are more explicitly articulated become positions between which the state must arbitrate, rather than viable alternatives that the state itself might adopt. By assuming the role of arbitrator and guarantor of fairness, the state's agents can avoid questions concerning the basis on which certain groups are included or excluded from the political process. There are two risks involved in the effort to cloak the state's normative framework in the veil of procedural fairness in the distribution of justice. First, it requires that the state actually maintains a modicum of fairness. Neutrality is a difficult disguise to maintain when groups with strong claims are regularly excluded in the distribution of resources. Hence, to the extent that the appearance of state neutrality is desired, a variety of groups whose positions may pose a challenge to the state's actual normative framework may have to be included among the contenders for state resources. Second, the risk of revealing the normative framework through which state policy is operating is a constant danger, especially for politicians whose electoral success or failure often depends upon their positions on questions of morality and the identifiable expression of that morality in public policy. In fact, I would assert that the negotiation of the tension between the facade of normative neutrality and the explicit expression of a public morality has been a key feature of post-oil-boom politics in Alberta. While the attempt to maintain the ruse of procedural fairness in the face of competing claims was fairly successful under the welfare state, the shift to a neo-liberal state form created a crisis in the established rules of interest group politics. Young reads this crisis as the failure of the capitalist state to walk the line between ensuring adequate conditions for the accumulation of capital and

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maximizing collective welfare.6 In Young's view, this failure represents a potential moment of insurgency; the possibility for a marked growth in politicization. Thus, it follows that, in the face of the state's inability or unwillingness to meet the needs of its citizens, we should be witnessing vigorous social claims-making and challenges to the practice of interest-group pluralism. Interestingly, however, while there is evidence of such an invigoration in the period immediately following the crash of oil prices, it is less clear that insurgency has continued under the clear retreat from ensuring collective welfare instituted by the Klein administration. EFFECTS OF NEO-LIBERALISM

Young suggests that the failure to realize a radical politicization of the social realm at present is the product of a shift in economic thinking from Keynesianism to the monetarist discourse of neoliberalism. The content of most social movement demands has been focused either on meeting previously unaddressed needs or on revising existing methods of service delivery. These kinds of demands, however, become increasingly futile when service provision itself is called into question, as is the case in current economic thinking focused on deficit reduction. When groups must defend the limited benefits they have received from the welfare state rather than criticizing the way in which those benefits have been bestowed, they become, in Young's view, increasingly susceptible to reabsorption within the competitive, pluralist framework. 7 What Young fails to appreciate is that the transformation of state form has redefined the process of containment. The neo-liberal state does not contain insurgent demands by attempting to corral them into the old game of distributing resources on the basis of procedural fairness and a market model of competition among interest groups. Instead, the neo-liberal model delegitimizes virtually all claims-makers whose objectives are not directly linked to the accumulation of capital. Young's observation that the character of monetarism has placed unique limits on the possibility of insurgency is an important qualification to her discussion of the distributive paradigm of justice.


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Yet, interestingly, she is largely unwilling to acknowledge its longterm importance. Instead, Young focuses on the possibility of democratizing the state and social life by challenging the distributive paradigm of justice in favour of a notion of justice centred on empowerment. This suggests an unwillingness to take the new form of containment established by the neo-liberal state very seriously. However, the ways in which this shift in state form has affected the discourse of claims-making is likely to be considerably more transformative than Young's theory allows. The work of Nancy Fraser provides some suggestions as to why Young's theory, while accurate in its critique of interest-group pluralism as a mechanism of distributive justice, is strained when confronting the current political climate.

PHASER'S POLITICS OF NEEDS INTERPRETATION

Nancy Eraser's work on the struggle over needs and needs interpretation addresses issues similar to those outlined in Young's work. Fraser, however, offers a richer theorization of the dynamics of claims-making and containment by defining a series of needs discourses that may come into play as demands are made and addressed. It is the theorization of the creation and interaction of these discourses, and the sensitivity to historical specificities that such a focus implies, that is most useful in helping to overcome the limitations of Young's analysis in making sense of the current political moment in Alberta politics. In addition, Fraser is more sensitive than Young to the political realm as a site in which groups not only contend with the state but also form alliances with and oppositions to each other. For Fraser, as for Young, the primary function of the welfare state is to identify and address a variety of needs in social and economic life. Fraser identifies this function as the politics of needs interpretation. The distinctly political aspect of interpreting needs is found in the contestation of competing networks of "in-orderto" relations.8 That is, the manner in which one answers the question, what must be done in order for a certain outcome to be realized, is an inherently political process. For example, feminist groups in

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Alberta such as Options for Women and the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee have argued since the late 1970s that in order to address the problem of women's unequal access to employment, the provincial government should pass employment equity legislation and provide training programs with child-care and transportation subsidies for participants. The Conservative government, by contrast, has argued that the formal declaration of women's equality and career counselling would provide adequate means to meet the challenge of equality in the workplace. For the most part, contestation over needs interpretation occurs when needs can no longer be contained within existing discursive parameters. In Fraser's theory, the contradictions in the state's role of facilitating capital accumulation and maximizing the collective welfare may form the context for social change, but so might the course of various social struggles or particular local events. The needs that are articulated in these moments of potential social change are "markers of major social-structural shifts in the boundaries separating what are classified as 'political,' 'economic/ and 'domestic' or 'personal' spheres of life."9 Fraser calls these "runaway needs" and suggests three categories of needs discourses that inhabit the unsettled social realm which they occupy: oppositional, reprivatization and expert. Oppositional discourses arise when needs are politicized "from below." Groups attempt to put issues on the political agenda that are considered private and/or "natural" and hence not open to public scrutiny, debate or regulation. Formerly non-politicized groups argue that relations of power inform and infuse the issues with which they are concerned and, thus, that these are legitimate political issues. This persuasive effort poses a challenge to hegemonic notions of the political and previously existing patterns of needs interpretation.10 The contestation that surrounds this process can contribute to the formation of a group identity as people organize around a particular cause and carve out an identity that is somehow representative of that cause. Reprivatization discourses emerge as a response to oppositional discourses and are an attempt to maintain emergent claims in their private and depoliticized form. The motivation behind this conservative reaction is the desire to prevent the recognition and


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fulfilment of new needs by the state. In the process, however, reprivatization discourses articulate interpretations of social life that, previously, had simply been assumed. Hence, people espousing reprivatization discourses can, contrary to their objective, actually contribute to the politicization of oppositional needs by making the hegemonic position explicit and, consequently, more open to contestation. As Fraser notes, this articulation of the old is also a modification, since in resisting the new, oppositional discourse, reprivatization discourse defines itself both in terms of the hegemonic view of the social but also in reference to the new discourse.11 Finally, expert discourses arise once the proponents of oppositional discourses have successfully politicized their claims. These needs discourses are the means through which runaway needs are transformed into the objects of state intervention.12 The effects of expert discourses are to depoliticize the process of needs interpretation by sterilizing it. The use of juridical, scientific, specialist language in creating the conditions in which oppositional needs can be administered abstracts from the context in which those needs arose and reduces the groups who promoted the runaway needs to individual claimants. They become passive recipients, while those who administer do so behind the guise of institutional objectivity.13 Hence, while the expression of the initial politicization may succeed in convincing the state to address runaway needs, the cost of that success is a discounting of those needs. The systemic conditions that gave rise to them are reduced to the problems of specific individuals to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. By addressing the need and individualizing the solution, expert discourse diffuses the possibility of continued collective identification and response to a particular concern. The reinterpretation of needs through expert discourse thus amounts to depoliticization, though not through a return to the private or the natural.

FEMINISM AND THE FAMILY

Under conditions of a change from the welfare to the neo-liberal state form, reprivatization discourse, deployed by social groups,

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as well as the Conservative government and the Alberta state, has provided the primary means for addressing the "runaway needs" articulated by Alberta feminists.14 Furthermore, the "traditional" family has served as the locus of this particular manifestation of reprivatization discourse. Indeed, the deployment of the "traditional," nuclear family as a means of reprivatizing the oppositional discourse of "women's issues" represents the consummate strategy for containing the demands of Alberta feminists. The usefulness of the "traditional family" for depoliticizing feminist demands stems from two significant cultural phenomena. The first is the desire to invoke some control and familiarity in an historical moment marked by insecurity and unpredictability. The globalization of capital, the decline of the Keynesian welfare state and the resulting precariousness of employment create anxiety. For conservatives, this anxiety is often expressed in terms of moral crisis—a perception of increased violence, untamed sexuality and disrespect for authority. The family is invoked in this moment as a stalwart against the disquiet of the postmodern condition.15 The second phenomenon relates to the discursive construction of "women's issues" as articulated by the feminist movement. Dubbed "Wollstonecraft's Dilemma" by Carole Pateman, and more commonly known as the equality versus difference debate, feminist theorists and activists have struggled over the question of whether to articulate their needs in such a way as to obtain treatment equal to that of men or whether to make claims on the basis of their difference from men, both in terms of the capacity to bear children and in their socially assigned responsibility for care-giving.16 The problem with adopting the equality strategy is that equality has a tendency to be equated with sameness. When women are treated "the same" as men, the specificity of women's various experiences within the gendered organization of social life and the particular expectations for women that this social organization implies cannot be addressed. The oft-used illustration of this problem is the inclusion of maternity leave under "disability" compensation in the framework of an employee benefits package. The equality strategy also risks homogenizing all women and all


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men, so that class and racial inequalities among women and between women and men are obscured. In light of the challenge posed by women from a variety of racial, ethnic and class backgrounds to the white, middle-class mainstream of the feminist movement, the equality strategy has largely been abandoned in recent claimsmaking efforts. Demanding that needs be interpreted on the basis of difference, however, poses its own set of difficulties for feminist struggles. In the context of this discussion, the primary risk of the difference strategy is the institutionalization of the existing gendered division of labour and women's subordinate position within that structure. When feminist claims-making is structured around addressing women's needs for child-care, elder care, respite care, protection against the objectification of pornography and freedom from domestic violence we enter the debate from a position of subordination. These issues are "women's issues" because women are responsible for activities that are undervalued and to which political power does not accrue. Of course, feminist campaigns in these areas are focused on re-valuing "women's work" and sharing the burden of care among all members of the household. But as long as the gendered subtext is maintained, so too is the possibility for conservative retrenchment expressed through reprivatization discourse. "The family" represents a peculiarly vexed institution for feminist analysis. On the one hand, the family has been a central location of women's oppression while, on the other hand, participation in family life has been and continues to be extremely meaningful and rewarding. Michelle Barrett and Mary Mclntosh contextualize the self-fulfilling attributes of the family as the limited reward for participating in an otherwise highly atomized society. While their argument focuses on the extremely anti-social nature of the reification of the family, which prevents the strengthening of community, they also recognize that existing historical conditions make participation in the family an overwhelmingly rational choice for women.17 In a less radical theoretical intervention, Mimi Abramovitz, too, qualifies her critical position on the family arguing that

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the critique of the family ethic is not meant to devalue the experience of sharing one's life with a partner or that of bearing, raising, and loving children. Rather it suggests that institutionally enforced rules of family organization do not necessarily enhance family life and they frequently disadvantage women.18

The combination of the continuing importance of the family to the organization of social life and individual identity and the pursuit of feminist claims-making strategies based on women's "difference" has produced an oppositional discourse around the family that is particularly amenable to refraining by groups who would cling to conservative notions of family form and function. It is this vulnerability to the reprivatization discourse of family values and the manifestations of this discourse in public policy that has posed the most significant challenge to feminist claims for justice vis-a-vis the Alberta state in the last ten years. The explicit use of family values discourse by the Getty government and the unarticulated necessity of a two-parent family for the realization of the Klein government's deficit reduction strategy provide a significant instantiation of Young's critique of distributive justice, her theory of insurgency and containment, her observations surrounding the effects of neo-liberal ideology on claims-making, and Eraser's theory of needs interpretation. In an effort to situate their insights in the context of feminist claimsmaking in Alberta, I will now turn to an examination of the provincial state's use of "the family" as a reprivatization discourse and as a means of depoliticizing Alberta's organized feminist groups. This examination will involve a consideration of the political climate that attenuated the Getty government's embrace of family values, the discursive expression of these values in the legislature and in the official documents of the Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families, and a discussion of the Klein government's approach to the family and the depoliticization of feminist organizations.


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THE GETTY GOVERNMENT AND THE FAMILY—"THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME"

When Don Getty succeeded Peter Lougheed as the Premier of Alberta in 1985, the province was in the midst of coping with the collapse of world oil prices and a reorientation of the political realm. This reorientation was the product of a number of political scandals that expressed the problems of adjustment to decreasing wealth, the election of the federal Conservatives to the House of Commons on a platform of pro-western initiatives (thereby undermining the Lougheed strategy of defusing internal political conflict by insisting on a united front to fight the federal government), and a declining ability to buy off dissent through state largesse. When decreasing government revenues eventually resulted in attempts to reduce spending on education, health and welfare, Albertans were no longer prepared to support the government's definition of the public interest.19 Growing discontent among Albertans manifested itself in the election returns of 1986 and 1989 and in the growth of social movements. Both of these elections augmented the ranks of the provincial opposition and increased the number of women in the legislature, among whom were some vocal critics of the gendered subtext of many government policies. As for the Conservative Party, its recognition of impending electoral misfortune inspired a move to court "new" electoral players, including women. As a result, mainstream feminist demands began to gain some political legitimacy thereby creating an opportunity for the articulation of a feminist oppositional discourse within provincial politics. For feminists, the Alberta state's acknowledgment of their enhanced power was reflected in: the reconstruction of the Alberta Women's Bureau as the Women's Secretariat with a larger, more competent staff, expanded mandate and increased budget; the appointment of an interdepartmental committee and a cabinet committee on women's issues; and, two years later in 1986, the establishment of the Alberta Advisory Council on Women's Issues (AACWI).20 These initiatives marked a significant departure from the government's insistence that the equality of women had been formally recognized in the Individual Rights Protection Act and

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that any further initiatives to ensure equality would constitute special treatment and, hence, discrimination. It was no longer possible to contain feminist demands by ignoring them. Instead, an attempt would be made to contain them by institutional means. The province's feminist groups, however, were not deceived. Their long experience of running up against the locked doors of Alberta legislators had made them suspicious of the government's initiatives and, as it turned out, their suspicions were well-founded. The first incarnation of AACWI was chaired by Margaret Leahy, a political climber who was so out of touch with provincial women's groups as to suggest that she wanted a "very strong male" from the private sector, who turned out to be Peter Pocklington, to be considered as a council member.21 While Pocklington did not, in fact, get the job, the council was, nonetheless, stacked with Tory supporters. Even with the council populated by the party faithful, however, AACWI's recommendations to government were systematically ignored. The Women's Secretariat, though employing well-intentioned feminists, had limited success in persuading government departments to consider the implications of their policies for women or to consult with the secretariat on proposed legislation. Predictably, the secretariat was also sorely understaffed. In light of these developments and as a result of the internal politics of grass-roots feminist organizations, by the late 1980s the province's feminists had largely refocused their energies on constitutional reform and free trade or had retreated from claimsmaking and intensified their involvements in community service. An additional restraint on the capacity of Alberta feminists to reap the limited rewards of state sanction was the concurrent attainment of political legitimacy by the anti-feminist group the Alberta Federation of Women United for Families (AFWUF). The emergence of AFWUF is illustrative of Young's critique of the normative weakness inherent in a distributive notion of justice. AFWUF was formed in direct response to the pro-choice position of the province's largest feminist organization, the Alberta Status of Women Action Committee (ASWAC). Formed in 1981 after its founder was expelled from ASWAC for claiming that she would "destroy the organization if it's the last thing I do," AFWUF promptly embarked on a campaign to secure government funding.22


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AFWUF argued that if the provincial government was providing funding ($5000 as a conference grant) to a pro-choice, anti-family, feminist organization, then AFWUF, with its Christian morality, surely deserved treatment at least equal to that of ASWAC. In response to rumours of AFWUF's impending funding request, the first impulse of the minister responsible for women's issues in this pre-oil bust context was to consider withdrawing funding for all women's groups, feminist, anti-feminist or otherwise.23 The cooler heads of bureaucrats prevailed, however, and a funding policy was proposed which would ensure all groups an equal opportunity to apply for available monies.24 Thus, rather than consider which of the groups had a more just claim, the state chose to avoid difficult normative questions by establishing a fair process and distributing justice with the help of its cheque-book. Six years later, when feminists had secured a place within the apparatus of the state, AFWUF's initiatives to eliminate state support for feminist groups continued, as did the state's adherence to a model of distributive justice. In 1987, ASWAC again found itself the target of an attempt to have its funding withdrawn. Upon hearing revelations from "pro-family" women regarding their experiences at ASWAC's annual conference, Ken Rostad, solicitor general, wrote to the minister responsible for women's issues (Elaine McCoy, who was fairly sympathetic to feminist demands) expressing his displeasure. He reported that, while his initial perception was that his constituents were overreacting, he had received reports from "level-headed people" that ASWAC was expressing their promotion of occults, ending their session with a form of witchcraft chant as well as promoting the formation and enhancement of lesbian groups in Edmonton.... The ASWAC group was thought to be destructive to the women's movement, to the family and an insult to the feminine gender.25

In response to these reports, Rostad wrote that he was distressed that the government would fund such a group and requested information on the amount of funding provided and McCoy's "latest intelligence" on ASWAC.26 McCoy's response to Rostad was that while "ASWAC has generated considerable

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controversy as a result of topics which the group has addressed...! believe the group as a whole and the majority of its members have added, in a constructive way, to the debate on many issues facing women today." In response to a similar concern expressed by one of Rostad's constituents, McCoy wrote, "I am certain that the government is aware that a number of the groups it funds have views that vary significantly from those of the government and many women. Diversity of opinion is important in a democratic society."28 Faced with containment through co-optation and an inability to diffuse the archaic notions of gender professed by AFWUF because of the unwillingness of the state to engage in a substantive discussion of justice, Alberta feminist groups were understandably disheartened with the politics of claims-making. Yet co-optation and the politics of interest-group pluralism were relatively common and predictable tools for the containment of claims-makers, feminist or otherwise. The espousal of family values, by contrast, was an entirely new innovation. While the province's organized feminist groups had weakened the intensity of their claims-making on the provincial state in the late 1980s, feminist demands continued to confront the government during this period. A number of NDP and Liberal members of the legislature ensured that the government regularly faced questions relating to the continuing inequality of the province's women, and the minister responsible for women's issues was, herself, supportive of many feminist objectives. AFWUF continued its lobbying efforts on behalf of the traditional family and in opposition to policies that would enhance an understanding of women as individuals rather than as wives and mothers. As Fraser suggests, this attempt to reprivatize feminist oppositional discourse only served to maintain feminist demands on the political agenda. Finally, by 1989, the government's thinly veiled contempt for the AACWI had knocked the council's members from their neutral stance into a much more activist and pro-feminist position. The appointment of a new chair to the council, though a former campaign manager for one of the cabinet ministers, also served to invigorate the council's role as a gadfly for women. ryj


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It is difficult to know precisely what combination of events sparked the provincial government's embrace of family values discourse. Certainly the premier's personal difficulties cannot be discounted, nor can the growing influence of AFWUF within the Conservative caucus. The 1980s also saw some troubling statistics reflecting the social ill-health of the province, including the country's highest rate of teenage pregnancy and divorce.29 It would not be surprising if certain bureaucrats and MLAs linked these social ills to another statistic—that Alberta's women have the highest labour force participation rate in Canada.30 In any event, beginning with the throne speech in 1986, but intensifying with the Lieutenant Governor's Conference on the Family and the establishment of the Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families in 1990, the discourse of family values came to be a feature of the province's political debate. Public statements by Conservative caucus members indicate the general character of the government's use of the family in response to the advances of women in attaining a level of personal autonomy. In response to the Mulroney government's child-care initiative, Getty stated in the legislature: Our initiative is to strengthen the family, to provide reasons why the family is stronger, why mothers will stay in the house with the family.... I get frustrated when most of the initiatives seem to be taking children out of the home or moving parents out of the home.31

John Oldring, the minister of family and social services, addressed the annual meeting of AFWUF in November 1989. In the question period he stated that a homosexual relationship does not constitute a family, that he was involved in a pro-life group in his constituency and that he did not support universal day care.32 Stockwell Day, an MLA and the first chair of the Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families and the current minister of labour in the Klein government, noted in an interview preceding the release of a Council report, that the council's statistics showed conclusively that children whose parents are divorced are more likely to have emotional and psychological problems that lead

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to drug abuse, crime and suicide than the children of couples who do not get divorced. "These statistics are the reality of what may happen to your kids should you choose divorce. "33

In regard to the issue of family violence, Premier Getty observed that the problem had not been solved by state spending. Instead, perversely, he argued that the issue should be addressed by a return to the foundation of the family itself.34 In addition to the limited appreciation of the reality of women's lives that such statements reveal, they also indicate a rethinking of the state's role in social service provision and the consideration of the family unit as a low-cost alternative. Rather than acknowledging a social obligation to ensure the welfare of citizens in the context of a widespread recession, the province turned, instead, to an emphasis on family support. By emphasizing the family as the solution to problems of poverty, substance abuse and violence, the government heralded a low-cost response to social ills that also had considerable moral force. With Ralph Klein's assumption of the premiership, this reclamation of the family in the interest of offsetting the costs of social service provision has become considerably more explicit. This "Ozzie and Harriet" conception of the family was also manifested in the Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families and the conference, hosted by the lieutenant-governor, that served as its inspiration. The knowledge and analysis of families that feminist groups had acquired over their years of activism were not, initially, welcome in this officially sanctioned forum, nor was much opportunity provided for open discussion. An ASWAC newsletter reporting on the event noted that only 3 of the 20 scheduled hours of the conference were devoted to discussion. It also notes that a number of organizations whose work focuses on reproductive rights and the status of women and children in poverty were initially excluded from the event.35 The Getty administration's most profound initiative in the rhetorical campaign to reclaim the traditional family, however, was the establishment of the premier's council. Chaired by a member of the Conservative caucus, with members appointed by the cabinet, and supported by a constituency of social groups that were much less suspicious of the provincial government and the Alberta state


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than the feminist groups to whom AACWI was to cater, the premier's council was, from the outset, much better suited to the task of reprivatizing the "runaway needs'7 politicized by feminist groups than AACWI proved to be. Some examples from the council's public consultations and publications should serve to demonstrate the particular character of its reprivatization discourse. The council asserted that its mandate was the product of a broadly representative (both geographically and ideologically) consultative process in which 3000 Albertans were given the opportunity to express their concerns about families. While it might have been possible to critique "the family" within that consultative process, the documents produced from the consultation offer no acknowledgment of such a critique. Indeed, the council declares that it "is guided in its mandate by the belief that the family has always been and remains the best environment in which the skills and values vital to a strong, democratic environment are acquired,"36 and that "the family is the single greatest influence on our lives, shaping who we are, how we feel about ourselves and how we approach the challenges of life."37 The list of participants suggests that more critical insights into the family and the character of citizenship might well have been put forward, but these insights were, apparently, deemed insufficiently representative to merit attention in the consultation summary or in the council's subsequent publications. The premier's council documents provide a number of examples of the dynamic between oppositional and reprivatization discourses outlined by Fraser. In the context of family form, feminist groups in the province had long challenged the nuclear family model implicit in many of the province's social policies. Criticism of the application of the "spouse-in-the-house" rule to women on social assistance (i.e., presuming that the presence of a man in the household requires his financial contribution to the care of the woman and her children); of the government's refusal to include protection on the grounds of sexual orientation in the province's human rights legislation; and of the widows' pension plan, which provided assistance to women between the ages of 55 and 64 whose spouses had died but not to women who had divorced or never married, suggests efforts on the part of feminist groups to install

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an appreciation in state policy for the range of relationships through which people organize their intimate lives. Interestingly, the premier's council begins virtually all of its documents with the claim that the government needs to recognize the diversity of Alberta families. On the face of it, such a claim suggests that the definition of the family employed by the council must be quite broad, although, interestingly, the closest the documents come is to claim that the definition of the family most frequently cited in their public consultations was "two or more persons related by birth, marriage, or adoption/'38 The documents do recognize that other, broader definitions exist, but there are many indications that "the best" family is the heterosexual, two-parent, nuclear model in which "traditional" gender roles are the norm. These indications range from the absence of any reference to same-sex couples to the claim that "a strong partnership between spouses is.. .important in modelling and teaching caring and loving behaviour to family members."39 Another indication of the preeminence of the nuclear family model is provided in an appendix listing the issues identified through the consultative process. Here we learn that the roles and responsibilities of family members can be categorized as nurturer, provider and contributor. Issues relating to the nurturer role include acknowledgment of the value of parenting and providing greater support, recognition and respect for stay-at-home mothers. In order to enhance the capacity of the provider role, the report identifies the need to increase the ability of a single income to meet basic family needs. As for contributors, that is, women employed in paid labour, the council observes: while many households require two earners...some families become two income households by choice rather than necessity. Some argue that this has chipped away at the family foundation by reducing family time and by placing an emphasis on accumulating possessions and material wealth to achieve happiness or success.40

By beginning their discussion of family roles from the perspective of appreciating family diversity, the premier's council takes up the oppositional discourse of provincial feminist groups surrounding the multiplicity of arrangements for one's intimate life.


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However, the council then turns this observation back into the nuclear family model—now couched in the gender-neutral terms of nurturer, provider and contributor. Similarly, while acknowledging that many families require two incomes to sustain them, the goal of families maintained by a single income earner is very much alive. This acknowledgment, however reluctant, also demonstrates Eraser's point regarding the tendency of reprivatization discourse to further politicize the oppositional claim by making the unarticulated assumptions of reprivatization discourse more explicit. In this case, the assumption is that the ideal family model is that of a two parent family with a single (male) income earner. Given that, by the late 1980s, 65-80 hours of work per week were required to sustain a family as opposed to 45 hours per week in the 1970s, the suggestion that women work simply to provide the family with luxury items is certainly worth contesting.41 Of course, the premier's council was neither an institution with much power nor could the council itself exercise any influence on the way people lived their lives. Its primary purpose seemed to be to provide the Getty government with some empirical support for the government's rhetorical position. The Klein government, by contrast, has embraced the family in terms that may be less rhetorically explicit, but have considerably more meaning for the organization of people's lives and women's lives in particular.

NEO-LIBERALISM AND THE FAMILY—"NOW YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON'T"

The debt and deficit reduction policies of the Klein government provide an excellent forum for observing the effects of neoliberalism on the politics of claims-making, particularly as it applies to notions of the traditional family and feminist activism. As Dacks, Green and Trimble have recently pointed out, the policies of the Klein government both assume and foster the notion that a woman's full-time focus should be the family. With this model in mind, the government can discount the burdens it places on working women and single mothers when it reduces social

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programs and cuts public sector employment in ways that disproportionately harm women.*2 While the nuclear family model is strongly implied in Klein's policies, as will be discussed below, the Klein government has moved with stealth to remove outward signs of the necessity of the family for neo-liberal policies and to displace the struggle between feminist and "pro-family" claims-makers from the public forum of the state. Extrapolating from Fraser, one can read this disengagement as a recognition of the tendency of reprivatization discourse to, contrary to its intent, actually further politicize the issues raised in oppositional discourse. The government's decision to disband the Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families in the summer of 1995 suggests a desire to overcome this dilemma. The chair of the council, Lyle Olberg, in discussing the decision to dismantle the council, provided the following rationale: We sat down with our board and we said: "You know, it's time that the state got out of the family. We've given it a good start in the International Year of the Family, but it's time that we got out. It's time to turn the baton over to families to allow them to control their own destiny."43 Similarly, the AACWI is also scheduled for disbanding in 1996 as per the legislation under which it was established. While the women's council has been asked to conduct public meetings with the province's women's groups in order to establish the appropriate vehicle through which their interests might be conveyed to government, the government's lengthy history of ignoring the council's recommendations and the responsible minister's own comments that "times have changed, women's groups have multiplied and grown in strength, and they can and want to speak for themselves to government without a publicly funded intermediary," suggest that the Klein government is attempting to put some distance between itself and feminist claims-makers.44 These efforts to depoliticize the debate between the competing conceptions of justice put forward by feminist groups and the "profamily" lobby are indicative of a larger tendency inherent in the


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neo-liberal state to avoid all issues that may incite competing claims regarding the substance of the collective good.45 This objective stems from a particular analysis of the crisis of "ungovernability" of the welfare state: the formation and politicization of various social groups and the challenges posed by these groups to the organization of the state and its role in the economy are at the root of this crisis. In order to re-establish some level of governability, then, the neoliberal state attempts to remake itself for the purposes of ensuring the efficacious functioning of the free market and to devolve from its role in compensating for the inequities that exist among citizens. Since proponents of the neo-liberal state are ill-disposed towards political conflict and debate, they argue that ridding the state of its redistributive functions and, hence, the need to articulate some inevitably contestatory notion of "the good" will allow for the imposition of a more lasting consensus around an apparently apolitical and minimalist notion of the state.46 If the state is no longer the site at which claims for democracy, equality and justice are to be made, it need no longer address the difficult moral questions with which politics is so intimately concerned. There is an obvious logical flaw in the assertion that the pursuit of state policies designed to facilitate the market is an endeavour which frees the state from normative concerns. The decision to intensify the state's role in facilitating the accumulation of capital is, itself, normative, and the policies which emerge from this endeavour are similarly laden with normative assumptions. Indeed, the argument that reducing the deficit must take precedence over all other social concerns is a clear articulation of the substance of the good. The presumption of the nuclear family form and the availability of women's unpaid labour to compensate for the caring work that has been abandoned through cuts to government services and employment are significant examples of the normative assumptions implicit in the neo-liberal state. Cuts to health care and education have relied on volunteer labour, primarily performed by women because of their flexible position in the labour force, in order to succeed. Hospital stays have been reduced, but the overall recovery time for many procedures remains the same. Hence, many patients are sent home requiring 24-hour care.47 The presumption here is that not only will

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someone be available to care for the patient,, but that the care-giver will actually have the skills with which to perform the required tasks. Nursing is, after all, a highly skilled profession, and to presume that a family member can do the job is both irresponsible and demeaning to the (female dominated) profession of nursing. Equally irresponsible are the premier's suggestion that educational program reductions can be addressed through the volunteer labour of parents and his decision to effect a 50 percent reduction in kindergarten funding.48 These cuts have cost teachers their jobs and have compromised the capacity of many other women to participate in the labour market as a result of their increased responsibilities for the education of their children. The Klein government's normative assumptions surrounding the nuclear family can also be detected in its treatment of single mothers on social assistance. While the government's efforts to implement a workfare scheme have suggested that single women with children are presumed to be workers rather than mothers, the absence of adequate child-care facilities, the low wage jobs in which many of these women are employed and the province's insistence on maintaining the minimum wage at $5.00 per hour, the second lowest in Canada,49 suggest that the only way for these women to attain a reasonable standard of living is to attach themselves to an employed man or return to their parental home. The offloading of state provision onto the private realm presumes that the family, but especially women, will take on responsibilities previously undertaken by the state. Drastic reductions to nursing care, decreasing resources for child-care and education and a growing emphasis on family support for elder care all impose new burdens on women's domestic labour. The assumption on the part of politicians and policy-makers is that women's labour is infinitely elastic.50 However, as Linda McDowell argues, the social speed-up that flows from increasing demands on both women's productive and reproductive work is not infinitely extendible.51 With the embarrassment of riches that have flowed into the coffers of the Alberta treasury as a result of a recent increase in natural gas prices, the Klein government's deficit elimination target has been achieved. Given the dire terms in which the province's


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finances were cast during the 1993 election, the insistence that considerable suffering would have to be endured and the hardship that many Albertans have withstood, the too hasty achievement of budget surpluses is likely to reignite the energies of many claimsmakers whose demands were sidelined in the drive for deficit elimination. It remains to be seen whether efforts to depoliticize feminist claims through the traditional family rhetoric of the Getty government and the policies of Klein's neo-liberal state will have a lasting effect on women's struggles for equality and justice.

ENDNOTES I would like to thank Caroline Andrew, Pat Armstrong, Pat Connelly and Linda Trimble for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its financial support. 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 90. Nancy Fraser, "Struggle Over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late-Capitalist Political Culture" in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 201. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 212. Expert discourse, at least as it is defined by Fraser, has played a less significant role in recent struggles over needs interpretation due to the perception of fiscal crisis and the decision to address this crisis through spending reductions. A weakened capacity for spending thus limits the possibility of establishing

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public programs to address the needs advanced by social groups and thus the opportunity to reframe these needs in the language of policy experts. Lise Gotell, "Policing Desire: Obscenity Law, Pornography Politics, and Feminism in Canada" in Janine Brodie, ed., Women and Canadian Public Policy (Toronto: Harcourt and Brace, 1996), pp. 292 and 300. See Carole Pateman "The Patriarchal Welfare State" in Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle, eds., Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions

(London: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 223-245; Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); and Joan Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism" in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 13448. Michelle Barrett and Mary Mclntosh, The Anti-Social Family, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 9. Linda Trimble, "The Politics of Gender in Modern Alberta" in Allan Tupper and Roger Gibbins, eds., Government and Politics in Alberta (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992), p. 233. The job of the secretariat was to act as an internal watchdog on government policy and legislation, advise the minister responsible for the status of women and provide a link to the community. See Government of Alberta news release, February 28, 1984. The interdepartmental committee on women's issues was composed of senior bureaucrats from key departments. Minutes of the committee's meetings and memos between the director of the Women's Secretariat and the minister responsible for women's issues indicate that the interdepartmental committee held monthly meetings for one year and then continued on an ad hoc basis for another six months while the cabinet committee on women's issues only met twice. Edmonton Journal 16 May 1986.

ASWAC to Mary LeMessurier (minister of culture), 5 January 1982, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton. Les Young (minister of labour and minister responsible for women's issues) to Al Kennedy (associate director, planning and research, Alberta labour) 1 March 1982, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton. Al Kennedy to Les Young 25 March 1982, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton. Ken Rostad to Elaine McCoy, 18 November 1987, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton.


2b 27

28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39

41

42

43 44 45

46

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Ibid. Elaine McCoy to Ken Rostad, 17 December 1987, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton. Elaine McCoy to Patricia Good, 16 December 1987, Women's Secretariat Documents, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton. Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, Alberta, A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1990), p. 106. Statistics Canada, Labour Force Annual Averages. Cited in Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, The Double Ghetto: Canadian Women and Their Segregated Work, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), p. 49. Calgary Herald 12 June 1988. Alberta Report 13 November 1989. Financial Post Daily 13/15 June 1992. Alberta Legislative Assembly, Debates, 29 June 1992. Alberta Status of Women Action Committee Newsletter, May 1990. Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families, Directions for the Future (Edmonton: Government of Alberta, 1992), p. 3. Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families, Family Policy Grid (Edmonton: Government of Alberta, 1992), p. 6. Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families, Albertans Speak Out About Families (Edmonton: Government of Alberta, 1992), p. 6. Premier's Council in Support of Alberta Families, Perspectives on Family WellBeing (Edmonton, Government of Alberta, 1993), p. 2. Albertans Speak Out About Families, p. 10. Judy Fudge, "Fragmentation and Feminization: The Challenge of Equity for Labour Relations Policy" in Janine Brodie, ed., Women and Canadian Public Policy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 67. Gurston Dacks, Joyce Green and Linda Trimble, "Road Kill: Women in Alberta's Drive Toward Deficit Elimination" in Trevor Harrison and Gordon Laxer, eds., The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), p. 282. Alberta Legislative Assembly, Debates, I March 1995, p. 293. Ibid., 27 March 1995, p. 839. See Anna Yeatman, Postmodern Revisionings of the Political (New York: Routledge, 1994). See Robert Devigne, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. chps. 3 and 4.

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Dacks, Green and Trimble, "Road Kill.../' p. 277. Laurie Adkin, "Life in Kleinland: Democratic Resistance to Folksy Fascism," Canadian Dimension 25 (April-May 1995), p. 35. Dacks, Green and Trimble, "Road Kill.../' p. 282. Isabella Bakker, "Engendering Macro-economic Policy Reform in the Era of Global Restructuring and Adjustment" in idem (ed.), The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (London: Zed Books, 1994), p. 8. Linda McDowell, "Gender Divisions in a Post-Fordist Era: New Contradictions or the Same Old Story?" in Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle, eds., Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 192.

CHAPTER 8

The Dilemma of Liberal Citizenship: Women and Social Assistance Reform in the 1990s {CATHERINE SCOTT

he women's movement has occupied a central role in the struggle around citizenship rights. Over the course of two and a half centuries, women have challenged the universality of democratic language, highlighting not only the ways in which women have been excluded from citizenship but the ways in which different groups of women—at different points in time—have been included. Instead of celebrating universal equality of freedom, women's movements have exposed a structure of "distinctions... which limits the extent to which citizenship rights have brought full inclusion/'1 These patterns of exclusion and inclusion have engendered and structured ongoing struggles to redefine the scope of citizenship. My interest in this article is to examine how women have been included in the Canadian welfare state. Canada has been classified as a liberal welfare state, one which is characterized by a clear distinction between core welfare programs, access to which is conditional on regular employment, and residual programs that provide a limited version of T.H. Marshall's social citizenship rights.2 Access to these programs reflects differential citizenship rights. Core welfare state programs have been designed to accommodate the life cycle of the male industrial worker; thus, men have historically made claims on the state on the basis of paid work. By contrast,

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women have generally been written into the welfare state either as the wives of core sector workers or as mothers. This second class of claims is associated with the lower benefits and stringent eligibility requirements of residual welfare programs like social assistance. The divide between these two welfare systems, however, has begun to blur over the past 20 years. Provincial social assistance reform has emerged as pivotal in redefining the gendered character of social citizenship. These reform efforts represent a paradigmatic shift in the social construction of citizenship, revealing the contradictions and tensions inherent in the specific ways in which women have been written into the liberal polity.3 Specifically, I argue that the "sanctity of motherhood" no longer shields women from the market; rather, a new vision of a "gender-neutral workercitizen" has emerged in proposals to transform social assistance. Potential gains from efforts to establish parity between men and women, however, are uncertain as women do not make claims on the same footing as do men. In the absence of labour market supports, the process of individuation at work here will simply confine women to competition with men on the margins of the labour market. The first section of the article lays out the background of Canada's liberal welfare state. The second section introduces my case study: the social assistance system in Ontario and the reform initiatives of the past decade. These developments emphasize the contradictions associated with seeking greater economic and social autonomy for different classes of women within the context of a liberal welfare state. In the conclusion, I discuss the dilemmas created for women when social entitlements are linked exclusively to one's status as independent wage earner.

CANADA'S LIBERAL WELFARE STATE REGIME

The Canadian welfare state has been characterized as a liberal welfare state regime. The liberal regime operates to provide a minimal level of assistance to those most in need. It is a model in which, implicitly and explicitly, "the progress of social reform has

THE DILEMMA OF LIBERAL CITIZENSHIP

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been severely circumscribed by traditional work-ethic norms/' entitlement regulations are strict, benefits are typically modest. In addition, "the state encourages the market, either passively—by guaranteeing only minimum benefits —or actively—by subsidizing private welfare schemes."4 Those studying the process of welfare state development in Canada—certainly the history of social assistance—have generally agreed with this classification as it applies to Canadian income security programs.5 By international standards, Canada is indeed a low social welfare spender: public expenditure on income maintenance, health and education as a proportion of GDP—19 percent in 1990 —remains below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 23 percent.6 This low standing is in large measure due to the comparatively impoverished status of the income security system in terms of scope of eligibility, systemic disincentives to take-up and the degree to which benefits approximate market earnings. The focus on "residual" income security programs is not unique to Canada or other English-speaking countries. Relief provision was a critical feature of the first efforts to create and extend the market economy in other European countries as well. As Polanyi pointed out in The Great Transformation, human labour power is not a commodity like others. Labour markets need welfare states. The difficulty lies in structuring collective provision so as to encourage labour market participation. The response to this historically specific problem of production —and reproduction —was the "social assistance welfare state." John Myles describes this welfare state in the following manner: This was a welfare state for the poor, designed to allow individuals and families to subsist when the main bread-winner fell out of the labour market through unemployment, sickness, disability or old age. Social assistance welfare states provided very low, subsistence benefits, typically used a great deal of means-testing, drew heavily on distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, and were very "flexible" (i.e. gave discretion to local authorities to adjust benefits and eligibility criteria to local labour market conditions.)8

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The social assistance welfare state represented an uneasy compromise between civil rights and social rights in the nineteenth century. The emergence of civil rights and its associated individual freedoms in the eighteenth century to a large extent supplanted the complex of duties and obligations that tied members of "feudal" communities together. The Poor Law reforms of 1834, for example, marked a clear break from community obligation to support the poor. Indeed, those who turned to workhouses out of economic desperation were forced to give up any and all rights of citizenship. It was argued that since individuals were free to pursue their own interests in a competitive market economy, it followed that social rights were unnecessary. Yet, in the face of growing poverty and destitution and, most importantly, given the extension of political rights to the working classes, states were pressured to proffer minimal protection to the impoverished. The initial price of protection, however, was exclusion from emerging forms of citizenship. In the Canadian case, the development of social assistance followed this general pattern. The deep roots of liberalism in Canada, the federal political structure and the circumscribed role of class-based, gender-based and other progressive movements have all contributed to the emergence of a liberal welfare regime. These factors go some way towards explaining why Canada did not fully develop a comprehensive welfare state in the post-war period as part of its consolidation of Fordist relations of production. Rather, the Canadian welfare state developed in fits and starts. After World War II, the federal state proceeded to institute some nationwide welfare programs, namely unemployment insurance, family allowances and housing—all targeted principally at mothers and veterans. The rest, including pensions and health care, was initially left to negotiation between business and unionized workers or, alternately, for the balance of the population, to the private market. Reform initiatives during the 1960s and early 1970s extended the scope of the welfare state to include public health insurance, the introduction of maternity benefits and the extension of unemployment insurance. However, these reforms stopped short of developments in Europe where the principles of universality and wage replacement were embraced.9


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The Canadian case provides ample evidence of differentiated citizenship rights at the heart of the welfare state. Historically, there has been a clear distinction between social rights available to those in regular employment and those on the margins of the economy who must rely on public programs such as social assistance. That is to say, workers in the core employment sectors enjoyed access to both public and private —state subsidized—benefits; workers in the secondary or tertiary sectors, and those who did not participate in the paid labour force at all, had to rely exclusively on limited public benefits.10 Core workers continue to make claims on the state, market and family on the basis of their status as independent workers. By contrast, low-wage and unpaid workers and citizens are forced to bring claims against limited citizenship rights on the basis of their subordinate status. This pattern of stratification, typical of liberal welfare regimes, "blends a relative equality of poverty among state welfare recipients, market differentiated welfare among the majorities, and a class-based dualism between the two/'11 Liberal welfare regimes also erect a stratification order between women and men—in the market, the family and within the state itself—that cuts across welfare regime types. Because governments attached greater importance to developing insurance schemes that work via the labour market, the majority of women working in the home were at a significant disadvantage. The choice was to treat women either as workers —that is, the "same as men"—or to treat women as wives and mothers—that is, "different from men." Most welfare systems embraced the latter. The result, according to Jane Lewis and Ilona Ostner, has been that women's substantial contributions to welfare, particularly their unpaid contribution, have been ignored and with them the direct entitlements that should have been their due; and second, that women's needs have been defined in terms of motherhood as a social function rather than on the basis of individual need.12

The evolution of the male breadwinner/female care-giver norm has varied cross-nationally, each country reflecting a distinctive understanding of gender relations and its practices (and other social relations as well), forged through political struggle in one place

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and at one point in time.13 In Canada, the two-tier insurance/ assistance system that developed also reflected the prevailing male breadwinner family ideal. The social construction of women as wives and mothers clearly informed the development of the social assistance system, the subject of this article. Indeed, this dual pattern of stratification—between workers and non-workers, between men and women—was institutionally reproduced through the post-war period of welfare state expansion, that is until the late 1960s when the stable economic and social environment that had fostered postwar prosperity began to crumble. As the balance of power relations underlying the economic and social structure shifted, the basis of the gender regime was similarly undermined. This process is ongoing; not only is the structure of entitlement to the rights of citizenship being challenged but the very boundaries of politics and the right of some actors to make claims are being contested as well. Two sets of factors came together to challenge the definition of welfare entitlement and, more specifically, the basis of women's claims as mothers in the social assistance program. First, the economic crisis evident in the late 1960s undermined the viability of the post-war welfare state and the accumulation regime upon which it was based. The outward signs of economic crisis were decreasing levels of economic productivity and job creation in core goods-producing industries and the simultaneous rise of interest rates and unemployment. The failure of traditional Keynesian economic tools, notably wage and price controls in 1975, opened the door to proponents of monetarism. The context was set for a new production paradigm, one predicated on higher levels of unemployment and underemployment and increased polarization in the labour market. One important feature of the new economy has been the drive for more flexible forms of employment in order to achieve higher levels of productivity, while driving down the costs of labour and other factors of production. Indeed, the growing polarization of the labour market in terms of skills, job security and earnings is evidence that the capitalist classes have enjoyed some success in liberating market forces from the "fetters" of state regulation and the labour unions. Studies that have attempted to chart the changing dynamics of the labour market concur that two quite distinct poles


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of employment growth have emerged over the past decade: "one includes highly skilled, well-compensated, stable jobs; the other consists of nonstandard jobs14 with relatively low levels of compensation and stability."15 The trend toward poor-quality employment with markedly lower skills levels, evident in the retail and personal services sectors, has set the course for other sectors of the economy. State policy at the national and provincial levels has supported this shift to a low-wage economy. The ratification of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and the North American Free Trade Agreement has been one of the most significant measures, firmly establishing trade policy as the motor of economic development and, consequently, exposing the Canadian economy to the American variant of neo-liberalism. Of specific note for this article, provincial and federal governments have also attempted to rationalize and restructure the welfare state so as 1) to reduce the degree of protection that the Keynesian welfare state has afforded workers, and 2) to reduce the scope of the welfare state and levels of state expenditures. Governments have systematically undertaken to reduce individual and program transfers, to contract out staterun services to private low-wage entrepreneurs, to undermine the collective bargaining process, and to discipline state sector workers, actions which have eroded the security of core workers, many of whom are employed in the state sector. To some extent, these types of policies and practices would appear entirely consistent with the structure of liberal welfare regimes. Data on the work patterns of welfare recipients indicate that many already move back and forth between low-wage employment and social assistance. For example, between 1988 and 1990, 61 percent of the 1.1 million welfare recipients of working age were employed for varying periods of time across Canada.16 What has changed, however, is "the growing recognition and consensus that in order to peripheralize the core, it is probably necessary and desirable to modernize the periphery —to make it more inhabitable and to build bridges between low-wage jobs in the periphery and the world of social assistance."17 Proposals to reform social assistance in Ontario are all involved, to varying degrees, in advancing this general agenda: to reduce work

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disincentives, maintain the supply of low-wage labour through wage supplementation and to increase labour flexibility at the bottom of the income scale. They form part of a "dualization-highemployment" strategy to achieve greater economic growth.18 The difficulty with the dualization-high-employment strategy as a whole is that it encourages the expansion of low-wage, lowskill industries at the expense of high-wage, high-skill alternatives, in effect by subsidizing low-wage employers. Rather than solving the problems of peripheral employment, facilitating the transition between social assistance and the low-wage economy reproduces and further exacerbates existing dualisms that structure the labour market and the liberal welfare state. The main consequences of efforts to restructure the welfare state along the lines of this strategy will be significant for women. This observation points to a second set of factors which are changing the nature of women's claims on the state, namely the large-scale entry of women into the paid labour force. The participation rate of women in the labour market has increased significantly since I960.19 In 1994, 57.6 percent of women aged 15 and over were active in the labour market. The most marked increase has been among married women, especially those with young children. Looking at employed workers, 42.4 percent of mothers with preschool children held jobs in 1981. In 1994, the percentage was 59.2. The increase for mothers with children between the ages of 6 and 15 was in the order of 12 percentage points, from 56.6 percent in 1981 to 68.6 percent in 1994.20 These figures demonstrate the now permanent attachment of Canadian women to the labour market. The rise in women's labour force participation coincides with a marked increase in service employment, the traditional site of women's employment. Between 1967 and 1988, service employment represented roughly 90 percent of employment growth;21 consequently, demand for female labour has been very strong. At the same time, declining real family incomes over the period propelled women into the labour market. Women had little choice but to enter the paid labour force if the family was to maintain its standard of living. A single male breadwinner family model was


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no longer feasible.22 Changing demographic factors such as the rise of marriage breakdown and the increase in female-headed, loneparent families (discussed below) were also important in this context. Marriage no longer offers the economic security that it once did; women increasingly have come to view employment as the principal means of economic independence—within and outside of marriage. Participation in the paid labour force has not been a complete success for women. Isabella Bakker notes: on the one hand, an enormous growth in female labour force activity and, on the other hand, an intensified segregation of women into secondary, low-wage jobs. Women as a group have more work but it is often poorly paid, unprotected and part-time, because restructuring has brought fewer "good jobs" in its wake?2

In effect, economic restructuring is exacerbating existing cleavages in the labour market, in this case gender cleavages, leading to greater economic insecurity among workers trapped at the bottom of the labour market. As the economy generates more "women's work," women find themselves locked into traditional industrial and occupation ghettos. Taken together, the changing character of the economy and the life course of women are challenging the basis of women's claims on the state. As a neo-liberal vision of state and economy has taken hold and the scope of the welfare state has been rolled back, claims of entitlement based on gender difference are being redefined. In the social assistance program, the classic example of difference-based entitlement, a new model of a gender-neutral worker-citizen has emerged. The trend toward greater individuation holds out promise to establish greater equality between men and women by linking entitlement to the individual rather than the position of wife or mother within the family. As Wendy McKeen argues: family-based social policy reinforces the prescription of dependency for women and helps construct a stereotype, against which all women are measured, and with which they are encouraged to

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identify. It contributes to the social construction and self-perception of women as having merely "secondary" roles in the paid labour force.2' Moving entitlement away from a rigid definition of women as different from men to a definition that is based on individual attribute would immediately benefit women by highlighting their needs outside of the family context. It is a strategy that fundamentally challenges the gender division of labour reproduced at the level of family, market and state. In effect, by shifting the focus to the relationship between women and the labour market, McKeen concludes, a strategy of individuation provides a better basis for seeking greater social, economic and personal autonomy. Challenging difference-based entitlement by pursuing individuation is a long-term strategy. In the short term, however, it presents women with a dilemma. The move to greater gender neutrality in the social assistance system is now conducted in the context of neo-liberal economic restructuring, at a point when the state aims to drastically curtail the entitlement claims of both core workers and those on the periphery. In Ontario today, efforts to modernize the periphery portend equality of poverty for growing numbers of both men and women.

SOCIAL ASSISTANCE IN ONTARIO

In 1986, the newly elected Liberal Party of Ontario launched a major review of the social assistance program. There had been no major changes to the structure of the program since the late 1960s. The new Liberal minister of community and social services, John Sweeney, stated at the time: Those statutes were designed for a different age —a time of lower unemployment, a time when most women stayed home, the great majority of families had two parents, and fathers were typically the sole wage earners in the family. For many, this is not the reality of life in Ontario in 1986.25


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The Liberal review began the formal process of change, articulating new ideas about the entitlement of women in the program and their position vis-a-vis the welfare state. The social assistance program in Ontario is comprised of two programs: Family Benefits (1967) administered by the province and General Welfare Assistance (1958) administered by municipalities and Indian bands. The division here directly reflects the historical division of the poor into categories of "deserving" and "undeserving." Family Benefits (FB) provides assistance on a longterm basis to single-parent families with little or no wage income, to disabled adults and their families, to older adults under 65 years, to disabled children and children in foster care. Benefits vary by family size and the number and age of dependents. A shelter subsidy is also available to all recipients. Supplementary assistance, extended at the discretion of welfare officers, provides one-time funding for items such as winter clothing, medical devices and first and last month's rent. Historically, benefits in this program have been richer than those provided under General Welfare Assistance (GWA). GWA was designed to provide basic financial support to people in short-term or emergency need due to unemployment, family breakdown or illness. Benefit levels are determined by calculating the maximum benefit to which an individual is entitled, less any income from other sources. The level is adjusted for family size and the number of dependents. GWA recipients are also eligible for the shelter subsidy and supplementary benefits, again at the discretion of municipal administrators. Recipients who are declared "employable" must demonstrate a willingness to find work in order to qualify for benefits. This clear division between categories of the poor reflects their different legislative histories. Mother's allowance, the precursor to the FB program, was introduced in 1920. It was the first instance of identifying a sub-group of the poor for financial aid. Certainly all mothers were not eligible for this benefit; rather it was targeted to destitute widows of World War I soldiers who, through "no fault of their own," were attempting to raise their children in dire poverty.

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This program reflected changing ideas about motherhood and women's role as principal caregivers. The discourse of a bourgeois breadwinner family ideal was at work here as a force in redefining the relationship between state and citizen. Single mothers posed a particularly difficult problem, living with their children outside of accepted norms. In order to square this circle, the idea of mothercitizen was introduced, but only for one group of "deserving" poor mothers, and then, only if they were considered "fit and suitable/7 In effect, women claimed this benefit in their roles as wives of soldier-citizens. It would be many years before all poor mothers were eligible for mother's allowance.26 Social assistance is the classic example of how women were identified with the social function of mothering, rather than in their capacity as individual citizens or as workers. Perhaps the clearest expression of this view was the provision that excluded women from the program if they were living with men. The "man about the house" rule, repealed only in 1987, was the most explicit example of the hegemonic power of the male breadwinner ideology; this rule also directly facilitated the state's active regulation of the "deserving" mothers who benefited from public largesse. In that these benefits were targeted to support the function of mothering, single mothers on the program were never formally expected to work. Women's categorical exclusion from the labour market has been a defining feature of social assistance in Ontario until recently. Early benefits however were quite low; at $35 a month, many single mothers were encouraged to supplement their income with paid part-time work. Welfare administrators initially felt that paid labour would strengthen the work ethic among poor women and their children. It was not until after World War II that even part-time work was discouraged as the government sought to accommodate returning soldiers in the labour market.27 At that point, the province introduced new regulations establishing limits to the hours per month single mothers were allowed to work. Tax back rates of 100 percent on any earned income and loss of other benefits and services available to "welfare mothers" have also effectively discouraged participation in the labour market. In the wake of the social and economic changes of the 1960s and 1970s, the position of women on the welfare caseload, the large majority of whom are single mothers, led governments to question


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the need for support. In particular, the provincial government has been concerned with the "ongoing growth in the social assistance caseload in the face of declining unemployment"28 and its attendant drain on the budget. Between 1969 and 1987, the FB caseload increased 175 percent while GWA cases went up 180 percent. These numbers have continued to rise in the 1990s, reflecting the depth of the 1990-92 recession. As a result, Ontario spent $6.7 billion to support over 1.3 million Ontario residents on the social assistance program in the 1994-95 fiscal year, roughly 13 percent of the total provincial budget. Fundamental changes in the economic and social structure have placed incredible stress on the residual safety net; consequently, both the Liberals in 1986 and the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1991 initiated projects to "modernize" social assistance. Two groups have drawn particular concern: lone-parent families and single "employables." The number of lone-parent families on FB grew 241 percent from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.29 The increase reflects both the rising numbers of lone-parent families, the clear majority of whom are headed by women, in the population as a whole (from 9 percent of all Canadian families in 1961 to 16.4 percent in 199130) and the high rates of poverty within this group. Sixty-one percent of female-headed, lone-parent families fell below the poverty line in 1991 compared to just 10 percent of two-parent families with children.31 The high incidence of poverty is a reflection of the fact that many single mothers are unemployed, unable to carry the costs and responsibilities of paid work and child care. Single mothers with children under 16 are less likely to be employed than women in two-parent families—52 percent of single mothers as compared to 65 percent of women in two-parent families in 1991. The employment figure for single mothers has in fact dropped since 1981 from 54 to 52 percent; by contrast, the number of employed women in two-parent families has increased substantially over the decade, from 49 to 65 percent.32 As a result of their poor standing in the labour market, lack of adequate supports such as affordable child care and often exclusive responsibility for their children, many single mothers are forced to turn to social assistance for financial

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support; one study has estimated that over one-third of all single mothers in Ontario receive social assistance; that figure is now closer to four in ten.33 The largest increase in social assistance caseload, however, was among single employables: since 1969, this group has grown by 800 percent, the largest increase after the 1981-82 recession.34 It has been suggested that the caseload has grown despite the decline in unemployment in the mid 1980s because many manual and lowskilled jobs were eliminated during the recession. Young people with low skill levels and short work histories and older displaced workers turned to social assistance through the 1980s as companies downsized. These trends have intensified during the recent economic recession of 1990-92. In 1987, the unemployed made up 20 percent of social assistance cases in 1987; in 1992, that figure had increased to 36 percent.35 Thus, growing long-term caseloads, especially in the categories of single employables and single mothers, and resultant expenditures have prompted governments to seek alternatives that respond to economic restructuring and contain pressure on the tax and transfer system. There are of course alternative strategies to address the breakdown of the Keynesian inspired policies that supported the Canadian welfare state of the post-war years. To date, however, the Canadian state has chosen to pursue a "dualization-high-employment" strategy. In this process, the basis of women's entitlement as mothers in the social assistance program is being redefined towards greater gender neutrality.

SARC TO TURNING POINT

This discursive shift was first evident in the Social Assistance Review Committee's (SARC) Transitions report presented to the Liberal government in 1988. Transitions argued for a unified welfare system based on the principle of economic need in the first instance. The committee's stated goal was to create a truly residual social assistance system where "no one in the labour force should need to turn to social assistance for help in making ends meet."36


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We believe that an essential starting point is an acceptance of a collective obligation to provide access to life's opportunities to all residents of Ontario. This leads to an overriding objective for social assistance: to help those most in need to make the transition from exclusion to full membership in the broader community:"7 To achieve this end, the committee proposed a separate disability insurance program, a child benefit for all low-income families and an income supplement program for the working poor. The single criteria for the remaining adult benefit would be economic need; emphasis would be placed on integrating these individuals into "day-to-day life in the community" through a process of opportunity planning. Transitions was hailed as one of the most extensive reviews of income security in Canada, supported by anti-poverty activists and business representatives alike. Its vision stood in stark contrast to prevailing ideas at the federal level and among other provinces that social assistance be directly tied to labour market participation for the majority of recipients. While acknowledging that there needed to be greater effort and coordination to facilitate the movement of social assistance recipients into the labour market, these programs were to be voluntary in character; the committee considered it imperative that need be the overriding criterion for eligibility. In 1989, the Liberal government responded with a number of interim changes to the system as a prelude to a broader reform project envisioned in Transitions. These changes fell into three broad groups: 1) eliminating barriers to employment; 2) improving benefit levels; and 3) addressing inequities between the 22 different categories of recipients. The first component was the most ambitious. The government introduced the Supports to Employment Program (STEP) to increase financial incentives for single mothers to work. Building on earlier employment initiatives, STEP was designed to address the difficulties single mothers experience entering the labour force such as the cost of child care and strict earnings exemptions. The program presented a package of changes including deductions for child-care

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expenses to a certain level, the removal of the 120 hour per month limit on the number of hours that single mothers could work, a guaranteed exemption of at least 20 percent of net earnings on top of a flat-rate exemption,38 and a limited extension of health and drug benefits to recipients who leave the program. The government also moved to improve funding to employment support and training programs for all social assistance recipients. The second group of reforms involved improving benefit levels. Shelter benefits and rates for children were restructured and increased for both the FB and GWA programs, and a general rate increase of 5 percent in 1989 and 6 percent in 1990 was introduced. With these changes, the income of social assistance recipients improved significantly; the benefit levels, however, were still below the poverty line. Lastly, the Liberal reforms attempted to address the historic inequities between different categories of recipients. Some of these changes include raising the level of benefits for single men age 60 to 64 years to the level paid to single women of the same age, increasing the rate for individuals over 65 years who are not eligible for the federal Old Age Security pension, and establishing the same benefit level and types of supplementary benefits for children under the FB and GWA programs. Transitions attempted to construct a progressive vision of a new social assistance regime, one that embraced the changing economic and social realities of the 1980s. It combined an emphasis on improving the employability of social assistance recipients with the recognition of economic need as the first principle of eligibility. In keeping with its liberal roots, it attempted to simplify the complex categories of entitlement, including the social function of mothering, into a unified, individually based system. In so doing, the SARC report captured the intent of a new generation of policy-makers to redefine single mothers as employable, an idea that came to fruition under the New Democratic government. After the 1990 provincial election, the New Democratic government hastened to continue the implementation of Transitions. It convened the Advisory Group on New Social Assistance Legislation, under the direction of Allan Moscovitch, to translate


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the vision of SARC into concrete reform. This group produced two studies: Back on Track (1991) and Time for Action (1992). The first identified further changes to the existing system, similar to those implemented by the Liberals in 1989, as a prelude to the creation of new social assistance legislation outlined in the second. The government published its own plans for reform, Turning Point, in 1993. In an apparent about-face, the government shifted the focus from individual economic need to labour market participation. Transitions stated that the principal objective of social assistance must be "to ensure that individuals are able to make the transition from dependence to autonomy, and from exclusion on the margins of society to integration within the mainstream of community life."39 Turning Point qualified this general statement: it asserted that the first goal of social assistance should be to "assist people in moving as quickly as possible back to work/'40 The system should be designed, then, to promote independence by encouraging job preparation and to provide fair treatment to all low-income families, including the working poor.41 To this end, the NDP government proposed to introduce a separate Ontario Child Income Program (OCIP) and an Ontario Adult Benefit (OAB). OCIP was designed to address child poverty. All low-income families would be eligible to receive the monthly benefit which would vary according to income level and the number of children in the family. The OAB would provide a uniform benefit to cover the costs of basic needs, including shelter, the level of which would be set in relation to the province's minimum wage rate. The benefit would be available to those "in transition to employment" as well as those individuals with long-term financial need. The proposal suggested that a financial top-up would be provided to the disabled and other groups who are classified as "unable to work." It was not stated whether parenting young children would continue to exempt single mothers from work requirements. In order to help adults make the transition to work, an employment planning system called Job Link was suggested. Individuals who participated would have their OAB cheque replaced by an Employment and Training Allowance (ETA) that would cover basic needs and the added cost of actively preparing for

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employment, set out in individual education and training plans. The government made a commitment to place 100,000 social assistance recipients in educational and training institutions as a part of this program. A number of factors prompted the NDP leadership to reconsider the design of social assistance, the most critical being severe revenue shortfall during the recession. Short-term deficits rose substantially between 1990 and 1993 in Ontario; the situation was compounded by federal efforts to constrain inflation on the one hand and government spending on the other. Changes in the unemployment insurance program, for instance, limiting eligibility and benefit levels forced many more people onto the provincial welfare roles. Similarly, the federal government's unilateral action to limit payments to Ontario under the Canada Assistance Plan in 1989 resulted in a total loss of $3.3 billion dollars between 1989 and 1993 for programs to those "in need/7 including social assistance.42 The New Democratic government was under intensive pressure to cut social spending in order to contain the growth of the provincial debt. In the face of opposition from its historical constituency of progressive groups, the government scaled back the scope of welfare reform. The leadership felt that the SARC reforms had not only failed but had exacerbated problems in the system.43 In fact, since the first round of reforms following the publication of Back on Track in 1991, the government had quietly sought ways to cut the system back. In March 1994, due to budget constraints, the minister of community and social services announced that plans for reform were being shelved with the exception of the Job Link proposal. Following this announcement, he reported that the province was preparing to hire 270 investigators to review 1.3 million current cases in an effort "to curb abuse and shave about $50 million from the welfare budget/'44

THE NEW WORKER-CITIZEN

The Ontario reforms, not surprisingly, reflect the contradictions and tensions of this period of economic and social restructuring; as such, they illustrate the familiar clash between the extension of civil


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rights and social rights that has shaped the development of liberal welfare regimes. In liberal regimes, state protection has typically been stintingly afforded to those groups of individuals on the basis of difference, that is difference from a white, male, independent worker. This structure of difference has supported a specific model of productive and reproductive relations. It is in the process of being redefined as liberal states attempt to break down the barriers between the core and peripheral sectors of the labour market. Social citizenship is being reconstructed through the social assistance reform process. Since 1988, reform proposals have attempted to introduce greater uniformity in the system, efforts in large part motivated by the need to bring legislation into compliance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) ,45 This has entailed systematically identifying inconsistencies between Family Benefits and General Welfare Assistance in order to erase the historical boundaries between the "deserving" and " undeserving" poor, and attempting to achieve a greater measure of equality in terms of access to resources between different groups of the poor. These efforts to change the terms of eligibility and conditionality of the program have revealed the contradictions of liberal citizenship for women captured in the embrace of a genderneutral worker-citizen. We see the problems inherent in moving to a gender-neutral construction of recipient in the NDP proposal for the Ontario Adult Benefit in Turning Point. The goal of this program is to provide a basic benefit for all adult applicants. A financial top-up will be available for those who are unable to work; for the most part, this group will probably consist of individuals with a significant disability. Other adults will be referred to the Job Link program. Individuals who are accepted into educational or training programs will receive an enriched benefit to support their "employment preparation" activities. The new system will clearly divide those who "want to work," those who are "unable to work" and those who "won't work." In keeping with the drive to eliminate difference within the program, the proposals were framed in gender-neutral language. Thus women are entitled as individuals to seek assistance on the same grounds as men. Similarly, they are expected to participate in

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employment preparation activities "just like men." In developing a model of gender-neutral entitlements, these proposals obscure structural inequalities that continue to shape women's lives. In this, the social assistance reform proposals are similar to other initiatives such as equal employment legislation. This type of legislation provides the opportunity for women and members of other historically disadvantaged groups to pursue formal equality in the labour market by providing the means to seek redress, but it has done little to change the pervasive structural inequalities that create such disparities in the first place. Most women who turn to social assistance need financial assistance to support their families. In many cases, they have fallen into poverty after a divorce or separation and cannot afford to raise their children relying exclusively on market earnings. While the social assistance system attempts to address these realities, in a stigmatizing fashion, it is arguable whether a gender-neutral social assistance system will better serve women's interests. The proposal to create a separate Ontario Child Benefit for all low-income families is interesting in this regard.46 On the face of it, the intent to provide an income-tested transfer to all low-income families is a positive step towards addressing child poverty. One of the express purposes is to create a system of family support that is not associated with welfare. Yet, separating the children's benefit from the adult's benefit arguably contributes to the view of women as just "like men." Separating the benefit structure denies the reality that children live in families and that women retain the primary responsibility for their care. This is not to say that the reform proposals adopt an exclusively liberal view of the independent worker or, in this case, the independent recipient. There is an effort to recognize the genderspecific barriers that women face in seeking and maintaining employment. The Supports to Employment Program, one of the innovations proposed in Transitions — the report prepared for the Liberal government in 1988—provides child-care deductions for single mothers in educational or training programs. Beginning in 1991, the NDP government sought to expand the child-care system in Ontario as a key plank in their economic recovery strategy. Child care was explicitly positioned as an economic policy to assist women


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in the labour market. In concrete terms, the government increased the number of child-care subsidies available to low-income families, including those on social assistance. More generally, the NDP amended existing pay equity legislation to extend coverage to larger numbers of working women and introduced employment equity legislation to improve employment opportunities for women and other disadvantaged groups. These policies pointed to the recognition of a structure of inequality that impoverishes women's lives and the lives of their families; as such these labour market initiatives challenged the supposed neutrality of employment and wage distribution. Contradictions are evident, then, in the discursive positioning of women in social assistance reform. As I have argued, the debate about the treatment of single mothers revolves around the classic feminist dilemma whether to pursue gender equality on the basis of sameness or difference. It is a strategic choice that feminists have sought to avoid. Conceivably, a system of welfare provision could be structured to equally value women's contribution as mothers. However, the benefits available to mothers in liberal regimes have typically been low, often forcing women to make the choice between work or welfare where women have been eligible for social assistance.47 Against the history of single mothers and the welfare system, the evidence of the "worker-citizen" model in Sweden appears attractive.48 Yet, if this is to be a recipe for success for women in other countries, the strategy of individuation—establishing parity between men and women as workers —must be accompanied by two other preconditions: "the provision of adequate social benefits whose entitlement is based on citizenship or residence; and a marginalization of means-tested programs where the family is the unit of benefits."49 Individuation in liberal regimes presents difficulties because it requires the elimination of supplements such as the children's benefit, often to the detriment of women who have limited entitlement as wives, as mothers or as workers with meagre earnings and benefits. In the case of social assistance in Ontario, constructing women's entitlement on the basis of their "potential" worker status

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can erode their ability to make claims on the basis of their needs as mothers, claims that reflect the ongoing reality of their lives. In the absence of other supports such as adequate child care and labour market measures to assist women, a policy of individuation will confine women to compete with men on the margins of the labour market. Indeed, current work on the polarization within the labour market seems to confirm this negative assessment. In a study of the Canadian labour market, Pat Armstrong has argued that while it would appear that the patterns of female and male employment have become increasingly similar, this trend has not necessarily improved the economic lot of women: [WJomen's and men's labour force experiences have become increasingly similar not simply because some women now have the kinds of good jobs traditionally held predominantly by men, but also because the labour force work of a growing number of men has become more like that traditionally done by women and because fewer women have alternatives to labour force work. The restructuring that is part of globalization has created more women's work in the market.50 Thus, feminization of the labour force is not necessarily a route to secure, well-paid employment; rather it has meant more women's work for some men. Efforts to redefine women's citizenship rights within the context of social assistance legislation converge with related attempts to transform the program so as to create greater flexibility in the lowwage labour market. We see this as well in the stated objective to eliminate discrimination between the working poor and transfer poor—the second theme of reform proposals. The rationale for establishing a separate Ontario Child Benefit, for example, is to address the perceived inequities of the existing system of children's benefits. Turning Point—tine NDFs own reform plan—claims that "the programs will ensure fairness in the treatment of all low-income households by eliminating the distinction between poor welfare families and working poor families."51 Indeed, one of the reasons underlying the introduction of work-seeking requirements for single


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mothers is that working poor mothers do not have access to the same level of benefits available to welfare mothers. Taken together, the move to establish equivalences between welfare recipients on the one hand, and between the working and transfer poor on the other, erode the potentially positive impact of integrating women into the labour market. Women are being commodified only to compete for a reduced share of the economic pie with men. Equality of opportunity in this instance would seem to imply the opportunity to be equally poor. The evidence of social assistance reform in Ontario remains problematic, caught in the dilemma of liberal citizenship. The emergence of a gender-neutral worker-citizen model of welfare provision appears to be a step toward modernizing the periphery, to facilitating the transition between means-tested programs and the low-wage labour market, further strengthening the division between "good jobs" and "bad jobs." In this picture, women are emerging as the new model citizen, that of flexible worker. It has been suggested that welfare reforms, specifically those that tie benefits to labour market participation, are reminiscent of nineteenth-century rather than twentieth-century social policy. The analysis presented here suggests that the extension of liberal rights through social assistance reforms may result in a roll back of social citizenship rights in the name of equality. The emphasis is shifted from making claims on the state to making claims of the market or family. In this way, the new gender-neutral worker-citizen of the social assistance program coincides with the strengthening of familybased income-testing that has ci^ been reintroduced in the unemployment insurance program. The ambiguity of citizenship rights in liberal polities is at the root of this critical contradiction.

POSTSCRIPT

Much has changed in Ontario since this article was written. In June 1995, the Progressive Conservative Party took power in Ontario and is now in the process of radically restructuring the social assistance program. The new government is moving quickly to act on promises made during the election campaign, a campaign that

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drew a sharp line between the rights of "taxpayers" and the welfare poor. Experience to date under the Conservative administration suggests that the new government is intent on stripping away the limited protection that social assistance afforded to the poor. Single mothers, in particular, have been targeted for some of the harshest treatment. Barely a month after election, the government announced a 21.6 percent reduction in social assistance benefits to most categories of recipients (with the exception of seniors and the disabled drawing Family Benefits) in order to cut a total of $1.4 billion from the program. Other program changes followed in quick succession, changes that in the words of the new minister of community and social services would target social assistance only to those with "genuine needs." In October, the government introduced tighter eligibility rules for 16- and 17-year-old claimants (0.5 percent of the current caseload) and persons with disabilities, making it much harder to qualify for assistance. In addition, the government is planning to cut back benefits to boarders, special payments for home heating and the $120-a-month shelter allowance for the homeless. Not surprisingly, the Conservatives are stepping up measures to police welfare recipients. A new "snitch line" was set up in October to encourage the public to report welfare fraud. (The only other phone line of this kind is in Manitoba.) In addition, the government is setting up a special team to review cases and to improve information sharing with the federal government and other provinces. There are plans to test a system whereby recipients would be required to pick up their cheques at welfare offices. The government announced that random home visits will become a condition of receiving assistance; refusal to submit to a visit will result in the cancellation of benefits. The government is also increasing, from one to three months, the time a person must wait for benefits after being fired from, or quitting, a job. In a move that will specifically affect single mothers, the province has reintroduced the "man-about-the-house" rule. Previously, a person on social assistance could live with a partner up to three years before the government considered the couple common-law and factored in the assets and income of the second person in calculating eligibility and benefits. In practice, this rule


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principally affected single mothers. Indeed, the three-year waiting period was introduced in 1987 in order to prevent a Charter challenge launched by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) on the grounds that the rule discriminated against single mothers on the basis of gender. The Harris government has eliminated the waiting period altogether, bringing the province into line with Alberta. This means that a single mother will not be able to qualify for the Family Benefit program (which pays higher benefits) if government workers determine that she is sharing her home and living expenses with a man, regardless of the man's inclination or ability to pay support. Four single mothers are taking the provincial government to court to challenge the constitutionality of the provision. Between October 1995 and January 1996, an estimated 5600 single mothers were cut off of FB or GWA, representing a total saving of $10 million according to government submissions to the court. The group lost the initial petition to suspend the man-about-the-house rule; the case will heard in June 1996. An earlier Charter challenge to the 21.6 percent cut in benefit levels was upheld by the provincial court. This case is being appealed. All of these measures, particularly the cut in benefit rates, are making life much more difficult for social assistance recipients. The Conservative government is clearly intent on making life on social assistance so unpalatable that recipients will seek out any type of employment, under any conditions. Indeed, the majority of recipients may have to take work as a condition of receiving benefits because the government is planning to introduce "workfare" in the spring of 1996. Currently, social assistance recipients who are labelled "employable" are required to look for work and accept any available job as a condition of receiving benefits. They can attend high school or a training program with the permission of the welfare office. Single mothers are not required to conduct a job search as long as their youngest child is not in school. The Conservative government intends to force all "able-bodied" recipients into workfare programs. While they have not announced which groups will be exempted from workfare programs, it is likely that many single mothers will be targeted and that the age limit for children will be lowered substantially.

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While one might have expected this government to pursue a difference-based approach to welfare entitlement, that is, adopting policies that identify women in relation to their family roles, the exact opposite appears to be the case. Not only have the Conservatives embraced a gender-neutral approach to social assistance reform, they appear to be targeting programs that specifically assist women. In the second round of program cuts announced in October 1995, social service agencies that provide critical support services to women and their families and are largely staffed by female workers were cut back 5 percent. Funding for Ontario Jobs Training, child care, second stage housing and family violence prevention and education programs was eliminated. Health care, education and training programs were all cut back to meet deficit targets. Pay equity legislation has been rolled back and funding directed to addressing historic wage inequities has been reduced. The Employment Equity Act has been repealed. The government has launched a review of the child-care program. It appears that funding for child-care subsidies will be discontinued; only half of these funds will be redirected into a voucher system. Taken together, these measures represent a systematic dismantling of many of the important gains that the women's movement has made over the last 20 years. In their haste to downsize government and privatize all productive and reproductive relations, the Conservative government is abandoning any notion of entitlement based on citizenship. In the absence of strong collective bonds among the citizenry at the family, community or national levels, women and their families are being abandoned to struggle for survival at the margins of the economy and the polity.

ENDNOTES An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference "Labour and Social Policy: The Experiences of the 1980s and the 1990s," sponsored by the Swedish-Canadian Academic Foundation and Swedish Centre for Working Life in Stockholm, May 17,1994. My thanks to John Myles, Gillian Creese and Hugh Armstrong for their useful suggestions for revising the paper. I would also like


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to thank Isa Bakker and Pat Evans. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Welfare Fellowship Program, Human Resources Development Canada.

ENDNOTES

Jane Jenson, "The Model Citizen? Women in the New Europe," (Paper prepared for the Social Science Research Council Workshop on a New Europe: Rethinking the Collective Responses to Change, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, December 11-13,1992), p. 3. T.H. Marshall, "Citizenship and Social Class," in Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Anchor, 1965), pp. 65-122. The term single mother is used through the article to refer to female-headed lone-parent families. This usage differs from the Statistics Canada definition which refers only to never-married female lone-parents as single mothers. See note 30. G0sta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 27. Gregg Olsen and Carolyn Tuohy argue that Canada does not neatly fit in Esping-Andersen's liberal category. Both point to the presence of universal health care in the Canadian welfare mix, a program that partially offsets the impact of low levels of income security benefits. See Olsen, "Locating the Canadian Welfare State: Family Policy and Health Care in Canada, Sweden and the United States," Canadian Journal of Sociology 19/1 (1994), pp. 1-20; Carolyn Tuohy, "Social Policy: Two Worlds," in M. Atkinson, ed., Governing Canada (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Canada Inc., 1993), pp. 275-305. OECD, "New Orientations," Social Policy Studies 12 (1994). Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), p. 73. John Myles, "Decline or Impasse? The Current State of the Welfare State," Studies in Political Economy 26 (1988), p. 86.

Benefits are tied to the rights of citizenship or the employment contract; wage replacement not only ties benefits to past earnings but is set at levels that allow the wage earner to maintain his or her standard of living when absent from the market. "It is not intended to provide subsistence to the 'poor/ but wage stabilization to the working class and, in its more developed forms, to the new middle class as well." Ibid. Ibid., pp. 90-91.

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Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, p. 27. Jane Lewis and Ilona Ostner, "Gender and the Evolution of European Social Policies," (Paper presented at CES Workshop on Emergent Supranational Social Policy: The EC's Social Dimension in Comparative Perspective, Centre for European Studies, Harvard University, Nov. 15-17th, 1991), pp. 25-26. See Jane Jenson, "Making Claims: Representation and Gender in Sweden and France," (Paper presented at York University, Toronto, January 27,1992) for a full discussion of regime variation and political struggle. Nonstandard work generally refers to work arrangements that differ from the traditional pattern of full-time, full-year employment. This includes parttime, short-term, contract, certain types of self-employment and temporaryhelp employment. Cross national data estimate that the incidence of nonstandard work is rising and that these employment forms now account for between one-quarter and slightly over one-third of total employment in the major industrialized countries. Economic Council of Canada, Employment in the Service Economy (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1991), chapter 5. Economic Council of Canada, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1990), p. 17. National Council of Welfare, Incentives and Disincentives to Work (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1993), p. 9. Myles "Decline or Impasse?...," p. 92. The following strategy labels are from John Myles, "Post-Industrialism and the Service Economy," in D. Drache and M. Gertler, eds., The New Era of Global Competition (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), pp. 362-63. The participation rate includes those who have paid employment, either fulltime or part-time, and the unemployed who are actively seeking work. Statistics Canada, Women in Canada: A Statistical Profile, 3rd edition (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1995), p. 72. The Canadian share of health, education and welfare service employment in 1988 was 15.5 percent of total employment. This sector, including public administration, represented 28.5 percent of job growth between 1967 and 1988. Similarly, retail and personal services represented 31.6 percent of employment growth over this period, and transportation, communications, wholesale trade, finance, insurance, real estate, and business services represented 28.0 percent of employment growth. These figures highlight the difference with Sweden where health, education and welfare service growth constituted 85 percent of total employment growth as noted above. For Canadian figures, see Economic Council of Canada Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Chart 1, p. 5.


22

23

28

29 30

31 32

35

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Edward Pryor," Canadian Husband-Wife Families: Labour Force Participation and Income Trends, 1971-1981," The Labour Force (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1984), Cat. 71-001. Isabella Bakker, "Women's Employment in Comparative Perspective," in J. Jenson, E. Hagen and C. Reddy, eds., Feminization of the Labour Force (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 31. Wendy McKeen, "The Radical Potential of the European Community's Equality Legislation," Studies in Political Economy 43 (1994), p. 119. Social Assistance Review Committee (SARC), Transitions (Toronto: Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1988), p. 27. Divorced women became eligible in 1955 and unmarried mothers in 1957. Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, "One-Stop Service," Report of the Joint Steering Committee on Integration, Monitoring and Evaluation" (1984). Cited in Pat Evans, "The Sexual Division of Poverty: The Consequences of Gendered Caring," in Carol Baines et al., eds., Women's Caring: Feminist Perspectives on Social Welfare (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), p. 186. Ministry of Community and Social Services, "Terms of Reference for the Social Assistance Review Committee," (July 1986). See Appendix 1, SARC, Transitions, p. 539. Ibid., p. 35. Canada, Statistics Canada, Lone-Parent Families in Canada Cat. 89-522E (December 1992), p. 15. Statistics Canada uses the term "lone-parent families" to refer to both male and female-headed families. The term "single mother" is reserved for those female lone-parents who have never been married. I have used the term single mothers throughout to refer to all female-headed, lone-parent families. According to Statistics Canada, 16 percent of all families in Ontario were headed by female lone-parents in 1991, just under the national average; yet, Ontario has the largest number of single mothers in Canada, 36 percent of the total. Ontario has also experienced the largest increase in numbers in recent years; between 1986 and 1991, female-headed, lone-parent families grew by 18 percent. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 21. Pat Evans, "Targeting Single Mothers for Employment: Comparisons from the United States, Britain and Canada," Social Service Review (September 1992), p. 387. SARC, Transitions, p. 38. The majority of this group are unattached men. Advisory Group on New Social Assistance, Time for Action (Toronto: Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1992), p. 20.

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SARC, Transitions, p. 121. Ibid., p. 8. The use of the term "full membership" is interesting. Marshall equates full membership and citizenship: citizenship "is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community." "Citizenship and Social Class," p. 87. Carole Pateman points out, however, that this relationship is complex. There are those who are members in some sense but not citizens, i.e., women before enfranchisement; and there are those who have gained the formal elements of citizenship but are not full members, i.e., women's position in the welfare state. Carole Pateman, "Promise and Paradox: Women and Democratic Citizenship" (Occasional Paper Series, Department of Political Science, York University, 1994), pp. 3-4. For example, a single-parent family is allowed to keep a flat-rate of $175 a month of earnings plus 20 percent of any additional net earnings. A single "employable" by contrast has a flat-rate earnings exemption of $75 plus a 20 percent exemption of additional net earnings. SARC, Transitions, p. 8. Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, Turning Point (Toronto: Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1993), p. i. Ibid., p. 3. The federal government moved unilaterally to cut CAP transfers to three provinces, a move that was subsequently challenged and upheld by the Supreme Court. Some have argued that Ontario in particular was targeted because it had substantially improved its benefit levels in the late 1980s, creating a "cadillac system," in opposition to the federal government's own philosophy of government spending restraint. Personal communication, 1990. Personal communication, 1993. "Crackdown on Welfare Cheats Expected to Save $50-million," Globe and Mail 28 March 1994, p. A5. See Sandra Wain, "Social Assistance Policy and Individual Rights" (Social Assistance Legislation Research and Technical Background Documents, Report No. LI01,1992). See Nancy Naylor, Ruth Abbott and Elizabeth Hewner, "The Design of the Ontario Child Income Program," (Paper presented to the Canadian Economics Association Conference, Calgary, June 10,1994). Barbara Hobson, "Welfare Policy Regimes, Solo Mothers, and the Logics of Gender: A Comparative Analysis" (Paper presented at the 21st Annual Joint Sessions of the European Consortium of Political Research, Leyden University, The Netherlands, April 2-7,1993), pp. 11-13.


48

49

50

511 52

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Jane Lewis and Gertrude Astrom, "Equality, Difference, and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family Policies in Sweden," Feminist Studies 18/1 (Spring 1992), pp. 59-87. Diane Sainsbury, "Welfare State Restructuring? Gender Equality Reforms and Their Impact" (Paper presented at the European Consortium on Political Research, Leiden University, The Netherlands, April 2-7,1993), p. 26. Pat Armstrong, "The Feminization of the Labour Force: Harmonizing Down in a Global Economy" (Paper presented to the North-South Institute Conference on Structural Change and Gender Relations in the Era of Globalization, Toronto, September 30,1993), p. 1. Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, Turning Point, p. 1. Another example of the strategic deployment of the "sameness/difference" distinction in the social assistance system itself is the restriction of youth entitlement. In Quebec for instance, young adults up to the age of 30 must demonstrate independence from their family of birth in order to qualify for social aid.


CHAPTER 9

The Radical Potential of the European Community's Equality Legislation

WENDYMcKEEN

INTRODUCTION

Whatever the projection of the European Community (EC) — whether it be simply deregulation in keeping with a neo-liberal agenda or organizing and planning an integrated society complete with basic social rights —it entails important implications for gender relations. At stake is whether women will be defined as other than "secondary" workers or dependants. Currently women in Europe are (as in many other places) located predominantly in the secondary labour market—in part-time, temporary and insecure employment.1 Among all EC women in employment, most had jobs in the service sector.2 They tend to be paid lower wages, have fewer fringe benefits and have higher levels of unemployment.3 Women's rights are mainly a low-level issue when it comes to the EC. It is considered a sub-issue of the "social dimension" one, which is itself low on the EC's political agenda. It is often said, however, that the EC equality policy, comprised mainly of a set of five "directives" legislating equal pay and treatment in employment and social security, is one of the more "successful" aspects of an EC social policy. Feminist reactions to the EC's equality legislation have tended to lean in one of two directions. Either it has been seen as a good

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thing for women that can, and has already, lead to significant advances for women, or it is seen as having too narrow a vision in being concerned only with labour market inequality and ignoring the world of unpaid work. Although both critics and supporters make valid points, so far they have completely overlooked a crucial and potentially far-reaching aspect of the legislation—namely that it adopts a discourse of "individualization," or individual based entitlement to social benefits. Individualization in social policy is the alternative to the family-wage-based ideology that has dominated social policy thinking and that has worked to keep women in a state of dependency within the family. Even though the EC has ensured that individual entitlement does not pose a threat to family-based systems, by making it an option rather than compulsory, the discourse of individual treatment is solidly entrenched in the legislation. As such, it represents a strategic foothold for pushing for more substantive reform—one that has not presented itself thus far in Canada, nor indeed in most other places. It seems, however, that it has been overlooked by key European feminist analysts. This paper first outlines the principle of individualization as applied to social welfare policy and argues its importance as a step towards, and as a foundation for advancing, greater autonomy for women from the family and men. It then focuses on the EC equality " directives/' arguing that they establish and support a discourse of individual entitlement as regards social benefits—a feature which came to be there more by ignorance than by design. The paper then turns to the dominant approach taken by European feminists, arguing that their analysis has failed to "see" and appreciate the important openings that individual entitlement offers to women's movements in Europe for pushing for further substantial reforms.

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALIZATION

The practice of defining the family rather than the individual as the basic unit of eligibility for social benefits has been an issue within Western feminism since the late 1970s. The arguments against family-based social programming entered second-wave feminist

THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY'S EQUALITY LEGISLATION

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discourse largely through the work of British feminists Mary Mclntosh and Elizabeth Wilson.4 Family-based social programs define a dependent relation between co-habiting couples. In effect, they assume that married women are economically dependent on their husbands, and eligibility to benefits is established through the husband (or co-habiting male partner). Social programs that refer to family income in determining eligibility mean that women are denied social benefits on the grounds that they can depend on their male partner's income. Family-based social policy thus reinforces the prescription of dependency for women and helps construct a stereotype for women against which all women are measured and with which they are encouraged to identify. It contributes to the social construction and self-perception of women as having merely secondary roles in the paid workforce. Feminist writers on the welfare state have thus pointed out that the strength or weakness of the male breadwinner norm is a predictor of the nature of women's participation in the labour market. In Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, for example, where policies adhere strongly to this norm, there is relatively lowlevel labour market participation amongst women in the form of very high rates of precarious (i.e., short-term, and with few benefits) and part-time work for women, particularly attached women, and high numbers of non-working mothers.5 France is more moderate in its support of the male breadwinner model. Its policies promote women both in terms of their family status (as wives/mothers) and as workers, so that historically women there have continued in full-time employment for a relatively longer period and have been able to secure more benefits as part-time workers.6 Denmark is the EC country with the weakest tendency towards the male breadwinner norm. Norway, Sweden and Finland, soon-to-be EC members, are similar in this respect as women are assumed to be breadwinners as well as wives/mothers, and their participation in the labour market is comparatively high. It is important, therefore, that social programs be re-rooted away from the family and towards the individual. In the short term, individual entitlement would bring more financial benefits to many women. It is important here to keep clear the difference between individualization in relation to the labour market as opposed to

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social welfare policy. Individualization in relation to the labour market, which has been accepted for some time now, can disadvantage women, owing to the expectation that women be selfsupporting but without taking into account their disadvantages as paid workers, especially when a co-habitant relationship breaks up. Individualization in relation to social security benefits, however, means greater benefits for women precisely because of their disadvantages in the labour market. Some women, however, especially those who have been outside the labour force and have not been able to build up their contributions, would be at a disadvantage under a system of individual entitlement to benefits.7 Thus it is important that individualization be brought in in a way that is sensitive to particularly vulnerable groups, such as older women. Dutch feminists have recommended, for example, that individualization apply only to younger women and be extended as the generations advance. The adoption of individual entitlement to social benefits will not on its own solve large-scale social problems like poverty or sex segregation. In the Swedish situation, individual entitlement to benefits exists alongside of a highly sex segregated labour market. Feminist activists might feel more compelled to put their energies into strategies, such as a wage solidarity strategy or affirmative action, which seem to address the problems more directly. But individualization is a strategy that in the long term loosens the ties between women and the family and potentially between marriage and the labour market with its wage and opportunity structure that favours male workers. In essence, it undermines the very process by which women are constructed as dependent and as secondary paid workers and men as breadwinners. It provides a strengthened foundation for women to seek further economic, social and personal autonomy. Individualization of social benefits, or disaggregation (of family income), has been a demand of the women's movements throughout the 1980s, especially in Britain but in other European countries as well. The issue became a focus for the women's movement in Britain in the late 1970s when a campaign for disaggregation of state social security policy was mounted. 8 In Canada, the concept of


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individualization has been central to feminist intervention in the field of social welfare policy. The studies of Canadian social and tax programs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially by Margrit Eichler, which revealed the Canadian welfare state to be overwhelmingly reliant on family-based eligibility criteria, often favouring the one-earner family type, were particularly influential in popularizing the issue within the Canadian women's movement.9 It formed the basis of a campaign in Ontario in the early 1980s to eliminate the "man-in-the-house" criteria for receipt of welfare under the Social Assistance Program, according to which a person was assumed to be financially dependent if they lived with or were suspected of living with a person of the other gender.10 It was also the focus of the strong criticism mounted against proposed federal changes to the social welfare system (by the Macdonald Royal Commission on the Economic Union, reporting in 1985, and the Forget Commission on Unemployment Insurance, reporting in 1988). Feminist groups were appalled at the attempts to move social programs even closer to a family-based system in which the plight of women is made invisible: ...[w]hen family income is the gauge by which social benefits are distributed (and it always is in guaranteed annual income schemes) the particular needs of women are lost.... We talk about poor families, poor kids, poor old people, but the particular poverty of women is invisible when they are in families^

For the most part, women's movements in Canada and Europe have been unsuccessful in placing the issue of individualization on the political agenda. In Canada, there has been no movement towards this principle, or towards replacing family-based programming with individual-based ones. Not even the progressive anti-poverty community has been convinced of the legitimacy of this principle. The progressively minded Ontario Social Assistance Review Committee addressed the issue but came down on the side of the current family-income approach. Only in Scandinavian countries has individual entitlement been taken as a serious option and has actually been incorporated in social policy. Here, however, it is more a feature of the earnings-based bias of the social welfare

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system and has not been used in a way that seriously undermines familialist or sex segregated structures.12 The resistance to the principle of individualization comes in large part from the fact that it poses a challenge to conventional economic wisdom which sees poverty as a family-based concept and the family as representing the basic unit within which income is pooled and resources shared. Resistance to its practical application comes from the added cost that such a system would impose. The European Community is in fact one of the very few jurisdictions that supports the principle of individual entitlement to social security benefits, albeit in a way that allows member nations to skirt its full implications.

THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY'S WOMEN'S POLICY

The hard core of the EC women's policy consists of five pieces of legislation or directives, three of which passed in the mid-1970s.13 They are legally binding on member states, although the means of achieving them are left to the individual nations. The commission can initiate infringement proceedings against a member state if it has not taken adequate measures within a given time period to ensure compliance.14 In 1975, the EC adopted the equal pay directive, which expands and strengthens Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome by broadening the principle of equal pay to the concept of equal pay for work of equal value. Member states were given one year to comply. In 1976, it adopted the equal treatment directive, which guarantees equal treatment in access to employment, vocational training and promotion and working conditions. Member states had 30 months to comply. The first social security directive, which covers statutory social security plans only, was passed in December 1978, with a sixyear time period for implementation. The second one was adopted in July 1986 and covered occupational social security schemes. The transition period for implementation was set for January 1993. Finally, in the end of 1986, the council adopted a directive on equal treatment for those in self-employed occupations, including agriculture. It extends equal treatment to women who are


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employers, or who are self-employed, and extends certain rights to women who work for their spouses.15 While there is ample room for criticism of the directives and their implementation, what is particularly valuable about them is that they entrench the principle of individual entitlement in the area of social security. The basis for it lay in the concept of indirect discrimination particularly in reference to marital or family status that ended up being included in the directive on equal treatment. This concept became ensconced as integral to the definition of equal treatment—a definition that set the framework for the directives which followed. It appears that in the initial stages at least, there was little real thought or understanding on the part of the negotiators as to the repercussions of this concept. In the process that led up to this directive, the greater concern was on the concept of positive discrimination. This was a priority for the small elite group of mostly concerned and informed women who had drawn up the proposal for the directive. In the final stage of the process, however, negotiated by an all-male social affairs working group for the council, the provision for positive discrimination was removed. The more ambiguous and less threatening concept of indirect discrimination was included "as if to compensate," evidently at the suggestion of the British representative.16 Indirect discrimination had not even been on the agenda of the initial drafters. Evidently the men had little knowledge of the situations being discussed and did not take the issues as seriously as the women further down in the hierarchy who had formulated the earlier proposal. There was no real involvement on the part of the women's movement.17 However haphazard the process, once in place the concept of indirect discrimination by reference to marital or family status could be interpreted as prohibiting the use of family-based critieria for social policy. It thus created a space for the more specific feminist discourse of individual entitlement. It did this primarily through the voices of the European Parliament's Women's Committee and the commission's Social Affairs Directorate, both of which tended to be committed to women's issues. The discourse on individualization emerged more fully in discussions over the drafting of the social security directives (1978 and 1986), which

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also appealed to the principle of indirect discrimination with reference to marital or family status. The discussion at the time focused on the concept of the head of household (which in most cases is a man) as the classic example of indirect discrimination. By October 1987, in discussions concerning a draft directive on social security to cover plans that had been excluded (i.e., survivors' and family benefits), the discourse of indirect discrimination had shifted to the more specific discourse of individual entitlement, and support for this principle by the commission and parliament was explicit: ...the granting of personal rights to each spouse is seen as an advantageous solution, particularly in the long term, in so far as the protection it provides is not affected by the vicissitudes of married life.... For this reason, individual entitlement has been adopted as one of the means of achieving equal treatment.18

There was a recognition by the commission and parliament, however, that in order to facilitate its acceptance by member states the definition and applicability of individual entitlement had to be limited.19 So it was left as an option for member states to convert family-based programs into individual-based ones. As long as there was "equal treatment" of the genders within whatever system was in place, the commission would not object.20 So a system based on family status (such as survivor's benefits) could be maintained as long as both genders (widowers and widows) had equal access to benefits. Thus a loose and contradictory interpretation of individualization has been allowed to prevail.

FEMINIST VIEWS ON THE EC'S WOMEN'S POLICY

Feminists have tended to react to the EC women's policy in one of two ways, neither of which has anything in particular to say about the role of the women's movement in EC politics. On one hand, there has been a tendency to see EC policy as a good thing for women. The EC's legislation is seen as being a catalyst for bringing about progressive changes in the legislation of member states. It


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has indeed been implicated in many of the changes in equality legislation that have taken place in the 1970s and 1980s. Virtually all of the changes that have taken place with respect to sex discrimination policy in Britain were initiated because of European law.21 The European Court of Justice ruled in 1982 that the British Equal Pay Act (1970) must be amended to include the "work of equal value" concept, to which the government reluctantly responded in 1984. The European Court of Justice also ruled against the British government's Sex Discrimination Act (1975), which was amended three years later. The opening up of the Family Income Supplement to women wage earners and the inclusion of married women among those eligible for the Invalid Care Allowance was also due to the awareness of the social security directive and the threat of judgment by the European Court of Justice. In Ireland equal pay legislation was introduced and the Employment Equality Act was adopted as a consequence of European law. Denmark has also, as a result of a European Court of Justice decision, had to amend its equal pay legislation to account for work of equal value. In October 1988, the court of justice ruled against French policies that provided special days off to care for sick children and for a rest period to mothers, but not to fathers.23 On the other hand, the more dominant approach to the EC legislation taken by European feminists has been to see it as irrelevant and ultimately not leading to much real change.24 There is a recognition that national governments can get around the intent of the legislation and that the EC commission is generally unwilling to push member states too far in complying. National governments have indeed often gotten away with minimal compliance and/or put the legislation to their own purposes.25 The British government withdrew the Housewives' Non-contributory Invalidity Pension because of the social security directive, but replaced it with a plan that made it harder for anyone to receive the benefit.26 The British government has also used the European law as an excuse to abolish all protective provisions affecting women's work, with deregulation in mind.27 Equal treatment reform in the Netherlands has taken place against a background of severe reduction in social security provision as a whole (as I will discuss in more detail later).28 9*7

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Germany has found ways of circumventing the equal pay provision by dividing labour into a "light" category, performed mostly by women, and a "heavy" category, performed mainly by men, for more pay. Indirect discrimination, in the form of disguised "headof-family allowances" paid by companies, has been observed in Germany and Denmark. Even though the 1979 social security directive insisted on gender neutrality, it did not remove the concept of head of household, so that most of the heads of households for the purposes of claiming benefits continue to be men.29 The European Court of Justice has rejected commission complaints against legislation in Italy and Germany that was based upon traditional assumptions about the domestic division of labour—in Italy, for allowing parental leave only to adoptive mothers, not fathers, and in Germany, for only allowing leave and an allowance to unmarried mothers looking after a child, but not fathers.30 In keeping with this negative view, a substantive critique of EC policy has been put forward by several prominent feminist theorists.31 The basic flaw of the EC directives, they say, is that they are very narrowly focused on trying to achieve equality in the market and employment without tampering with aspects of life outside of paid work. In other words, they are modelled on the notion that the genders are the "same and equal," rather than "different but equal." Lewis and Ostner have made this argument forcefully: "women's interests are only taken up by the EC...as paid workers or as future workers, mainly in terms of educational equal opportunity," reflecting the fact that social policy is discussed and legislated only "in terms of a very narrow version of workers' social security."32 In their view, until and unless the world of unpaid work is acknowledged and put on the political agenda there will be no movement towards substantive change for women. In keeping with this view, the major specific problem with the directives is that they are compatible with the dominant male breadwinner norm because they are applicable mainly to those women who fit the male norm of continuous, full-time employment and not to those (mostly women) in part-time and more precarious forms of employment or unpaid work.33 Lewis and Ostner note that the directives that have passed have been closely tied to


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employment issues and working conditions for women while those which did not pass—for example, one on the regulation of voluntary part-time work—would have changed the prevailing male norm of employment. This critique is valid to some extent. The substance of the policies may indeed favour the male norm of continuous, full-time employment and is therefore biased against women. This is clearly a limitation from the standpoint of the larger feminist project, although it should not be a surprising one perhaps given the fundamentally economic nature of the larger EC project, the fact that social policy activities are circumscribed by the EC's overriding concern to encourage labour mobility and that its mandate to address sex equality issues at all derives from Article 19 of the Treaty of Rome, which concerns equal pay for equal work. But what is unfortunate about this analysis is that in being so preoccupied with the philosophical bias of the legislation, these theorists have overlooked a dimension of the policy that opens up new political space within which the women's movement can operate. The directives recognize and support the principle of individual entitlement, and even though it has been so narrowed in the legislation that member states are only required to ensure their programs are gender neutral, it gives political legitimacy to this issue and creates strategic space for a more open and intense struggle in the political arena. This view was recently echoed by Elizabeth Meehan in her book, which is the first full-scale treatment of the community's social/equality legislation in English.34 Although she acknowledges the concerns feminists have had with the concept of individualization, notably its use so far only to replace genderspecific terms with gender-neutral ones ignoring the fact that women are differently located in the labour market from which access to and level of benefits derive, she objects to the implicit pessimism of that criticism. She counters it with the recognition that "measures devised for other reasons can provide the means through which women may be able to become political actors.. .with the power to define their own needs.. .."35Such measures can expand the opportunity for pushing for meanings that are more favourable to women, which, as Meehan suggests, is the very stuff of politics.36

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Signs of a more intense struggle appeared in Britain in the late 1970s and more recently in Holland. The British Department of Health and Social Security was forced to address the question of individualization of social benefits as a result of the EC's first social security directive. It recommended the retention of the treatment of the couple as "one" for the purposes of means-testing and claiming. Its report, put out in 1978, became a focal point for debate and campaigning for women's groups, some of which demanded individualization as a means of equalizing treatment in this area.37 The cost of individualization made it unattractive for the government, which opted for regulations prescribing the conditions which a member of a couple had to meet to be considered the breadwinner, which in a few years were replaced with a voluntary system wherein couples could choose between them who would claim as the breadwinner. What happened in Holland in the mid-1980s is particularly suggestive of the possibilites. The Dutch social security system has been perhaps the closest of any in Europe to the breadwinner model. Its system is strongly based on family critieria that work to discourage women from labour force participation. Up until recently the system blatantly discriminated against married women. For example, prior to 1986 married women were only allowed unemployment benefits for six months unless they could prove they were breadwinners; others could receive benefits for two-and-onehalf years.38 Not surprisingly, Holland has one of the lowest rates of female labour force participation (41.2% in 1985, compared to 78.2% in Sweden) and most employed women work part-time.39 Consequently, it has extremely high rates of dependency for married/cohabiting women. Only a small proportion of married women are in paid work.40 In the mid-1980s the Dutch government was forced, because of the equal treatment directive, to adjust the social security system (i.e., tax system, unemployment and disability benefits, old age pensions and social assistance). It did this by eliminating direct forms of discrimination against women, but the indirect forms of discrimination remained and are in some ways made worse. Unemployment benefits, for instance, were changed so that there would be more benefits for breadwinners after a means


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test, making it highly uneconomical for women with part-time jobs to remain at work when their partners were unemployed.41 In judging these changes the EC commission was guided by the view that increases in benefits for dependent spouses are "objectively justified" if they serve to guarantee a minimum income for a couple or family.42 On these grounds the new Dutch system, which actually enlarges the family-based element of the system, was not opposed by the commission. The Dutch case nicely illustrates much of what has already been said about the strengths and weaknesses of the EC directives. On the one hand, the EC directive on equal treatment served as a catalyst for change, forcing the Dutch government to act to eliminate blatant forms of discrimination in its social security system. On the other hand, the EC legislation could not prevent the government from carrying out its own agenda of levelling down benefits and avoiding the true intent of the legislation by continuing and enlarging the aspects of the system that indirectly discriminate against women. But what is really interesting about this case is that individualbased versus family-based critieria was an issue in the political debate. Given the extreme bias of the Dutch system, the Dutch women's movement were sensitized to the problem of family-based social programs, and individual entitlement had been one of its main demands in the 1980s.43 The main women's organizations in Holland, the Emancipatieraad and the Breed Platform Vrouwen vorr Economishe Zelfstandigheid, advocated transformation to an individualized system, with a proposal to abolish all breadwinnerbased benefits for those 18 years or younger in 1985.44 It appears then that the parameters of the political discourse on social security had been sufficiently widened by the EC directive on equal treatment and the discussion of indirect discrimination surrounding it to include the issue of family versus individual treatment. Within this expanded framework, feminist organizations were given recognition as political actors, and their vision of an individualized system was an option considered suitable for political debate.

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CONCLUSIONS

Feminist reactions to the EC's equality policy in Europe fall primarily into two camps —either the "oh wow!" camp, which portrays it mostly in positive terms as a catalyst for change, or the "nothing ever changes" camp, which tends to focus on the inadequacies of the policies. While they both provide some valuable insight, they are ultimately too simplistic in their understanding of the limitations and possibilities for acheiving advances. Neither of these approaches specifies a meaningful role for women's movements in EC politics. The dominant negative approach, overwhelmed as it is with the refusal of the EC to address the world of unpaid work, has been blinded to the ways that significant opportunities do exist even within the established parameters to push for radical change. The argument I have made here is that the discourse of individualization entrenched in the EC's equality legislation on social security is an opportunity that has not been given due recognition by European feminist theorists. Individual entitlement to social benefits challenges the family-wage-based thinking, which has almost always guided social welfare systems. Breaking the male breadwinner model would undermine a crucial mechanism for defining and constructing women as dependent, with its implication of a secondary status in the workforce. But the EC's adoption of the principle of individualization for social security benefits does not necessarily translate into dramatic change, as the Dutch case well signifies.45 The commission, the European Court of Justice and member nations have chosen to see the concept of individualization more as an "equal treatment" measure than as a new foundation for social security entitlement, although it is interesting to note that the commission has at times attempted to push for a more radical interpretation.46 But what is valuable about the EC's adoption of even the principle of individualization is the strategic advantage it gives to European feminist activists (an advantage they have over those in most other advanced nations, including Canada), for placing and keeping the issue within the realm of legitimate political option—something that was also evident in the Dutch situation.47


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There is considerable current interest in the question of the prospects for a "social policy" for Europe.48 Ross has argued that the prospects for a "social Europe" are now more remote than ever given the extent of anti-Maastricht sentiment expressed by the very people who are disappointed with the EC's absence of positive social policy activity.49 Feminists may have good reason to be apathetic to the EC project or to oppose its extension given some of its philosophical limitations, as well as the responses of member states. After all, most European nations have so far opted for either the "nil-cost" or the "levelling down" solution to implementing equal treatment.50 Nevertheless, it is important to note that even within the work-related limitations of the ECs mandate, the definition of sex equality has in fact been broadened to include, for example, such issues as child care and sexual harassment. Overly simplistic analyses of the problems only obscure some of the real openings for effective political intervention. Individualization of social welfare as provided for in EC equality policy can, if energetically supported and defended by women's movements and their allies, make way for a profound restructuring of gender roles. At the same time, such intervention could only reinforce the support for a humane social order in Europe.

ENDNOTES 1

2

3

In 1989, only 3.8 percent of male employment in the EC was part-time, compared to 2.8 percent of female employment. Commission of the European Communities, Women of Europe, Supplement 36, "The Position of Women in the Labour Market" (Luxembourg: March 1992), p. 42. More specifically, onequarter of Spanish, Belgian, Danish and French women work part-time, onethird of German women, and 42 percent of British women. Commission of the European Communities, Women of Europe, No. 70 (Luxembourg: 1992), p. 16. In 1989, 72.8 percent of employed women had jobs in the service sector compared to 51.1 percent of men. Commission of the European Communities, Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs and Eurostat, Women in the European Community (Luxembourg: 1992), p. 82. Part-time employment is often paid at a lower hourly rate and excludes fringe benefits. Sonia Mazey, "European Community Action on Behalf of Women:

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The Limits of Legislation," Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, (Sept. 1988), p. 67. In 1990,10.8 percent of women (11.5 percent in 1992) were unemployed compared with 6.6 percent of men (8.1 percent in 1992). Commission of the European Communities, Eurostatistics (Luxembourg: 1993),pp. 44,45. Women formed 39.5 percent of the employed (39.9 percent in 1990), but 51.4 percent of the unemployed in 1989. Commission, Eurostatistics, p. 39; and Commission of the European Communities, Women of Europe, Supplement 30, "Women in Graphics" (Luxembourg: Dec. 1989), p. 89. See, for example, Mary Mclntosh, "The State and the Oppression of Women," Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977). Jane Lewis and Ilona Ostner, "Gender and the Evolution of European Social Policies," Harvard University, Center for European Studies, CES Workshop on Emergent Supranational Social Policy, (Boston, 1991), pp. 34, 35. Lewis and Ostner, "Gender," pp. 39,40. For this reason some have argued that we need individualization of "needs" rather than "rights." Catherine Hakim, "On the Margins of Europe? The Social Policy Implications of Women's Marginal Work," Margaret O'Brien, Linda Hantrais, and Steen Mangen, eds., Women, Equal Opportunities and Welfare, Aston University: Cross-national Research Group, Cross-national Research Papers, New Series: The Implications of 1992 for Social Policy, cited in Elizabeth Meehan/'European Community Policies on Sex Equality," Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 15, no. 1,40,41—72, pp. 59. See, for example, London Women's Liberation Campaign, "Disaggregation Now! Another Battle for Women's Independence," Feminist Review, No. 2, (1979), pp. 19,31. See, for example, Margrit Eichler, "'Family Income'—A Critical Look at the Concept," Status of Women News, vol. 6, no. 2, (Spring, 1980), pp. 7-10, and Families in Canada Today (Toronto: Gage Publications, 1983). The criteria were superficially altered in April 1987. The same assumption of dependency still remains under this program. Marjorie Cohen, "A Good Idea Goes Bad—Guaranteed Income or Guaranteed Poverty," This Magazine, vol. 21, no. 2, (May/June 1987), p. 21. See, for example, Wendy McKeen, "Problems with Feminist Approaches to the Scandinavian Welfare State," Unpublished paper, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. A broader view of women's policy would take into account all of the activities the EC has undertaken to benefit women. For example, the EC has benefited


14

17

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women through the European Social Fund. In 1983, 38 percent of the fund went to women, Commission of the European Communities, "Equal Opportunities for Women," European File (Luxembourg: 1987.) It has set up and supported women's organizations—the Women's Information Service in 1977, which has funded a women's research centre (Centre for Research on European Women), which in turn helped establish a Europe-wide network of grass-roots feminsts (European Network of Women), and has been behind the formation of a Women's European Lobby. It has also issued "recommendations" on protective measures; promoted affirmative action in banks, industry, universities, unions, etc.; and has issued various other types of statements and research findings on issues of concern to women. These activities and the major prioirties in the area of equality policy are outlined in three "action programmes" covering the period 1982 to 1995. Elizabeth Vallance and Elizabeth Davies, Women of Europe - Women MEPs and Equality Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 90. The commission has also proposed several other directives, but they have never been passed by council, including one on parental leave (in 1983) and several on part-time and temporary work (the first time in December 1982, most recently, in June 1990). A directive was also proposed in October 1987 to extend equal treatment to those benefits that had previously been excluded from the social security directives, particularly family benefits and survivors' benefits, and a draft directive on reversing the burden of proof in discrimination cases is in the process of being prepared. None of these have been approved as yet. Catherine Hoskyns, "Women's Equality and the European Community," Feminist Review, no. 20, (June, 1985), 71-88, p. 83. Several feminist commentators have stressed that the EC's women's policy has for the most part failed to capture the imagination, or build upon the interests, of the women's movement. See for example, Catherine Hoskyns, "Women, European Law and Transnational Politics," International Jounal of the Sociology of Law, no. 14, (1986), 299—315; and Joan Lovenduski, Women in European Politics (London: Harvester, 1986). The EC's women's policy does not reflect the major interests or concerns of the European women's movement. The second wave feminist movement has never been very interested in engaging in the political realm to achieve formal equality. It has tended, rather, to focus on self-realization and establishing alternative structures based on women's experience. The focus of the movement is still mainly on issues around male violence (campaigns for rape crisis and battered women's shelters) and peace rather than on equality. The usefulness of equality legislation has thus been a point of contention within the movement.

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Commission of the European Communities, "Proposal for a Council Directive Completing the Implementation of the Principle of Equal Treatment for Men and Women in Statutory and Occupational Social Security Schemes/' (Brussels: Oct. 23,1987) COM (87) 494 final, p. 3. See, for example, Commission of the European Communities, "Action Program Seeks to Promote Real Change," European Affairs/Dossier, July/Aug. 1988), 30 — 33; and "Proposal for a Council Directive completing the implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in statutory and occupational social security schemes," Social Europe, 1,1988, p. 40. See Catherine Hoskyns and Linda Luckhaus, "The European Community Directive on Equal Treatment in Social Security," Policy and Politics, vol. 17, no. 4,321-335, p. 323. See Hoskyns, "Transnational Politics," p. 308. According to Meehan, most of the sex equality disputes that have gone to the European Court of Justice have arisen in the United Kingdom partly because the equal opportunities commissions of Northern Ireland and of Great Britain have been particularly active in using the EC to improve domestic law. Elizabeth Meehan, Citizenship and the European Community (London: Sage Publications, 1993), p. 111. Meehan, Citizenship, p. 111. See, Jane Jenson, "Labor Market and Family Policy in France: An Intersecting Complex for Dealing with Poverty; Only in America?" The Feminization of Poverty, Gertrude Schafmer Goldberg and Eleanor Kremen, eds., (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press), 107-128, p. 121. See, for example, Hoskyns, "Women's Equality" and "Transnational Politics," and "'Give Us Equal Pay and We'll Open Our Own Doors' —A Study of the Impact in the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Ireland of the European Community's Policy on Women's Rights," Women, Equality and Europe, Mary Buckley and Malcolm Anderson, eds., (London: Macmillan Press, 1988); Lewis and Ostner, "Gender"; Mazey, "European Community"; and Harriet Warner, "EC Social Policy in Practice: Community Action on Behalf of Women and Its Impact in the Member States," Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, (Dec. 1984). The balance of power in this area ultimately rests with the member states and not the commission. For legislation to pass it must be unanimously approved by member states. Most of the current legislation was passed in the mid-1970s. Governments are more careful now of approving any new social legislation. The commission has tried without success since 1978 to get approval on a series of directives and social policy—part-time work, parental leave, burden of proof. Hoskyns, "Transnational Politics," p. 313. Even the


27 28

29

32 33

35 36

40

41 42 43 44

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European Court of Justice has bowed to pressure from member states. The court ruled in the second Defrenne case that equal pay claims could not be made prior to the date of this judgment on the grounds that it would be too costly for the member states. Warner, "EC Social Policy," p. 147. Hoskyns, "Transnational," p. 311. Ibid. Susan Atkins and Linda Luckhaus, "The Social Security Directive and U.K. Law," in Christopher McCrudden, ed., Women, Employment and European Equality Law (London: Eclipse Publications, 1987), p. 120. Lewis and Ostner, "Gender," p. 57. Meehan, Citizenship, p. 114. See, for example, Lewis and Ostner, "Gender"; and Hoskyns, "Women's Equality," "Transnational" and "Equal Pay." Lewis and Ostner, "Gender," p. 53. Ibid., p. 56. Meehan, Citizenship. Meehan, Citizenship, p. 118. Ibid. Hoskyns and Luckhaus, "Equal Treatment," p. 329. Ina Sjerps, "Indirect Discrimination in Social Security in the Netherlands: Demands of the Dutch Women's Movement," Mary Buckley and Malcolm Anderson, eds., Women, Equality and Europe (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 101. Goran Therborn, "'Pillarization' and 'Popular Movements' Two Variants of Welfare State Capitalism: The Netherlands and Sweden," Francis Castles, ed., The Comparative History of Public Policy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 234. Barbara Hobson, "No Exit, No Voice: Women's Economic Dependency and the Welfare State," Acta Sociologica, (33,1990), 3, p. 240, 241. Sjerps, "Indirect," p. 102. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 104. According to Ross, classical social policy is firmly within the domain of member states. George Ross, "The European Community and Social Policy: Regional Blocs and a Humane Social Order," Studies in Political Economy, 40, (1993), 41 — 72, p. 66. In 1991 the commission brought the case of the provision in Belgium whereby higher benefits are paid to unemployed heads of families to court on the

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47

48

49 50


grounds that this amounted to indirect discrimination since the benefits mainly went to men. The European Court of Justice disagreed with the commission, seeing it as within the domain of member states given the current state of community law. Commission of the European Communities, Women of Europe, (June/July 1991), 10. Recent debates over a basic income plan or a guaranteed income for Europe do in fact assume "individual" entitlement, suggesting that this issue is indeed having an impact in the broader social policy context. Compare this with the 1985 Canadian version of a guaranteed income proposed by the Macdonald Royal Commission which assumed entitlement on the basis of "family" income. See, for example, Paul Teague, The European Community: The Social Dimension (London: Kogan Page, 1989); Stephan Leibfried and Paul Pierson, "The Prospects for Social Europe," Harvard University, Center for European Studies, CES Workshop on Emergent Supranational Social Policy: The EC's Social Dimension in Comparative Perspective, Nov. 51—17,1991; and Ross, "Humane Social Order." Ross, "Humane," pp. 66, 67. See, Hoskyns and Luckhaus, "Equal Treatment."

CHAPTER 10

Duet for Peasant and Socialist Revolutionary, with Obbligato Feminism: Lessons of the Nicaraguan Case PHIL RYAN

n 1795, Beethoven wrote a short piece with the whimsical title, "Duet for Viola, Cello, and Two Obbligato Eyeglasses." Obbligato denotes a part which must not be omitted, a part which is essential to the structure, or at least to the effect. This essay is about another duet: between the peasantry and the socialist revolutionaries of Nicaragua's Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN). The duet was, unfortunately, much less harmonious than those created by Beethoven. After losing power in 1990, many Sandinista leaders concluded that relations with the peasantry had been one of the great failures of the revolutionary process. The first three sections of this paper will examine the problems of this duet. The first of these argues that the Sandinistas came to power influenced by an orthodox Marxism that led them to a particular interpretation of the Nicaraguan countryside. In the second, I argue that this interpretation, along with other factors, led the FSLN to promote an initial project of statist modernization in the countryside. The third section reviews the crisis of this project, a crisis which came to threaten the revolution when it became clear that the peasantry was providing the United States with the human resources it needed to wage its contra war.

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Clearly something was missing from the duet between peasant and socialist revolutionary, something which, while absent, was obbligato. That missing something was perhaps the simple feminist insight that gender divides class, and that one should not assume that male and female peasants have similar interests. In the fourth section, I will offer some brief reflections on the "path not chosen'7 by the Nicaraguan revolution. This path would have involved reaching out to rural women as potential partners in a project of rural transformation. This section points to the possibility that "socialism has failed because those who have tried to put it into practice have not been feminists/' as my friend Roxanne Murrell puts it. These reflections are brief and tentative, but are nonetheless essential to the structure, or at least to the effect, of my argument. Of course what some feel must not be omitted others are quite willing to dispense with: "Unfortunately, the term obbligato has come to mean the opposite, i.e. an accompanying part which may be omitted if so desired."11 will argue in the conclusion that the FSLN's self-critique of its relations with the peasantry has yet to raise the question of gender, and that this has led the Sandinistas to an overly simplistic understanding of what went wrong in the countryside. While the FSLN has slowly become more willing to discuss its positions on women in general terms, it does not yet believe that a gender analysis is obbligato — in the first sense—if it is to understand its own society.

THE SANDINISTA LEADERSHIP'S INITIAL IDEOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

The Sandinista leadership came to power shaped by a Marxism much more orthodox than has been recognized or admitted by many observers.2 Despite their flexibility once in power, this initial orientation had a great influence on their initial policy choices, which in turn influenced the entire course of the Sandinista decade. Though it may appear so to conservative or liberal readers, to say that the Sandinistas entered power as orthodox Marxists, or as MarxistLeninists, is not an accusation. Rather, it corresponds to many of

DUET FOR PEASANT AND SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY

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the leadership's statements on its own ideological background. By "orthodox Marxism" I mean the orthodoxy traditionally promoted by the Soviet Union, and periodically codified in such manuals as the various editions of Political Economy issued by Progress Publishers. This orthodoxy is often termed Marxist-Leninism, though its relation to the actual thought of Marx or Lenin has been the subject of endless debate. It is characterized as much by its form as its content: the systematization of the manuals tends to erase tensions in the original thought of Marx or Lenin. One could say that, as catechisms are to the Bible, so the orthodox manuals are to the Marxist "classics." Orthodox Marxism has historically been taught to thousands of cadres and millions of students throughout the world. For many, it is the only Marxism they have ever known. As John Saul notes, it has been influential for Third World socialism, "disseminated by the 'eastern allies' of the young socialisms through numerous manuals, teachers and ideological advisors."3 To say, then, that the Sandinista leaders were influenced by orthodox Marxism is to say that they received cadre training based upon the standard manuals, generally in Cuba, and that this training "took" to some degree. Prior to 1979, most Sandinista leaders had extended stays in Cuba.4 As National Directorate member Bayardo Arce later put it, Cuba "was the only secure land where the Sandinista leaders could heal their wounds in order to continue the battle."5 Many Sandinistas received military and political training there. National Directorate member Humberto Ortega would later comment that the Sandinista leadership was trained in the manuals "from very early on," and that "We had great respect for those manuals."6 To say that the Sandinistas were influenced by orthodox Marxism does not mean that they did not demonstrate flexibility. In fact, the Sandinista leaders demonstrated a remarkable capacity to reflect upon their fundamental project and modify it on the fly. But flexibility must always start from somewhere: it is not enough to say that FSLN leaders were flexible, one must also identify the framework within which that flexibility operated. Just as the position of a moving object depends upon the direction and speed

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of its movement as well as its starting position, so too did Sandinista ideology at any given moment reflect not only its movement or flexibility but also its starting point. In more recent years, Sandinista leaders have been willing to discuss this struggle between flexibility and their original ideological framework. In a 1988 interview, Tomas Borge, member of the National Directorate and sole surviving founder of the FSLN, commented that "I'm fighting against my own orthodoxy."7 Similarly, in an interview with an Italian paper, Borge commented that "for a long time our outlook was orthodox.... Yes, we considered ourselves Marxist-Leninists and had in mind a communist society. We did not like the social democracies.. .."8 After the 1990 election defeat, former Vice-President Sergio Ramirez would describe the FSLN in power as "trying to get away from theoretical schemes and prejudices, away from the self-proclaimed, eternal truths; struggling to abandon models and create our own path."9 Even in 1991, it appears that this struggle was continuing. Speaking to the FSLN's first party congress in July 1991, Humberto Ortega commented: It is more difficult to be a revolutionary.. .when it is necessary to come together, to find common ground with the classes and social sectors that the Marxist manuals —with which we were trained from very early on — said must be crushed. We had great respect for those manuals, and we were guided by them in the past, but now they are being subordinated to the real dynamic of practice, and obligated to find new positions, and we can no longer, therefore, be mechanically or rigidly guided by them.10

Given their training in orthodox Marxism, the Sandinistas came to power influenced by certain central themes of orthodoxy. One theme that would be of particular importance for their relations with the peasantry was the belief that human history is a fairly linear progression from more backward to more progressive forms of production and culture.11 This progression, which must culminate in socialism,12 was guaranteed because "history has no reverse gear," as Sandinista leaders were wont to declare.13


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The Sandinista leadership felt that Nicaragua and its people were located at a backward point in this historical progression. As National Directorate member Victor Tirado commented in 1980, "The slogan 'power to the workers and peasants' will be just a phrase so long as they live in the midst of spiritual backwardness."14 Certain categories of Nicaraguans, in particular the Miskito people of the Atlantic coast15 and the peasantry throughout the country, were particularly marked by backwardness. A second important ideological theme was that of class reductionism, the view that a person's identity is decisively determined by class, and that class cleavages are the only important ones in a society. FSLN leaders occasionally offered statements of class reductionism straight out of the Marxist classics.16 Class reductionism influenced the leadership's interpretation of the ethnic minorities of the Atlantic coast. Sandinista leaders initially saw the Miskito people as one more group of exploited and backward Nicaraguans. For example, FSLN leader Daniel Ortega commented that the indigenous groups of the Atlantic coast were just the same as all other workers: they had been exploited as workers, not as natives.17 Similarly, on those occasions when the leaders spoke of gender oppression, they tended to treat it as an effect of class oppression. As National Directorate member Henry Ruiz put it in 1981: "The problem of the exploitation of women is the problem of the exploitation of men, and it is not resolved by adopting 'machista' or 'feminist' positions, but rather struggling against the scandalous structures of the past."18 How did the Sandinistas' initial ideological framework affect their approach to the countryside? Ideology influences what we want. It also influences what we "see." It is commonplace to observe that human perception is limited, that everyone sees some things and neglects others. It is also common to note that our limited perception is not random, that our perception is structured by our prior assumptions, many of which are not fully conscious,19 and by our pragmatic interests.20 Ideology can play an important role in this structuring of perception, focusing our attention on some phenomena and blinding us to others. This is partly an effect of the general pragmatism of

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perception. In so far as one's ideology orients one towards "what is to be done," it correspondingly orients one's perception. In addition, ideologies, like Kuhn's paradigms, may contain tacit assumptions about which types of phenomena exist in the social world and which do not.21 What has been said of individuals applies with perhaps greater force to organizations. There, pragmatic interests and presuppositions will be built into the very structure and standard practices of the organization. As Simon argues, organizations will seek through training to give the individual member a "frame of reference for his thinking/' and will seek, through a division of labour, to focus attention upon matters pertaining to this member's particular task.22 Focusing in particular on the leadership, one can say the information the leaders perceive directly may be minimal in relation to that which they acquire through "organizational sensors."23 They are thus dependent on information filtered at various points by the pragmatic interests and pre-suppositions — both organizational and personal—of subordinates. Using this simple conceptual framework, we may inquire of the information that the Sandinista leaders did and did not possess when they made policy decisions. When the Sandinista leaders gazed out upon the countryside, what did they see and what did they fail to see? They certainly saw a countryside divided by class antagonisms. Moreover, their ideological outlook led them to view rural class relations as simply antagonistic rather than antagonistic yet functional. Thus, rural merchants were viewed by the Sandinistas as super exploiters of the peasantry. It would become clear over time that these merchants had in fact linked the peasantry with urban markets in a much more complex and satisfactory way than originally believed. The peasantry, in fact, never lost its preference for dealing with private rather than state merchants. The Sandinistas also saw a countryside marked by backwardness. They shared that hidden lust for modernization held by many leftist critics of modernization theory. Thus we will see below that they believed that state farms and cooperatives would serve as agents of both technical modernization and of the ideological or cultural modernization of the peasantry.


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These two perceptions combined to give the Sandinistas a particularly negative view of so-called "pre-capitalist" social relations. Thus the 1981 agrarian reform law made non-monetary rental arrangements grounds for expropriation. Because of this, many peasants lost access to land they had worked under these pre-capitalist arrangements and felt themselves worse off for the loss. Thus, I believe that their initial ideological framework influenced what the Sandinistas saw when they looked at the countryside. In a later section, we will examine what their ideology helped prevent them from seeing. First, we must examine how the Sandinistas' outlook influenced specific agrarian policies.

THE INITIAL ORIENTATION OF SANDINISTA LAND POLICY

The Sandinista leadership's Marxist orthodoxy influenced their initial agrarian reform policies. Beginning from a position that emphasized state production, the FSLN would gradually be forced by political factors to accept the growth of productive forms that they considered lower and more backward. Throughout, their policy would reflect the tensions that have historically marked Marxian socialist thinking on the peasant question. Marx insisted that the perpetuation of small-hold agriculture implied the perpetuation of "universal mediocrity."24 As early as 1844, Marx warned against land parcelling.25 His arguments against peasant agriculture were based partly on productivity grounds. Marx argued that "Proprietorship of land parcels by its very nature excludes the development of social productive forces of labour, social forms of labour, social concentration of capital, large-scale cattle farming, and the progressive application of science."26 And he wrote to Engels that, without socialization of the land, "Father Malthus would prove to be right."27 But Marx's view of peasant agriculture also reflected his vision of socialism as the realm of "directly social" labour. "Small landed property," he wrote, presupposes "that not social, but isolated labour predominates." Hence "small landed property creates a class

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of barbarians standing halfway outside of society, a class combining all the crudeness of primitive forms of society with the anguish and misery of civilised countries."28 The political dilemma arising from this position is clear: how can a socialist revolution triumph if it is opposed to a property form in which much of the population has traditionally placed its hopes? Marx at some point might have hoped that capitalist development would solve the problem by eliminating the peasantry before a socialist revolution became a possibility,29 but his studies of France circa 1848 suggested to him that this might not be the case, and that the peasantry could play an important role in frustrating proletarian aspirations. Shortly before his death, Engels stated the political problem clearly. "Small production," he confidently declared, "is irretrievably going to rack and ruin." He went on to note, however, that "in the meantime," a workers' party could not take power without a base of support in the countryside. Yet this base must be established "without violating the basic principles of the general socialist programme."30 Socialists ever since have sought to square this circle. Like other socialist movements, the FSLN promised peasants an extensive agrarian reform. The party's 1969 program stated that the revolutionary government would "freely transfer land to the peasants in accordance with the principle that the land should belong to those who work it."31 Small-hold production would be respected, though the voluntary formation of cooperatives would be encouraged. A 1978 program ratified this commitment, promising that all lands expropriated from the Somoza family and its allies would be given to "landless peasant families and all those who wish to go work the land." Upon coming to power, the FSLN did expropriate the lands belonging to the Somoza family and its allies, but they did not keep their promises to transfer land ownership until they were pressured by political factors into doing so. The initial strategy was to retain these lands, representing over onefifth of Nicaragua's agricultural land, under state control. This strategy was affected by the same views that had influenced other socialist revolutions. There was, first, a belief within the Sandinista leadership that large state farms would be more efficient and that niy


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economies of scale outweighed diseconomies at almost any level of production.33 For National Directorate member and agrarian reform minister Jaime Wheelock, state production was more efficient than both peasant and large private agriculture: "[I]n underdeveloped societies the scale of production of a local owner can never permit the same possibilities for development, for mechanization, for intensive use of technology as exist in a firm managed by the state."34 The quest for extensive state control over the economy also created a bias for large-scale production. As an official of the Ministry of Internal Trade told me in 1983, it was much easier to control the rice market, in which 40 farms produce 80 percent of output, than the bean market, with its 250,000 producers. In this respect, large private farms had an advantage over peasant production, since the former could be "submitted to some planning mechanisms," while small production permitted at best "indicative planning."35 The leadership saw yet another benefit of large-scale production: its salutary impact upon the peasantry, which was held to suffer from what Jaime Wheelock termed "cultural or ideological weakness."36 Handing out individual plots, Wheelock argued, ran the risk of returning to the "narrow, rudimentary and primitive" peasant state those who had already reached the "higher historical stage" of the proletariat.37 On the other hand, Wheelock argued, the peasant's participation in "higher forms" of production was part of the process of becoming a "new man."38 Thus, Wheelock felt that the revolution should eventually abolish both large and small private farms.39 These comments indicate a great distance between the Sandinista leadership at the moment of taking power and the "actually existing" peasantry. This distance reflected the social origin and guerrilla experience of the leadership. None of the nine FSLN leaders shared the peasant background of much of Nicaragua's population, nor did the peasantry ever participate directly in the movement to the same extent as other social classes.40 FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca originally followed Guevara in believing that peasants would make up the bulk of the guerrilla forces.41 After peasant desertions from the Pancasan guerrilla column

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in 1967, however, Fonseca concluded that peasants should not participate in regular guerrilla columns.42 Peasant participation was thereafter generally limited to logistical support.43 Tomas Borge would later comment that before 1979 the FSLN "drew only some sectors of the peasantry into the struggle/' adding that peasants "are not yet—nor do I think they ever will be—the principal force in Nicaragua's revolutionary changes."44 Thus, the peasantry penetrated neither the movement's leadership nor its lower levels. Hence, the leaders were naturally unable to understand the experience of the peasantry "from the inside," and integrate it with their Marxism. After the triumph they would essentially relate to the peasantry "from the outside." Thus it is not surprising that relations with the peasantry proved one of the most serious problems for the revolution. After losing power, Daniel Ortega commented, "To lose something, you have to have it, and the truth is that we didn't lose the campesinos, simply because we never had them."45 This distance between the FSLN and the peasantry created an interesting convergence between the Sandinistas and their opponents on the peasant question. After 1979, the Ministry of Agriculture would promote the physical relocation and concentrations of peasants. This resettlement process, accelerated by the military situation, was seen as promoting "high levels of socialization."46 Thus, the resettlements were a means of overcoming peasant isolation and backwardness. The conservative opposition, however, also favoured resettlement projects. A 1980 statement of the Democratic Conservative Party declared that such projects would allow rural dwellers to "benefit from the advances of civilization and raise their standard of living."47 Even though the peasantry had displayed much resistance to such projects throughout the 1980s, the opposition's platform for the 1990 electoral campaign promoted the physical concentration of peasants, in order to bring them "the benefits of civilization."48 This convergence suggests an affinity between aspects of Marxist and non-Marxist modernization tendencies. Thus, upon coming to power the FSLN contemplated no "peasant solution" to the problem of landlessness. In a speech to


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the FSLN-led Rural Workers' Union in December 1979, Jaime Wheelock implied two alternatives for the landless. One was to work on state farms, where each worker was a "free person" because the state was not a "new boss" but a "state of the workers and producers." The other was to move to a remote part of the country. Nicaragua did not lack unused land, Wheelock proclaimed, hence agrarian reform should be not a "distribution of land," but a "distribution of people and an adventure of colonization."49 Wheelock here came perilously close to identifying the new government's policy with that of the ousted Somoza regime.50 Initially, the reluctance to distribute expropriated land extended to cooperatives.51 Upon meeting a worker who asked that a farm be made into a cooperative rather than a state farm, Jaime Wheelock answered: "The state has revolutionary plans that will increase production in a spectacular fashion, and no one but the state can globally direct these plans."52 By mid-1980 only 6.7 percent of the reformed sector was made up of cooperatives, the rest being state farms.53 Though the FSLN's views on the disposition of expropriated land have been examined here as an effect of Sandinista ideology, other factors also came into play. Since landless labourers had traditionally been a key source of seasonal labour for the agroexport sector, plans to reactivate that sector could have been frustrated by an extensive transfer of land to the peasantry. Thus, Jaime Wheelock declared that "handing over land without planning, without a vision of our reality and of our future, would abolish our export economy."54 One could also make the case that turning expropriated agro-export farms over to peasant cooperatives might have led to part or all of those farms being diverted to domestic crop production, at least in the short term. Failing that, agro-export cooperatives may have generated a new rural elite.55 Whatever the specific mix of reasons for the FSLN's initial policy on expropriated land, it is striking that the leadership, normally so attuned to the political implications of economic decisions, viewed the land question solely in terms of its economic ramifications and tended to give little importance to the peasantry's demand for individual land ownership. The Sandinista preference for state farms

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was pursued to the extent of forcing cooperatives, formed by landless peasants who immediately prior to the triumph had seized farms belonging to Somocistas, to be turned over to the state.56 Only several years later, when the contra war was at its height, did the government begin explicitly to use the distribution of land to individuals and cooperatives as a key means of weakening the contras' rural support.

THE EVOLUTION OF AGRARIAN REFORM POLICY

We have seen that the Sandinistas' initial agrarian policy included no explicit provision for addressing peasant land hunger. Rather, it was hoped that employment on state farms, perhaps in conjunction with some colonization projects in marginal areas, would attenuate land hunger without fostering the historical regression of peasant production. Peasant land seizures throughout 1980-81 were in part a response to the Sandinista strategy, a response at times even encouraged by members of the FSLN's Rural Workers' Union. The government reacted to these seizures in statist fashion: land seized was generally incorporated into the state sector. This had the effect, observers have noted, of discouraging further land seizures without returning land to private owners, towards whom peasants often felt great animosity.57 As land seizures continued, the FSLN promised in July 1980 that an agrarian reform law to nationalize all idle lands and address peasant land hunger was imminent.58 The decree was finally issued in mid-1981. The 1981 agrarian reform law has been termed "antifeudal," as opposed to anti-capitalist.59 Article 1 declared, "This Law guarantees the landed property of all those who work it productively and efficiently." The decree thus provided for expropriation of land that was idle, underused or abandoned. Except in cases where the land was abandoned, no person owning less than a total of 350 hectares in the more advanced agricultural departments of the country, or less than 700 hectares elsewhere, was to be affected. No ceiling was placed upon the amount of land


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an individual could own, so long as that land was worked efficiently.60 The central provisions of the law were in fact strikingly close to those of the agrarian reform law of 1963, which provided for expropriation of lands "which do not fulfil their social function because they are idle or uncultivated, or because they are not exploited in an efficient manner, or because the owner does not make use of them/'61 Thus, in large part the Sandinistas' agrarian reform law simply called for the enforcement of a law from the era of the Alliance for Progress. Land titles acquired under the agrarian reform law were not alienable and were indivisible for inheritance purposes. Thus, the government sought to withdraw agrarian reform land from the land market. The law gave priority in the granting of land to peasants organized in production cooperatives, although some provision was made for the granting of titles to individual producers. More than a transfer of land from the modern to the peasant pole of a "bimodal" countryside,62 then, the agrarian reform law sought to adjust ownership within the advanced pole, and prevent the "regression" of land to the peasant pole. It was believed that cooperatives could be subjected to central control almost as completely as state farms. In fact, the cooperatives "were initially included in the material balances of the state plans."63 As Marvin Ortega notes, the state tried to force cooperatives "to sow the products it stipulated, to use the technology it stipulated, to sell at official prices in controlled markets, [and to adopt] the system of organization that it stipulated, independently of the wishes of cooperative members."64 Ironically, Ortega notes, the cooperatives that were most successful in the long run were those that managed to escape state verticalism.65 While the agrarian reform law thus sought to limit the retreat from the Sandinistas' initial statist vision, it appears that officials within the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (MIDINRA) were slow to accept even this partial retreat. As Gilbert notes, "the state sector continued to dominate the ministry's budget, consuming resources which might have gone into organizing and supporting the cooperatives."66 For two years after the declaration of the

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agrarian reform law, reform proceeded at a snail's pace. By the end of 1982, a mere 1.6 percent of Nicaragua's agricultural land had been transferred. Of this, over 80 percent had been used to form production cooperatives. MIDINRA seemed much more adept at expropriating land than at transferring it to peasants: by mid1982, five times as much had been expropriated under the agrarian reform law as had been transferred.67 Those with more patience than landless peasants argued that such things take time, that all must be done scientifically: the land transfer was proceeding slowly, Jaime Wheelock insisted, only because the government was "carefully seeking out the best land" to transfer to peasants. MIDINRA apparently had little intention of modifying this approach. Salvador Mayorga, MIDINRA vice-minister in charge of the reform, announced in January 1983 that the coming year would see the transfer of 140,000 hectares — about 2.5 percent of all agricultural land—to cooperatives. Mayorga added that during 1983 MIDINRA's attention would be focused upon a "selected group of cooperatives," which would receive special technical assistance, training in accounting, etc.68 Jaime Wheelock declared in a 1983 interview that "we have achieved a rather acceptable process of transformation," and held that the agrarian reform would now enter a phase of "consolidation and rationalization of that which has been achieved."69 But politics imposed an abandonment of this gradualist approach to the agrarian reform. I believe that the United States invasion of Grenada in late October 1983 marked the point of inflection in the reform process. Contra attacks had been stepped up, key oil storage facilities had been destroyed on both coasts, and many believed there would be a decisive attempt to overthrow the Sandinistas before Christmas. Up to this point, the reform process was following the rhythm predicted by Mayorga in early 1983. But just two days after the invasion, Jaime Wheelock announced that 160,000 hectares would be transferred before year's end.70 In addition, the government began to transform de facto possession of land into legal title for thousands of peasants.71 Thus, as noted in early 1984, "30 percent of the land given to campesinos since October 1981 was granted in the last 41 days of


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1983."72 For 1984, MIDINRA planned to either transfer or give legal title to some 490,000 hectares of land. As Jaime Wheelock noted at the end of 1984, "political conditions" forced a near doubling of this pace.73 This represented more than merely a quantitative acceleration in the agrarian reform. Land was now being transferred at a pace that would inevitably undermine MIDINRA's vision of an agrarian reform dominated by modern, well-organized cooperatives maintaining close links with the state. For the first time, the FSLN was accepting that the survival of the revolution would require at least a partial abandonment of the vision of a state-dominated countryside, as well as a "regression" of some land to the "primitive" pole of the bipolar agricultural economy. Nevertheless, government resistance to the transfer of land to individuals continued. Though the transformation of de facto possession into legal title represented a significant support for smallhold production, by the end of 1984 only 8 percent of actually transferred land had been granted to individuals. In addition, some peasants had lost access to the land that they had previously worked.74 The peasantry was not enamoured of this strategy. As one observer put it, the production cooperatives represented "an unwelcome toll necessary to gain access to land."75 Officials of both the FSLN and its association of agricultural producers (UNAG) attributed the resistance to enter cooperatives to ideological backwardness. Victor Tirade noted in late 1981 that It is not easy to eliminate from the minds of many companero peasants the established system of individually working the land. We must all fight against that system. We have to eliminate from our minds the individualistic ideas because it has been proven that collective exploitation of land favours peasants more than individual work in a plot which perhaps will never get him out of misery and backwardness.76

But peasants could legitimately argue that the cooperatives were more trouble than they were worth. Many cooperatives suffered

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from serious problems of internal organization. In some cooperatives, small groups of members — of ten belonging to one extended family—tried to force out other members, thus reducing the number of members among whom profits would be shared. Such ousted members would be replaced by salaried workers. The war gave the peasantry another reason to resist production cooperatives, which were a favoured target of contra terrorism. In late 1983, the government reported that nearly 400 cooperative members had been killed by the contras.77 The FSLN's duet with the peasantry would have unfolded in a very different way had it not been for the contra war. By 19841985, the Sandinista leadership had come to the conclusion that the relation with the peasantry had become a serious political problem. The leadership was slowly realizing that, whatever the "objective class nature" of the contras' overall project, the peasantry had become the contras' effective social base. While members of the bourgeoisie might root for the contras from Managua, or join the contra leadership in Miami, those who fought and died with the contras were, by and large, peasants. This does not mean that the peasantry had gone over to the contras en bloc. But enough peasants had turned to the contras to give the United States the basic human resources it needed to wage its war against the Sandinistas. Apart from the fact that the agrarian reform was forcing peasants into cooperatives, and ending pre-capitalist rental relationships that had been the only access to land for many peasants, other government policies contributed to peasant alienation: the state was trying to force peasants to sell their output at low prices, rural trade had been disarticulated, and MIDINRA was focusing its energy on large modern projects rather than peasant-oriented extension services. These factors help explain the willingness of many peasants to participate in, or collaborate with, the contras. It was difficult for the FSLN leadership to understand the roots of peasant disaffection. Jaime Wheelock commented in 1983, "If the revolution has benefitted any social sector in the country, that sector is the peasantry."78 The leadership could point to the tremendous increase in credit granted to peasants and to the extension of health and education services in the countryside. It


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could also point to the same agrarian reform that had frustrated so many peasants: the reform, after all, was reducing the concentration of land ownership, even if cooperative ownership was not the first choice of many peasants. Unable or unwilling to identify the material roots of peasant alienation, the leadership took refuge in its longheld concept of peasant backwardness. The contras were directing their propaganda towards the peasantry, National Directorate member Luis Carrion argued in 1983, because the peasantry has an "almost fanatic religious mentality."79 Despite its belief in peasant backwardness and its tendency to underestimate the peasantry's grievances, however, the FSLN was able to change course from 1985. The state relaxed its controls on the selling of peasant products, and the agrarian reform strategy retreated yet again, recognizing the political need to give land to individual peasants. The shift in the agrarian reform was triggered by large-scale peasant land seizures in various parts of the country in mid-1985. Some 100,000 hectares were transferred to individual peasants in 1985, almost 14 times the original plan.80 Nearly all of the transfers to individuals occurred after the mid-year land seizures. The acceptance of the need to transfer land to individual peasants represented a further sacrifice of modern agriculture to the goal of "strengthening the alliance with the Revolution in the countryside," as an internal FSLN document put it.81 The same document noted that the government had yet to find the correct "technical-economic structuring" to accompany changes that had been dictated by political objectives. There was thus great concern that the "alliance with the peasantry" was being purchased at the expense of long-term economic stagnation. The agrarian reform's weakening of the modern pole of rural production also had implications for the project of a state-dominated economy. The explosion of cooperatives not closely linked with MIDINRA from 1984 onwards and the 1985 increase in land transfers to individual peasants made the types of rural economic relations originally pursued increasingly unrealistic. Jaime Wheelock would later comment that it was the growing role of the peasant economy, more than the survival of capitalist enterprise, that pushed

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the FSLN towards a "commodity economy, away from centralized planning."82 Thus, while the shift in the agrarian reform strategy was believed successful in weakening the contras' social base in Nicaragua, it was not without cost. Indeed, the agrarian reform shift and various other policy changes seemed to leave the Sandinistas of the late 1980s without a clear sense of the raison d'etre of their revolution.

A PATH NOT CHOSEN?

Could the story have had a different ending? We must recognize first that the crisis of the Sandinista revolution reflected both an external factor—the intense hostility of the Reagan regime —and various internal tensions. Although many of the latter were, of course, intensified by pressure from the United States, the internal difficulties of the Sandinista revolution are worth examining in and of themselves. Thus, we will examine here whether the Sandinista strategy could not have been pursued at lower internal cost, leaving aside the question of relations with the United States. We will begin this search for the path not chosen by returning to Sandinista ideology. We have seen how that ideology influenced what the Sandinistas saw when they looked at the countryside. But another question must be asked: what did the Sandinistas fail to see in the countryside? They certainly did not see a peasantry differentiated by gender. This blindness may have had an important impact upon the Sandinista project. It is important to ask, for example, whether the costs and benefits of strategies of modernization such as cooperativization and villagization might be skewed by gender. Such a question requires some change of focus from the sphere of "production" to that of "reproduction," or domestic work.83 Here we find an extreme concentration of work in female hands: a 1984 study estimated that the average peasant woman spent 9.5 hours a day on household work, while her daughters contributed another 6.5 hours. By comparison, her husband and sons together spent less than one hour on domestic work.84 Modernization strategies


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that sought to reduce the physical isolation of the peasant family could have a significant impact upon the domestic workload. A study of the women's work day, for example, commented that "creeping deforestation means that an increasing amount of time is spent hauling water and collecting wood. Daily walks of between five and eight kilometres in search of these resources are not uncommon nowadays."85 Thus, the alleviation of this task through village electrification and potable water projects would have been an important attraction for women. As those primarily responsible for the care of children, women might also have been more interested in the educational and health services that accompanied the cooperativization process. In fact, when rural Nicaraguan women were able to articulate their demands, many of these involved a socialization of reproductive tasks. A 1983 meeting of rural women workers called for day-care centres,86 and a survey of 800 waged women working in export agriculture found that 80 percent would place their children in day care were it available.87 Rural women also called for other mechanisms to socialize domestic tasks, such as collective laundries,88 and the provision of potable water.89 Hence, the rural modernization promoted by the Sandinistas might have had a more obviously beneficial impact upon the sphere of reproduction than the sphere of production. Thus, one can argue that cooperativization and/or villagization could do more to meet the "practical gender needs" of women than of men.90 One could therefore hypothesize that there was a potential basis of support in the countryside for some of the changes that the Sandinistas sought to promote. But there is a jump from recognizing that certain aspects of a socialist modernization strategy could reduce women's workload to showing that this strategy could therefore gain the support of those women. This hypothesis is politically sensitive since it is redolent of the traditional Marxist conception of "objective interests," with all of its authoritarian possibilities. While this category needs to be critiqued, it is all too easy to throw the whole problem of the objectivity of interests out the window and conclude that interests are infinitely malleable and are determined only within political struggle.

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This is the route taken by Laclau and Mouffe, who set up a stark choice: either objective interests "can be determined from the very beginning/' prior to political struggle, or else the whole concept "becomes meaningless."91 This choice leads them to argue that "there are no privileged points for the unleashing of a socialist political practice."92 That is, there is no basis for believing, prior to political action, that this or that social group is more likely to be attracted to socialism. Interests are constituted exclusively "within the political practice."93 But this radical indeterminacy abandons one of the vital qualities of Marxist thought. Pre-Marxist socialist thinkers paid great attention to the question "What is to be done?"; Marx added the question "And who is to do it?" Although Marx and Engels exaggerated the precision with which they could answer this question (and hence exaggerated also the distance between "utopian" and "scientific" socialism), the very posing of the question is a crucial advance. It is this advance which is abandoned when one asserts that political practice is entirely unconstrained in its constitution of interests. This seems a rather untenable position: if one asserts that no social group has a privileged connection to a socialist project, is one also willing to assert that women have no privileged connection to a feminist project?94 The problem is the false choice which forms the starting point of the Laclau-Mouffe argument: Is it really true that the notion of objective interests is meaningless merely because such interests cannot be fully and precisely identified prior to political action? (Ironically, the postmodern Laclau and Mouffe are wielding an almost positivistic conception of meaning here.) We may confront this false choice by borrowing Weber's category of "objective possibility." Weber used the concept to overcome another false choice, according to which history must be governed by necessity or by mere chance.95 Adapting the conception to our needs, one can argue that the analysis of society and its members can identify not objective interests, but objectively possible interests. That is, analysis can identify possible interests which might be embraced by specific constituencies. The objectivity of these interests comes from the quality of the analysis: that is, possible


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interests are not identified in a merely arbitrary form. Nevertheless, the analysis can only identify possibilities. "The category of 'possibility' is thus not used in its negative form. It is, in other words, not an expression of our ignorance or incomplete knowledge."96 Rather, objective analysis reveals only possibilities because of the very nature of the matter under consideration: people remain free to respond or not to respond to appeals constructed around their possible interests. The validity of the identification of possible interests must then be tested through political practice. Thus, the hypothesis that rural women constituted a potential basis of support for a project of rural transformation might have been tested through different strategies of political interpellation and mobilization. Imagine, for example, that the Sandinistas had made greater effort to integrate rural women into their ranks, and in particular into their leadership structure, and had allowed their organization to be transformed through this integration. Imagine that they had encouraged the development of a relatively autonomous rural women's movement, a movement that could interpellate women as women.97 The outcome of such a strategy is not predictable: a vibrant rural women's movement would hopefully have gone beyond questions of "practical gender needs" to address issues related to "strategic gender needs."98 That is, such a movement would have pushed the Sandinistas to address contradictions of gender alongside those of class. The very autonomy required to make a rural women's movement capable of interpellating women as women would have posed a range of challenges to the leadership. Thus, had a rural women's movement broken in on the duet between peasant and socialist revolutionary, it would probably have both changed the Sandinista project and given that project greater chances of success, by rooting the demand for change within the countryside itself. But this remains an untested hypothesis, as the Sandinistas walked down the same path that many other socialist movements had walked: they oriented their appeal to the peasantry around the question of land, though they knew they could not resolve the land question in the way that the peasantry hoped it would be resolved. Production was paramount; reproduction was irrelevant.

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The potential interests of peasant women were never explored, as the appeal to the peasantry was resolutely male-oriented. Omar Cabezas, author of the classic work on the Sandinistas' rural guerrilla experience, wrote: the farm animals, the wife, the children, and the land constitute one element, it is a unit for the peasant, his indivisible universe. That's why I say that the peasant without land is an incomplete man, a man without a soul."

A political language that lumped "the wife" together with "the farm animals" and the land corresponded to a political practice that sought to work within rural patriarchal structures, rather than question them.100 After taking power, the implementation of various rural policies reflected this same willingness to treat the rural household as an undifferentiated whole of which the eldest male— where one was present—was the automatic head. A 1984 study found that women represented only 6 percent of cooperative members despite the fact that women make up the majority of the workforce on many cooperatives. Most women continue to work as seasonal labourers. Although they now receive the same pay as men for the work they do, they lose the benefits of full membership: they cannot take part in the decision-making process nor receive a share of the profits.101

The standard assumption was that "wherever there is a man in the house, he is the head of the family, and by extension the cooperative member."102 By the same logic, only 8 percent of land titles granted by the agrarian reform to individual farmers were held by women.103 Apart from male resistance, women were also blocked from a fuller participation in the agrarian reform by their absorption in (unsocialized) reproductive tasks, which therefore helped marginalize them politically while exhausting them physically.104 It is important to recognize, of course, that many factors kept the Sandinistas from seeing rural women as potential partners in a


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transformation of the countryside, and not all of these factors derived from their socialist ideological framework. At various points in their memoirs, Sandinistas reveal sexist and "urbanist" attitudes towards rural women.105 This raises the question of what independent causal status one should attribute to the Sandinista leaders' ideology. Could one not argue that they were simply drawn to an ideology that privileges contradictions of class over those of gender because they were men, and that their attitudes would not have been much different in the absence of this ideology? But an ideological framework can either strengthen or challenge biases. It is helpful to keep in mind, for example, that Marx often displayed, particularly in his early writings, elitist attitudes towards workers, who were "barbarous/' in a state of "bestial savagery." Nevertheless, this class, precisely because of its "radical chains," had the potential to turn society on its head.106 Similarly, exposure to a different ideological framework would have helped the Sandinista leadership to glimpse the radical potential of rural women.107

CONCLUSIONS

Alfred Schutz argues that, just as our pragmatic interests structure our perception, they determine whether we find a particular "thing or event" worthy of a separate name: e.g.,108 a cat-lover has many more words with which to classify domestic felines than I do; the Queen of England no doubt has a rich vocabulary to describe the subtle distinctions between types of forks. Socialists like to speak of "the peasantry." Where this group has been broken down into sub-categories, these have tended to carry names like small, medium, landless and so on. These names all refer to varying degrees of access to means of production. Such variations are believed to be decisive for distinguishing between the political potentials of various types of peasants. If socialists have not coined names to distinguish between male and female peasants, it is because this distinction has not been seen as politically important. What has been missing from socialist discussions of "the peasant question" is the simple feminist insight that gender divides class.

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"Bourgeois" feminists have been criticized for ignoring the fact that class divides gender, that women of different classes have different material situations and political interests. The obvious counterpart to bourgeois feminism might be termed male socialism, which fails to see that gender divides class as profoundly as class divides gender. It is obvious that the failure to grasp this point can mean that a socialist project will not benefit women as much as it might. It is less obvious that it can threaten the entire socialist project by ignoring a vital potential protagonist of that project. At least two different readings of the failure of the duet between the Nicaraguan peasantry and the FSLN are possible, and the difference between these readings is precisely the insight that the peasantry is a class divided by gender. The first reading has become the "official" one, part of the profound Sandinista "auto-critique" undertaken since the loss of the 1990 election. By this reading, the whole socialist modernization project was a mistake from the start. The peasantry did not want it, and the FSLN should have accepted what the peasantry wanted. Thus, in its report to the FSLN's first party congress, in 1991, the National Directorate paid great attention to perceived errors in the relation with the peasantry. The most important of these was the "tendency to distribute lands primarily in the form of state farms and cooperatives."109 Good relations with the peasantry apparently require that socialists abandon their hopes of transcending the form of individual land ownership. The second reading, which I have proposed here, begins from the suggestion that one should avoid speaking of what the peasantry wants, since it is a gender-divided group. Given the differing material situations of peasant men and women, one should not be surprised by a gender-divided response to the peasantry's traditions and to projects of socialist modernization. This reading leads to the hypothesis that the project of transforming the peasantry's material situation requires the constitution of a vibrant peasant women's movement. This hypothesis is easily misunderstood. I am not arguing that the Sandinistas could have benefitted simply from seeing peasant women as another base of support for a pre-determined political project. Rather, I am arguing that the Sandinista project could have


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been both modified and strengthened by encouraging rural women to organize and to function in their own interests, and to share in the determination of the FSLN's overall strategy. Similarly, I am not arguing that one can formulate any old modernization project and hope that women will support it. Strategies of change formulated without insight into the logic of the peasant economy can easily alienate both men and women.110 Finally, I am not arguing that the Sandinistas should simply have provided better services for rural women. The Sandinistas did in fact seek to do much for rural dwellers, both female and male.111 But this did not change the fact that the FSLN was generally perceived as an alien force in the countryside. Weber's comment that "every policy that ever banked on political gratitude has failed" comes to mind here.112 The Sandinista project required, not that rural women feel grateful towards that project, but that they identify with it. Such an identification would not come about merely through the provision of services by a benevolent external force, but by the organization of rural women to demand the transformation of structures of production and reproduction. Such organization, unlike the simple provision of services, could have changed the political stance of the peasantry as a whole, by rooting the demand for change within each family. At least two readings of the failure of the peasant-FSLN duet are possible. How is one to choose between these readings? Various questions must be asked of the "official" reading: if one takes the peasantry's desire for individual land ownership as an immutable given, if one abandons the goal of a socialist transformation of the countryside, just what is left of one's overall project? What form of socialism is compatible with the enthronement of smallhold agriculture? Can a developing nation foster such property relations and remain economically viable in today's world economy? If a workable Third World socialism requires a socialist transformation of the countryside, and if this transformation can only find extensive rural support through the organization of rural women, then it is possible that a significant dose of feminism is obbligato for socialism.

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ENDNOTES 1

2

3 4

5

6

7 8

9 10

11 12 13

Denis Arnold, The New Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Just where the eyeglasses fit in is not clear: "The point of the joke," one commentator notes, "remains a mystery." High Fidelity, The Recordings of Beethoven as Viewed by the Critics from High Fidelity (Great Barrington: Wyeth, 1971). See, for example, Sergio RamRirez, "Nicaragua: Confession of Love," This Magazine (May 1991), p. 23; and Direcci6n Nacional [del Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional], Informe Central (Managua: n.p, 1991), p. 18. Arnold, The New Oxford Companion.... The following analysis focuses on the nine man (sic) National Directorate, the FSLN's top decision-making body. I present a more extensive analysis of Sandinista ideology and relations with the peasantry in The Fall and Rise of the Market in Sandinista Nicaragua (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, forthcoming). John Saul, "El Papel de la Ideologia en la Transition al Socialismo," in Jose Luis Corragio and Carmen Diana Deere, eds., La Transicion Dificil: La Autodeterminacion de los Pequenos Paises Perifericos (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1986), p. 147. See, Barricada August 13,1979; David Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, Florida: Institute of Interamerican Studies, 1984), p. 34; El Nuevo Diario October 24,1987; Carlos Fonseca, Obras, 3d ed. (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1985), pp. 1:262,1:271; Guillermo Rothschuh, Los Guerrilleros Vencen a los Generales (Managua: Ediciones Distribuidora Cultural, 1983), p. 33; Tomas Borge, La Paciente Impaciencia (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1989), pp. 153,194. Barricada January 7,1984. Humberto Ortega, "Es Mas Dificil Ser Revolucionario en las Actuates Circunstancias," N.Y. Transfer News Service August 7,1991. The Wall Street Journal May 16,1988. Foreign Broadcast Information Service [FBIS], Daily Report: Latin America February 26,1988. Ramirez, "Nicaragua: Confession of Love," p. 25. Humberto Ortega, "Es Mas Dificil..." See, for example, Tomas Borge, "The New Education in the New Nicaragua," in Bruce Marcus, ed., Nicaragua: The Sandinista People's Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1985); Humberto Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, and Bayardo Arce, Sandinistas (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1986), p. 22.


14

15

16 17

18

19

20

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See, for example, Victor Tirade, La Primera Gran Conquista: La Toma del Poder Politico (Managua: C.S.T, 1985), p. 60. See, for example, Carlos Nunez in Barricada October 26,1979; Tomas Borge, El Axioma de la Esperanza (Bilbao: Desclee de Brouwer, 1984), pp. 90,154. Barricada August 29,1980. The Miskito people, Tomas Borge commented in 1982, were "still the victims of their own backwardness." FB/S, February 24,1982. E.g., "We cannot forget for a moment that 'the history of all hitherto existing societies is a history of class struggle'." Bayardo Arce, Sandinismo y Politica Imperialista (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1985), p. 85. Barricada October 21,1979; Barricada March 1,1981; Daniel Ortega et al., "De Cara al Pueblo" [meeting of the government cabinet with representatives of FSLN and opposition organizations], Managua: author's notes, August 5,1983. Cited in Beth Woroniuk, Women's Oppression and Revolution: The Nicaraguan Debate, CUSO Occasional Paper (Ottawa: CUSO Latin America Program, 1987),

21 PAs '8'Michael Polanyi notes, we are not focally aware of the pre-suppositions that form the ground of our knowledge and perception: "The curious thing is that we have no clear knowledge of what our pre-suppositions are and when we try to formulate them they appear quite unconvincing." Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 59. 22 As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann put it, everyday consciousness "is dominated by the pragmatic motive," that is, attention "is mainly determined by what I am doing, have done or plan to do." The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), p. 22. See also Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 75. This pragmatic approach to perception and knowledge is captured nicely in Nietzsche's aphorism that people "do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception." The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 45. Even the scientific theory, as Michael Polanyi argues, has a pragmatic grounding. Personal Knowledge, p. 3. 23 Thus, a neoclassical ideology may lead one to assume that exploitation cannot exist in a voluntary market relation. Similarly, a Marxist ideology may lead one to assume that mutual satisfaction cannot exist in a relation between members of opposing classes. On the "quasi-metaphysical commitments" of paradigms, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 41. 24 Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior, 2d ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 16,102.

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Graham Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), p. 67. Cited in Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 318. Ibid., p. 406. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 807. Cited in Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, p. 407. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 813. This possibility is implied, for example, in Marx's "Comments on Bakunin's Book Statehood and Anarchy," in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 411. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 458ff. FSLN, Programa Historico del FSLN (Managua: DEPEP, 1981), p. 21. FSLN-insurrectional tendency, "Programa sandinista," in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ed., Los Sandinistas (Bogota: Editorial La Oveja Negra, 1979), p. 246. Throughout much of the late 1970s, the FSLN was divided into three tendencies, each of which would eventually supply three members of the joint National Directorate formed in early 1979. The 1978 program was issued by the "insurrectional" or "third" tendency, led by Daniel and Humberto Ortega. This tendency, the FSLN's largest, formulated the insurrectional strategy which brought the Sandinistas to power in July 1979. Daniel Ortega commented in late 1979 that "It is more profitable for 10,000 peasants to work in a large hacienda than for each one to work separately." Barricada October 25,1979. Jaime Wheelock, El Gran Desafio (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1983), p. 93. Ibid., p. 116. Barricada March 6,1980. Jaime Wheelock, Marco Estrategico de la Reforma Agraria (Managua: DEPEP, 1981). Though Wheelock tended to be more explicit in this view of the peasantry, there is no evidence that other members of the National Directorate differed markedly from his view. This view of the peasantry was not easily reconciled with the view that it was one of the "fundamental classes" of the revolution. The contradiction led to some interesting formulations, as when Tomas Borge argued that "Peasants constitute an objectively revolutionary social force, though because of their relations with production and because of concrete historical elements they are more backward than factory workers and the agrarian proletariat." Barricada August 28,1984. Note the confusion here: in Marxist thought production relations are usually the key determinant


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of "objective" class position. Thus Borge is in essence saying that peasants are "objectively" both revolutionary and backward. Jaime Wheelock, "Balance y Perspectivas de las Politicas de la Revoluci6n en el Campo," in La Direction National y la Organization Campesina (Managua: Ediciones Tierra Arada, 1986), p. 47. Similarly, Henry Ruiz noted the importance of the political consciousness-raising that takes place on the state farms (Barricada April 20, 1980), and a Barricada editorial of July 17, 1980 promoted cooperatives for their capacity to overcome the "traditional individualism of the peasant," because they foster "the consolidation of the spirit of mutual cooperation amongst members; the development of consciousness and political motivation; the raising of the peasant's cultural level, and of his living and working conditions." Barricada August 19,1979. This point has been obscured by various commentators on the revolution. George Black, for example, gives a section of his Triumph of the People: The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua (London: Zed Press, 1981) the title "Pancasan 1967: The Peasants Take Up Arms," though in fact the section states that "Many peasants deserted or had to be dismissed, and a number even turned informers. The urban or student cadre by contrast had greater staying power." Similarly, Joseph Collins entitles a chapter of his What Difference Could a Revolution Make? (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1982) "The Peasant's Victory," though nothing in the chapter justifies the title. Fonseca, Obras, p. 1:118; Ernesto Guevara, Obras Escogidas: 1957-1967 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), p. 1:63. Fonseca, Obras, p. 1:163. An exception to this was the Zinica guerrilla column of 1970. Humberto Ortega, 50 Anos de Lucha Sandinista (Managua: Ministerio del Interior, 1979), p. 107. Tomas Borge, "Tomas Borge on the Nicaraguan Revolution," New Left Review no. 164 (July-August 1987), p. 60. Daniel Ortega, "Interview withBarricada Internacional," N.Y. Nicaragua Weekly Update no. 76 fluty 14,1991). Jaime Wheelock, "Discurso de Jaime Wheelock ante el Consejo Superior de MIDINRA," in MIDINRA: Plan de Trabajo, Balance y Perspectivas (Managua: MIDINRA, 1985), pp. 90f. La Prensa March 9,1980. Uni6n Nacional Opositora, Programa de Gobierno (Managua: UNO, 1989). Barricada December 22,1979. Jaime Biderman notes that the agrarian reform law passed in 1963 during the Somoza dynasty's mildly reformist phase led in effect to "a few colonization

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projects and the provision of land titles in these and other remote areas to which [peasants] migrated." "The Development of Capitalism in Nicaragua: A Political Economic History/' Latin American Perspectives 10/1 (Winter 1983), p. 21. Ironically, in a 1990 book, Wheelock would criticize the Somoza regime for this focus on colonization, and claim that the FSLN knew "from the beginning" that such an approach was unacceptable. La Reforma Agraria Sandinista (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1990), p. 49f. Both proponents and opponents of socialist cooperatives can invoke authoritative support. On the negative side there is Marx's view that "To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society to one exclusive class of producers." Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p. 2:290. On the other hand, Lenin's late article on cooperatives was quite favourable, arguing that "for us the mere growth of cooperatives.. .is identical with the growth of socialism." Lenin on Politics and Revolution, edited by James E. Conner (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 358. One could argue that Marx was considering ideal socialist arrangements, while Lenin's remarks reflect his pragmatic orientation during the NEP period. In any case, it should be noted that Lenin's endorsement of cooperatives assumed that "the land on which they are situated and the means of production belong to the state." Barricada January 15,1980. David Kaimowitz and Joseph R. Thome, "Nicaragua's Agrarian Reform: The First Year," in Thomas Walker, ed., Nicaragua in Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1982), p. 230. Barricada May 20,1980. Wheelock elsewhere commented that "someone who is not sufficiently adapted as a farm worker, a farm wage earner, tends to seek a way to utilize his time better as a peasant than as a farm worker." This "deals us a harsh blow, creating a social and economic problem which may deal a harsh blow to the export economy." Joint Publications Research Service QPRS], Latin America Report no. 76378. One might say that the Sandinistas adopted the view of E.G. Wakefield, cited by Marx, that "where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear.. .but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price." Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 719. The experience of Peru during the Velasco era would support this concern. Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 217ff. Marvin Ortega, "Las Cooperativas Sandinistas: Entre la Democracia y el Verticalismo," in Radl Ruben and J.P. De Groot, eds., El Debate sobre la Reforma Agraria en Nicaragua (Managua: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1989), p. 207.


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Colburn argues that the incorporation into the state sector of land seized by peasants discouraged further seizures because peasants generally did not see much advantage in working for the state as opposed to a private owner. Forrest D. Colburn, Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: State, Class and the Dilemmas of Agrarian Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 113. Barricada July 20,1980. Jose Luis Medal commented that the law was more Schumpeterian than Marxist-Leninist in inspiration, in that it penalized not capitalist exploitation, but the failure of land owners to fulfil their entrepreneurial function. La Revolucion Nicaraghense: Balance Economico y Alternativas Futuras (Managua: Ediciones Nicaragua Hoy, 1985), p. 28. Junta de Gobierno de Reconstrucci6n Nacional, Decretos-Leyes para Gobierno de un Pais, 15 vols., edited by Rolando Lacayo and Martha Lacayo de Arauz (Managua: Editorial Uni6n, 1979-1988), Decree 782. Jos6 Antonio Tijerino Medrano and Mario Palma Ibarra, A Statement of the Laws of Nicaragua in Matters Affecting Business, 4th ed. (Washington: OAS, 1978), p. 172. B.F. Johnston and P. Kilby, Agriculture and Structural Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). David Kaimowitz, "La Planificaci6n Agropecuaria en Nicaragua: De un Proceso de Acumulacion Basado en el Estado a la Alianza Estrat6gica con el Campesinado," in Ruben and De Groot, eds., El Debate sobre la Refbrma..., p. 71. "In practice," Kaimowitz adds, "the State had little capacity to ensure fulfilment of these plans." Marvin Ortega, "Las Cooperativas Sandinistas...," p. 200. Ibid., p. 219. Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 93. Barricada June 15,1982. Barricada January 30,1983; FBIS, February 8,1983. Wheelock, El Gran Desafio pp. 85, 88. Barricada October 28, 1983. Without specifically mentioning Grenada, both Borge and Wheelock recognized that the acceleration of the reform was a response to United States aggression. Tomas Borge, [Interview by losu Perales], in Nicaragua: Valientamente libre (Madrid: Editorial Revoluci6n, 1984), p. 159; Wheelock, "Discurso...," p. 90; Wheelock, La Rejbrma Agraria..., p. 72. This generally affected those who had settled on idle national lands along the agricultural frontier. Under the Somoza regime, such precaristas had often been displaced by the export agriculture booms.

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[Phil Ryan], "Nicaragua's Agrarian Reform," Central American Historical Institute Update 3/2 (January 13,1984). Wheelock, "Discurso...," p. 21. The 1981 agrarian reform law called for the expropriation of all lands involved in non-monetary renting, such as sharecropping. CIERA, MIDINRA's main research centre, condemned such rental arrangements as "proper to the Middle Ages." CIERA, "Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua: The First Three Years," International Journal of Sociology 13/2 (Summer 1983), p. 41. While sharecropping relations are often highly exploitative, the assumption that they are necessarily so is problematic. In the Nicaraguan context, peasants who received access to a plot of land and a modest working capital in exchange for half of their crop (medieria) might have been no worse off than many who were paying a money rent and relying on usurers for working capital. In any case, they certainly did not feel themselves worse off than those who had no access to land at all. But under the terms of the agrarian reform law, peasants could find themselves "liberated" from their exploitative sharecropping arrangements, only to find that they now had no access to land at all, unless they were willing to join a production cooperative. Envio no. 72 (June 1987). JPRS 79359. Barricada November 24,1983. Marvin Ortega states that 61 percent of those killed in the war up to 1987 were cooperative members. He adds that peasants also stayed away from the cooperatives as they were seen as a prime site of recruitment for the Sandinista Popular Army. "Las Cooperativas Sandinistas...," p. 204. Wheelock, El Gran Desafio, p. 92. Cited in Gilbert, Sandinistas, p. 97. Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario y Reforma Agraria [MIDINRA], Plan de Trabajo: Balance y Perspectivas, 1986 (Managua: MIDINRA, 1986). Direcci6n Nacional y Asamblea Sandinista del Frente Sandinista de Liberation Nacional, "Produccion y Abastecimiento" (Managua: unpublished, 1986). Land transfers to individuals represented 47 percent of all transfers in the 1985-1987 period, up from just 18 percent in the 1981-1984 period. Ivan Gutierrez, "La Politica de Tierras de la Reforma Agraria Sandinista," in Ruben and De Groot, eds., El Debate sobre la Reforma..., p. 119. Wheelock, La Reforma Agraria..., p. 18. The term "reproduction" is used here despite its inherent ambiguity. Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1980), p. 19ff.


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Cited in Woroniuk, Women's Oppression and Revolution..., p. 30. These figures are broadly consistent with those gathered in other Latin American societies. United Nations, The World's Women, 1970-1990: Trends and Statistics (New York: The United Nations, 1991), p. 101. Helen Collinson, ed., Women and Revolution in Nicaragua (London: Zed Press, 1990), p. 37. Primer Encuentro de Obreras Agrecolas ATC-AMNLAE, "Conclusiones" (April 1983, mimeo). CIERA, CETRA-MTTRAB, and ATC, "La Feminizacion de la Fuerza de Trababo Asalariada en el Agro y sus Implicacciones en la Producci6n y la Organizaci6n Sindical" (mimeo, October 1985). Oficina Gubernamental de la Mujer, "Reivindicaciones Planteadas por las Mujeres Nicaraguenses: Sintesis" (Managua, mimeo, 1987). Ana Criquillon and Clara M. Martinez, "Conquistar la Igualdad," Barricada October 5,1985; and "Cual es la Situaci6n de la Mujer Rural en Nicaragua," Barricada September 1,1986. Caroline Moser defines practical gender needs as "those needs which are formulated from the concrete conditions women experience, in their engendered position within the sexual division of labour." See "Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Needs," in Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, eds., Gender and International Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 90. Thus, while one may argue from an abstract perspective that potable water is not a "women's issue," because both men and women should be responsible for the water supply, in practical terms easy access to clean water will be of more importance for those who actually do obtain that water, under the prevailing gender division of labour. Nothing in this discussion should be taken to suggest that Nicaraguan rural women were exclusively concerned with reproductive tasks, while men were in charge of production. In fact, women's directly productive role had always been significant, and increased during the Sandinista decade as many men shifted from production to defence tasks. The argument is rather that, being directly responsible for the reproductive sphere, women would be more directly affected by changes in this sphere than men. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), p. 84. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 120. Norman Geras, "Post-Marxism?," New Left Review no. 163 (May-June 1987), p. 81.

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97

98 99

100

101

102

103 104

105

106 107


Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Glencoe, 1949), pp. 164ff. Ibid., pp. 173-74. There were efforts to organize rural women in the 1980s, but these developed after relations with the peasantry had reached a point of crisis and remained a relatively marginal component of Sandinista strategy. Moser defines these as "needs which are formulated from the analysis of women's subordination to men, and deriving out of this the strategic gender interest identified for an alternative, more equal and satisfactory organization of society." "Gender Planning in the Third World...." Thus, while the identification of practical gender needs takes the gender division of labour as a given, the identification of strategic needs calls that division of labour into question. This does not mean that there is a necessary contradiction between the pursuit of practical and strategic gender interests. Just as Marx saw trade unions as a "preparation for the overthrow of the whole old society" (cited in Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, p. 95), the self-organization of women in response to their practical needs can nurture the capacity to identify and mobilize around their strategic needs. Omar Cabezas, La Montana Es Algo Mas Que Una Inmensa Estepa Verde, 2d ed. (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982), p. 242. Thus, Cabezas explained the Sandinista strategy of beginning the search for rural supporters with the most respected peasant families: "The C6rdoba family was the most respected in the valley, and the fact that they introduced me helped other people be less afraid, because if the Cbrdobas, the sons of Don Leandro, were involved, then it was all right for the others to be involved." La Montana..., p. 238. Within these families, the eldest son was the starting point: "the eldest son of Don Leandro was Moises, and in the countryside this meant he was the heir; so we were convinced that we had to stick close to Moises, to raise his awareness." Idem, Condon de Amor para los Hombres (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1988), p. 24. The eldest son, Cabezas argued, was "the goose that would lay the golden eggs" (p. 25). Collinson, Women and Revolution in Nicaragua, p. 51. CIERA, La Vida Cotidiana de la Mujer Campesina (Managua: CIERA, 1989), p. 168. Martha Luz Padilla et al., "Impact of the Sandinista Agrarian Reform on Rural Women's Subordination," in Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon, eds., Rural Women and State Policy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), p. 128. ATC, "Revoluci6n y Mujeres del Campo," (Managua: ATC, 1985). Thus, Tomas Borge writes that when Gladys Baez, the only woman in his guerrilla column, hid a package of sensitive documents under her shirt, "she


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109

110 111 112

114

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looked like she was pregnant. This was a perfect disguise, since this was the natural state of peasant women." La Paciente Impaciencia, p. 309. Ornar Cabezas relates how, upon entering the mountain, their squadron leader would shame them by telling them, among other things, that they were "little women." La Montana..., p. 112. Elsewhere, Cabezas recounts a long conversation with a rural woman, the main point of which seems to be to display the woman's ignorance. Ibid., p. 121. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 123,169,58. It might also have helped ensure that the eventual make-up of the FSLN leadership displayed some gender balance. Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations, p. 117. Direcci6n National, Informe Central, p. 18. In 19841 worked with peasant families that had been displaced by the Victoria de Julio sugar project and moved into a new village 40 kilometres north-east of Managua. The families complained that the close placement of the houses left them no space to keep their chickens and pigs. With the care of small animals usually assigned to women, the failure to consult the peasants on their space requirements undermined one of the women's traditional economic resources. The degree to which this modernization showpiece had been imposed on the peasants from above is exemplified by the project coordinator's comment to me: "Some people say we have robbed them of their culture, but the only culture they ever had was a culture of misery." On efforts to improve rural social services, for example, see Phil Ryan, "Nicaragua's Economy: The Dilemmas of a Revolution at War," Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 11/22 (1986). Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 1391.


CHAPTER 11

The Womb is to the Nation as the Heart is to the Body: Ethnopolitical Discourses of the Canadian Indigenous Women's Movement JO-ANNE HSKE

onstitutional reform is a story of contested boundaries and shifting solidarities. It is a story of new opportunities, the transformation of old structures and the creation of new social identities arising with new political boundaries. The following is a story of ethnopolitical transformation in Canada's ongoing struggles for constitutional reform and ethnic redefinition. It is part of a broader study of the political struggles of Canadian indigenous1 women to achieve full citizenship within their cultural communities and to restore the dignity their foremothers knew prior to European colonization. This chapter of the story focuses on two of four indigenous socio-legal groups —status Indians, or First Nations, and the Metis.2 In particular it focuses on the discursive strategies of the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), a national body representing 120,000 status and non-status Indian and Metis women through 13 representative organizations, its Ontario chapter, and the Women of the Metis Nation (WMN).3 Their struggle has, for the most part, found them in opposition to male-dominated, federally funded national Aboriginal associations battling for constitutional guarantees of self-determination. The struggle of all these associations, however, requires some means of cooperation. In 1991, according to Krosenbrink-Gelissen, the Native Women's Association of Canada had achieved new

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measures of harmony with its strongest Aboriginal opponent, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN, formerly the National Indian Brotherhood, NIB), through articulation of a "traditional motherhood ideology" that expressed a common viewpoint on traditional gender roles and that had become the reference point for traditional femaleness as expressed through the social and sacred values of motherhood (which we find expressed at the grassroots level as well as by political leadership).4 Subsequent events, however, have proven that Krosenbrink-Gelissen's optimism was misplaced. The political agenda for constitutional reform in 1992 once again found the NWAC and AFN locked into oppositional struggle, and the motherhood discourse displaced by an earlier and more combative articulation regarding constitutional protection of sexual equality as an Aboriginal right. The political context that shaped this discursive shift and the underlying, often subtle and implicit gendered nature of two visions of a future Aboriginal nationhood that arose are the subject of this paper.5 Canadian constitutional reform has been ongoing, and at the time of writing remains (and is likely to remain for some years to come) at the centre of the federal-provincial political agenda. In 1982, the British North America Act, 1867, which constituted the original confederation of the fledgling dominion, was repatriated from Britain and the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms were born. Existing Aboriginal and treaty rights were affirmed; three classifications of Aboriginal peoples recognized —Indians, Inuit and Metis; and the rights of Aboriginal peoples protected. In subsequent years a series of first ministers' conferences were held to negotiate further clarification of Aboriginal rights and governmental powers. In this process, Aboriginal and treaty rights were recognized as pertaining equally to women and men (Section 35 (4)). Generally speaking, however, the first ministers' conferences were a failure. Media coverage of rich public ceremony and national costume notwithstanding, Aboriginal aspirations remained subordinate to the shifting agendas of federal and provincial power brokers. Faced with the reality of their vulnerability and the relative impotence of their capacity to command substantial change, the male leaders of AFN struggled to project to their grassroots constituents an image of effective

THE WOMB IS TO THE NATION AS THE HEART IS TO THE BODY

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leadership committed to their collective good. Sitting on the sidelines, granted nothing more than official "observers" status, were the leaders of the NWAC, essentially silenced and invisible, unable to participate except as "they were assigned solely to take care of the equality issue."7 Significantly, the federal government did not directly grant NWAC a seat at these meetings. Rather, in 1983, NWAC received accreditation through the Native Council Canada (NCC, now the Aboriginal Congress) to attend the meeting and represent shared views of NWAC and the nonstatus constituents of NCC. In 1985, AFN granted NWAC accreditation, again to represent the sexual equality issue. Some provincial associations of women were similarly situated as members of provincial government delegations to speak to sexual equality. In 1990, Aboriginal people emerged at the centre of the constitutional process as one provincial legislative member, Elijah Harper of Manitoba, crushed the Meech Lake Accord, a constitutional reform that would increase provincial powers and would threaten Aboriginal self-determination.8 For the next two years, this time with the full participation of four Aboriginal political lobbying groups, renegotiation of the constitution took place. The result, the Charlottetown Accord, went to country-wide referendum in October 1992, only to be rejected by Canadians as a whole and First Nations communities in particular. The rifts between the grassroots and the Aboriginal political elite had never been so clearly exposed to the Canadian public. Nor had the chasm between the predominantly male-dominated Aboriginal associations party to the negotiations (Assembly of First Nations, Native Congress Canada, Metis National Council, and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada)9 and their excluded sisters, the Native Women's Association of Canada and the Women of the M6tis Nation been so explicitly revealed. Unwilling to continue being the silent sisters, NWAC, with the support of the WMN, appealed to the federal court for redress against the federal government, asserting their constitutional rights of expression and gender equality had been denied by a lack of funding equitable with that received by the other four national organizations and by exclusion from the constitutional table. The district federal court ruled against NWAC in March 1992; however, the federal court of appeal granted them

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a partial victory on 20 August, 1992 when it found that "the Canadian government has accorded the advocates of male-dominated Aboriginal self-governments a preferred position in the exercise of an expressive activity...restricting the freedom of expression of Aboriginal women in a manner offensive to ss.2(b) and 28 of the Charter." While the court ruled they had been wrong, it stopped short of offering a remedy, arguing to do so lay beyond its authority.10 NWAC's court actions arose after decades of political manoeuvring, litigation and appeals to the international courts had brought few significant changes for indigenous women. The continued denial of their collective right to direct political representation within the constitutional negotiation merely symbolized centuries of diminution and humiliation wrought by colonization. For the most part, Aboriginal women's struggle for equity with men within their communities and for equal access to the rights and protection of the Indian Act, 1876 (subsequently revised on many occasions) has been labelled a conflict between "collective" and "individual" rights.11 The current struggle between the Native Women's Association and the Assembly of First nations.. .vividly illustrates a brewing problem —the difficult fit between traditional Aboriginal conceptions of governance and the individual rights regime in the Charter...a contest between individual and collective rights...?2 In part this alleged dichotomy has dominated legal and political discourses as a result of the former sexually discriminatory provisions of the Indian Act, s. 12(1)(b), which, until 1985, stripped status Indian women of their legal status and of all its ensuing social and economic benefits upon marriage to any man not holding registration as a status Indian under the Indian Act. The same was not true for status Indian men. In keeping with Euro-Canadian notions of patriarchy and derived identity, non-Indian women became status Indians upon marriage to a status male and were enabled to transmit status to the children of their marriage and to retain it after divorce or in widowhood.13 Indian women's efforts to regain status and community membership and to amend the


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Indian Act comprised a series of unsuccessful court challenges in the 1970s in which they appealed for rights granted in the Canadian Bill of Rights. Having exhausted legal avenues in Canada, Sandra Lovelace, of Tobique, New Brunswick, took the issue to the international court on the grounds that Indian women were suffering racial and sexual discrimination in contravention of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. In 1981, the International Human Rights Committee agreed with Lovelace, setting events in Canada on a new course with respect to amending the offending sections of the Indian Act to provide for sexual equality for status Indians —an action some deem to be a remedy of individual rights rather than the collective right of Aboriginal women.14 Women's contestation of their subjugation has been conceived by some legal scholars and male-dominated Aboriginal associations as a threat to the security of First Nations and Metis communities, the latter of which had no constitutional recognition until 1982. In brief, this narrative runs as thus: any appeal to an outside authority diminishes the autonomy of the community/nation, imperilling the struggle for self-determination and diminishing traditional culture and decision-making processes. The narrative continues: human rights, being a Western concept, cannot be unilaterally imposed upon indigenous peoples; to do so violates principles of cultural integrity, abrogates inherent rights of self-determination and weakens the collectivity in favour of the individual. Turpel provides the most insightful and creative insights on this position, asserting that any claims to dominant courts will reconstitute the claimant's world view within an individual rights perspective, which, she asseverates, "is particularly threatening, perhaps even ethnocidal, to Aboriginal Peoples who are on the brink of cultural destruction because of the legacy of colonialism and paternalism under the Indian Act."15 Thus the AFN, the status Indian association granted participation status at the constitutional table and generally deemed the voice of status Indians, and the National Metis Council oppose any efforts to redress gender inequity by means of constitutional guarantees and have blocked further attempts that would permit independent and equitable participation of women's groups in constitutional reform.

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The male-dominated associations' fear of women's capacity to undermine collective identity and autonomy escalated in 1992 when the Native Women's Association turned to the federal court.16 They had successfully argued that exclusion was contrary to two sections of the Charter: 2(b), which protects expressive rights; and 28, which protects gender equality. The appeal court not only found the Canadian government at fault, it confirmed NWAC's view of the AFN. In reference to the AFN and its former self, NIB, the court stated, "[they have] vigorously and consistently resisted the struggle of Aboriginal women to rid themselves of the gender inequality historically entrenched in the Indian Act." It further asserted, "it is clear AFN is not addressing their [women's] concerns." In their absence from negotiations, and in the midst of souring relations with the Assembly of First Nations and the Native Council of Canada (which represents non-status Indians), NWAC faced more setbacks. In their eyes, the constitutional amendments approved for the referendum weakened the gender equity protection pertaining to affirmed Aboriginal and treaty rights; moreover, in a seemingly dismissive manner, constitutional delegates proposed postponing further discussion of gender equity until 1996, at which time a first ministers' conference would be called. In view of the dismal failure of the first round of such talks, with the removal of sexual equality from the table, it is not unduly cynical to suggest that this gesture may well have been a self-conscious ploy to block women's aspirations rather than to negotiate honestly. This perspective was shared by Justice Mahoney of the federal court of appeal in an August 1992 decision. The court had taken note that the adversarial stance of AFN had included opposition to Section 35(4) of the Constitutional Act 1982, equal application of Aboriginal rights to women and men. In treating the dissension between the male-dominated political associations and the Native Women's Association of Canada as a contest fought over "competing rights," legal scholars and social scientists have overlooked a critical issue of the constitutional play: the discursive formation of ethnopolitical identity that emerges as male and female political leaders contest each other's expressed collective aspirations and envisioned future nationhood. This view,


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focused as it has been on the issue of "Indian rights" guaranteed by the Indian Act, has also not taken into account the dissension within the Metis nation. Metis women, too, were excluded from constitutional negotiation and were viewed by the state and the Metis National Council (MNC) as subordinate to the male elect 17 and, in the eyes of the latter, as a social and political threat. Moreover, the social/political agendas of NWAC, Women of the Metis Nation and the Metis Women's Commission share salient features that cannot be reduced to an individual rights campaign. In contradistinction, core issues are shared with male leadership: self-government, land entitlements, identity, economic well-being, etc.1 They espouse a classical discourse of nationhood; a unity emerging from common culture, language, descent and place of origin, known and understood through its unique history and committed to visions of a "future thousands of years away."19 Women of these organizations stand united on their collective issues of community and national well-being, of eradicating social ills and of achieving true self-determination. An injury to one is an injury to all is a common subtextual thread uniting their national visions. "The extended family is vital to our Nations; it is the premise of our community-life. The welfare of any one member of our communities is important to everyone."20 Women's associations, NWAC, Aboriginal Nurses, Women of the Metis Nations grant priority to social concerns: family harmony, child welfare, health care and education, all of which are seen as the foundation for community healing. Whether it is full political and social participation in their nations or remedies for family violence, the goals of Metis and First Nations' women leaders are asserted in holistic terms. Thus in presentations to the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women, NWAC declared, "The preferred approach to dealing with violence is to establish Aboriginal lodges in the community for individuals (offenders and victims) and family members to work toward healing through their renewal of spiritualism and customs." In a similar vein, NWAC avers among its objectives "to assist and promote common goals towards selfdetermination and self-sufficiency for Native Peoples."21 Notwithstanding the classical sense of nationhood, the "imagined community" of nationhood as espoused in First Nations

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and Metis ethnopolitical discourses is itself gendered. While female leadership imagines a neo-traditional community for which essentialist womanhood stands as a metaphor, male leadership's goals emulate the masculinist nation-state (despite expressing a counterhegemonic resistance to state authority).22 Whereas women conceive of a community in which it can be said, "the womb is to the nation as the heart is to the body/'23 men envision an indigenous nation whose drum beat radiates from the quasi-state powers of a constitutionally defined "third order of government." This gendered discourse is, of course, not unifaceted nor necessarily voiced by gender distinct groups.24 Leaders and consultants of the Assembly of First Nations include women strongly committed to an agenda of constitutional reform and First Nations governments' autonomy from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a passionate media debate leading into the 1992 constitutional referendum, Mary Ellen Turpel, constitutional lawyer for the AFN, rejected the position of NWAC regarding constitutional process and staunchly defended AFN's stance on changes to the constitutional guarantees of gender equity. Simultaneously, men from First Nations reckoning descent and membership through the matrilineal line echoed some of the women's associations' concerns regarding gender equity and the honour of women. "The women are the people who will heal the troubled world; that's their job. That's the Law of the Creator. We can't go nowhere in this constitutional business if we try to leave them behind. That is the way of our people. We are a maternal people."25 Because Canadian indigenous women struggle against colonial legacies on a variety of fronts, it is not surprising that solidarities shift and alliances regroup. Their political discourses emerge at the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender and call upon symbols and images from a variety of cultural foundations, which alternatively attract and repel support within and outside of indigenous nations. As Krosenbrink-Gelissen has cogently argued, NWAC did make alliances with NCC and AFN when it was possible to do so, and in the formation of them sought an integrative ideology and discourse. Male support is also garnered from social foundations of matrilineal groups such as the Mohawk, and male expressions of


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honourific gender-segregated roles in both matrilineal and patrilineal nations become texts from which women draw the metaphors of their envisioned nationhood. "The woman is the foundation on which Nations are built. She is the heart of her Nation. If that heart is weak, the people are weak. If her heart is strong and her mind is clear, then the Nation is strong and knows its purpose. The woman is the centre of everything."2 THE FEMININE NATION27

The construction of political identity is a function of learning metaphors and learning the apposite moment to present the metaphors to the appropriate audience. Metaphors are primary resources of the discursive "tool kit"; they figure the culture from which speakers extract meanings and symbols. Because metaphors of gender are seemingly "natural," they become part of the expression of ethnic identity. Stated otherwise, masculinity and femininity structure symbols and practices of ethnopolitics; thus nationhood, now a foundational concept of political/cultural identity, is embedded in gendered identity. The evolving concepts of nation carry within them founding myths and legends, couched in traditions and languages understood to convey unbroken ties to a past era. The political is shrouded in neo-traditional symbolism that is meant to resolve present dilemmas in an image of the past and to project a future that will replicate this purified past. In the course of their struggle for Indian rights, that is, rights perceived to be inherent Aboriginal entitlements as well as rights of statute and treaty, Aboriginal women have had to respond to two antagonistic discourses: that of the state and that of their own male leadership. The burden, hence, has been twofold: to construct an Aboriginal identity in common with male counterparts and distinct from that of Euro-Canadians, and more problematically to construct a gendered identity distinct from non-Aboriginal femaleness.29 Polemical discourses emerge as the material conditions that underlie their constructions polarize the Aboriginal ethnopolitical movement. It is within the latter struggle that gendered concepts of nation emerge. The struggle for full

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membership in the Aboriginal polity —that is, for Indian rights in Indian nations —has led to women asserting an essentialist femininity as the foundation if not the essence of the nation.30 Common themes of essentialist womanhood are asserted experientially: as mothers, aunts, and grandmothers women give and sustain life and beyond that give and sustain culture through nurturing future generations.31 Frequently employed metaphors of universal woman include notions of Earth Mother; the water of earth gives life to earth's creatures as the water of the womb carries life, and Sister (or Mother) Moon who visits women each month. "Traditional societies universally recognized the power of women to bear life. It was believed that women shared the same spirit as Mother Earth, the bearer of all life, and she was revered as such."32 Graphically, sacred creative powers of women are represented in the home: woman, the sacred doorway of life, is represented in the tipi (a standing female form, her sacred door open) and the hogan, igloo or other rounded homes (a supine female carrying life). Woman is the sacred entry—the only doorway through which life passes. "A mother has been the lodge for her children, male and female. In healing, the individual must search for the original lodge and find healing within the family context." Like Earth, woman holds and carries water (the life source); she is woman, and what happens to woman happens to earth. "The Earth is the original mother of nations; nations must go back to the Earth to find their healing."33 Breast-feeding constitutes the symbols of the four directions: kindness, sharing, strength and honesty; the principles upon which family and nationhood are founded. Thus mother comes to represent life-giving and life-sustaining. Mother sacrifices for family. "[Aboriginal women's] roles as mothers, grandmothers, and caregivers of their nation are still widely recognized and honoured by Aboriginal women today."34 Because family is united through female sacrifice and structured by female principle, so is the nation. In so far as the family survives because of woman, the nation is doomed without her. "Woman is the centre of the wheel of life. She is the heartbeat of the people. She is not just in the home, but she is the community, she is the Nation" (emphasis added).35 In today's social pathos of human suffering


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within the Aboriginal communities, principles of nurture underlie solutions to redress social pathology. Breast-feeding symbolizes healing; healing is the metaphor of social readjustment that will bring peace, security and prosperity to the future generations.36 For peoples organized into maternal clans these principles are expressed in concepts of the clan mother.37 "The most respected members of our community are our elders and spiritual leaders — our grandmothers, our hereditary chiefs, our clan mothers."38 At the stage of grandmotherhood wise women are recognized as clan mothers. They are the grandmothers for the nation and it is from them that men get teaching and direction. As an elder, in her seventh life stage, woman is double blessed and her purpose unfolds; she moves from a fast life to fasting/healing. As grandmother and auntie, woman's work is just beginning; she will "heal" and "feed" the "children" (male politicians among them) who humble themselves to seek wisdom and guidance. In woman inheres the moral force to solve problems; the nation is to be nurtured and the prime national issues are social issues of immediacy to the family/ household unit. Thus NWAC proclaims its obligations as "mothers and leaders." They perceive of their association as a 'Grandmother's Lodge.' In this 'Grandmother's Lodge/ we as Aunties, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers and Relatives collectively recognize, respect, promote, defend and enhance our Native ancestral laws, spiritual beliefs, language and traditions given to us by the Creator.

In this spirit they cite Art Solomon's words, "Women have to pick up their medicine and heal a sick and troubled world....Woman is the Medicine."39 Aboriginal women today find that they need to establish their claims to enter full humanity, that is, to attain full citizenship in First Nations. Excluded from the nation, whether by colonial legacies such as the Indian Act or by internalization of Euro-Canadian patriarchy,40 women feel compelled to argue that they have been displaced from their traditionally honoured place and to demonstrate their capacities. Because women's right to belong to the nation has to be earned, women's virtues have to be enunciated

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and defended. For it is on this very basis that they are denied full humanity; they are alienated from nationhood by their sexuality and reproductive capacity. It is perhaps styles of female leaders7 political discourse that make this most visible. It is common for women claiming authority to speak and act for their nation to justify themselves in kinship terms. Thus, at a series of sessions at the 1994 Learned Meetings of Canada, dignified women related their worth and authority by relating to their audience as women of kin: mothers, grandmothers, aunties. For it is from these experiences that vital, sacred roles, principles of responsibility and wisdom are understood and acted upon.41 But it is not only claims to membership that are expressed in feminine principle and metaphor. Rather the claims are for membership in a nation that itself embodies feminine principles. "What Aboriginal women have said...is that they have the right to give birth to the new government along with men. Aboriginal governments and Aboriginal justice will have a mother and a father or it [sic] will be an abomination rejected by women."42 Thus as an extension of family, the nation is feminized; it is a large family, linked by motherhood to the Creator and Mother Earth.43 This perception is most forcibly expressed in viewing reserves (or in the case of the Metis the community or townships) as the mother homeland that nurtures her people, feeding them from her breast, sustaining them with her water. The mother reserve nurtures her people by being the source of food, language and culture. Nationhood rests on demonstrating the vitality of the mother (the reserve) just as the family sustains itself into the future by producing daughters, that is, future mothers. Through female fecundity history has been transcended; national origins surpass history as powers of reproduction are extrapolated into the past to the primeval mother. In short, kin ties are evoked as symbols of community and nation; blood and culture, not law, define ethnic identity and citizenship within a nation that nurtures and sustains her people. When we mentioned [sic] the words "Aboriginal community", it is meant to give a broad definition to all Aboriginal People,


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encompassing Metis, status Indians and non-status Indians.... Since its inception, the Ontario Native Women's Association has fought for equality amongst all Aboriginal women in face of discriminatory governmental legislation (i.e., the Indian Act) and for the right of Metis and First Nations women to determine their own identity.44 In this and other ways, a feminized nation transcends legal definition and jurisdictional restriction to truly be the teacher and keeper of tradition. The nation is a higher good, a sacred unity. In this metaphysical discourse the ephemeral boundaries of family/ community/nation shift, blur and become invisible. The language of nation is attached to nurturing, caring, comforting and teaching. Breast, heart and womb form a purified metonymic triad of the feminine nation. Explicit use of "woman" as a philosophical construct stands in for nation. Just as the nation needs healing—"heal the family heal the nation" has emerged as a contemporary slogan of wellness conferences and of community politicians —so the nation heals. It is within nationhood, as Aboriginal peoples become conscious of their feminine principles of the universal woman (Mother Moon to some, Mother Earth to others), that the colonial divisions so cruelly thrust upon the peoples through the Indian Act and the dismissal of Metis claims will be transcended; failure to do so will result in a self-governing nation that "will oppress the very people it set out to liberate. It will be corrupted, it will be visionless, and it will be heartless." In short, in Nahanee's words, it would be "a motherless beast."45 This association of nurture with empowered women opens up new political possibilities despite its maternal dimensions. Colonial paternalism has left men awash in elusive political roles and diminished productive capacities. In this sea of cultural and social estrangement, women assert new roles of responsibility for men rather than obligation to men. They articulate the "honours" that befall women in leading the putative leaders: women represent a resiliency,.. .Mikmaq grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and aunts typify a spirit of commitment, dedication, and physical and mental hardiness that allow the people as a whole to withstand economic hardships and social changes.... When European

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racism attempted to enslave Mikmaq males, the Mikmacj family became the last resort of pride and respect.46 Because a masculinist reading of feminine discourse misconstrues their visions of gender harmony and complementarity, women feel compelled to deny ideological affiliation with Western feminisms.47 The feminine nation is not a feminist nation; men are neither estranged from the community body nor diminished by it, rather they are nurtured and honoured.48 "Universal law" teaches that the Spirit of Life is made up of three parts; neither men nor women can be excluded.49 Symbols of male tradition are nestled in with the feminine; as women are the centre of the circle so men are the boundary which provides for and guards the centre.50 As in the past, when women were sheltered because of their extraordinary significance, so in the future nation, men strengthened by the nurture and wisdom of their grandmothers will shelter the community/ nation.51 Nonetheless, men and women will be partners, as they are in the family. The partnership shall not be confined to a private domestic space but shall be a symbiotic relationship that is political, for as Women of the M£tis Nation declare, "A women's place is at the constitutional table." That place, however, unlike that now assumed by men, is marked by a moral obligation to womanhood, for what is good for women is good for the nation. THE MASCULINIST NATION AND ITS "DERIVATIVE DISCOURSE»»52

Feminine neo-traditionalist discourse, by its contrary position to the discourses of male-dominated national assemblies, exposes a masculinist discourse derived from, and inextricably linked by, emulation and hostility to a colonial European discourse.53 Whether in professing a primacy of collective rights over individual (read women's) rights or in asserting that a secure national future lies in constitutional confirmation of a "third order of government," the masculine discourse locates itself in the rationalist discourse of modernity from which the notions of nationhood spring. Like colonized nationalists elsewhere, this discourse is entrapped in European intellectual traditions. As with the European nation, the


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Aboriginal nation is explicitly masculine. By asserting membership based on legal categories created by the masculinist state, which derive from male experience and male privileges of patrilineality and social patriarchy, the Aboriginal nation of status Indians is a fraternity into which women may be received but into which men are born.54 Men are the natural citizens; the "other" is admitted by legal fiat, by proof of worth. This has been made most evident in the stance taken by the AFN with regard to "citizenship." It opposed amendments to the Indian Act that would reinstate women into their communities on the grounds that rights to define citizenship must be given priority. However, at an earlier period it failed to contest amended policies that would benefit men, specifically the so-called "option-clause" that allowed bands to be exempt from the membership rules of the Indian Act. While 19 percent of bands chose to exempt women from 12(1) (b) from 1981 (when the clause came into effect) to November 1984, 53 percent had exempted themselves from the "double-mother" rule, S.12(l)(a) IV, thereby upholding patriarchal privilege.55 Unlike the female leaders, male national leaders do not assert sacred kinship identity as political legitimation. Having articulated legal definitions of the nation and its citizens, in contrast to the cultural self-identification embraced in the feminine nation, male leaders need not draw upon sexual/reproductive roles to mark their identity and capabilities. Thus the leadership of male dominated associations does not stand before us as grandfathers, fathers, and uncles. Rather they pose together as brothers, united in a fraternity, once explicitly defined as "the Brotherhood," now implicitly signified by the male majority of elected community leaders and delegates to AFN.56 Since they are not alienated from ethnopolitical identity by their gendered social formation, men need no sacred justification of fatherhood to claim political power. Men embody potential power; they do not perceive the need to protect themselves from their own power, that is, from a third order of government. One cannot speak of tensions between the rights of men and the right of Aboriginal communities to self-determination as one can posit tensions between women and self-determining nations. Insofar as the legal entities, status Indian and Indian band have

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arisen from an uncontested male membership and, insofar as First Nation membership rules constructed by the Canadian government and by First Nations do not place restrictions on male sexuality or reproduction, no apparent conflicting rights exist. This is precisely the case with Bill C-31, the 1985 amendments to the Indian Act. In eradicating the sexual discrimination of 12(1) (b), the federal government imposed greater restrictions on, and surveillance over, women's reproductive behaviour. Thus, for example, in order to have their children registered as status Indians with the rights to transfer that status to their own children, mothers bearing children out of wedlock must obtain affidavits of paternity from the father, otherwise the father is deemed by the state to be non-status. Male sexuality does not impinge on male legal/political/cultural identity. Men retain patriarchal powers (their rallying cry might well be liberty, equality, paternity); their visions of nationhood and citizenship are not founded on coercive control over the masculine body and sexuality, but on the constraint of the female body, which must produce future citizens in conditions and contexts that women remain powerless to define. As Brown has said of the state, so it can be said of the nation: it would control and regulate the sexual and reproductive construction and condition of women.57 Within a third order of government, citizenship is to be defined and membership granted or denied according to the conditions under which a mother bears her child.58 The relationship between Creator and Mother is nullified, for when a fraternity is the nation, equality rights for women rend that body; they represent a severance of the collectivity and an emasculation of power. Sacralization of women's sexual/reproductive powers in a commonwealth of equality defies legal boundaries, the foundation of male empowerment. Women penetrate the nation and upset the relations of sexuality and power.59 In this manner, the masculine nation is often inclined toward the power of the state even while it decries subjugation to a coercive hierarchy. The power of the state to define Aboriginal nationhood is denounced, even while parallel powers are sought and conceived of as "natural law" in the European tradition. In this vein, Ovide Mercredi, national chief of the AFN, can declare his intention to turn to the international courts to claim self-determination for the


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nations his organization represents without being called into question for relying on a Western philosophy. It is this cultural dialectic of political resistance and accommodation that draws women into the discourse of "competing rights" and inexorably leads them also to seek protection from the state and international laws, the very institutions of Aboriginal and gender subjugation. By invoking a notion of competing collective and individual rights, masculinist discourse performs a sleight of hand that essentially conceals the fact that the collective right under defence is the right of individual men. The narrative of collective rights mystifies the fraternity of the nation and renders the association of brotherhood and nationhood as natural. In this manner, for example, Dumont represents the traditional Ojibwa clan system as a "brotherhood" and traditional Aboriginal values as an opposition of the "Red Brother" and the "White Brother." Unlike MontureOkanee, who turns to Art Solomon for traditional wisdom and who seeks clarification of a gender-specific experience of justice, Dumont fails to probe the gendered nuances of Ojibwa justice.60 The ramifications of such mystification, whether they are applied to specific Aboriginal nations or to their umbrella associations, are far-reaching. Thus, despite the 1992 statements of Justice Mahoney of the federal court of appeal to the contrary, given NWAC's exclusion from the table, it is possible for barrister John Giokas to assert, "In essence, Aboriginal organizations entered the constitutional debate in the 1970s as citizens groups of a special type and came out of it at the 1992 Charlottetown meeting as full participants on a par with the federal and provincial governments in most respects."61 Nowhere does Giokas acknowledge that this was the full participation of state-selected, male-dominated organizations opposed to any participation of women's associations, which were and remain mere "citizens groups of a special type." It is thus that we hear that a collective right to define citizenship, protected by the Constitution and by international laws respecting self-determination of Aboriginal peoples, must precede any definition of women's individual rights to be of that citizenship. Masculine discourse foregrounds the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women; it contests Aboriginal women's nationalist aspirations by conflating their desires with a

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liberal/radical feminism alleged to target men as the enemy. Ironically, individual women are embraced by the masculinist nation as long as they remain individual and obedient citizens. When, however, they speak as a collective, they are disparaged for fostering a selfish individualism. By asserting a competition between collective and individual rights, men are empowered to define the categories of social being, to reduce women to a sex category; they are the "other" who may now be seen as any woman, devoid of national or indigenous identity. An argument then unfolds that proceeds from the premise of cultural difference with respect to the essential attributes of Western states, seen to be culturally equipped and politically positioned to withstand the centrifugal pressures of individualism and human rights. This discourse turns women's aspirations on their head. Ignored is the claim for traditional respect through equation of femaleness and motherhood to the nation. Rather, women's aspirations are deemed to be the individualistic goals of modernity that cannot be accommodated by the traditional world views of male leadership and male collectivity.62 Framing the gendered contestation in a competing rights discourse masks intent; gendered discourses are discourses of power. What is sought, through constitutional reform that would insulate Aboriginal governments from the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is protection for men from women. What is stated is an anti-colonial justification of cultural practice, group solidarity and sovereign government. Figured by tropes of neo-traditionalism, the popular appeal is to emotion and passion aroused by images of the endangered Fourth World, to spiritual rights granted by the Creator, to a moral order pristine in a pre-colonial era.63 The power underlying the appeal, however, lies in reason and modernity of the state government ("What I'm trying to do is work with groups that want to move ahead," asserts an Indian affairs minister with respect to self-government): and in the advantaged position of male leaders vis-a-vis the state. ("As for who talks for who, I'm not getting into the politics of the Assembly of First Nations.... Whatever leader is elected is the leader I will deal with," the same minister asserts.)64 As for recognition and consensus building with other Aboriginal


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groups, "The only national Native body that the Assembly of First Nations believes in is the Assembly itself."65 The crucial advantage of affiliation augments the asymmetry between the contending gendered forces; the powerful side enjoys access to greater financial and ideological resources. Any movement that exposes the identity between the fraternity and the nation exposes the state emulated by the nation and is denied the status of legitimate politics. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the 1992 constitutional struggles. Not only were women denied a voice at the table by state and assembly alike, their secondary role had been upheld by both powers in preparations for the talks. The masculine hegemony of the state led to its refusal to fund directly any Aboriginal women's association interested in the constitutional process, preferring instead to transfer the designated funding to the male-dominated organizations, with whom the women were beseeched to cooperate even though these limited monies were held from them until the process was nearing its close.66 It is noteworthy that the masculine hegemony of the state extended at the same time to its study of violence against women. Initially the federal panel struck by the government had just one Aboriginal representative, a female elder appointed by AFN. NWAC, in collaboration with the Indian and Inuit Nurses' Association (now Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada), and Pauktuutit (Inuit Women's Association) protested their seclusion and eventually negotiated satisfactory terms of reference that allowed their full participation in the panel, marking the first time in Canadian history that Aboriginal women were engaged in a federal process.67 The implicit conflation of a fraternity with the collective emerges as well in the specifically patriarchal actions at the grass-roots level: questions of extraordinarily high rates of sexual and family violence illustrate the problem unequivocally. For as the Manitoba Justice Inquiry noted in 1991, male chiefs and councillors have done little to stem the rising tide of violence.68 Indeed, violence as a political issue is secondary to the call for self-government and subordinated to the presumed interest of the collective. Similarly, the lack of protection for violated women with respect to property rights (as in matrimonial property) is subordinated, if not erased, by the argument that the collective must take priority over the individuals

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within the collective. Thus, within this implicitly male perception of the collective, no clear remedy for addressing either the violence against or the homelessness of the women and children violated emerges.69 In the fraternal, masculinist nation, what is good for the nation is good for women. The "pathetic fallacy" although "known and demonstrated as false in the classical texts on power in every nonEuropean civilization" is expounded: "a government is the same as the subjects and is flesh of their flesh" and... "the aims and interests of government are the very same as those for which the governed work and struggle."70 The masculinist discourse reverses the feminine nation; through paternalism women will be protected, even from themselves. Thus AFN leadership can assert that it can, and does, meet women's interests by protecting the collective against the dangers of individualism.71 Paternalism implicitly declares that men can, and often should, speak for women when the maledominated leadership accepts the privileges granted to it by the state as, for example, in funding advantages or in access to state negotiations. Being a derivative discourse, the rights said to inhere in a nation replicate those of the state. The masculine nation has a history; in fact, it has a discursive history of "Western rights" epitomized by resorting to theories of common law that allocate rights as those existing "since time immemorial."72 A third order of government absorbs the nation into the state. Whether the Aboriginal nation is envisioned as a dependent or a sovereign nation residing in the state, it is a constitutionally defined order. Thus constituted the nation is imaged in a frame of institutional structures, state and ideological apparatuses: education, judicial systems, legislative bodies and the like whose jurisdictions mesh with two other orders of government.73 The hierarchical order positions male leadership in parallel roles to those of the other two orders; leaders of nonprofit organizations such as the AFN and MNC assume the mantle of political office and define themselves in relation to the hierarchy of first ministers and inter-state diplomats. The evolution from peoples to nations is marked by discursive shifts: the National Indian Brotherhood is transformed to the Assembly of First Nations, the


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Native Council of Canada splits to become over time the Metis National Council and the Aboriginal Congress. The AFN and MNC act within the institutional processes set up and directed by the state. Bureaucracies emerge that prioritize state issues: boundaries, territorial integrity, international relations, conceptualizing them as the real issues of governance.75 "[Tjreated like governments, they now believe that they are governments and claim this government status by default."76 Like the governments they emulate, they assume power to define women's issues for women: day care, elder care, social services, youth and culture. They do not connect colonial coercion and brutality to the violence within their nations as do women's associations.78 Hence, the private/public dichotomy of nation-states is reproduced; women are consigned to the private domain beyond the realm of real issues of the nation. The public/private dichotomy insinuates a conflict between the mind and heart, contesting the unity of the feminine nation. Social goals are politicized in order to achieve the primary objective, viz. a third order of government. Faced with rationalist arguments to their disadvantage, women find little room in which to manoeuvre. Hence, it not surprising that feminine and masculinist discourses are enmeshed in a Western rationalist polemic even as they seek to transcend the colonial past. CONCLUSION

Aboriginal nationalist discourse is selective; as it selects from the texts of rights and progress so it must evade incorporation of thought that would make it indistinguishable from the colonialist discourse it counters. Ironically, in rejecting the humanity claims of women as a colonial/Western text, Aboriginal leaders have recuperated the very rationalist discourse they seek to transcend. The new order they envision is imprisoned in a gendered world of derivative discourse, whatever neo-traditional symbols are extracted to distinguish it from the colonial world it opposes. Neotraditional feminine discourse fares little better. Derivative discourse begets derivative discourse. The material conditions of

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political disempowerment of women generate a polemic discourse: ethnic and gender inequities draw Aboriginal people into a discursive field not of their own making. The masculinist state grants and withholds secondary powers of governance as it sees fit. Preferring not to extend itself to women's associations, it legitimates male politicians and provides them with the basis of power and hence shapes the texts and visions of a nationalism cast in its own image. In this manner, "[tjhrough a monopoly of political authority and discourse, the state mediates the discursive, semiotic, and spatial terms of women's political practice."79 Women are not unaware of the discursive disjunctures between their appeals to the state and their idealized nation; the former, it is hoped, will be the bridge to the latter.

ENDNOTES An earlier version of this paper was presented to the XIII World Congress of Sociology, International Sociology Association, Bielefeld, Germany, July 1823, 1994. The research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and from Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

2

I have chosen to use the words indigenous and Aboriginal interchangeably for the First Peoples of Canada. Indigenous is the term used globally (as in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples). In Canada it is more common to employ "Aboriginal," since this is the term used in the Constitution. Both are contested terms, however, and, as we shall see, the socio-legal subcategories Indian/First Nation and Metis, which constitute the shifting political identities and alliances under discussion, are more relevant to political process. Indigenous peoples have been legally classified in Canadian statute and policy into: status Indians, those registered and recognized by the state as Indians, for whom the state has fiduciary and other legal obligations; nonstatus Indians, individuals or communities whose ancestors were not registered or who were either disenfranchised or who failed to meet the criteria of status; Metis, a cultural and language group of Aboriginal and European descent; and the Inuit, the Arctic inhabitants formerly known to us as the Eskimo.


5

6

8

9

10 11

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Teressa Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla: Aboriginal Women, Justice and the Charter," Aboriginal Peoples and the Justice System: Report of the National Round Table on Aboriginal Justice Issues (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993), p. 379. Lilianne Ernestine Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Sexual Equality as an Aboriginal Right: The Native Women's Association of Canada and the Constitutional Process on Aboriginal Matters 1982-1987 (Saarbrucken: Verlag breitenbach Publishers, 1991). I define discourse as a conversation or political dialogue between unequal parties, with the superordinate party holding the resources—economic, human and cultural—that determine the context and the content of the discourse. Discursive strategies or moves on the part of the superordinate voice provoke responses of resistance from others; these voices struggle to dominate the discursive arena. A series of first ministers conferences were mandated in the Constitution; the opening ceremonies and speeches were televised and provided Canadians as a whole their first direct glimpse of the intricate diplomacy and protocol of Aboriginal politics. Others concur with my perception of their failure and of the media manipulation that surrounded them. For supporting interpretations see David Hawkes, Negotiating Aboriginal Selfgovernment: Developments Surrounding the 1985 First Ministers' Conference (Kingston: Queen's University Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, 1985); and Tony Hall, "The Pipe and the Constitution: Some Personal Reflections on the First Federal Provincial Conference on Aboriginal Rights," (unpublished, 1983). Teressa Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...," p. 371. Although Harper was the only one to reject the Meech Lake Accord on the grounds of Aboriginal issues, he was not alone in his opposition to the accord. Premier Wells of Newfoundland led his legislative assembly in its rejection of the accord. Although the Inuit Tapirisat was at the time led by a woman, Rosemary Kuptana, the association did not share NWAC's views on women's issues; rather it supported the position of the AFN with respect to women's rights. NWAC et al. v. Her Majesty et al, (20 August 1992), Federal Court of Appeal. Kathleen Jamieson, Indian Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1978); Camille Jones, "Towards Equal Rights and Amendment of Section 12(1) (b) of the Indian Act: A Postscript to Lovelace v. Canada," case note Harvard Women's Law Journal 8 (1985), pp. 195-213; M.B.J. Jones, "Sexual Equality, The Constitution and Indian Status: A Comment on S.12(l)(b) of the Indian Act," Windsor 'Yearbook of Access

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to Justice 4 (1985), pp. 48-72; John, D. Whyte, "The Lavell Case and Equality in Canada," Queen's Quarterly 81 (1974), pp. 28-42. Michael MacDonald, "Indian Status: Colonialism or Sexism?" Canadian Community Law Journal 9 (1986), pp. 23-48. John Giokas, "Accommodating the Concerns of Aboriginal People within the Existing Justice System," Aboriginal Peoples and the Justice System: Report of the National Round Table on Aboriginal Justice Issues (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993), p.199. For a comprehensive account of the impact of the Indian Act on women, see Jamieson, Indian Women and the Law in Canada, p. 14. The history of this struggle has been documented by Jamieson, Indian Women and the Law in Canada; Janet Silman et al., Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: The Woman's Press, 1987); and Shirley Bear and the Tobique Women's Group, "You Can't Change the Indian Act?" in Jeri Dawn Wine and Janice L. Ristock, eds., Women and Social Change: Feminist Activism in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1991). The implications of viewing the struggle as one of competing rights has also been addressed by Irene Blumer, Native Women and Equality Before the Courts (National Association of Women and the Law, 1993); Sharon Mclvor, "Aboriginal Women's Rights as 'Existing Rights'," Canadian Woman Studies/les Cahiers de la Femme 15/2&3 (1995); Nahanee, Dancing With a Gorilla...; and Allan McChesney, "Aboriginal Communities and Rights in Canada," in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na cin, ed., Human Rights in Cross Cultural Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Mary Ellen Turpel, "Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter: Interpretive Monopolies, Cultural Differences," Canadian Human Rights Yearbook 6/3 (1989-90), p. 42; Also see Mary Ellen Turpel, "Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Contradictions and Challenges," Canadian Woman Studies 10/2&3 (1989), pp. 149-157; Delia Opekokew, "Self Identification and Cultural Preservation: A Commentary on Recent Indian Act Amendments," Canadian Native Law Reporter 2 (1986), pp. 1-25. The NWAC's executive has at times expressed similar fears and for these reasons a past president once advised women against suing a band that refused them reinstatement under the provisions of Bill C-31. KrosenbrinkGelissen, Sexual Equality as an Aboriginal Right..., p.187. NWAC et al. v. Her Majesty et al, (August 20,1992), Federal Court of Appeal. Women of the Metis Nation (WMN), "Submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples." WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission..." n.p.; Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA), Breaking Free: A Proposal for Change to


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Aboriginal Family Violence (Thunder Bay: Ontario Native Women's Association, 1989). WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission...." For a comprehensive understanding of the dimensions of the classical national discourse see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). ONWA, Breaking Free..., p.45. Statement of principles and objectives appearing in NWAC public education documents. See, for example, Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), Voices of Aboriginal Women: Aboriginal Women Speak out About Violence (Ottawa: Canadian Council on Social Development and Native Women's Association of Canada, 1991). As feminist theorists have made clear, the institutions, practices and discourses of the state are inextricably bound up with prerogatives of manhood. The socially masculine powers of the state have defined women's position in relation to men in terms of domination, dependence, discipline and protection. My use of masculinist state includes issues of patriarchy, paternalism and fraternalism and the ways in which these are linked to rational thought. I am influenced by Brown in this application. Wendy Brown, "Finding the Man in the State," Feminist Studies 18/1 (1992), pp.7-34. I am unable to locate an authoritative source for this phrase. It has been used in oral contexts by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women to convey the connotations of the expression "mothers of the nation" and to capture the political sense of the term "No Indian Women—No Indian Nation" used by NWAC. This apocryphal statement has not been used solely with respect to Aboriginal women of Canada. It has been similarly applied in comparative post-colonial struggles. In addition to hearing it at political and academic meetings in Canada, I have heard it used in reference to the black woman's maternal movement in South Africa and in reference to the post-colonial discourses of the International Indigenous Women's Movement. For an earlier discussion of the sentiments of NWAC and the committee on Indian Rights for Indian Women, which express concepts of traditional motherhood, see Lilianne Krosenbrink-Gelissen, No Indian Women, No Indian Nation: Canadian Native Women in Search of their Identity (Nijmegen: Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1984). This was made evident in the recent elections of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. President Rosemary Kuptana, who was one of three Aboriginal women at the table during the 1992 constitutional negotiations, was challenged by Ruby Argna'naaq, consultant of the Inuit Women's Association. Kuptana is

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a strong supporter of constitutional reform and the creation of a "third order of government" and is opposed the court challenge led by the Native Women's Association. Argna'naaq, who lost, ran on a grass-roots platform, in which figured many of the issues and aspirations of national indigenous women's organizations. An unidentified young man of the Six Nations Confederacy, speaking on a radio hotline, Ottawa, August 20,1994. Art Solomon, "The Woman's Part," cited by ONWA, Breaking Free..., and by WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission..."; Patricia Monture Okanee, Mohawk Nation, also credits Art Solomon's traditional teachings along with those of Shirley O'Connor. Reclaiming Justice (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1992), p.105. Solomon and Shirley O'Connor are both members of the patrilineal Ojibwa nation yet espouse concepts of femaleness, motherhood and the feminine nation shared by women of matrilineal nations such as the Six Nations, Mohawk and Carrier (Yinka Dene). Sharon Mclvor, Lower Nicola Indian Band of British Columbia, has provided similar metaphors derived from traditional knowledge and practices of her patrilineal nation. See note 29. See also her public speeches, on record with NWAC and as cited in Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...," p.379. The discourse analysis that follows adheres to the interpretative frameworks that have evolved in the interdisciplinary fields of gender and cultural studies, utilizing a poststructural discourse analysis. The database for this interpretation comprises observations and citations compiled at academic meetings, from media interviews and reports during constitutional talks, personal conversations with Aboriginal women, statements made at the NWAC/National Action Committee Public Forum, August 24, 1994 at Ottawa, as well as from political documents (position and background papers, policy documents and discussion papers). Texts used cover a decade of constitutional talks (1982-1992) as well as discussion and academic papers published from 1982-1993. From this wealth of material, illustrative examples have been drawn primarily from documents available to the public; these are representative of the discursive strategy identified by KrosenbrinkGelissen as the "traditional motherhood ideology" and interpreted by myself as the "feminine nation." For further information on poststructuralism and discourse analysis see: Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (London: Routledge, 1989); idem, Law, Crime, and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism (London: Sage, 1995); Peter Goodrich, Language of Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990); Jeremy R. Beckett, ed., Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988); Andrew Parker et al., Nationalism and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992).


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I have explored the significance of metaphor and neo-traditional reconstructions with respect to gender and mothering elsewhere: see "The Supreme Law and the Grand Law: Changing Significance of Customary Law for Aboriginal Women of British Columbia/' BC Studies 105/106 (1995), pp. 183-199; "Child of the State, Mother to the Nation: Aboriginal Women and the Ideology of Mothering," Culture XIII/1 (1993), pp. 17-35; "Carrier Women and the Politics of Mothering" in Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds., From the Periphery: Essays on Women in British Columbia (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1992); and "Native Women in Reserve Politics: Strategies and Struggles," Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 30/31 (1990-1991), pp. 121-137. For another view on the strategic responses of NWAC to this dilemma see Krosenbrink-Gelissen, No Indian Women, No Indian Nation...; and idem, Sexual Equality as An Aboriginal Right.... Significantly, after NWAC's exclusion from the Charlottetown talks, Teressa Nahanee of NWAC reverts to an explicit reliance on "the individualistic feminist perspective to argue for application of the Charter to First Nations governments and their justice systems." Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...," p.369. Sharon Mclvor, an individual appellant in NWAC et al. v. Her Majesty et al, pursues a similar "feminist" argument. See "Aboriginal Women's Rights as 'Existing Rights'," Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers De la Femme 15/2&3 (1995). It must be noted that the discourse of nationhood that dominates the feminine discourse is intertwined with and inseparable from the "rights" discourse, which predominated in the 1970s and 1980s and which continues to be woven into today's text as women obviously cannot extricate themselves from the political dialectic in which the state simultaneously empowers (as happened with the court appeal of August 1992) and disempowers (as it continues to do with its inequitable funding formulae and its continuing perception that male-dominated organizations can and do fairly represent women). I have addressed some of these narrative threads in an earlier paper, "Child of the State, Mother to the Nation...." Further examples of the discourse on feminine nationhood can be found in statements made by the Aboriginal Circle, Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women, Changing the Landscape: Ending Violence - Achieving Equality (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1993). Shirley O'Conner, Patricia Monture and Norissa O'Conner, "Grandmothers, Mothers and Daughters," Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de lafemme 10/ 2&3 (1989), pp.38^0; Aboriginal Circle..., Changing the Landscape..., pp. 144, 151. Aboriginal Circle..., Changing the Landscape..., p.144; Art Solomon, "The Woman's Part," cited by Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Sexual Equality as an Aboriginal Right..., pp. 142-43. Aboriginal Circle..., Changing the Landscape..., p. 187.

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34 35 36

37

38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45

46


Ibid.,p.l51. Attributed to "One of our Grandmothers" by ONWA, Breaking Free.... Aboriginal Woman's Circle..., Changing the Landscape..., p. 187; NWAQ Voices of Aboriginal Women..., p.28. Following is a composite text drawn from a number of talks given by Six Nations women, the words of Art Solomon at various conferences and public forums, and from statements to the media during the "Oka Crises" of 1990. An exemplary commentary of this nature was given by Edna Manitowabe at the Learneds Society Meetings, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 1992, and from the Public Forum of NWAC and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, 24 August, 1994, Ottawa. ONWA, Breaking Free..., p.50. NWAC, "Statement of Objectives and Principles," Voices of Aboriginal Women...,p.22. I use the term patriarchy in reference to state and nation to refer to power structures and social practices that privilege men, that derive from male experience and that subordinate women's sexual and reproductive choices to state/nation goals. Patriarchy is a term frequently employed by Aboriginal women to describe the devastating impact of colonialism upon their lives consequent to imposition of the Indian Act, Christian conversion and the integration of male-dominated Aboriginal associations into state politics. Most specifically, references to patriarchy are made in regard to male power bases in Aboriginal communities that constrict and/or violate women's lives through political exclusion, violence, etc. See, among others, Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla..."; Monture-Okanee, Reclaiming Justice...; Aboriginal Circle...; and Changing the Landscape.... For another example of this classical form of introduction see Chief Leona Nahwegabbow, "Social, Economic, and Political Issues in First Nations" in Anne Marie Mawhiney, Rebirth: Political, Economic And Social Development in First Nations (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1993), p. 62; also see Monture-Okanee, Reclaiming Justice. Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...," p.371. Aboriginal Circle...; Changing the Landscape..., p.199. ONWA, Breaking Free..., p.118. WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission..."; Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...,"p.371. Marie Anne Battiste, "Mikmaq Women: Their Special Dialogue," Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de lafemme 10/2&3 (1989), pp. 61-63.1 have taken up


321

this aspect of the feminine concept of obligation more fully in "Child of the State, Mother to the Nation...." Ideological uneasiness with and the relative merits of feminist theoretical formulations and political praxis have been expressed in various ways by Aboriginal women over the past two decades, with the strongest concerns being raised against a liberal (individualistic) feminism and a radical feminism that sees male sexual desire as the source of sexual inequality. For a range of insightful views see: S. Cheda, "Indian Women: An Historical Example and a Contemporary View" in M. Stephenson, ed., Women in Canada (Don Mills: General Publishing, 1977); C. Lachapelle, "Beyond Barriers: Native Women and the Women's Movement" in Maureen Fitzgerald et al., eds., Still Ain't Satisfied: Canadian Feminism Today (Toronto: The Women's Press, 1982); Monture-Okanee, Reclaiming Justice...; Winona Stevenson, Rhonda Johnson and Donna Greschner, "Peekiskwetan," Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6 (1992). And for examples of the application of liberal feminist legal praxis see Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla...." Mclvor applies this praxis in an original manner to charter protections of Aboriginal rights. See Mclvor, "Aboriginal Women's Rights as 'Existing Rights'." This precept is made unequivocally by NWAC and ONWA in their proposals for remedying family violence, and indeed each links eradication of violence to a gender-harmonious, self-governing nation. WMN echo similar sentiments. See NWAC, Voices of Aboriginal Women...; ONWA, Breaking Free...; WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission..."; Aboriginal Circle..., Changing the Landscape...; and Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Sexual Equality as an Aboriginal Right..., passim. WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission...." Maria Campbell, Address at the Canadian Indian Native Studies Association, Ottawa, October, 1990. Karlene Faith, Marry Gottriedson, Cherry Joe, Wendy Leonard and Sharon Mclvor, "Native Women in Canada: A Quest for Justice," Social Justice 17/3 (1991), pp. 167-189. Sharon Mclvor, executive member of NWAC, in Karlene Faith, Marry Gottriedson, Cherry Joe, Wendy Leonard, and Sharon Mclvor, "Native Women in Canada: A Quest for Justice," Social Justice 17/3 (1991), pp.167189. A similar point is made by Monture-Okanee, who draws from Shirley O'Conner (Ojibway) and Marie Wilson (Gitksan Nation). See MontureOkanee, Reclaiming Justice. I take this concept from Chatterjee, whose influence is implicit earlier in this paper and made explicit hereafter. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought..., p. 2. While the feminine neo-traditionist discourses are also inevitably influenced by and interwoven with dominant

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54

55

56

57 58

59


discourses, they are not imprisoned in European, post-Enlightenment, rationalist discourse in the manner in which masculinist discourses of nationhood are shaped by a rational order of power. A reviewer of this paper rightly notes, "In Canada, Mother Earth, for example, has become a potent metaphor since the 1970s. Ethnopolitical discourses of the present, both male and female, and conducted in the English language, offer little guidance to older Aboriginal constructs of gender and gender relations." In some ways, the path trod by Aboriginal women today replicates in subtle and explicit ways the historic path of European women when they sought collective entry into the nation/state, in large because of the inescapable derivative qualities of Aboriginal nationhood and the recuperation of a European discourse that creates the sexed category of women as the "other." Denise Riley's reading of European women's history as women makes this evident. Denise Riley, "Am I that Name?" Feminism and the Category of women' in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988). See Joan Holmes, Bill C-31, Equality or Disparity? The Effects of the New Indian Act on Native Women (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1987). Unlike NWAC, which represents individuals through voluntary associations without regard to legal identities, AFN's constituents are "Indian bands" as legally defined by the Indian Act. The constituent delegates, therefore, are elected chiefs and counsellors, who are overwhelmingly male. Brown, "Finding the Man...," p.29. First Nations currently have limited powers granted to them regarding definitions of membership under the amended Indian Act of 1985. Since the federal government retains authority to define status and limit the scope of its fiduciary responsibilities to status Indians, First Nations' powers are circumscribed. Several First Nations of Alberta asserted their right to refuse as members women reinstated in the 1985 amendments (Bill C-31), issuing a challenge to the Constitution on these grounds. They lost their case, interestingly on grounds that their policies violated racial equality, not on legal protection of sexual equality nor on recognition of traditional values of gender harmony or motherhood. Twinn v. the Queen, Federal Court of Canada. This concern lies at the heart of Twinn v. the Queen and is upheld by legal scholars and legal analysts supportive of male-dominated groups. See McChesnye, "Aboriginal Communities and Rights...." For a different reading of these discursive battles Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Sexual Equality as an Aboriginal Right....


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James Dumont, "Justice and Aboriginal Peoples," Aboriginal Peoples and the Justice System: Report of the National Round Table on Aboriginal Justice Issues (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993), pp. 58, 76. Giokas, "Accommodating the Concerns of Aboriginal People...," p. 184. For a clear example of how legal scholars have appropriated the female discourse as an individualistic discourse in violation of tradition, see Giokas, "Accommodating the Concerns of Aboriginal People...," p. 199. For examples of AFN (NIB) assertions regarding the collective see: Harold Cardinal, "Native Women and the Indian Act" in Jean Elliot, ed., Two Nations, Many Cultures (Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1979); Krosenbrink-Gelissen, Sexual Equality as An Aboriginal Right..., p. 188; George Erasmus, "'Native Rights', Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence of the Senate and of the House of Commons on the 1987 Constitutional Accord," Meech Lake and Canada: Perspectives from the West (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1988); and "Introduction" in Boyce Richardson, ed., Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country (Toronto: Summerhill Press, 1989); Ovide Mercredi's submission to Aboriginal Peoples and Criminal Justice: Equality, Respect and the Search for Justice (Report 34, Law Reform of Canada, 1991). "The First Nations and the Future," an Interview with Ovide Mercredi led by M.A. Gaudet, The National 19/1 (1992). See also Turpel, "Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter...." This is in part the underlying theme of the Mikmaq (Micmac) Tribal Council's appeal to the International Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on the Protection of Civil and Political Rights, CCPR/C.39/D/205/1986. See also Oren Lyons, "Traditional Native Philosophies Relating to Aboriginal Rights," cited in Menno Boldt and J. Anthony Long, The Quest for Justice: Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p.19. Cited in Windspeaker 11 April 1993, p.l. Assembly of First Nations Ontario Vice-Chief Gordon Peters cited by Windspeaker 7 June 1993, p. 1. WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission..."; NWAC, "Trial Division Erred," letter to Joe Clark, minister responsible for constitutional affairs, Press Release, 24 August, 1992. Aboriginal Circle...; Changing the Landscape..., p. 143. A.C. Hamilton and C.M. Sinclair, Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba: The Justice System and Aboriginal People, vol. 1 (Winnipeg: The Queen's Printer, 1991). For a full discussion of violence and its implications for women see ONWA, Breaking Free...; Nahanee, "Dancing with a Gorilla..."; Emma D. LaRocque,

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"Violence in Aboriginal Communities," The Path to Healing: Report of the National Round Table on Aboriginal Health and Social Issues, (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1993). Mary Ellen Turpel discusses the issues of marital property and violence in "Home/Land," Canadian Journal of Family Law 17 (1991). Richard Bartlett defends the right of the collective against imposition of women's protected rights to marital property, which he would view as an invasion against self-government, "Indian Self-Government, The Equality of the Sexes, and Application of Provincial Matrimonial Property Laws," Canadian Journal of Family Law 5 (1986). Adam Smith in Theories of Nationalism cited in Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought..., p.135 Mary Ellen Turpel, on behalf of AFN, made this argument in public speeches and media interviews in 1992. The theoretical efforts to disassociate Aboriginal philosophy from Western state ideologies are not successful so long as the so-called traditional philosophy resorts to international or common law for legitimacy. Boldt and Long made an effort to provide this distinction but have been criticized for implicitly relying on a "noble savage" idealization. Menno Boldt and J. Anthony Long, "Tribal Traditions and European-Western Political Ideologies: The Dilemma of Canada's Native Indians," Canadian Journal of Political Science XVII/ 3 (1984). See Dumont's comments in "Justice and Aboriginal People." A clear example of this is found in James Dumont's image of the Ojibwa clan system and its adaptation to self-government. Clans' traditional obligations to individuals and to the other clans are translated into a Western style government division of powers and responsibilities. See "Justice and Aboriginal Peoples," pp. 80-81. The legal boundaries between non-status Indians and Metis are indeterminate since both rely upon a mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestry. They have shared exclusion from the benefits accruing to status Indians and Inuit. In 1981 Metis leaders lay the groundwork for constitutional recognition of themselves as a separate people and were recognized as such a year later. This position is made manifest by Hudson and Taylor-Henley in an article that purports male leadership is "properly political" while women's aspirations merely "thwart" the goal of self-governance. Taking the male position uncritically, they discredit women's associations' concerns for the well-being of their families and communities. Peter Hudson and Sharon Taylor-Henley, "Linking Social and Political Development in First Nations Community" in Anne Marie Mawhiney, ed., Rebirth: Political, Economic, and Social Development in First Nations (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1993).


76 77 78

79

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WMN, "Submission to the Royal Commission...." Ibid. ONWA, Breaking Free..., p.4; Hamilton and Sinclair, Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry...; Teressa Nahanee, "Do Native Women need Charter rights?" Priorities (Summer 1992), p.6. Brown, "Finding the Man...," p.30.


CHAPTER 12

A Critical Feminist Analysis of the Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies LORNA WEIR JASMIN HABIB

roceed with Care: The Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies1 is one of a series of official studies that have appeared in a number of jurisdictions since the beginning of the 1980s addressing medically assisted human reproduction. These reports are a product of uncertainties and conflicts in the governance of human reproduction at the present time and pose the classic questions of governance: "how to use power to improve national well being, what ends to seek; what evils to avoid; what means to use and what is the nature of the persons upon whom they act//2 This comment first draws in broad strokes some of the larger issues at stake in Proceed with Care and the changing governance of human reproduction, concentrating on the intensification of the regulation of pregnancy, changes in the techniques and governance of pregnancy and the destabilization of cultural interpretations of the two-sexed body. Following these situating remarks we sketch the global politics of Proceed with Care, its relation to gender, capital and class, and law together with its recommendations about regulation and research. The comment employs explanatory concepts from both the Foucauldian governance literature and Bob Jessop's state theory.

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Over the last five decades biomedicine, law and later the popular media have constituted the fetus as a subject distinct from the pregnant woman. This shift is leading to a complex negotiation of the relation between the fetus and the state. The place of the maternal body in state policy and professional practice is being renegotiated as new practices for the government of pregnancy emerge distinct from prior sites of governance over conception, childbirth and child care. In the United States, for example, women have been charged with drug trafficking because they supposedly delivered prohibited narcotics through the umbilical cord in the moments after birth. In some Canadian provinces, women have been subjected, under child welfare law, to involuntary surgery for fetal protection. Women who have refused sterilization have been excluded from jobs judged hazardous for the fetus. More generally, the capacity of genetic diagnosis to screen out workers potentially susceptible to particular occupational health hazards marks a new phase in struggles around workplace protection for working-class men and women. Additionally, the subjectification of the fetus is linked to a remoralization of pregnancy and new techniques of the self (Don't smoke! Avoid Alcohol! Eat well!). The issue has become whether the state has an interest in fetal conservation, as an extension of its positive powers over children as a national resource. The frequent framing of the fetus and the pregnant woman as having separate and sometimes competing interests has led to the potential construction of the state and physicians as guardians of fetal interests. At stake here are key issues about the bodily autonomy of women and women's citizenship rights to bodily integrity.3 At the same time, it is important to recognize that these are complicated matters requiring fundamental theoretical rethinking and public policy research. In vitro fertilization and allied technologies make possible conception outside women's bodies; the resulting zygote has become an object of concern for the state and biomedicine regarding criteria for its preservation, implantation, transfer and destruction. Family law, inheritance law and health law are all implicated in the widely ramified effects of the new conceptive technologies; the wrongs to avoid and the ends to seek

A CRITICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS

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in the governance of zygotes and cryopreserved eggs and sperm are not transparent, but of enormous importance to women. The capacity of molecular genetics to diagnose genetic disorders in utero, particulary in the absence of foreseeable treatments or to engage in research experimentation that may damage the human gene pool, raises questions ranging from fundamental public values regarding disability to the design of the (presently woeful) system of ethical review for biomedicine. At an even more general level, assisted human reproduction is acting to destabilize dominant cultural understandings of how sex and reproduction relate to human bodies. They are associated with what may become a cultural reconfiguration of the sexed body. Cultural interpretations of how the human body is sexed vary historically and cross-culturally. Extending the previous insights of Louise Vandelac4 and Rosi Braidotti5 in a way that helps to situate their arguments historically, Thomas Laqueur argues that the Aristotelian model of reproduction, culturally and legally dominant in the West, has provided the basis for the adjudication of disputes between men and women for centuries.6 In this model, men's contribution to reproduction is held to be ideal and abstract and women's material and concrete; men's experience of reproduction is understood as temporally and spatially discontinuous, while women's is continuous. Under the influence of assisted human reproduction, this model is contested and a new discourse is emerging. Embryo transfer, it is argued, makes women's experience of reproduction discontinuous and abstract, thereby identifying women's contribution to human reproduction with men's. Where human reproduction comes to be understood in terms of genes, it is but a short step to seeing men's and women's relation to reproduction as identical and equal. This has profound implications for child custody cases as well as for our cultural understandings of childbirth and care. The labour of having babies and taking care of children is constructed within this discourse as gender-neutral. If it became dominant, such a unisexual and gender-neutral model of human reproduction, modelled on prior cultural understandings of the masculine body, could have profoundly negative consequences for women.

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GLOBAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PROCEED WITH CARE

To date there has been little legislation in Canada or elsewhere related to assisted human reproduction, and the areas where a rough consensus exists cover only a fraction of potential policy decisions. No coherent policy framework has emerged. In this context, the broad mandate of the Baird Commission, more extensive than any previous official inquiry on assisted human reproduction internationally, was particularly significant. In 1989 the federal state mandated the commission to: [examine] current and potential medical and scientific developments related to new reproductive technologies, considering in particular their social, ethical, health, research, legal and economic implications and the public interest, recommending what policies and safeguards should be applied. The commission will examine, in particular, a) implications of new reproductive technologies for women's reproductive health and well-being; b) the causes, prevention and treatment of male and female infertility; c) reversals of sterilizations procedures, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, embryo transfers, prenatal screening and diagnostic techniques, genetic manipulation and therapeutic interventions to correct genetic anomalies, sex selection techniques, embryo experimentation and fetal tissue transplants; d) social and legal arrangements, such as surrogate parenting, judicial interventions during gestation and birth, and 'ownership' of ova, sperm, embryos and fetal tissue; e) the status and rights of people using or contributing to reproductive services, such as access to procedures, 'rights' to parenthood, informed consent, status of gamete donors and confidentiality, and the impact of these services on all concerned parties, particularly the children; and f) the economic ramifications of these technologies, such as the commercial marketing of ova, sperm and embryos, the


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application of patent law, and the funding of research and procedures including infertility treatment.7 The commission's mandate thus covered a wide-ranging project of governance, with the state posing itself broad questions about the ends of government on this terrain, what to avoid, what means to use and the characteristics of the persons and entities to which action would attach. The result of the broad mandate was a final report that deals with widely disparate phenomena, ranging from eight chapters on the prevention of infertility through public health measures, four chapters on acute care treatments for infertility, three chapters on prenatal diagnosis, and a miscellany of chapters on ethics, fetal tissues, gene therapy, sex selection, embryo research, as well as several chapters laying the basis for the general architecture of the report. Overall, Proceed with Care is strongest in its epidemiological arguments, much weaker in its historical, social scientific and legal reasoning. This is not surprising, given that the chair of the commission, Patricia Baird, is a genetic epidemiologist, and that the commission was racked by internal divisions8 that left a lasting impact on its research. The secrecy of the commission's research process, the centralization of research control in the chair and the lack of public accountability for research funds (three-and-one-half years after its appointment the commission still had not publicly released information as to the titles of research projects, the names of researchers and short descriptions of the projects) led to the condemnation of the conduct of the inquiry by the Social Science Federation of Canada.9 The behaviour of the Baird Commission sets a negative precedent for future research at commissions of inquiry.10 The commission agrees with criticisms coming from medical, feminist and labour groups that many forms of medically assisted human reproduction are experimental, and are neither safe nor effective for the women and children whose bodies are the chief sites of intervention. The hallmark of Proceed with Care is its vigorous defence of "evidence-based medicine," defined in the report as "medical practice based on data and assessment of whether procedures or treatments are of benefit for their intended purpose."11

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Using British data, the commission estimates that anywhere between 30 percent and 80 percent of clinical treatments used today have never been evaluated. The report links the principle of evidencebased medicine to quality control of Canadian health care, arguing that only those treatments and procedures that have been adequately evaluated should in future be publicly funded, and suggests that evidence-based medicine be first applied to new reproductive technologies. Evidence-based medicine is an attack on the principles of clinical knowledge that over the past two centuries have emphasized variability in treatment forms in order to adapt medical knowledge to the individuality of bodies and disease.12 Clinical medicine has never institutionalized a sharp boundary between research and treatment. The report also proposes creation of a New Reproductive Technologies Commission (NRTC), as a centralized regulatory structure with the power to enforce a division between treatments and research. The NRTC would be a highly centralized regulatory body with sweeping powers. If these were to encroach on provincial jurisdiction in health care, the report suggests the use of the "peace, order and good government" clause of the Constitution Act to accomplish the accretion. The commission's report gives no consideration to amendment or extension of existing health-care institutions and health legislation so as to deal with questions about medically assisted human reproduction. It prefers to resolve the potential complexity and the headaches that fine institutional distinctions might bring by economically recommending one massive institution. We believe it is the case that a federal regulatory body should be politically supported since it would enhance the possibilities for democratic control and public participation in decision-making more than would likely be the case at the provincial level, but the commission's motivating argument was sweeping and unsubtle. With these two types of recommendations, the commission links its main recommendation for a central regulatory body to its support for evidence-based medicine, a principle of therapeutic knowledge and therapeutic authority that would transform clinical practice, increasingly standardizing treatments. The combination of knowledge with institution makes "evidence" actionable, a new


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move since clinical practice to this point has not been directly linked with research results. From a sociological point of view, one of the things that is most interesting about the proposal for evidence-based medicine is the ascendancy of epidemiological knowledge (through the use of standardized evaluation procedures such as clinical trials that generate aggregate data) in an attempt to inscribe biomedical knowledge on clinical practice. The transformation in clinical practice is predicated on an alliance of epidemiology with health-care economics. The social effects of governing large populations according to insurance principles1 are here conjoined with the scientificity of epidemiological knowledge against the principles of clinical knowledge over the last two centuries. Evidence-based medicine is neither unequivocally good nor bad; it marks a new terrain for contestation, one that could conceivably have benefits for women as users of health care. We return to this issue in the next portion of this comment. The legal reasoning of Proceed with Care has gained it little respect among lawyers. Many of its recommendations would involve the creation of new criminal offences and the use of criminal law powers. Thus, the commission argued that medical procedures performed on a pregnant woman against her will for the purported benefit of the fetus should be criminalized. However, such activities can already be dealt with through present assault legislation; moreover the Charter of Rights and Freedoms affords another level of protection through its guarantees for the security of the person, this alternative legal strategy is nowhere discussed. The report repeatedly fails to consider existing law or other remedies before it leaps to new uses of criminal law powers. Nowhere, for instance, does the report discuss the appropriateness of criminalizing research activities. The Baird Commission fails to reflect seriously on the present research trajectory of biomedicine and bioscience, taking it as in general unproblematic, although it grants that the trajectory gives rise to or exacerbates inequities that the commission takes as its task to remedy. Hence, Proceed with Care contains no recommendations for changing the economics of assisted human reproduction, reflecting a profound indifference to disturbing the alliance between, on the one hand, the health-care system and, on

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the other, research biomedicine, biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry. Its proposals are limited to extending ethical reviews of research to the private sector and forbidding the emergence of Canadian markets in reproductive tissues. Its main section on the economics of assisted human reproduction contains precisely one recommendation. This is to suggest further study of patents. Yet the text never explains the significance of contemporary changes in patent law for the development of property claims to genetic resources.14 The chapter entitled "Commercial Interests and New Reproductive Technologies," is arguably the worst in the entire report. The commission interpreted very restrictively its mandate to examine the economics of the technologies, limiting its field of inquiry to Canadian companies and Canadian subsidiaries of multinationals. The text does not place Canadian developments in an international context, thereby creating the impression that Canada is a cosy, self-determining nation-state. The document nowhere so much as mentions NAFTA or GATT; their present and future impact on Canadian health care is left blank. Proceed with Care also accomplishes the formidable feat of being written without one word about the ongoing legal battles in the United States around attempts to patent the knowledge of human DNA sequences. It is also interesting to note that the commission was quite closely linked to Burson-Marsteller, awarding that firm two contracts for advice and recommendations on the corporations involved in the research, development and marketing of assisted human reproduction. The authors of the article, "Commercial Involvement in New Reproductive Technologies: An Overview/' which appears in Volume 5 of the commission's research volumes, are associates of Burson-Marsteller. Burson-Marsteller is the largest public relations and lobby organization in the world and has a specialty in health care, providing advice to Dow, Ciba-Geigy, Sandoz and Eli Lilly, among many others. One of its recent clients was the government of Mexico, which hired Burson-Marsteller to manage publicity about NAFTA prior to the signing of the agreement.15 It is thus evident that Proceed with Care provided absolutely no critique of the relations between the public healthcare system, research bioscience, the medical profession and capital.


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While the commission did suggest limitations on experimental research such as the prohibition of germ-line genetic research (research affecting inherited cells and thus inherited research effects) and genetic enhancement that would apply equally to the public and private sectors, it shunned intervention in the political economy of private health care and research, thereby implicitly proposing that the federal state maintain its existing class alliances. The commission was more actively concerned with the relation between family law and the kinship options being created at the intersection of assisted human reproduction and specific cultural understandings of kinship. Canadian family law has evolved in relation to a particular kinship system. The latter is now changing, forming new categories and relations under the impact of donor insemination, egg donation, embryo transfer and contract motherhood. When a woman can become pregnant with the implanted embryo of her daughter and son-in-law and children be borne as the result of harvesting eggs from cadavers, conceptions of kinship are challenged. In the past it was a principle of family law that "the mother is always certain," but this is no longer the case. The commission's recommendation that the gestational mother be recognized as legal mother addresses a number of dilemmas in family law that have occurred with the development of hitherto untapped sources of eggs: cadavers, fetuses, the ovaries of surgically sterilized women, altruistic donors, commercially motivated donors and women undergoing fertility treatments. The recommendation would, for instance, resolve child custody questions in cases where the contracting mother, egg donor and gestational mother were separate persons, that is, where new forms of social parenthood are possible. Likewise, the recommendation that the consenting male partner of a woman undergoing donor insemination be recognized as the legal father of the child would resolve a series of legal issues related to inheritance, access and custody rights of sperm donors. Through this series of recommendations the commission proposes to deal with the instabilities introduced into kinship and law through reproductive biology by asserting a family model of kin relations recognizing one father and one mother, and maintaining gestation rather than genes as the defining criterion of motherhood.

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Bob Jessop's concept of " structural coupling" can be used to situate contemporary tensions between kinship and family law within state theory. Jessop suggests that certain social systems, inclusive of some state institutions, have their own rules of procedure and autonomy from other systems, but are dependent on particular environments or systems for interactions or inputs. Under these conditions, the histories of the system or systems (with the concept of "system" here enjoining systematicity but not social closure) and their environments are linked or, in Jessop's terms, "structurally coupled."16 We are suggesting that kinship and family law have been structurally coupled: family law has its own autonomy and rules of procedure, but it has historically been systematically linked with kinship systems. The history of Canadian family law has been coupled with a particular kinship system; at present, the relations between the two have been destabilized. Another example of structural coupling changing under the impact of new knowledge forms in human reproduction would be the relation between state health-care economics and reproductive biology, the new medical specialty that is displacing obstetrics and gynaecology. Public health care was historically structurally coupled with obstetrics and gynaecology, but the ongoing displacement of obstetrics and gynaecology by the rapidly changing subdiscipline of reproductive biology, which is in turn structurally coupled with biotechnology, introduces new sets of options for public health care. Contemporary changes in the knowledge and practices of human reproduction have challenged multiple sites of structural coupling involving the state. Although it is certainly the case that there are inconsistencies and uncertainties at locations outside the state in the contemporary governance of human reproduction, and that the theory of the state addresses a limited aspect of the governance of human reproduction, it is the problems of governance with respect to the state sector that Proceed with Care was charged with and addressed. Proceed with Care attempts a coordinated response to multiple problems of structural coupling across state systems; it may be read as a coherent plan offered to the Canadian federal state to enact new forms of structural coupling, an exercise in what Jessop would call "strategic co-ordination."17


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THE SALIENCE OF GENDER

In comparison with reports done elsewhere —and regulatory discussions in this field are made with scrupulous attention to international developments — Proceed with Care takes gender, especially the impact of assisted human reproduction on women, very seriously. The Baird Commission formulates measures for the equitable governance of gender in reaction to the highly contested gender politics that have arisen in the context of the social and cultural changes taking place in human reproduction. During the 1980s, the Canadian federal state had been increasingly drawn into a strategy of formal gender neutrality in law and regulation. The commission was given the task of setting assisted human reproduction on a gender-neutral trajectory. The first clue to this gender strategy is the short statement found at the beginning of Proceed with Care. At the bottom of the page after the title one, we read, "Consistent with the Commission's commitment to full equality between men and women, care has been taken throughout this text to use gender-neutral language wherever possible." Unlike commissions of inquiry undertaken elsewhere, such as the Warnock Commission (UK) and the Waller Commission (Australia), the Baird Commission had been initiated by feminists through the activities of the Canadian Coalition for a Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. This was a binational lobbying group of feminist organizations that was founded in the spring of 1987.18 The coalition sought in effect to use the vehicle of a royal commission as an access point for feminists to the state. Its goals included defining the mandate of the commission, obtaining funds for badly needed research, acquiring a vehicle for public debate and exerting major influence over the commission's final report. Feminist control of the commission was lost definitively in December 1991 when the two strongest feminist commissioners, Maureen McTeer and Louise Vandelac, were fired, an event preceded by months of rumoured internal distress. Given this history, the initial reaction of Canadian feminists to Proceed with Care was relief at its gender sensitivity. Canadian feminism exercised a profound influence on Proceed with Care, although few feminist organizations had much expertise

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in the area prior to the formation of the royal commission. The general understanding that preceded the Baird Commission was consonant with the international and largely radical feminist literature then extant that viewed reproductive medicine as a research agenda dominated by masculine gender interests. Feminist responses to NRTs have generally involved cold fear at the prospect of sex selection, forced judicial intervention in pregnancy and the spread of contract motherhood, often viewing these as attempts to undermine women's sex-specific capacity to bear children and the social power of mothers. It was through interaction with the royal commission that many Canadian feminist organizations developed a more thorough and detailed knowledge about contemporary transformations in human reproduction. Feminist interpretations of women's interests in the general area of assisted human reproduction and genetic technologies were constituted through the process of working on briefs to the royal commission and reacting to that state-mandated body, although organizations did draw on international feminist literature to formulate their positions. Some of the resulting statements defining women's interests, such as those made by Aboriginal women's organizations, were unprecedented anywhere. Hence, the process of participating in the royal commission also led to the dissemination of new dialogic positions. A state inquiry was thus the eliciting condition for the development of knowledge by a social movement about changes in scientific knowledge. The general policy goals articulated by feminist and other women's organizations in their briefs and oral presentations to the Baird Commission included: a primary commitment to prevention and health promotion in reproductive health care; equitable access to safe and effective treatments (without racist, regional, class or heterosexist biases); non-commercialization of human tissues; inclusion of women in the decision-making structures of medical and scientific research bodies; enhanced reporting of and access to information; more and better counselling; informed choice; freedom of pregnant women to accept or refuse medical treatment; and prohibition of sex selection for non-therapeutic purposes. These points had been politicized, and identified as generating reinforcing inequities, by feminists, labour unions and a number of


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health-care organizations. The effect was to demonstrate a sexist pattern in dealings with health professionals and the state that violated the standard of gender-neutral governance adopted by the Canadian federal state. The royal commission responded to the sites that feminists had constituted as politically sensitive, but failed to extend the critique into areas that had not been problematized or only weakly addressed by feminists. Thus bioscience other than clinical medicine, genetics, the biotechnology industry and other forms of capital were left untouched by feminist perspectives. Outside these areas, the commission concurred with many of the feminist recommendations, including suggestions to devote more emphasis and time to preventive health measures (although no formula for the ratio of preventive to acute care funding is recommended in Proceed with Care), to preclude courtordered obstetrical interventions, to increase and improve counselling to those undergoing treatment or enrolled in research protocols, to license only those clinics that conducted sex selection tests for medical reasons, and to make preconception contracts unenforceable while legally recognizing the gestational mother as the legal mother of her birth child. Proceed with Care took up a common concern among feminists and condemned the denial of access to health services experienced by members of social groups protected in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition to feminist demands relating to gender, Proceed with Care made a series of recommendations that would clarify paternity in cases of donor insemination. As to the well-documented feminist claims that NRTs were entering clinical practice when there was insufficient evidence to prove their safety or efficacy, the commission heartily concurred, proposing evidence-based medicine as a gender-neutral standard for protecting women. The gender strategy that the Baird Commission proposed was for the most part a disarmingly positive reaction to many of the main feminist recommendations contained in briefs to it. The commission responded to the feminist critique of medicine through proposals that would secure its position both in research science and clinical practice. Medicine was to be reconstructed as non-sexist through a series of recommendations that would fashion the

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emerging field of reproductive biology as a form of gender-neutral, evidence-based medicine. A second array of feminist criticisms dealt with the ways in which medical personnel failed to treat women in a manner conforming to the liberal ideal of patient autonomy: lack of informed consent,19 lack of counselling, involuntary treatment and violations of constitutional rights. These principles form the bases on which medicine constitutes itself as a liberal profession governing patients according to their freedom.20 This principle of governing patients according to their freedom establishes the possibility of resistance and counterclaims. That is, it opens space for conflict initiated by the claims of those who have not been treated in accordance with this principle. The report replied to feminist criticisms of the directive, sovereign use of medical power, with recommendations that would extend to women the discursive practices of liberal professionalism in clinical medicine. Women would be governed as liberal subjects, even in reproductive health care. Proceed with Care thus makes a dual line of recommendations so as to secure assisted human reproduction in a manner consistent with the state strategy of gender-neutral governance. It proposes to secure biomedicine as a science and extend professional standards of liberal governance to women as patients. Given its limited attention to feminist critiques and acceptance of biomedical visions, the report makes a very limited contribution to understanding the social and cultural changes associated with the government of human reproduction. Proceeding from a binary distinction between nature and culture, the report presupposes that human bodies have a fixed and stable meaning. The notion that expertise could in any way be constitutive of the body was a thought that seemingly never occurred to the commissioners. Nor did it heed the warning in a number of feminist briefs to the royal commission, particularly those from Quebecois feminists, which broke with the commission's biomedical and legal framing of issues in order to argue that the discourse of new reproductive technologies is especially dangerous because it assimilates women's activity in having children with men's. It may be that our cultural understandings of the sexed body are changing and that a new, one-sex body is being fashioned. This


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echoes the one-sex interpretation of the human body that Laqueur argues was prevalent in the West from classical antiquity until the eighteenth century.21 In the one-sex interpretation, two genders were recognized, but the female body was understood as modelled on the male, being interpreted as a less perfect version of the male. Men's bodies were imagined as hotter and dryer than women's, but what we distinguish as male and female reproductive organs were thought to be essentially analogous, differing mainly in location. This vision was part of a general ordering of the cosmos from less perfect to more perfect forms, a gradation scaled according to remoteness or proximity to the divine. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Laqueur argues, the shift to a two-sex body came as part of a move to a vision of a purely natural order which was open to scientific investigation. The idea of a cosmic chain of gradually increasing perfection disappeared. The incommensurability of the sexes thereby introduced then became justification for practices of social classification that separated the sexes and made possible political claims on the basis of a distinction authorized by the order of nature. Such analysis teaches us that the body is sexed in historically and culturally specific ways. It has no fixed and stable meaning. If a new one-sex model of the human body is now being negotiated, it will not mark a return to the Ancients, of course. It will not be secured by divine law but, like the two-sex body, will be inscribed in a secular order of nature, the stuff of DNA and protein sequences. It may well be a profoundly sexist gender order, however, just as the one-sex body in its first incarnation was pervasively patriarchal. Imagining the one-sex body is a feat for those who have been made the subjects of the two-sex body, where two sexes are distinguished as opposite on the basis of anatomy. Therefore, much feminist thinking, especially when faced with the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, reacted to the emerging discourse of a one-sex body with attempts to shore up the two-sex body. They continued to read the sexed body as part of the order of nature. In such a reading, NRTs become a violation of nature and an attack on the sovereign power of the mother, which is guaranteed by the two-sexed vision of human reproduction. New reproductive technologies are then represented as a transgression

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of the laws of nature. All this marks a curious return to a quasimedieval concept of natural law as socially prescriptive. This position, which we call "natural law feminism," is deeply vested with a binary of nature and culture, with the sexed body guaranteed in the order of nature. This position also underpinned Proceed with Care. Moving beyond this deeply problematic politic will be difficult. Nonetheless, conceptual resources are being created by feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler working on the sexgender distinction and feminist theory of the human body. The writing of this new feminist politics is an urgent and practical political matter.

ENDNOTES 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8

9

Proceed with Care: The Final Report of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies (Ottawa: Canada Communications Group, 1993). Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power Beyond the State," British Journal of Sociology 43/2 (1992), p. 177. The discussion here draws on Cynthia Daniels, At Women's Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Louise Vandelac, "Sexes et technologies de procreation: 'Meres porteuses' ou la maternity deportee par la langue," Sociologie et societes 19/1 (1987), pp. 108-109. Rosi Braidotti, "Organs without Bodies," Differences 1/1 (1989), p. 156-158. Thomas Laqueur, "Imagining Forms of Solidarity in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies" (Paper presented at the Conference on the History of the Family, Carleton University, Ottawa, May 1994). Proceed with Care, p. 3. Four of its original seven commissioners were fired in December 1991 after they filed a lawsuit against the commission. The firing of commissioners was unprecedented in the history of Canadian royal commissions. For an overview of the conduct of research at the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, see Margrit Eichler, "Frankenstein Meets Kafka: The Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies" in Gwynne Basen, Margrit Eichler and Abby Lippman, eds., Misconceptions (Hull: Voyageur, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 196-222.


10

11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

19

20

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The Social Science Federation of Canada has prepared a booklet, "Research at Royal Commissions: Guidelines and Procedures" (1993), that will be distributed to future commissions, but it has no binding authority. Proceed with Care, p. 72. On clinical knowledge, see Thomas Osborne, "Medicine and Epistemology: Michel Foucault and the Liberality of Clinical Reason," History of the Human Sciences 5/2 (1992), pp. 75-77. See for instance, Francois Ewald, "Insurance and Risks," in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller eds., The Foucault Effect (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991); Pat O'Malley, "Risk, Power and Crime Prevention," Economy and Society 21 (1992), pp. 252-275; Jonathan Simon, "The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices," Law and Society Review 22 (1988), pp. 772-800. For a sketch of the history of patent law, see Gerd Winter, "Patent Law Policy in Biotechnology," Journal of Environmental Law 4/2 (), pp. 167-187. Information about Burson-Marsteller is from Joyce Nelson, Canadian Forum December 1993. Ibid. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 360. Eichler, "Frankenstein Meets Kafka...," p. 196. For a partial listing of the feminist organizations involved in the coalition see n. 6, p. 218. See especially the results of the survey of physician attitudes to prenatal diagnosis, Proceed with Care, p. 766. Thomas Osborne, "On Liberalism, Neoliberalism and the 'Liberal Profession' of Medicine," Economy and Society 22/3 (1993), pp. 347-350. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).


CHAPTER 13

Of GIFTS,1 GAMETRICS,2 Victim Women and Surplus Peoples: New Reproductive Technologies and the Representation of 'Third World' Women

NAVSHARAN SINGH

Popular conceptions of new reproductive technologies (NRTs) often take as their starting point the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby born in Lancashire, Britain, in July 1978. This birth, it is often claimed, marked a new beginning in the area of reproductive technologies. NRTs are thus presented as the great hope in a so-called third technological revolution and are often lauded for increasing reproductive choice.3 Reproduction has long been a terrain of political struggle, and NRTs are changing and extending the issues of struggle. NRTs are powerful tools that are altering, or threatening to alter, the traditional associations between heterosexuality, marriage and women's association with reproduction. NRTs also potentially extend reproductive choices for many women. They also involve the potential for women to lose control over their bodies and reproduction, probable intrusion of the state into more areas of personal life and the extension of medical and technological control over women's bodies. More importantly, in a world where population control is often represented as a tool of economic development, reproductive technologies, with their accompanying reproductive abuses for many women, reveal contradictions which underlie notions such as women's freedom, self-determination or the right to choose of all women in all societies.

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At every stage, developments in the field of reproductive technologies have attracted the attention of feminist scholars and activists. The availability, in the 1960s, of new technologies of birth control on a potentially universal scale made many feminists in the West optimistic of the technical potential of NRTs in transforming the modes of reproduction. These feminists maintained that so long as reproduction remained a natural phenomenon, women were bound in a cycle of social exploitation in which they could not control a large part of their lives. Once childbearing became totally voluntary, it need no longer be the sole or ultimate vocation of women; it becomes one option among others. An underlying assumption of most of these views was that all women everywhere share an oppression based upon their potential role in reproduction. This argument underscored the relationship between oppression of women and female bodies and linked the struggle for women's liberation, therefore, to women's control of their own bodies through access and control over reproductive technologies. Many feminists in the West thus felt that availability of technologies of contraception was the "defining moment" in the history of reproductive relations as it signalled a transformation in women's reproductive consciousness. The potential of reproductive technologies to establish reproductive control for women was not in doubt. These Western feminists believed reproductive technologies could liberate women, usher in reproductive choice and transform the social relations of reproduction fairly directly. As new technologies of reproduction began to appear in the 1970s, while many Western feminists perceived them as choice enhancing because they gave women more control over their bodies and reproduction (many lesbians and women with disabilities also supported technologies of artificial insemination), others began to experience loss of control over their bodies. Many feminists in the West then became critical of the ways in which normal biological processes such as pregnancy, childbirth and also contraception were increasingly medicalized. They began to perceive new technologies as experimentation on women's bodies, treating them as living laboratories, enhancing the control of male "technodocs" on women's reproduction and women's lives as a result of "male envy."

OF GIFTS, GAMETRICS, VICTIM WOMEN AND SURPLUS PEOPLES

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While Western feminists engaged in debates over the emancipatory or disempowering potential of NRTs for women universally, women in the Third World experienced the reproductive technologies very differently. NRTs in the Third World did not come as choice enhancing options for individual women nor were they part of a "male envy" seeking control of women's reproduction. They followed a different trajectory with very different implications for women. In the Third World, reproductive technologies are usually introduced by state-led and Western states'aided programs designed to control individual women's reproductive choice in order to control Third World population. NRTs in the family planning programs are often introduced whether or not women demand control of their reproduction. This largely neo-Malthusian and eugenist control of women's reproduction in the Third World, and the introduction of the NRTs not as part of women's demand for control of their bodies and reproduction but as part of the population control programs, make the issue of NRTs very different for Third World women. Whereas, in the West, NRTs may focus on enhancing women's choice, in the Third World, NRTs almost always aim at fighting fertility "on a war footing." The origin and projected expansion of NRTs in the West are matched by an obsessive emphasis on population control in the Third World and reflect the differential impact of NRTs on women of different socioeconomic backgrounds with respect to reproductive rights. The situation poses a serious challenge for gender analysis and politics. In the West, feminist critique of NRTs and the "programming" of birthing procedures is developed and formulated in detail. In another area, which concerns the use of reproductive technologies in population control and which has direct implications for Third World women and poor women in the West, the Western feminist analysis is problematic.4 It is not that Third World women are absent in the Western feminist discourse. No, Third World women appear regularly in the Western critique. But they are the poor, victimized sisters, the bearers of the brunt of new technologies. While the Western feminist critique is useful and necessary, the overwhelmingly "victim" status it confers on Third World women denies agency to Third World

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women. It consciously or unconsciously draws from the same knowledge about Third World people that guides the population control politics. In both cases, Third World woman as subject is missing. As a Third World woman whose political ideas took shape in the democratic struggles in India, I find this representation deeply problematic. It is now well documented that in the Western context the demand for reproductive choices (including contraception and legalization of abortion) is part of women's struggle over the control of their bodies. Two broad birth control movements are part of the feminist legacy in the West. First, radical feminism, which gathered strength in early twentieth century, strongly believed that it was the women's right to control their own bodies. Access to birth control, then banned, was one element in their struggle for democratic rights. The second movement was lead by socialist feminists on the plank that repeated pregnancies were harmful to the health of working-class women and that it was in the interest of capitalists to have a reserved army of unemployed people. Socialist women demanded birth control for emancipation of working-class women. In the case of Third World, on the other hand, the aspects of reproductive decisions in the very beginning came under state control influenced heavily by the US foreign and domestic policies. Whereas there is a constant debate from the 1960s through the 1990s within Western feminism on the potential implications of the newly emerging reproductive technologies for reproductive control, in the Third World the new technologies were used by population experts to discipline poor woman's reproduction as part of population control programs. This population control discourse invaded the popular consciousness about reproductive control to such an extent that it often clouded the vision of an independent struggle for reproductive freedom in the Third World. In this paper, I draw attention to two processes. First, the emergence of reproductive technologies in the West and the population control programs in the Third World and, secondly, the feminist critique of reproductive technologies in Western feminist literature and the (re)presentation of Third World women. In doing so I draw my examples from India as I explore


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contradictions which underlie feminist politics and scholarship. My argument is that woman's agency is contextual and feminist theory will develop by acknowledging the importance of theorizing from the contexts of Third World women not in terms of a victim status construed in a timeless tradition but in terms that place women's agency at the centre of feminist understanding of power and resistance.

THE POPULATION COMMUNITY AND THE FRAMING OF THE POSTWAR POPULATION PROBLEM

Even today, the term "population explosion in Third World" remains an essentially uncontested one in the international agencies' universe of public discourse. Although the concerns now come laced with epithets like "sustainable populations," or in the name of women's "reproductive health," there is a near consensus that the growing populations of the Third World are a threat to global security.5 The interpretive frame of the Third World persists as "expanding beyond its capacity" which, at the same time, limits the possibility of thinking critically and alternatively about the population issue. Malthus's fear of terrible disasters resulting from population growth and a consequent imbalance in the proportion between the natural increase of population and food were temporarily allayed by the success of the Industrial Revolution. But by World War II, the international importance of the population question was again being treated seriously in many quarters. At this time eugenists, demographers, geographers and US government officials, armed with projections and forecasts, began to signal a global population explosion.6 The projections, which built largely upon colonial censuses, also help to explain the timing of international agencies' overseas intervention in the population field. These new statistics, which appeared following World War II, marked the coming together of much more organized efforts to curb population growth. Some demographers consider 1952 to be a watershed year in population policy history —the year in which Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were

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founded, the year in which the Ford Foundation made its first population grant and the year in which India became the first Third World nation to announce an anti-natalist population policy. This period witnessed the emergence of a population community which was constituted by demographers, philanthropists and public and private organizations who were committed to curbing population growth. The prominent members of this community who shaped the population movement worldwide were the Rockefeller Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and its counterparts in other industrial countries, the United Nations Population Fund, the World Bank, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Mellon and Hewlett foundations, Population Council and the Ford Foundation. Some other private organizations like the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems were already working in the field by that time. The intellectual backdrop to the population community was formed by the postwar modernization discourse. The developments of the late 1940s and 1950s—political decolonization, Bretton Woods Conference, the foundation of IMF and the World Bank, the success of the postwar European reconstruction via the Marshall Plan, the Korean War boom and unparalleled US hegemony in the world economy—all prompted faith in the ability of the West to be able to make a difference to the problems of the non-Western, backward societies. It was assumed that the crux of the problem was the inability of these countries to grow because of their low levels of per capita income due to high populations and consequent low levels of savings and investment. Western thinkers and policy-makers assumed that Third World peoples could gradually, but steadily, be helped to achieve political and economic systems similar to those in the industrialized worlds.7 It was during the 1960s, the first international development decade, that the phenomenon of mass poverty was conceptualized as underdevelopment. In the UN documents and in most parts of the world, countries with a per capita income of less than onetenth of that of the United States were classified as underdeveloped. By this reckoning, nearly 70 percent of the population of the world lived in underdeveloped countries and needed to be developed. It


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was also clear that within a short period, following the process of decolonization, the underdeveloped countries showed an unexpectedly high capacity for growth. But national growth patterns also showed that growth appeared to benefit only those who were already well to do or had gained access to the benefits of growth through new opportunities with little or no benefit to the previously poorer and marginalized sections of the society. But, with tremendous faith in the unlimited possibilities of science and technology and free enterprise, it was assumed that by exporting Western development models, turning the demographic tide, giving financial aid and transferring science and technology there would be a trickle-down effect and poverty would slowly disappear from the face of the earth. Many development aid and population assistance programs were devised in this spirit as the number of poor people swelled in the Third World. The dominant paradigm of development is rooted in a belief in the superiority of the people of the West, of Western knowledge and technology and of Western civilization as a whole.8 Similarly, population control as a field of research and action was based on a representation of the non-Western subjectivity as rural, immobile, illiterate, irrational and multiplying. Work in this genre provided a standard or model of comparison, counterposing Western subjectivity, emphasizing the Western man's (sic) secular, scientific, cosmopolitan, rational and individualistic predilections for crosscultural comparisons. Third World subjectivities were judged and represented on this model.9 Those who saw colonialism as a civilizing mission were disappointed at the articulation of cultural differences and political assertion of the people during the anti-colonial nationalist struggles. They argued that colonialism made death control easier but fertility control harder because of the confrontation between colonial governments and dependent people defending their own culture. Many members of the population community similarly believed that the Raj was synonymous with progress, reason and rationality, which gave the "barbarian" an opportunity to progress, but the "rapid liquidation of colonialism" and the rise of nationalism cut short barbarian cultures' transition to modernity.10 The population community used metaphors of earth as a sinking spaceship with an

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increasing number of Third World people on board posing a threat to the lives of the First World people, projections of scary future numbers and civil strife where " people competed with dogs for refuse/'11 The patrons in the field of population were true believers in science, rationality and progress through scientific engineering of the human community, who got involved in the field of population through their personal encounters with the "backwardness" of the non-Western world or were influenced by their wives who were the elite support of eugenists or Margaret Sanger.12 The population community swung into action by what they described as "the unprecedented growth of population in Third World brought about by rapid declines in infant and child mortality after World War II largely as a result of progress under colonial rule."13 The population community was thus targeting population growth as the cause of underdevelopment of the newly independent nations. It is surprising to read how population scholars' work in this period is totally oblivious of the Third World scholars' drain of wealth or deindustrialization theses. The scholarship of the population community chose to omit the connection between colonial dominance and underdevelopment. It failed to recognize as to how the "masses" were created in the first place. During the mid-1950s, the US administration began to link economic aid to poor countries with policies aimed at checking the so-called demographic explosion. The pressure to do so came from many quarters. Harold Dorn, a US senator, for example, argued that the populations of Third World countries were the cause of grave concern because millions of persons in Asia, Africa and Latin America were now aware of the standards of living enjoyed by Europeans and North Americans and they were demanding the opportunity to attain the same standards and resisted the idea that they must permanently be content with less.14 In 1957, the Population Council, a US-based think-tank held a conference to examine the global population policy. Alarmed by the population explosion in the Third World, the conference proposed that government policies should be of a sort to equalize births between people at different socio-economic levels and they should discourage births among the socially handicapped who cannot give their children adequate


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opportunities. They should encourage large families among the socially fit, it proposed. This selection and elimination approach to population policy, which continues until the present, urges principles of selective procreation, where the fit are enticed to breed and the reproduction of the unfit is restrained. President Eisenhower constituted a president's committee in 1958 to look at the United States Military Assistance Program. This committee helped to crystallize the transition of population from a relatively minor social movement to a major geopolitical issue. The committee was chaired by Major General William H. Draper, who directed the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) and who claimed that "the population problem is the greatest bar to our economic aid programme and to the progress of the world."16 Aid was finally tied to what Julian Huxley, a staunch neo-Malthusian, termed as the "demographic credit-worthiness" of the applicant.17 In 1963, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee added an amendment to the Foreign Aid Bill authorizing "technical assistance to cooperating countries in carrying out programmes of population control." USAID adopted an aggressive population control policy, and in its "war on hunger," triggered by the drought in 1966-67 in many parts of the world, control of population growth became a major strategy. So much so that the head of the USAID population branch, Dr. Reimert T. Ravenholt, in an interview in April, 1977 told his interviewer that sterilization of millions of world's women should be promoted to maintain "the normal operation of US commercial interests around the world."18 The reproductive rights of "millions of world's women" thus stood no chance against safeguarding the commercial interests of the superpower. The commercial interests of the US were to decide when woman in the Third World could or could not bear children. Third World women's reproduction was to be under US commercial control. Ravenholt took the interests of the population community to a pernicious height, and international agencies like the Ford Foundation, as they began their operation in the Third World, strived to develop the "miracle rice" of birth control. As they believed, if they solved the hunger problem of the world through the HYVs of rice, then they could solve the population problem of the world through the anti-fertility vaccine.19

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Third World states were also deeply implicated in the construction of the population explosion as they urged birth rate reduction for the poor as a weapon against poverty and as a tool in economic development. The neo-Malthusian argument—since the poor can never obtain higher living standards, the next generation could only be saved from this awful destiny by keeping their numbers as low as possible—became the basic underlying principle of all national and international population programs. And therefore, with all their potential for providing support to women in terms of reproductive choice, the birth control program in Third World countries became policies to assist or coerce women to delay or terminate pregnancies to fit the goal of population control, which has nothing to do with women's liberation. With reduced birth rates as the highest priority and as a precondition of economic development, the policies make sure that the prevailing social economic order is not altered; that gender relations are allowed to shift, if it all, only gradually and within the existing class structure. International organizations, such as the Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF), USAID and the Population Council who sponsor and regulate the research and promote the use of contraceptives, and the multinational corporations (MNCs), such as Up John and Rousell-Uclaf, which produce them, often invoke the founding demands of the women's movement itself as they market these drugs. Women's lives, their reproductive rights and choice, their privacy, autonomy and empowerment are interestingly on their agenda.20 IPPF, in one of its documents commenting on India's otherwise praiseworthy efforts at population control, identifies lack of contraceptive options to Indian women as the most serious problem that consequently limits the reproductive choices she can make as an individual.21 However, the choice involved for Third World women always means the choice to reduce fertility. Proponents of the hormonal implant Norplant, and anti-fertility vaccine Net-Oen in India, proclaim that long-acting implant or injectables that do not require women to do anything on a regular basis are particularly suitable for an "illiterate" and "backward" population. They also point out that these drugs expand the options open to women and allow Indian women to take decisions about contraception that do not require the cooperation of their husbands


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or the sanction of their families. Choice and privacy freely appear in their jargon. In their mission of liberating women they represent themselves as the good, progressive, pro-woman scientists and those who oppose hormonal contraceptives are the conservative opponents. Thus, when feminist litigation stalled the trials and use of Net-Oen and Norplant in India, it was decried by the company as an anti-woman move which was unfortunate and politicized.22 It is well known that Norplant, like many other providercontrolled technologies of fertility control, was developed as a drug to be used on unruly and recalcitrant populations not only in the Third World but also in the West. Proponents of Norplant favour it because it is long-acting, targets women, does not need a literate or numerate user, does not require the user's cooperation after it has been implanted and can be monitored by the authorities with a glance at the woman's arm. Norplant is now promoted in muchadvertised population control programs in some of the most coercive regimes in the Third World. Lately, a highly invasive Quinacrine sterilization has been added to the list of easy-to-perform terminal methods.23 The Q method of sterilization does not involve surgery, hence the need for a clean place to administer the drug is also eliminated, it is provider controlled, takes only a few minutes and is permanent —women do not have to worry about becoming pregnant for the rest of their lives. In a world of family planning program, women's freedom, choice and agency are invoked only in closed-off, private domains of the family, and reproduction is imaged as unchangeable. Implicit in the woman in family planning discourse are some inherent characteristics. She is "backward," "illiterate," has no control over her fertility, sexuality and the conditions in which she becomes pregnant. It assumes that contraception cannot be negotiated or discussed by the couple, that the woman has no right to refuse sex. No attempt is made to reinforce or envisage a more egalitarian relationship between a man and a woman or place responsibility on the man. No questions are asked about the nature and quality of existing health-care systems and complex factors that mediate different women's access to them. The androcentric and ethnocentric biases are endorsed, elaborated and reproduced in the family planning discourse. The wide range of relations that

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exist in the specific contexts and the variety of subject positions that are therefore available to a woman are, in the process, homogenized and naturalized regressively.24 It is then envisaged that society requires planning and scientifically developed products that can fulfil women's demands for liberty and self-determination (and lead them into modernity) without changes in the existing family relations or in society at large. In other words, there is a technological "fix" that can bypass sexual politics and social relations in which women are gendered and subjugated. The technological fix is apparent in the approaches to policy-making which rely on "experts" who propose "dispassionate solutions" that are politically "unbiased." Within this (un)informed milieu, the woman is claimed to exercise choice. The discourses of family planning appropriate the vocabulary drawn from the women's movement and address the question of woman's rights and invoke women as free only for reducing population numbers. In this way, a range of issues that constitutes the subjugation of women, and indeed their differential subjugation in relation to class, race and caste, is bypassed. A mythical woman is conceived who exercises her right to choose. By making this argument I am not denying that in a different context, where women have access to medical care and sufficient information, hormonal and injectable contraceptives can be regarded as genuine choices for some. The point here, however, is that the new injectables and technologies are not developed for this woman. They are intended for the less desirable demographic groups: the teeming millions of the Third World, First World immigrants, blacks, criminals, i.e., the surplus people, the people who, to borrow from Timothy Findley, are Not Wanted on the Voyage.25

WESTERN FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE NRTS

Going by the recent history of the feminist critique in the West, it is clear that feminists have always actively engaged with various aspects of reproductive technologies. The first-wave feminists demanded access to a safe and reliable means of preventing pregnancy and saw contraception as a necessary condition of


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women's liberation.26 During the 1960s, as reproductive technologies began to emerge potentially on a universal scale, many feminists in the West welcomed this development. As early as 1966, Juliet Mitchell, a socialist feminist, celebrated the availability of the Pill as she wrote, "at last the mode of reproduction could potentially be transformed."27 Her argument was that the technical possibility which made childbearing a conscious decision fundamentally altered the significance of childbearing. She maintained that in the dissociation of sexual from reproductive experience with the availability of contraception, the bourgeois ideology's raison d'etre of family as a social institution was threatened. Mitchell was thus optimistic about the technical potential of reproductive technologies.28 Other feminists also welcomed the accessibility of contraception and reproductive technologies as they provided women greater control over their reproduction. In 1970, Canadian Shulamith Firestone, for example, proclaimed that women's liberation demanded a biological revolution to free women from the tyranny of reproduction by every possible means.29 Not everybody, however, shared this optimism, or for very long. As the technical potential of the biological revolution and its choice-giving capacity was controlled and regulated by those who patented and sold those technologies, many women began to feel a loss of control over their bodies. They became critical of the ways in which normal, healthy processes such as pregnancy, childbirth and, especially, contraception began to be medicalized and became provider controlled. They resented the medical profession taking control over more aspects of women's lives, more conditions being labelled as illness and more drugs and high technology procedures being identified as the solution to newly targeted problems. Since the control of reproductive technologies lay with the technodocs, scientists, medical engineers and the transnational drug companies, who sold not only their product through aggressive marketing strategies but also controlled the information and the kind of interpretation available on the technologies, many feminist scholars and activists during the 1980s began to focus on various implications of reproductive technologies on the lives of women.30

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Feminist writers focused on the health risks of IVF, basing their objections primarily on the poor track record in predicting the problems resulting from other biotechnological interventions. Ruth Hubbard, for example, pointed out the potential parallels between the many unanticipated problems that have occurred in the areas of waste disposal, pest control and other aspects of the ecological crisis and problems that might arise with IVF. She argued that just as there was no way to ensure the safety of those earlier technologies, at present there was no way to assess the safety of IVF procedures. Thus she concludes that IVF represented experimentation on women.31 Some others expressed similar views. Robyn Rowland warned, "we should not wait, as we did with the Pill, until we are twenty years too late/'32 Duelli Klein concurred that the same people who experimented on women with technologies such as the birth control Pill, Dalkon Shields and Depo Proveras were again treating women's bodies as living laboratories in IVF and other procedures.33 Supporters of the new technologies often maintain that all women have the right to bear children and that the new technologies are extending these rights to those who were previously denied it.34 However, many feminists claim that although the new interventions may expand the rights of some women, they reduce the rights and options of most women. They argue that the claim of the supporters of these technologies reinforces the view that women's lives are unfulfilled or worthless unless they bear children. Furthermore, a number of feminist scholars argued that the appearance of women's enthusiastic response to IVF programs is deceptive because in reality women are coerced emotionally by the deeply ingrained message that women's lives are meaningless unless they bear children, or male children in some contexts.5 Coercion also occurs as a result of the commercialization of the reproductive technologies. Feminists also showed concern over the male-controlled nature of the technologies, and since new technologies are characterized by the persistent medicalization of women's lives, the medicalization makes women ever more dependent on a highly professionalized, highly technological, male-dominated medical system. Concern was also expressed on the excessively expensive nature of the NRTs,


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which render them out of reach for poor women. Janice Raymond argues that for poor women NRTs only open new means of exploitation. She cites devastating ways in which poor women are exploited through surrogacy mechanisms.36 How men generally benefit from the new technologies has also been the concern for some feminists. They contend that physicians, scientists, pharmaceutical representatives, most of whom are male and white, reap financial success and professional advancement.37 But their "gains" are not limited to professional or financial: "the control of women's reproduction [by men] furthers the power... of men over their wives by demonstrating the power of men per se."38 Women's near total absence in the policy debates on NRTs and the absence of democratic and participatory regulation mechanisms have been areas of concern. Lately, in the Canadian context, this aspect was brought under women's scrutiny by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Responding to the official Royal Commission Report on New Reproductive Technologies, Proceed with Care, the NAC demanded a moratorium on NRTs by proclaiming that the society "[has] not yet developed the mechanisms that would allow for the democratic control and regulation of biomedicine, science and technology... [and] offered little possibility for genuine public participation in guarding and regulating the operation on NRTs."39 Feminists also deconstructed the language game in NRTs. Klein, for example, argues how terms such as test-tube baby invisibilize women. The term in vitro fertilization, which means literally fertilization in glass, conceals the long series of painful procedures performed on women at great risk to their health and that of their offspring.40 They are also engaging with the legal implications of reproductive technologies to family law.41 They are also problematizing and contesting the mind/body dichotomy that the scientific and technological discourse on reproductive technologies privilege.42 The critique of reproductive technologies controlling the process of reproduction in the West is multifaceted and is generating a powerful movement for the reproductive freedom of women. But whereas Western feminist scholars and activists engage with reproductive technologies, the manifold politics of reproduction in

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the Third World is much less explored. Various Western feminist critiques unveil the many dimensions of NRTs as they see how woman, the female of the human species, is affected, treated or even represented in the NRTs discourse and with what implications. The reproductive technologies, however, do not and have not affected all women equally. Women in the Third World do not only bear the burden of the so-called choice-enhancing technologies like amniocentesis and IVF but also bear the harmful effects of population control technologies like Depo-Provera, Dalkon Shield, Norplant, Net-Oen and Quinacrine on their bodies, often under repressive political conditions. The slogan of reproductive rights often has little meaning in a situation where poor women's main concern is sheer survival. The struggles for reproductive rights thus have a very different meaning for women in the Third World who are shaping these struggles in varied forms, individually and collectively. The feminist critique in the West largely ignores the differential realities. In the majority of Western accounts, whenever and wherever Third World woman appears, she appears as a victim—a woman made guinea-pig, a woman experimented on and haunted by the multinational drug and contraceptive corporations, a woman unable to resist, a woman not allowed to decide and so on. Such a representation depoliticizes the many layers of politics of population control in the Third World and omits how a woman's right to choose is often mediated by a coercive state, more importantly, it denies agency to Third World women. Such a representation reproduces the hegemonic discourse in which agency or transforming capacity remains in the West. Women from the Third World critique the Western feminist reproductive rights movement for defining reproductive and sexual rights to mean personal freedom; for focussing on fertility control in the name of gaining control over the body, which works out differently for Third World women; for focussing on the liberal notion of reproductive rights; for being choice oriented or dismissive of the analysis of the power dynamics in the social and global context and for focussing on individual needs.43 These issues are as important for Third World women as they are for Western feminists. But voicing these rights as the fundamental rights of all


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women also requires the comprehension of economic, political and social realities of different contexts. The demand for reproductive rights for all women, which does not at the same time attack the exploitative order in which women fend for themselves, has little meaning. In the concerns for the liberal body, issues of class and race cannot be overlooked. In the highly inegalitarian, iniquitous and extremely disparate contexts of the Third World, class, for example, is a relevant category. It is the poor and underclass whose rights and claims are particularly undermined in population control programs. Third World women's movements are known for forging extremely meaningful alliances with other democratic movements of the oppressed—classes, castes, minorities, tribal and hill peoples and the like. This does not make Third World feminists' demands any less feminist. They are weaving their story, and as Mohanty says, constructing their story not disengaged from the existing history.44 They are part of the larger story. They are not only bearing the brunt of coercive population control policies but also bearing the hardships brought down to them in the name of economic restructuring, structural adjustment programs, privatization, free market, differentiation in agriculture and debt, with men and all other oppressed people and waging struggles to change these conditions. And it is precisely this context which is often missing in the Western notion of reproductive rights. This is not to deny the existence of a feminist critique of the new technologies applied in the contexts of the Third World for population control. The degeneration of birth control into population control at the hands of states in the Third World and in the international population control establishment has been coming up in the Western feminist critique of reproductive technologies.45 But what is often missing in these critiques is the contestation of reproductive control by the women in those contexts. While the excesses of the population control establishment are deplored and critiqued, the forms of contestation in the contexts of the Third World are neither explored nor theorized. How do women get organized; how do they say "no;" what are the reproductive issues around which women mobilize; what are the forms of their struggle and what are their weapons; what is their vision of reproductive rights?

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Third World women are victims of the population control establishment, but they are not passive victims. Non-compliance, for example, which appears as one of the major (population control) failure factors in the official evaluative studies, is a major means employed by individual women. The women simply do not report for their next dose, they remove the lUDs when the medical staff fails to do it for them, they throw the Pills away.46 They mobilize against invasive technologies, fight for gender justice and against powerful corporate interests. These narratives are seldom part of any Western accounts. Let me narrate a few encounters here.

One A Government of India project evaluation committee bemoaned the dismal failure of Pill distribution and injectables. It reached the conclusion that the mass distribution of Pills and mass experimentation with injectables do not "serve the purpose/' Women on the Pill or injectables simply discontinue these methods when they are unable to handle the side-effects. They throw up the Pill and refuse to turn up for the next injection. The project evaluation committee regretted that despite the best efforts of family welfare policies, the number of Indian women sterilized continues to be abysmally low, that the use of injectables has been stalled and that women refuse to take the Pill.47 Two

In 1982, some national dailies in India published news and advertisement about a particular clinic in Chandigarh in northern India, which is providing ante-natal sex determination services. Through the test, a pregnant woman and her family can know if the fetus she is carrying is male or female, and thus can decide to terminate pregnancy if the fetus is female. In response, several women's groups from Bombay, Delhi and elsewhere started a protest campaign. The emphasis initially was on writing articles for the media and creating a public support group to make the issue publicly visible, highlight the role of unscrupulous scientists


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and doctors who help to propagate the tests and talk about the dangerous effects that these techniques could have, either of permanent damage to the fetus or injury to the woman's uterus. In November 1985, a group of activists from women's groups and people's science groups in Bombay agreed to demand a ban on sex determination tests because of extent to which the practice has spread to all parts of India. A joint action group, the Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex-Preselection, was formed. The forum analyzed the issue at multiple levels. The question of sex determination and pre-selection was now viewed as an integral part of women's oppression and discrimination, as a misuse of science and technology against people in general and women in particular, and as a human rights issue. Forum members spent long hours educating themselves with the medical, social and legal technicalities. They were then ready to propose a new law, the first of its kind, regulating fetal diagnostic techniques. Forum members formulated the act as they wanted it to be and lobbied the state bureaucracy and Maharashtra State Legislative Assembly members. Simultaneously, a country-wide signature campaign was launched and eminent persons from different walks of life were contacted. Articles were written in the media and events such as parent-daughter marches were organized to highlight the campaign. The campaign slogan—Ladki na ladke se kam (A girl is no less than a boy)—was popularized through street plays, songs, documentary films and street corner meetings. In April-May 1988, eight organizations jointly organized a fortnightlong program Nari Jeevan Sangharsh Yatra (A quest to liberate women's lives). This campaign brought together issues related to women's survival in society. An exhibition, accompanied by a booklet, was set up linking the issues of female feticide and infanticide, wife-murder, abuse, rape and sati. The forum managed to be represented in the state expert committee to formulate such a law. In June 1988, the Pre-natal Diagnostic Technologies (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Bill was passed in the state of Maharashtra. A sustained campaign by women led to an all India act on prevention and misuse of pre-natal diagnostic technologies, which was passed in 1995 and ratified in 1996.48

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Three Delhi, April 1994. The occasion was a press conference by Max Pharma Ltd., the Indian distributor for Up John's Depo Provera, a few days before the Depo launch in India to dispel doubts about the injectable. Women's groups were not invited, but they learned about the press conference and decided to attend to inform the press about the dangers of Depo and the results of the trials that were not made public by the company. Led by several women's organizations, women reached the venue in big numbers but were debarred by the security of the publicity firm for Max Pharma Ltd. Determined to enter, women activists scaled the walls and entered the press conference. They raised questions ranging from dose determination and long-term effects to product safety and efficacy. Max Pharma representatives had no answers for most of the questions. Women activists then drew their attention to their corporate social responsibility, which means that if they have no case for defending the introduction of Depo in India they should voluntarily suspend its marketing. Women activists also made public the fact that while the Depo kit sold to buyers in the United States contains literature with a long list of possible side-effects and complications arising out of its use, the one produced in Hindi, for the Indian women, simply does not mention any of those things. Max Pharma announced the meeting adjourned. The women's intervention made the front page of most national dailies. Their arguments were heard, but they were also criticized for their "ungracious conduct of scaling walls and violating the rights the of corporate sector" and their very unfeminine conduct. Depo was not withdrawn from the market, but as a result of their intervention, Max Pharma was asked by the Drugs Controller of India to withhold marketing till the time they supply the same information to women in India in Hindi which is given out to customers in the United States.49 Women in the Third World are not the hapless victims of the onward march of new technologies. They fight their own battles, derive meanings from their own contexts and carve out their own strategies. Women's bodies and fertility came to be controlled through the (ab)use of reproductive technologies, but there is


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another part of the story—a process of feminist reappropriation of women's claims over their bodies, sexualities and reproductive capacities. The encounters I described above are by no means isolated incidents. They point to the counter-practices of contestation that are reconstructing women's control over their bodies. Why is Third World women's agency overlooked in Western discourses and how? Feminist theorizing has certainly come a long way since the 1960s and the 1970s when the needs, priorities and aims of feminism were often defined by the experience of Western feminisms. Third World women's numerous critiques contributed to enlarging, enriching and invigorating feminist theory and practice. Their insistence that race and class could not be made invisible in order to make gender visible, and that their theory and politics came out of the materiality of their lives —economically, physically, bodily, racially and sexually—expanded the feminist agenda considerably. The difference is now acknowledged; so much so that incorporating difference in analysis has become the latest academic fad for some. The question of difference is complex. It certainly is not adding colour to the existing pallid formation, but I am not going into that question here. The essential issue here is Third World women's agency and how it is denied in certain discourses. Let me narrate another encounter here. The occasion was the 35th anniversary of the Pill and the location was a talk show on the Women's Television Network, Canada.50 The host was sharing the "premature optimism" which women had when the Pill first appeared with another feminist who happened to be a white Canadian woman. They discussed how the harmful effects of the Pill were not known to women until after women's organizations did there own independent researches, which contributed to improvements in the Pill including lowering of the hormonal content in the contraceptives. The discussion moved on to Norplant. They both agreed that it is a method for the "less conscientious," the women who forget to take the Pill regularly. It is implanted under the skin and it releases the hormone progestin/levonorgestral that stops ovulation and it cannot be taken out by the woman herself. They share concerns about how it causes menstrual irregularities to which medical professionals are paying little attention. The guest then, exhibiting extreme sensitivity to other cultures, narrates how

366


menstrual irregularities cause so much trouble for women in different cultures. She informs the audience how Muslim women and native women are not allowed to participate in daily chores when they are menstruating, and then shares how in Indonesia, where she was visiting, it caused tremendous inconvenience to women who were experiencing prolonged periods with Norplant as they now had to remain out of bounds for prolonged intervals. The Third World woman is certainly not absent in Western women's critiques of reproductive technologies. The talk show thesis is a typical deployment of contexts where the Third World woman is cast in a timeless, unchanging tradition. Women's organizations in many parts of the Third World are opposing Norplant, for example, for the disorders it creates in the body, for its invasiveness; for it is a birth control method not suitable for Third World women who are, on average, more anaemic, malnourished, underweight and suffer from other problems of poor health and live where the public health-care system is in a poor state. Norplant-related deaths in Thailand, Philippines and Bangladesh have been reported due to severe anaemia, and not because the women are unable to perform household chores. The Western lens totally misses women's activism in many parts of the Third World against oppressive religious codes in which women's bodies and their natural functions are rendered impure and in which women are denied sexuality in the name of tradition and culture.51 Culture in this discourse is posited as a timeless, structuring principle of the Third World social order. It is clear that it is more convenient to cast Third World women's identity in a timeless tradition than to labour to see the multiple socio-cultural and political contexts in which Third World women are constructing their identities. The Third World woman will naturally appear as a passive victim and her disarticulation natural when she is conceived in this timeless, unchanging tradition. Privileging culture to the marginalization of other discourses not only apoliticizes and ahistoricizes the phenomenon, it reifies the tradition. The issue of human agency is effectively evaded as a result of this transhistorical concept of culture. The deployment of tradition also illustrates how easy it is to overlook the issues of global relations of dominance and produce cultural explanations without having to encounter questions of


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power. This privileging of culture often disregards any analysis of structures and finds little relevance of an elaborate socio-economic analysis of dependent relationships and larger historical configurations. What is produced is thus an erasure of history, class and the effects of imperialism. Such an analysis simply bails out the corporate interests in the field of contraceptive industry, of the interests of corporations like the Up John, German Remedies, and Max Pharma, which dump invasive contraceptives on the Third World. The talk show analysis comes from a position of power, of privilege, of privileged access to resources. The feminist on the talk show shares her experience in a privileged surrounding. She has an edge of superiority over the distant other—the native, the Muslim. Difference is acknowledged, but it is hierarchical. It is invoked to underscore their problems, their issues which do not significantly affect our lives. It raises their issues, and raising their issues then becomes a matter of helping those women. In this discourse the agents in the Third World are invisible and have little chance of influencing their surroundings. On the other hand, the same discourse constructs a Western woman, the woman aware of how she is being invisiblized by the new technologies and by being aware, she is seen as reclaiming her identity. In this construction, contesting her invisibility, the Western woman has a subjectivity. In the hierarchy she is way above the woman who is being administered drugs so that she stops breeding. It reproduces the hegemonic discourse in which agency or transforming capacity remains in the West. The victim woman has no control over her circumstances, she is an object, a guinea-pig, a pawn at the hands of multinational birth control drug corporations to be experimented on. Contrast it with the illiterate, uneducated, superstitious, breeding machine image reflected in the population control programs while advancing, for example, the case for an injectable contraceptive that requires no management on the part of the recipient or permanent sterilization through Quinacrine, which is the final solution. The end product is the same. Third World woman as subject is missing in both. In the process of gender alliances, who speaks, about whom, and how and where surely involves issues of power and privilege that need to be interrogated.

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The contemporary feminist theory indicates that lessons of second-wave feminism are being learnt. The argument once again is that feminist theory will develop by acknowledging the importance of theorizing from the point of view and contexts of Third World women not in terms of a victim status but in terms that place women's agency, their subjectivities and collective consciousness, at the centre of feminist understanding of power and resistance. Postscript. As I am writing these lines, I read in newspapers that in response to the writ petition entered by several local women's groups in the Supreme Court of India against unethical trials of Quinacrine sterilization, the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of women's petition. It has ruled that all Quinacrine trials and sterilizations be stopped with an immediate effect in private as well as public hospitals and clinics and it has demanded the Drug Controller of India's written commitment on the ban of Quinacrine trials.52

ENDNOTES

2

3

GIFT, gamete intrafallopian tube transfer, is the latest laboratory technique for artificially injecting sperm into the Fallopian tube. GAMETRICS Limited is a sex predetermination clinic chain. Its main branch is in Sausalito, California, but it operates in numerous countries. It sells its franchise to other private companies around the world who are in the business of fetal sex-determination. India is a major market for it. The new reproductive technologies (NRTs) include biomedical intervention in reproduction and broadly include technologies which control fertility (e.g., injectable contraceptives, implants, hormonal pills); monitor and control labour and childbirth (e.g., Caesarean sections); monitor the quality of the fetus (ultrasound and amniocentesis); and help infertile people to have children who are genetically their own (IVF and artificial insemination).These technologies extend to sex selection technologies that are used to increase the male babies, fertilization outside the womb through fertilization of human eggs in a laboratory dish, FVF (in vitro fertilization) and injection of sperm into the Fallopian tube, GIFT (gamete intrafallopian tube transfer) techniques.


4

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The usage of Third World and West in this paper remains problematic. I am aware of and sensitive to the reality that Third World is not any automatic unity nor is West a coherent group. Divisions and alliances on the basis of class, ethnicity, race, history and sexuality are internal to both. But as Chandra Talpade Mohanty concurs, Third World as context refers here to the colonized countries and peoples whose economic, cultural and political structures have been deformed within the colonial processes. This context also extends to black, brown and yellow immigrants and indigenous peoples in North America, Europe and Australia. The West forms a unity in terms of its hegemonic relation (political, economic and cultural) with others and its representation of the Other. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 14-32. See, for example, Population /Environment Equations: Implications for Future Security, Final Report of the Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security, held at Tufts University, Medford, MA, U.S. A, May 31-June 4,1994; Garret Hardin, Living within Limits, (London: Oxford University Press, 1993); Paul Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Thomas Homer-Dixon, "Environmental and Demographic Threats to Canadian Society," Canadian Foreign Policy, Number 2, Volume 2, Fall 1994; Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 1993); Paul Ehrlich et al., "Food Security, Population and Environment," Population and Development Review, Volume 19, Number 1, March 1993. A large number of studies became available in the years to follow which reflected post-war population concerns. See, for example, Philip M. Hauser edited, Population and World Politics, (Illinois: The Free Press, 1958); Philip M. Hauser, The Population Dilemma, (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Philip Appleman, The Silent Explosion, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Harrison Brown and Edward Hutchings, Jr., Are Our Descendants Doomed? Technological Change and Population Growth, (New York: The Viking Press, 1970); Paul Ehlrich, The Population Bomb, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). Jane Parpart, "Post-Modernism, Gender and Development," in Jonathan Crush ed., Power of Development, (NewYork: Routeledge, 1995). Stephen Marglin, "Towards a Decolonizing of Mind," in F. Marglin and Stephen Marglin eds., Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990) Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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10

11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

19


See, for example, Kingsley Davis, "Demographic Fact and Policy in India," Milibank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 22/3 (1944), p. 260. Philip Appleman, The Silent Explosion, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) p. 6. Edward Scripps, who founded the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, for example, became concerned with population problems during travels in Asia in 1920s. He was a newspaper publisher, and to share his Asian population experience Scripps took Warren Thompson, who had just completed his Ph.D. on Malthus, to the "Orient" and the Pacific Islands on his yatch. As a result of this excursion, in 1922, he established the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems at Miami University, which later became a big research unit on population problems with more grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. Similarly, John D. Rockefeller Ill's concern with population issues developed through his social welfare work in the United States and his travels in Asia, which gave him "firsthand experience of population pressure in that continent." See, for example, John Caldwell and Pat Caldwell, Limiting Population Growth and The Ford Foundation Contribution, (London: Fraces Pinter, 1986), p. 14; Oscar Harkavy, Curbing Population Growth: An Insider's Perspective on Population Movement, (New York: Plenum Press, 1995). Kingsley Davis, "Population and Power in the Free World," in Philip M. Hauser ed., Population and World Politics, p. 210. Harold F. Dorn, "World Population Growth," in Philip M. Hauser ed., Population and World Politics, pp. 35-36. Loes Keysers, Does Family Planning Liberate Women? Unpublished thesis, Institute of Social Sciences, The Hague, (1982) cited in Sultana Kamal, "Seizure of Reproductive Rights?" in Patricia Spallone and Lynn Steinberg eds., Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress, (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), p.146. Ibid. Julian Huxley argued that since people in the Third World are choosing to be poor by multiplying their numbers, "a lesson for all grant-giving and loan making agencies is that if a recipient country's population is growing too fast, aid may be wholly wasted.... Aid-giving agencies should regard it as their duty to enquire into the demographic credit-worthiness of the applicant." Julian Huxley, "Foreword" to Philip Appleman The Silent Explosion, p. xii. Peter J. Davidson, Nature Against Us, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 88. A Ford Foundation consultant remarking on foundation funded research in the field of reproductive biology once remarked, "Foundation funding has contributed to an explosion of new fundamental knowledge in reproduction,


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although the device - the miracle rice of birth control - has not been invented." See, Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological Degradation and Political Conflict in Punjab, (Dehra Dun: Research Foundation for Science and Ecology, 1989), p.94. Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the scientist who is a consultant and spokesperson for the multinational Roussel-Uclaf, which developed the abortifacient pill, RU 486, speaks of it as the moral property of women. It is a duty, he claims, to make the right to this property available in the Third World: "Denying this pill is basically signing the death warrant for the 200,000 women who die annually, worldwide from abortion." Cited in Renate Klein et al., RU 486 Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, (Cambridge: Institute on Women and Technology, 1991). Sara Adhikari, "Countdown to Disaster," The Sunday Times of India, 1 November, 1992. Vimal Balasubrahmanyan, "Fix it, Forget it: Norplant and Human Rights," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 22, May 29,1993. Quinacrine has a notorious history. It was discovered in the 1920s and has been used as an anti-malarial drug and as a treatment for several infections for more than 60 years. Quinacrine is known to produce corrosion and irritation of the membranous substances it stays in contact with. The corrosive action results in the two adjoining surfaces sticking together permanently. In the late 1960s, a Chilean scientist, Jaime Zipper, published reports about the potential use of Quinacrine for tubal blockage by inserting it into the uterus. The Fallopian tubes get blocked when Quinacrine, in the form of pellets, is instilled in the uterus through the vagina, thus resulting in female sterilization. This method is being hailed by the population lobby internationally on the grounds that it presents an "easy" and economical alternative to surgical sterilization. Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, "Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender," Social Scientist, Volume 22, No. 4,1994. Corresponding groups in the Indian national context are the rural masses, the urban poor, the majority of whom are low caste dalits, and of course, Muslims. Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in Brooklyn, New York. Juliet Mitchell/'Women: the Longest Revolution," New Left Review, Number 40, November 1966. Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s, (New York: Pandora, 1989).

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29 30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43


Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, (New York: William Morrow, 1970) Abby Lippman et al., Misconceptions: The Social Construction of Choice and the New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies, (Hull: Voyager Publishers, 1993). Ruth Hubbard, "Test Tube Babies: Solution or Problem," Technology Review, 82, March-April 1980. Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technology, (London: Lime Tree, 1984. Rennate Duelli Klein, "What's New About the 'New' Reproductive Technologies?," in Gena Corea et al., eds., Man Made Women: How the New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). See, for example, B. Menning, "In Defense of In Vitro Fertilization," in Helen B. Holmes et al., eds., Custom-Made Child? Women-Centered Perspectives, (Clifton: Humana Pres, 1981). Renate Klien, The Exploitation of a Desire: Women's Experience with In Vitro fertilization, (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1989). Janice Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women's freedom, (San Francisco: Harper Collins,1993). Robin Rowland Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs, (New York: Harper and Roe, 1985). Jalna Hanmer, "Reproductive Technologies: The Future for Women," cited in Holmes et al., eds., Custom Made Child, 1981. Draft Document for Discussion NAC Response to "Proceed With Care" the Royal Commission Report on New Reproductive Technologies. Annual General Meeting, Ottawa, 1994. Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klien and Gena Corea eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?, (Boston: Pandora Press, 1984), p.5. Roxanne Mykitiuk and E. Sloss, "The Challenge of the New Reproductive Technologies to Family Law," Paper completed for the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, 1992. Roxanne Mykitiuk, "Fragmenting the Body," The Australian Feminist Law Journal, Volume 2,1994, p. 84. See, for example, Sumati Nair, "Population Policies and the Ideology of Population Control in India," Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, Volume 5, No.l, 1992; Sumati Nair, "Population Policy: Their Abuse," Paper presented at the Seventh International Women and Health Conference, September 12-18, Kampala, Uganda, 1993; Sundari Ravindran, Case Discussion in the panel "International Population and Family Planning from


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a Feminist Perspective/' in Petchesky R. and Jennifer Weiner eds., Report on the Special Sessions, Fourth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Hunter College, New York, 1993; 1984.Mies Maria, "New Reproductive Technologies: Sexist and Racist Implications," in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva eds., Ecofeminism, Kali for Women, 1993; Mustafa Kabir, Case Discussion in the panel "Reproductive Rights as the International Human Rights," in Petchesky Weiner ed., Report on the Special Sessions; Akhter Farida, "The Eugenics and Racist Premise of Reproductive Rights and Population Control," Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, Volume 5, No.l, 1992. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience," in Michelle Barrett and Anne Phillips eds., Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). See, for example, Betsy Hartman, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and Contraceptive Choice, 1987; Janice Raymond, Women as Wombs. See, for example, Deepa Dhanaraj, Something like a War, (Documentary Film, D&N Production, Banglore, India in association with Equal Media Ltd. [London] for Channel Four, 1992. Project Evaluation Document (Rajasthan), GOVERNMENT OF INDIA, 1992, cited in Vimal Balasubrahmanyan, "Fix it, Forget it: Norplant and Human Rights," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 22, May 29,1993. Compiled from FASDSP Group, "Using Technology, Choosing Sex: The Campaign against Sex Determination and the Question of Choice," in Vandana Shiva ed., Minding Our Lives: Women from the South and North Reconnect Ecology and Health, (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993). Compiled from Saheli Newsletter, Volume 5, Number 2, January 1995 and newspaper reports. Take Three, Women's Television Network, March 14,1996. Women's activism in India during the mid-1980s, when a young bride, Roop Kanwar, burnt to death over the funeral pyre of her husband, is a testimony of a feminist interpretation of "tradition" of sati. "Trial and Error," The Times of India, 20 March 1998

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