This factsheet is a snapshot of the impacts of maternal feminism, the race and class based ideology of a group of first-wave feminists on domestic workers they employed to take over their household work. Maternal feminists believed that Canada belonged as home to an Anglo-Saxon race who only they could reproduce, and this racism lead to comparison of British domestic workers to Caribbean domestic workers and the low status of all domestic workers.
Arat-Koc, Sedet. “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant Servants.” In Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, edited by Abigail B. Baken and Daiva Stasiulis, 53-80. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Bacchi, Carol Lee. “Race Regeneration, Evolution, and Social Purity.” In Liberation Deferred? : The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1887-1918, 104-16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.
Calliste, Agnes. “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900-1932." Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 4 (Winter 1993-1994): 131-48.
Fahrni, Magda. “‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids: Respectability and the Case of Domestic Service, 1880-1914.” Labour 39, no. 39 (Spring 1997): 69–97, https://doi.org/10.2307/25144107.
Schecter, Tanya. Race, Class, Women and the State: The Case of Domestic Labour in Canada. Montréal: Black Rose, 1998.
Valverde, Mariana. “‘When the Mother of the Race Is Free’: Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism.” In Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History, edited by Mariana Valverde and Franca Iacovetta, 3–26. University of Toronto Press, 1992.