Maternal Feminism and Domestic Workers

Factsheet

Description

This factsheet discusses the impacts of maternal feminism, the ideology of a group of first-wave feminists fighting for their right to vote that is based in racial and classist distinctions and discrimination, 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.

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References

  • 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.

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