Women's Lives and the Second Wave, 1945–1982

Two pictures of Canadian women

Picture a 1950s magazine ad for a new washing machine. A smiling woman in a dress stands in a spotless kitchen. The message: a woman's place is in the home, and her job is to keep it perfect for her husband and children.

Now picture 1981. Hundreds of women from across Canada crowd into a conference in Ottawa and lobby members of Parliament to make sure equality for women is written into the new Constitution. They win.

What happened in between? In this lesson you will analyse what changed and what stayed the same for women in Canada from 1945 to 1982, including for First Nations, Métis and Inuit women, racialized women and immigrant women. You will also study the second wave of feminism, one of the most important social movements of the period.

After the war: back to the kitchen?

During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of women worked in factories and joined the forces. When the war ended, many were expected to give their jobs to returning men. Government daycare centres that had opened in wartime were closed. Popular culture, from magazines to TV shows, celebrated the homemaker.

But the picture was never that simple:

• Many women, especially working-class women, immigrant women and Black women, always worked for pay because their families needed the money.
• The federal public service required women to resign when they married. This "marriage bar" was removed in 1955.
• Women often earned much less than men for similar work. Ontario passed a law requiring equal pay for equal work in 1951, and the federal government did the same for its area in 1956, but the laws were hard to enforce.
• Each decade, more married women went to work for pay, often part-time or after their children were in school.

The second wave of feminism

The first wave of feminism (late 1800s to the 1920s) focused on winning the vote. The second wave, from the 1960s, focused on equality in work, family, law, education and the body.

• Laura Sabia and the Committee for the Equality of Women pressured Prime Minister Pearson. In 1967 he appointed the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by journalist Florence Bird. Women across Canada sent briefs and spoke at hearings.
• Its 1970 report made 167 recommendations, including equal pay, paid maternity leave, a national daycare program, and changes to the Indian Act's treatment of First Nations women.
• In 1972, women's groups formed the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) to push governments to act on the report.
• Doris Anderson, editor of Chatelaine magazine from 1957 to 1977, published articles on equal pay, divorce, birth control and other issues that most magazines avoided.
• Madeleine Parent, a union organizer in Quebec's textile mills, fought for women workers' wages and conditions, and later helped found NAC.
• In 1970, the Abortion Caravan travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa to protest the abortion law; some members chained themselves in the House of Commons gallery.

New laws for families

• The Divorce Act (1968) created Canada's first national divorce law and allowed divorce when a marriage had broken down (for example, after three years apart), not only for adultery. Divorce rates rose sharply afterward.
• Bill C-150 (passed 1969) made major changes to the Criminal Code. It made selling and advertising birth control legal; allowed abortion in hospitals under strict conditions; and decriminalized private sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex (aged 21 and over). Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau said in 1967 that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
• Unemployment Insurance added maternity benefits in 1971.
• Political representation stayed low. Ellen Fairclough became the first woman in a federal cabinet in 1957. In the 1968 election, only one woman was elected to the House of Commons (Grace MacInnis). Jeanne Sauvé became the first woman Speaker of the House in 1980, and Bertha Wilson the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1982.

First Nations women and the Indian Act

Under section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act, a First Nations woman with Indian status who married a man without status lost her status, and so did her children. She could lose the right to live on her reserve, to own property there and to be buried with her family. A First Nations man who married a woman without status kept his status, and his wife gained it.

First Nations women fought this law:

• Mary Two-Axe Earley, a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman from Kahnawà:ke, campaigned against it for decades from the 1960s.
• Jeannette Corbiere Lavell (Anishinaabe) and Yvonne Bédard took cases to court; the Supreme Court ruled against them in 1973.
• In 1979, women from the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick led a walk from Oka, Quebec, to Ottawa to draw attention to the issue.
• Sandra Lovelace of Tobique took her case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which ruled in 1981 that Canada had violated her rights.

The law was finally changed in 1985, three years after this unit ends.

Immigrant and racialized women

The domestic worker programs, such as the West Indian Domestic Scheme (1955–1967), brought women from the Caribbean to work in Canadian homes. They had to live with their employers, often worked long hours for low pay, and had little power to complain. Many still built new lives and sponsored family members. Immigrant women also worked in garment factories, cleaning and food processing, often in poorly paid jobs. Feminist organizations of the time were led mostly by white, middle-class women, and racialized and immigrant women organized their own groups to make sure their needs were heard.