University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2010
416 pp., illus., $35 paperback
A double review with Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929–1939
by Katrina Srigley
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2010
240 pp., illus., $24.95 paperback
As a child of post-World War II immigrants, I sometimes find it difficult to connect with Canadian history prior to 1949. When I opened Katrina Srigley’s Breadwinning Daughters, it occurred to me how little I knew about Canadians’ personal experiences of the interwar years.
For her book, Srigley collected a number of oral histories from women who lived in Toronto during the 1930s and combined these with insights drawn from leading historians and publications. Although there are definitely academic overtones in her writing, the interviews make the book a more intimate read and each chapter includes images that let readers put faces to names and stories.
The women who participated in Srigley’s project share many characteristics. Most evident are their resilience in accepting their place in the working world and, more sadly, their shared sense of loss and regret. For many, the Depression ended their dream of post-secondary education. For a few, that dream waited until after child rearing, when they became Canada’s first generation of “mature students.”
Where Breadwinning Daughters ends, Joan Sangster’s Transforming Labour begins. Compared to Srigley’s book, Sangster’s exploration of women and work in Canada after World War II is lengthy and sometimes heavy reading.
Sangster examines policy decisions and systemic practices of government departments and labour organizations. She also devotes a whole chapter to Aboriginal women, looking at the specialized nature of the work they did in their local economies as well as the federal government’s depiction of their move into white-collar labour.
Both of these books offer intriguing insights into the lives of individual women in the workforce, and together they develop a context that challenges common notions of Canadian women’s experiences before and after the Second World War.
— Tanja Hütter (Read bio)
Tanja Hütter is Online Manager for Canada's History Society and a pragmatic idealist.