A mighty power against the cost of living: Canadian housewives organize in the 1930s

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 77, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 27-47

  Guard, Julie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA   (Canada)

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EID: 77951635943     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547909990238     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (137)

1. "Housewives Plan 'High Prices' Boycott: Plan City-Wide Union to Fight Food Costs Control Board Told," Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1937, 1
2. "Women Uniting Against Prices Mrs. Lamb Says," Daily Clarion, November 8, 1937, 1.
3. "Spurn School Milk Boycott Say 'Many Need It Badly' . . . Approve Principle," Toronto Daily Star, November 5, 1937, 6.
4. "Chart Great Crusade to Gain Lower Prices: Housewives' Resolutions Present Plan of Action," Daily Clarion, December 2, 1938, 2.
5. Julie Guard, "Canadian Consumers or Dangerous Foreign Women? Canada's Radical Consumer Movement, 1947-1950," in Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, ed. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, (Toronto, 2004), 161-189.
6. Dana Frank, "Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests," Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 255-285. Jewish housewives in Canada also struck kosher butchers who raised their prices too high.
7. See Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939 (Toronto, 1992): 36-37.
8. Karen Hunt, "Negotiating the Boundaries of the Domestic: British Socialist Women and the Politics of Consumption," Women's History Review 9 (2000): 389-410.
9. Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000).
10. According to historian James Hinton, the British Housewives' League advanced a program to the right of the Conservative Party, alienated almost everyone, failed to attract broad-based support, and faded away quickly.
11. James Hinton, "Militant Housewives: The British Housewives' League and the Atlee Government," History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 131-156.
12. Judith Smart, "The Politics of Consumption: The Housewives' Associations in South-Eastern Australia Before 1950," Journal of Women's History 18 (2006): 13-39
13. "Consumption, Collectivism and Conservatism: Food in the Mobilisation of Housewives in Interwar Southeastern Australia," paper presented at Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History in Europe and Beyond, August 28-31, 2008
14. Stockholm, Sweden. On maternalist politics, see also many of the essays in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York, 1993).
15. Temma Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (Berkeley, 2004): 40-72; 115.
16. Amy Swerdlow, "Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC," Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 493-520.
17. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005), 95-135.
18. "Reveals Profits on Milk Reach 27 Percent in N.Y.," Toronto Daily Star, December 29, 1937, 19.
19. Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 215-249;
20. Annelise Orleck, "'We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public': Militant Housewives During the Great Depression," Feminist Studies 19 (1993): 147-173.
21. See also Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, ch. 3. African American Housewives' Leagues also mobilized in major US cities during the 1930s around a somewhat different agenda.
22. See Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998): 62-65
23. Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York, 1998): 245-247
24. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985): 215-216.
25. "Oppose Boost in Milk Price," Daily Clarion, January 28, 1937
26. "Rise in Food Cost Fought By Women," Daily Clarion, February 11, 1937;
27. "Would Probe Spread Before Price Raised," Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1937, 6.
28. Swerdlow, "Ladies' Day at the Capitol."
29. "Meeting Hectic as Women Vote to Force Milk Cut," Toronto Daily Star, November 9, 1937, 9.
30. Carmela Patrias, Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression in Crowland, Ontario 1930-1935. (Toronto, 1990)
31. Patricia V. Schultz, The East York Workers' Association: A Response to the Great Depression (Toronto, 1975).
32. In addition to those listed below, some useful anthologies include Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History 3rd ed., ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York, 2000)
33. Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights, ed. Sheila Rowbotham and Stephanie Linkogle (New York, 2001)
34. The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, ed. Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor (Hanover, NH: 1997);
35. Mothers of the Municipality: Women, Work and Social Policy in Post-1945 Halifax, ed. Judith Fingard and Janet Guildford (Toronto, 2005).
36. Annelise Orleck, "Tradition Unbound: Radical Mothers in International Perspective," in The Politics of Motherhood, 3-20.
37. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York, 2005).
38. There is an enormous historiography on African American women's struggles. Some recent anthologies include Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (New York, 2001)
39. Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, ed. David W. Houck and David E. Dixon (Jackson, MS, 2009)
40. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Ann Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY, 1990).
41. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004).
42. Sheila Rowbotham, "Facets of Emancipation: Women in Movement from the Eighteenth Century to the Present," in Women Resist Globalization, 13-27.
43. "Introduction," in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880-1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (New York, 1991); 1-20.
44. For example, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York, 1993).
45. E.H. Clarke, A History of the Toronto Milk Producers' Association, 1900-1966 (Toronto, 1966), 57-65.
46. A fine collection of anecdotes describing these hardships is Barry Broadfoot, Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression (Don Mills, ON, 1973).
47. Eugene A. Forsey, Recovery - For Whom? (Toronto, 1937).
48. Reprinted in The Dirty Thirties: Canadians in the Great Depression, ed. Michiel Horn (Toronto, 1972), 3-76.
49. Alice M. Cooke, "Fate on the Dole," Daily Clarion, June 20, 1936, 5.
50. Margaret Gould, "Starvelings, 1938 Model," Toronto Daily Star, October 7, 1938, 4.
51. For useful insights into the importance of decent funerals for poor families in a slightly earlier period, see Esyllt Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (Toronto, 2008), 106-109.
52. E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (New York, 2002)
53. James Giblin, Milk: The Fight for Purity (New York, 1986), 107-120.
54. Gordon Bates, "Health League of Canada," Canadian Journal of Public Health 61 (1970): 60-62.
55. "Not Enough Milk Drunk, Says Doctor," Toronto Daily Star, January 17, 1938, 12.
56. "Important to Health," Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1937, 4.
57. Clarke, Toronto Milk Producers' Association, 1.
58. "Drink More Milk Drive Urged on Jersey Breeders," Toronto Daily Star, July 11, 1938, 6.
59. DuPuis argues that advertisements suggest a related construction, nativism. DuPuis, 117-119.
60. "Spurn School Milk Boycott Say 'Many Need It Badly,'" Toronto Daily Star, November 5, 1937, 6.
61. "Housewives Limit Milk Boycott Meeting to Women," Evening Telegram, November 8, 1937, 26.
62. "Housework Comes First So Stores Unpicketed," Toronto Daily Star, February 26, 1938, 1.
63. See, for example, Lizabeth Cohen, "Citizens and Consumers in the United States in the Century of Mass Consumption," in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (New York, 2001), 203-221
64. Davis, Home Fires, 1-7
65. Frank, Purchasing Power, 5-8
66. Meg Jacobs, "The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in the Twentieth-Century United States," in The Politics of Consumption, 223-239
67. The essays in Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, and Marlene Epp (Toronto, 2010, forthcoming). In an interesting reversal of the phenomenon identified by historian Elizabeth Faue, in which women are erased from the historical memory of male-identified events such as strikes, even when men engaged in consumer-led activities, they tend to be seen as women's protests.
68. See Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991).
69. Temma Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (Berkeley, 2004), 46.
70. Landon Storrs, "Left-Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States, 1935-1960," Journal of Women's History 18 (2006): 40-67
71. Landon Y.R. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 2000).
72. Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets; Swerdlow, "Ladies' Day at the Capitol."
73. "Women Uniting Against Prices Mrs. Lamb Says," Daily Clarion, November 8, 1937, 1.
74. "Women To Present Protest to Hepburn," Toronto Daily Star, November 25, 1937, 6
75. "As a Woman Sees It," Daily Clarion, November 27, 1937
76. "Drive for Cheaper Milk Not Dead, Declare Women," Evening Telegram, December 10, 1937, 30
77. "Toronto Housewives to Publish Paper," Daily Clarion, April 6, 1938
78. "Housewives Hold Party Wednesday," Daily Clarion, April 27, 1938
79. "Housewives Assn. Will Hold Picnic," Daily Clarion, July 16, 1938;
80. "Housewives Send Speakers," Daily Clarion, November 10, 1938
81. "Housewives Concert," Daily Clarion, April 13, 1939
82. "Housewives' Satire Depicts Campaign," Toronto Daily Star, April 15, 1939, 12
83. "Housewife Drama Produced," Daily Clarion, April 18, 1939, 3
84. "Housewives Garden Party On Saturday," Daily Clarion, July 8, 1939;
85. "Housewives' Meetings Oppose Cadet Revival," Toronto Daily Star, August 1, 1939, 10.
86. "Suburban Dairies Form Association to Sell 12-Cent Milk," The Evening Telegram, November 18, 1937, 25
87. "Milk Producers Informed Boycott 'Flash in Pan,'" Toronto Daily Star, November 29, 1937, 6
88. "Toronto Milk Distribution Abominable, Says Hepburn," Toronto Daily Star, December 23, 1937, 7.
89. "Dairyman Defies Board's Milk Price Boost," Evening Telegram, November 5, 1937, 13;
90. "Milk at Ten Cents is Possible Claim," Toronto Daily Star, December 8, 1937, 6.
91. "Trying to Weld Milk Producers in One Big Unit," Toronto Daily Star, February 17, 1938, 1.
92. "Appeal to Housewives," letters to the editor, Toronto Daily Star, November 4, 1937, 4.
93. "Won't Buy, Say 4,000 Women if Butter over 30 Cents," Toronto Daily Star, February 22, 1938, 5.
94. "Housewives Plan Boycott to Fight Gas Meter Fee," Toronto Daily Star, December 1, 1938, 22
95. "Chart Great Crusade to Gain Lower Prices: Housewives' Resolutions Present Plan of Action," Daily Clarion, December 2, 1938, 2.
96. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics; Storrs, "Left-Feminism" and Civilizing Capitalism.
97. "Reeve Offers Housewives Support in Milk-Price War," Toronto Daily Star, November 9, 1937, 6.
98. "Up To Housewives," letter to the editor, Toronto Daily Star, November 3, 1937, 4.
99. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics.
100. Pat Thane, "Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State: The Case of Women in the British Labour Party and Social Policy, 1906-1945," in Maternity and Gender Policies, 93-118.
101. Dennis Guest, The Emergence of Social Security in Canada (Vancouver, 1980), 84-85, 142-165.
102. James Struthers, No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State, 1914-1941 (Toronto, 1983)
103. see also Pierre Burton, The Great Depression, 1929-1939 (Toronto, 1990)
104. The Depression in Canada: Responses to Economic Crisis, ed. Michiel Horn (Toronto, 1988)
105. Michiel Horn, "The Great Depression: Past and Present," Journal of Canadian Studies 11 (1976): 41-50.
106. Struthers, No Fault, 110.
107. Guest, Social Security in Canada; Kenneth Norrie, Douglas Owram, and J.C. Herbert Emery, A History of the Canadian Economy, 4th ed. (Toronto, 2008), 317-339
108. Richard Pomfret, The Economic Development of Canada (Scarborough, ON, 1992), 237-243
109. Struthers, No Fault; James Struthers, "The Great Depression," in The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecana-dianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm? PgNm1/4TCE&Params 1/4 a1ARTA0003425. Accessed May 13, 2009.
110. Social Fabric or Patchwork Quilt: The Development of Social Policy in Canada, ed. Raymond B. Blake and Jeffrey A. Keshen (Toronto, 2006)
111. Alvin Finkel, Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto, 1997)
112. Guest, Social Security in Canada.
113. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, 1993), 58-96.
114. Nancy E. Rose, Workfare or Fair Work: Women, Welfare, and Government Work Programs (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), 5.
115. Burton, Great Depression, 176-179, 326-329, 390-407
116. Norrie, Owram, and Emery, History of the Canadian Economy; Struthers, No Fault, 95-103, 132-137, 142-146, 158-159.
117. Jeff Singleton, The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (Westport, CT, 2000), 10-12.
118. Struthers, No Fault, 168-169.
119. Guest, Social Security in Canada, 85.
120. Marcus Klee notes that doctors' requisitions were required for relief milk: Marcus Aurelius Klee, "Between the Scylla and Charybdis of Anarchy and Despotism: The State, Capital, and the Working Class in the Great Depression, Toronto, 1929-1940," (Ph.D. diss., Queen's University, 1999), 54
121. Burton Great Depression 103-104.
122. "Boost Cash Relief To Meet Milk Rise," Toronto Daily Star, November 17, 1937, 6;
123. "Will Ask All Dairies for Relief Quotation," Toronto Daily Star, December 2, 1937, 6.
124. "Relief Milk Expense Raised $1,000 Week," Toronto Daily Star, November 18, 1937, 1.
125. "Administration Body on Relief is Vetoed," Toronto Daily Star, November 30, 1937, 5;
126. "Relief in Toronto Off $1,570,100 in '37," Toronto Daily Star, January 26, 1938, 6.
127. "City's Tax Rate Seen Cut by New Relief Cost Plan," Toronto Daily Star, February 10, 1938, 1.
128. Struthers, No Fault, 173.
129. "Toronto Milk Distribution Abominable, Says Hepburn," Toronto Daily Star, December 23, 1937, 7.
130. "Houck Resigns Post as Milk Board Head," Toronto Daily Star, March 28, 1938, 1;
131. "Demands of Housewives Granted," Daily Clarion, February 16, 1938;
132. "Women Urge Federal Probe of Food Prices," Daily Clarion, February 19, 1938;
133. "International Women's Day," "The Cost of Living and March the Eighth," Daily Clarion, February 28, 1938, 1.
134. Ontario, Royal Commission on Milk, Report of the Ontario Royal Commission on Milk, 1947 (Toronto, 1947).
135. Ontario, Royal Commission on Milk, Report (Toronto, 1947).
136. Julie Guard, "Women Worth Watching: Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada," in Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, ed. Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto, 2000), 73-88.
137. Storrs, "Left-Feminism."