10) BEFORE THE BOMB GIRLS: WOMEN & THE WUL
By Kimball Cariou
The simplification of history sometimes becomes an art form in bourgeois society. The struggle for women's equality apparently skipped a couple of generations, going into hibernation between the era of the suffragettes and the emergence of women's liberation some fifty years later.
Occasionally Rosie the Rivetter pops up, adding a touch of working class reality. CBC's Bomb Girls has been an exception, offering a glimpse into the wartime lives of women in a Toronto munitions factory. In Bomb Girls, the depiction of tough working conditions and low pay is expanded by plot lines involving the problems faced by minority groups, including young black women, lesbians, and immigrant workers. But there has been little mention of trade unionism.
That brings us to one of the missing links in the equality narrative: the long struggle to organize industries which employed working class women. Historian Stephen Endicott adds an important dimension to this story as part of his new book. Raising the Workers' Flag tells the record of the Workers' Unity League, which was the most revolutionary labour federation in Canada's history from 1930 to 1936. (See review in our Feb. 15‑28 issue.)
Nearly every page of this volume contains fascinating new information, dug out from the archives by the author. Those interested in real "herstory" will find plenty of substance, since the WUL included powerful leaders like Annie Buller, Becky Buhay, and many more. One of the real gems of is Chapgter 9, titled "Women of the workers' Unity League: Taking their place side by side as Activists in the Labour Market."
Endicott gives a clear picture of the situation faced by working class women before and during the "Great Depression". Such women often had to work a double day, going from the workplace back to the unpaid domestic labour of the household. Married women who worked were accused of "stealing" men's jobs.
Already difficult enough during the so‑called "Roaring Twenties," the lives of these women became worse as the capitalist economy crashed. Their wages, already lower than those of their male counterparts, were rolled back as the bosses passed on the burden of the crisis to their employees. The report of the first WUL National Congress noted that "the average earnings of women workers have decreased from $12 per week in 1926 to $9 per week in 1930; at the same time the hours of labour have increased from 48 per week to 52 hours per week."
Many women activists in the WUL were involved in an earlier formation, the Women's Labour Leagues, which originated at the time of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. In contrast to the YWCA and other groups, the WLL focused on demands for equal pay and a higher minimum wage. The Leagues grew to about sixty branches and affiliates by 1929, publishing their own newspaper, the Woman Worker. Most of the members were from Finnish immigrant left‑wing communities in northern Ontario, with a few English‑ or Yiddish‑speaking branches in other areas.
At that point, the strategic orientation of the WLL shifted, away from cooperation with "reformist" women's organizations, towards a more militant stance. Over the next couple of years, under the leadership of Becky Buhay, one of the top Communist organizers of the time, the WLL merged into the Workers' Unity League.
Despite considerable turmoil, Endicott writes that "in the end, joining the WUL gave the Women's Labour Leagues a new unifying focus: to strive for the improvement of the living and working conditions of working class women through vigorous support of various economic and social issues and the drive for industrial trade unionism."
As the author explains, the events of the Great Depression included hundreds of strikes, battles for relief and civil rights, campaigns for unemployment insurance. Women often played a prominent role as participants and leaders.
Much of their inspiration came from the huge advances towards equality made by women in the Soviet Union, as reported by a six-member WLL delegation which toured the USSR in 1930. The delegates found a society which aimed to break the subordination of women to the patriarchal family model, a goal which resonated strongly with many women in Canada.
The Soviet example helped to bolster the WUL position that married women should be allowed to work for pay ‑ controversial at a time when unemployment was skyrocketing among male workers. But such right‑wing opposition was contradicted by a more powerful imperative: employers hired women because they were a source of cheap labour and higher profits.
This factor alone ensured that the WUL's female membership went much beyond the WLL branches and women's auxiliaries, although these were a major area of activity. Many women were involved in the new unemployed movements. One was Flora Hutton, a member of the Capitol Hill (Burnaby) WLL branch and also the Unemployed Girls' Club in Vancouver. During a Workers' Economic Conference organized in Ottawa by the WUL, Hutton boldly confronted Deputy Prime Minister Sir George Perley, telling him that unemployed girls in Vancouver starved or sold their bodies for a meal while Prime Minister Bennett lived in luxury.
Across the country, women organizers led many delegations, pickets, and protests to demand relief for jobless women, unemployment insurance, and hot meals for schoolchildren. Thousands took part in solidarity campaigns around the Relief Camp Workers Union, which led the 1935 On to Ottawa Trek. Despite government repression, these activists helped expand the annual celebrations of March 8, International Women's Day. Some were jailed for their actions, notably Annie Buller, imprisoned for her outstanding leadership of the Estevan‑Bienfait coal miners strike in Saskatchewan.
The struggle for industrial trade unionism (as opposed to the old "craft union" system) had particular relevance for women in certain industries. The needle trades in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg were infamous for low wages and sweatshop conditions. As another chapter in Raising the Workers' Flag relates, the WUL played a huge role in bringing women in the needle trades into the labour movement, overcoming the opposition of the Catholic Church, and cultural barriers between French‑Canadian and Jewish workers. The WUL's Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers led a number of successful strikes, winning important gains for women in the industry.
It's true that these struggles sometimes failed, and also that male chauvinism was not eradicated by the growing participation of women in the trade unions. But the WUL did bring thousands of women into the labour movement, setting the stage for the mass entry of women into industry during WW2, and for the dramatic growth of public sector unions during the 1950s and '60s.
These enormous social changes in turn created far better conditions for a more explicit women's liberation movement to emerge. As women made progress towards greater economic independence, the protections afforded by collective agreements made it easier to speak out on a wide range of social issues.
In a very real way, the victories for pay equity, child care, reproductive rights and much more achieved in the decades of the 1960s through the 1990s were built on the efforts of earlier generations of women who refused to accept subordination to the bosses, the Church, the state, and patriarchal "family values". The Workers' Unity League was instrumental in this transformation of the role of women in Canada, and Endicott's book sheds new light on this historic shift
(The above article is from the March 1-15, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)