Welfare Mother

Journal of Women, Politics & Policy
ISSN: 1554-477X (Print) 1554-4788 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wwap20
“Welfare Mother” Activism, Mainstream Feminism,

and the Cunning of History in Ontario’s 1970s
Welfare Debate
Wendy McKeen
To cite this article: Wendy McKeen (2018) “Welfare Mother” Activism, Mainstream Feminism, and
the Cunning of History in Ontario’s 1970s Welfare Debate, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy,
39:1, 75-103, DOI: 10.1080/1554477X.2017.1375787
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2017.1375787
Published online: 01 Dec 2017.
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JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY
2018, VOL. 39, NO. 1, 75–103
https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477X.2017.1375787
“Welfare Mother” Activism, Mainstream Feminism, and the

Cunning of History in Ontario’s 1970s Welfare Debate
Wendy McKeen
York University, Toronto, Ontario
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines the voice of mobilized welfare mothers Welfare mother activism;
feminism; welfare debate;
and the mainstream women’s movement in the welfare debate women’s unpaid work
of the 1970s in Ontario. A question debated was whether
welfare mothers had a right to “stay home” while receiving
welfare. The article shows that a radical strain of welfare
mother activists at this time demanded recognition of
women’s unpaid work. While mainstream women’s groups
were generally sympathetic to welfare mothers, their overrid-
ing focus on employability as the solution to their poverty
served to derail the radical possibilities of welfare mother
politics and solidify a policy agenda that undermined the
deserving status of welfare mothers.
Introduction
Currently, lone mothers on welfare are largely vilified, and their harsh and
punitive treatment under the welfare system is accepted as normal. Feminist
literature has amply documented the transformations in the treatment of
lone mothers under social assistance and their detrimental effects on women
and their families (e.g., Baker and Tippin 1999; Breitkreuz 2005; Evans 1996;
Gaszo 2012; Little 1998, 2012; Mosher 2007; Scott 1996). Single mothers on
social assistance have gone from being seen as deserving to undeserving.
They are now often subject to work-for-welfare programs, while their care
work has become invisible (Breitkreuz 2005; Gaszo 2012). But how did we
arrive at this place? In answering this question feminist scholars have tended
to point to broad economic, political, or cultural shifts that have forced or
encouraged governments to move in certain directions. Many scholars have
highlighted the effects of globalization or neoliberal economic restructuring
in creating deficits and encouraging governments to reduce social spending
(e.g., Baker and Tippin 1999; Evans 1996; Little 2012). For example, Patricia
Evans (1988) argues that the Ontario government’s initial turn to mount
work incentive programs for single mothers on welfare in the 1970s primarily
reflected the government’s interest in curbing rising welfare costs in the
CONTACT Wendy McKeen wmckeen@yorku.ca School of Social Work, York University, S874 Ross Bldg.,
4700 Keele St., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3.
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
76 W. MCKEEN
context of the emerging recession and the rapid rise in the numbers of single
mothers on welfare. Other scholars have emphasized the role that shifts in
cultural norms have played in influencing social policy (e.g., Gaszo 2012;
Mayson 1999). For example, Amber Gaszo (2012) argues that the current
embrace of a gender-neutral, work-for-welfare type policy for single mothers
on social assistance has paralleled shifts over time in societal beliefs about
mothering, namely, from the moral code of mother-carer to one of mother-
worker. While these are all important insights, they tend to leave many
questions unanswered. For example, why does one moral code become
dominant at a certain point in time; why does another emerge; how do
dominant discourses or economic or political agendas often succeed in
reasserting themselves in the face of challenges from oppositional actors? I
contend that to answer these questions we need to pay more attention to
political agency and political struggle—and not merely from a top-down
perspective that focuses narrowly on state actors but also from a bottom-
up perspective that reveals the voices of the full range of political actors
involved in the debate, including the more marginalized oppositional actors.
This approach draws from a combination of theoretical traditions: feminist
political economy, especially the notion that actors make change but not in
circumstances of their own choosing (e.g., see Jenson 1990); the poststruc-
tural recognition that a good deal of politics is made up of struggle over
discourse and meaning (Fraser 1990; McKeen 2004, 2012; Porter 2003); and
finally, a critical appreciation of the concept of “policy community” (McKeen
2004). The latter contends that much political struggle occurs as policy
debates that involve particular subsets of political actors (the “policy com-
munity”) whose outlooks and political choices are at least partly influenced
by the specific discursive and ideational constraints and opportunities oper-
ating at the policy community level (McKeen 2004; McKeen and Porter
2003). This combined lens provides for a richer and more complex under-
standing of the forces of social change and can often reveal the ways that
even marginalized oppositional actors have a role in shaping policy debates
by offering alternative social visions and policy paths.
This article draws on the above theoretical traditions to examine one specific
period of politics surrounding single mothers on welfare in Ontario, Canada. Of
particular interest are the forces at play that led to the reclassifying of single
mothers on welfare from carers to workers like any other. In the mid-1990s the
Ontario government moved to reclassify single mothers on social assistance from
unemployable to employable, and many feminist researchers have seen this
reclassification as the critical moment when single mothers on welfare were recast
from deserving to undeserving (e.g., Baker and Tippin 1999; Breitkreuz 2005;
Evans 1996; Gaszo 2012; Little 2012; Scott 1996). As some researchers have shown,
however, the Ontario government first began to float these ideas and to introduce
measures to encourage single mothers on welfare to move from welfare into paid
JOURNAL OF WOMEN, POLITICS & POLICY 77
employment as early as the mid-1970s (Evans 1988). Indeed, a key subject of

debate in the early and mid-1970s was whether and to what extent single mothers
on welfare should be allowed to “stay home” to receive welfare benefits as opposed
to being seen as employable and therefore suitable candidates for “work incen-
tives.” While a complete account of the debate would ideally focus on the activities
of the full range of actors involved (e.g., government, social policy advocacy
organizations, or social service agencies), the primary focus of the current article
is on the roles that two key actors played: mobilized “welfare mothers” and the
mainstream women’s movement. (Please note that I use the term “welfare
mother” throughout this article because it was the term often used at that time
in referring to single mothers on welfare, including by activist single mothers
themselves.) The two main questions this article addresses are (1) what were the
positions of activist welfare mothers on the issue of the right of welfare mothers to
“stay home” and (2) to what extent were welfare mothers’ positions supported by
the mainstream women’s movement and what consequences did this support
have for the shaping of the welfare mother debate? Research for this article is based
on both secondary and archival material relating to the activities of welfare mother
activist groups and women’s organizations active in Toronto and media accounts
of the debate that took place at this time.
To be clear, welfare mothers have barely been visible as political actors in
the social policy literature, and when they have figured, have often been
subsumed within the antipoverty movement rather than seen as actors in
their own right (e.g., Finkel 2006).1 Alternatively, they have been portrayed
as gender neutral, community-based actors with an “insider’s” view of the
welfare system (Rice and Prince 2013). Moreover, the Canadian women’s
movement literature has tended to imply that welfare mother activists were
not feminists and/or their politics was more akin to that of the previous era
of maternal feminism, with its notion that a woman’s place is in the home.2
This article troubles these perceptions by providing a more complex and
nuanced account of welfare mother activism of this period. Indeed, an
examination of the political demands of welfare mother groups shows
that there was an important radical stream of welfare mother activism in
the mid-1970s. I argue that some groups strongly echoed the analyses
advanced at the time by the grassroots wing of the women’s movement,
particularly its recognition that the devaluation of women’s unpaid work is
intimately connected to their devalued status as paid workers. This analysis
seems to have appealed to many welfare mothers who at the time felt
trapped in an untenable situation: on the one hand, coping with inadequate
benefits, having access only to low paid work, and facing welfare rules that
put severe limits on their ability to earn enough to give them an adequate
income; and on the other hand, being given no credit for the unpaid work
and family responsibilities that they performed on the domestic front. One
group, in particular—the Mother Led Union—was a strong advocate of
78 W. MCKEEN
these ideas. Its politics captured both a desire to have a greater ability to
work for pay under welfare, including better training opportunities and
support services to facilitate their entry into paid work, and to have their
unpaid care work recognized and valued as real work and as a mark of
dignity, respect, and entitlement. A key question raised in this article is
what became of this radical voice within the welfare mother movement,
and, in particular, to what extent was their call for the recognition and
valuing of their unpaid domestic work supported by the broader main-
stream feminist movement?
Turning to the focus on the mainstream second wave women’s movement, a
common perception within the women’s movement literature is that main-
stream feminism was largely supportive of poor and marginalized women. As
this article finds, however, this is not the whole story. Examining the responses
of the mainstream women’s movement organizations to issues affecting welfare
mothers reveals that while women’s organizations, such as the Ontario Status
of Women Council, were sympathetic to welfare mothers and pushed to
improve conditions under welfare, their strategic or political choices within
the context of the debate showed only limited and qualified support for a key
element of welfare mother politics, namely, the valuing of the unpaid work
welfare mothers did in the home. Indeed, the Council ultimately adopted a
social-liberal, employability-focused orientation to the problem of welfare
mothers. It pushed for employability as the main solution for welfare mothers
and remained largely silent on the question of valuing their unpaid care work.
While the political choices of feminists were not the only factor conditioning
welfare politics of the day, I argue that their actions did have important
unintended consequences for curbing the essential radical possibilities of
welfare mother politics and, ultimately, helped to solidify a policy agenda
that undermined the social legitimacy and deserving status of welfare mothers.
This article has four sections. The first section provides the context for the
welfare mother debate and activism that took place in Ontario in the 1970s
and 1980s. The second section examines the politics of welfare mother
activism within the context of the welfare debate of the mid-1970s and
highlights the extent to which its positions were influenced by grassroots
feminism. The third section examines the choices that mainstream feminism
made on these issues within the context of Ontario’s welfare debate and asks
what influence it had in shaping the debate on welfare mothers. The final
section concludes with reflections on the meaning and consequences of this
period of struggle for feminism and future possibilities for creating a socially
just society. I argue that in many ways welfare mother activists presented a
deep and rich understanding of equality and social justice based on their own
lived experiences, and it is one that needs to be better understood by
contemporary feminists and progressives.
Backdrop: welfare mother activism in Ontario in the 1970s

While the 1960s was a relatively prosperous and economically expansive period
in Canada, poverty existed and particularly impacted certain marginalized
groups. Women, as a group, were particularly prone to poverty. While their
participation in the labor force had been rising since the 1950s, most women
were limited to poor jobs with poor pay. As Ann Porter (2003) shows, since the
mid-1950s, a growing proportion of women’s employment was precarious and
part-time therefore, it did not give them the ability to live independently,
support dependents, save, or contribute to pension plans. Moreover, the num-
bers of female-headed lone-parent families grew dramatically with the liberal-
ization of divorce laws in 1968. The lack of access to adequately paying jobs, day
care, and the fact that often child support payments were not paid, meant that
many women and their families were forced to turn to social assistance (Baker
and Tippin 1999). Apart from these pressures, welfare mothers mobilized in the
1960s and 1970s within a context in which social justice and equality had
become public concerns.3 They came together out of a sense that they had rights
as citizens and that welfare was a right and not a charity. They urged for the
reform of the welfare system and participated both in the antipoverty and
welfare rights groups movement and in their own organizations; for example,
several welfare mother groups gave presentations to the Senate Committee on
Poverty in the late 1960s (McKeen 2012).4 Several key reports were published in
the late 1960s and early 1970s (i.e., by the Royal Commission on the Status of
Women, the Croll Senate Committee on Poverty, and the “Real Poverty
Report”) that recognized lone mothers as an important group experiencing
poverty and highlighted the particular disadvantages they faced in having to
take on the roles of both breadwinner and mother.5 One of the solutions they
advanced was for a guaranteed annual income (GAI) program to ensure a
minimum standard of living, and this measure became the focus of a federal-
provincial social security review that took place between 1973 and 1978.
The issues of poverty and welfare and the treatment of welfare mothers
continued to be debated, both federally and provincially, through the 1970s. In
Ontario the economic and political climate began to shift in the early 1970s, and
the cost of welfare became a concern. Attention turned to the rising welfare
caseloads and the fact that single mother families were a growing proportion of
welfare recipients. The Ontario government began to scrutinize and problema-
tize this group. For example, it commissioned an extensive study and survey of
single mothers receiving Family Benefits in 1973, the final report of which was
seen by many as judgmental in tone and conveying a sense that single mothers
on welfare were an unreasonable and an overly demanding group (James 1973;
also see Daly 1975). Although previously, the Ontario government had primar-
ily viewed single mothers on welfare as “unemployable” (in reality, there was
always pressure on lone mothers, even those with young children, to avail
80 W. MCKEEN
themselves of rehabilitative programs and services to become employable and

secure employment), it began to increasingly promote the view that they were
potentially employable.6
The debates over welfare and social services intensified further in the mid-
1970s with the emergence of an economic recession featuring spiraling inflation,
high unemployment, and a declining rate of growth (Little 1998, 152). A fiscal
crisis of the state took hold with governments facing declining revenues and
rising debt (McKeen 2004, 51). Keynesian economics was abandoned and a new
monetarist and supply-side doctrine designed to put more money into the
hands of the private sector was embraced. With the idea that social programs
were repressing work incentives, business and other right-wing interests began
to apply pressure on government to reduce social spending and restructure
social programs. In 1975 Ontario’s “Davis” government veered sharply from its
“red tory” tradition to adopt a policy of austerity, including restraints in social
welfare and social services, and looked to the voluntary sector and individual
families to take up the slack.7 Right-wing commentators and politicians seemed
to become increasingly vocal on issues of social policy and the welfare system.8
The stage was set for an intense debate over social policy, involving government
actors, right-wing voices, activist welfare mothers, and the progressive sector.
The latter included largely left-liberal, middle-class, social policy advocacy
organizations, such as the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto and the
Ontario Welfare Council, various social services coalitions, such as the Metro
Agencies Action Committee, and self-help agencies oriented to working with
welfare mothers, such as Opportunity for Advancement and Times Change.
Also participating at times were the newly emerged women’s movement orga-
nizations, especially the Ontario Status of Women Council. Further to the
background were the voices of the various strains of feminism, including the
radical, left, and grassroots women’s movement.
The next section of the article examines the politics of the welfare mother
groups that were active in welfare debates in this period, with the focus
mainly on the groups active in Toronto. The argument put forward is that
while these groups varied in political orientation, there was a significant
surge of activist welfare mothers who were inspired by, and shared much
with, grassroots (radical and socialist) feminism.
Welfare mother activism in Ontario in the 1970s–1980S: the radical

voice of mobilized welfare mothers
The welfare mother groups that were vocal in Toronto over the 1970s and
early 1980s included (among others): Operation Family Rights (1972–73),
Women After Rights (1976), the Coalition for the Right to Earn (1974–
unknown), Women’s Action Group (1974–76), Mother Led Union
(1974–76), Family Benefits Work Group (1978–83), Mothers’ Action Group
(1982–unknown), and the Sole Support Parents Coalition (1982–85).9 These

groups shared a number of common concerns that flowed from the con-
straints and hardships that single mothers faced as welfare recipients.10
Benefit levels had not kept pace with inflation, especially the price of housing
and food, and the gap between them continued to grow in Ontario over the
1970s.11 Welfare mother groups consistently demanded increased benefits
and regular increases thereafter.12 This demand was also consistent with
findings and recommendations of several key social welfare advocacy orga-
nizations (e.g., National Council of Welfare 1979; Ontario Welfare Council
and Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto 1981; SPCMT and
OWC 1977). Welfare mother groups also took issue with the fact that welfare
regulations placed severe restrictions on their abilities to supplement their
meager benefits with earnings from employment.13 Restrictions came in the
form of penalizing recoupment rates on earnings and the low ceiling placed
on allowable earnings. They were also concerned about the lack of services
needed to make paid employment a viable option, especially training and
upgrading programs, and child care services.14 Several groups objected to the
fact that foster mothers received significantly higher pay for doing the same
work that welfare mothers did and demanded that this lack of parity be
addressed.15 Some groups also demanded parity with those on veterans’ or
old age pensions, given that the latter also received significantly more income
even though they were not caring for dependents.16
To be clear, however, while there were common themes among them,
not all welfare mother groups were of the same political strain. Some
groups were relatively more influenced by the liberal professional and
family-oriented doctrines and ideologies of the social services and reli-
gious organizations. The Coalition for the Right to Earn (CRE), which
formed in the early to mid-1970s (possibly 1973 or 1974), involved several
professional social service and advocacy agencies, including the YWCA,
Family Services Association, several churches (Anglican Church Women,
United Church Women), Solo Parents Association, Toronto Catholic
Women’s League, and the Metro Agencies Action Coalition (itself, a
coalition of several social service agencies).17 The CRE tended to be
deferential in tone and to make claims in the name of supporting
women’s roles as “parents,” as opposed to “women.” They sought more
adequate welfare benefits, an increase in allowable earnings, and a reduc-
tion of the recoupment rate on earnings.18 Their sense was that single
mothers on welfare were employable, but within limits. The group called
for the right of single parents to earn a realistic amount in addition to
their allowance.19 They argued that this additional ability to earn would
allow single mothers to have an interest outside the narrow world of
housekeeping and childraising, which would improve their morale and
sense of self-worth.20
82 W. MCKEEN
Other groups and individual welfare mother activists adopted an angrier

and more radical stance and tone. Many welfare mothers spoke out about
feeling attacked as mothers and citizens under the welfare system, and to some
extent, by society at large (O’Connell 1983; Reinhardt 1974). They deeply
resented the humiliating and patronizing treatment they received at the
hands of welfare workers and bureaucrats and the way it undermined their
relationships with their children—their very abilities to be role models to their
children (Reinhardt 1974).21 Their perception was that welfare mothers were
frequently the target of blame no matter what they did—whether they stayed
home or whether they went to work. They were often cast in the media as
bums, misfits, and even criminal (O’Connell 1983).22 Welfare mothers often
felt the ever-present threat, even if just implied, that if they stepped out of line,
they could lose their benefits and/or their children (O’Connell 1983; Reinhardt
1974). They also shared a sense of outrage at their lack of power and voice
under the welfare system, the unfair use of discretionary power by bureaucrats
and welfare workers, the lack of transparency within the system, and the lack
of a meaningful and unbiased appeal system. They were generally concerned
that those designing the system were far removed from the realities of poverty
and the lives of single mothers and their families and felt it unfair that they had
to comply with and live under policies and practices over which they had little
say (O’Connell 1983; Reinhardt 1974).
To be clear, this angrier and more radical strain of welfare mother activism had
much in common with the grassroots, socialist, and radical feminist women’s
movement that existed at this time. Socialist feminism, which emerged from the
radical left movement and the Marxist critique of capitalism, viewed women’s
oppression as essential to the workings of the capitalist-patriarchal system. Under
this system women were cast as devalued labor, whether doing unpaid work
within the household or as cheap workers in the labor market. Moreover, the
two conditions were seen as mutually reinforcing, thereby ensuring women’s
dependency and their lack of autonomy and power, which benefitted both
individual men and the profiteers of capitalism (Lang 1972). Radical feminism,
which was often reflected in the many women’s centers that emerged within
communities across Canada, set its sights more on challenging and overthrowing
male supremacy and male domination, including the nuclear family model, which
was seen as inadequate and fundamentally oppressive to women. While the
grassroots wing of the women’s movement was always in the political shadows
relative to the institutionalized wing, and declined further over the course of the
1970s,23 it often raised the topics of women’s poverty and the situation of welfare
mothers at conferences and rallies24 and through such feminist periodicals as
Kinesis and The Pedestal. It viewed all women as vulnerable to poverty and
exploitation under existing capitalist-patriarchal structures (Lang 1972). It saw
the welfare system as reinforcing the unequal power relations of the wider society
by operating to keep women in their place as exploitable labor, both as mothers
and housewives in the home and as workers in the labor market. It did this by
keeping welfare benefits low (not to undermine low market wages) and through
regulations preventing them from being able to earn small amounts that would
raise their income beyond that of the “working poor.” The humiliating and
degrading treatment of women by welfare officials was seen as serving to keep
women “broken to the harness” (Lang 1972):
The added burden for a woman (who is a welfare recipient) is that her labour is
not perceived as productive. Men work for money; women work for love. This
basic assumption undercuts the productive value of women’s work in the home
and in the workforce (Lang 1972, 155).
This doctrine resonated with many poor and marginalized women, and in
the late 1960s to mid-1970s there was significant overlap between the grass-
roots women’s movement and antipoverty and welfare mother activism. This
was evident in the Just Society Movement, a vocal and militant antipoverty
group that received significant attention in the media in the late 1960s to
early 1970s. As Margaret Little (2007) and Wendy McKeen (2004) point out,
the Just Society Movement was largely made up of and led by welfare
mothers, some of whom were also active within the grassroots women’s
movement.25 The grassroots feminist doctrine was also evident in the mid-
1970s period with the emergence of the Mother Led Union (MLU).
The MLU was active between 1973 and 1976 and had several locals in
Toronto. It saw itself as both a “women’s” group and focused on poverty and
the problems of welfare mothers. The MLU viewed the welfare system as
degrading and exploitative to women and designed to “keep women in their
place.”26 It was relatively hostile toward government, claiming that the “self-
glorified male legislators” who were in charge of making policy and who were
“totally isolated from any effective solution … by their own masculinity” as
part of the problem.27 The group demanded a meaningful voice in the design
and implementation of the welfare system.
The MLU held a critical and social view of the problems of welfare
mothers that did not blame individual women. The group sought to both
raise awareness about policy issues that impacted welfare mothers and poor
families generally (e.g., food prices, rents, and day care needs) and to address
the immediate needs of welfare mothers through reform of the welfare
system. It wanted welfare mothers to have the right to financial independence
(however each woman chose to arrange that). A key issue was the inadequacy
of welfare benefits and the rules surrounding earnings that prevented them
from being able to increase their income through part-time earnings.28 The
Ontario government made changes to welfare in the fall of 1974 that failed to
alter work exemptions and made increases to benefits that amounted to
25 cents per day per child.29 The MLU described the impact on welfare
mothers’ lives as follows:
84 W. MCKEEN
There are few employers anywhere who can provide employment on this limited
basis. Therefore, in order to get a job, you must make more than the limit. At this
point the Government starts grabbing 75% out of every dollar … Just when you
feel you might start to breathe a little easier, you have to start giving it back… . The
low level of benefits and earnings allowed mean that women have to find illegal
ways of supplementing her income—using a false social insurance number or
secretly forming a relationship with a man for financial reasons hoping welfare
will not find out … The children in these cases are subjected to the results of
incompatibility and dishonesty … A woman should not be forced into dishonesty
in any fashion to provide for her children, hastily abandoned by a man, after the
‘fun’ is over.30
One of the key pillars of the MLU was the idea that mothers raising children
alone had a right to a decent income and living conditions because they were
already earning it through their unpaid domestic work. The group wanted
the unpaid work of welfare mothers to be recognized and valued as real work,
equal to any other. As Joan Clark, the chairperson of the MLU, put it:
Ontario is a place where men, women and children of every walk of life and every
background thrive and prosper in an atmosphere of decency and dignity…
Women with children should be regarded as full time members of the labour
force—decency and dignity require this (Carson 1975).
At one point the group threatened to go on strike “for better pay and
working conditions.” They were going to organize single mothers to drop
their children off on the steps of the Ontario legislature buildings unless the
government agreed to act on their key demands—for “equal pay” between
welfare mothers and foster mothers, a higher earning capacity for mothers
while receiving Family Benefits (i.e., welfare), and free universal 24-hour
child care available to all women whether working in or outside the home
(Typescript, List of Demands 1976). Members of the MLU were angry about
the double standard in the rates of pay between welfare mothers and foster
mothers (with the former paid $30 to $35 per child, and the latter paid
$100 per child):
We might ask at this point why there is this difference … Natural mothers must
always deny themselves all of the necessities of life to sustain their children … all
through the year a mother has to choose between her children’s needs and her
own. This self-sacrifice … is a way of life … So we find a situation where the
natural mother’s instinctive, protective nature, to care for her young is being used
to keep her at a level of poverty that prevents her from having these bare
necessities of life (Ibid.).
The MLU also recognized the connection between the devaluing of women’s
unpaid work and the ability of capital to exploit women in paid work. It was
critical of the various proposals put forward by government that aimed to
lure welfare mothers into paid work. The MLU did not see full-time paid
work as the simple answer for welfare mothers and did not accept that the
welfare poor and working poor were in competition. Also at issue was the
limited range and quality of jobs and pay available to women when they did
enter the paid work force. These concerns were evident in its response to the
notion of the guaranteed annual income that was being proposed:
It would be very wise at this point to be sure that women are not being divided
against each other. Whether she decides to work in her home or takes a second job
outside the home, she is being handed the same amount of peanuts (Carson 1975).
In 1976 the Ontario Minister for Community and Social Services, James
Taylor, announced a new federal and provincial pilot project to assist able-
bodied women with dependent children on welfare to actively seek employ-
ment so that they could become “useful contributors to society” rather than
“sit[ting] around collecting welfare checks (sic).”31 The MLU responded by
agreeing that women who wished to go back to work “ … should be given
every assistance in this effort through the provision of adequate subsidized
daycare and … job training and other support services” but vigorously
defended women’s right to make that decision based on the fact that
women were already working and making a contribution to society.32
It has been the MLU’s position all along that women who choose to remain at
home to raise their children are making a useful contribution to society, that we
are already working. We also hold that women who wish to go back to work
should be given every assistance in this effort through the provision of adequate
subsidized daycare and the availability of job retraining and other support ser-
vices … But this is not the sort of assistance the Ministry has in mind … the
decision will no longer be ours but will depend on the assessment of us made by
welfare offices … it would have us become the source of cheap labor for business
and industry, and force us to compete with the working poor … and he tries to
rationalize these measure in the name of equality for women …33
The MLU had an important public profile during the period it was active.
The group was often cited in the media and seemed to have some influence
on decisions made by Ontario Community and Social Services (i.e., the
provincial body responsible for social assistance). A similar outlook can
also be found in the writings of individual activists, such as Dorothy
O’Connell and Celia Reinhardt.34
In many ways, then, the view that welfare mothers of this period were
traditionalists and more aligned with maternal feminism is misleading. There
was clearly a period in the mid-1970s when welfare mother activism pre-
sented a unique strain of feminism that reflected and blended with grassroots
feminism. This activism offered a complex understanding of the welfare
mother that valued women’s independence and accepted that women had
both a right to work for pay and to parent.
To be clear, the MLU did not achieve its goals with respect to recognizing
welfare mothers’ unpaid work. The Ontario government pointedly refused to
86 W. MCKEEN
acknowledge welfare mothers’ unpaid work as real or valuable work and con-
tinued through the 1970s to advance an agenda of increasing work incentive
measures and pressuring welfare mothers to leave welfare for paid employment.
Moreover, while the MLU was disbanded in 1976, the two new welfare mother
groups that came to the fore in the late 1970s and early 1980s (i.e., the Family
Benefits Work Group [FBWG] and the Mothers’ Action Group [MAG])
reflected a more liberal standpoint that steered away from a structural analysis
and recognition of the relationship between the devaluation of women’s unpaid
work and their devalued status in paid work.35 Their major focus was on the
need for individuals to transition from the dependency of welfare to the inde-
pendency and self-sufficiency of employment, and they were concerned about
the way the welfare system seemingly undermined this goal. They did not argue
that welfare mothers had a right to society’s support on the grounds of the work
they were already doing as mothers, although they did argue that women should
have the “freedom of choice” to stay home. As the FBWG described,
Single women have the right to take care of their children when they want to and the
right to choose the appropriate time to enter the labour market. Only the parent in a
position to make that decision and she should not be forced into a decision. Any work
or retraining incentive built into the social assistance programme must not be seen as a
lessoning of the importance of this role, must not allow the Catch 22 situation to
continue, where women are told to be mothers yet not given adequate resources to do
so. Freedom of choice and the availability of options must be entrenched rights.36
The MAG also recommended that the rights of mothers who wished to
remain in the home be protected and entrenched within the proposed new
Social Services Act (Typescript, Protecting 1982).
Why was the MLU unable to achieve its goals? What happened to dislodge
the more radical perspective that welfare mothers were already working and
deserving of societal support on the grounds of their unpaid care work? Why
were the welfare mother groups that emerged in the late 1970s more accept-
ing of the idea of work incentives as a solution to their problems? Certainly,
welfare mother groups were relatively powerless within the policy commu-
nity and society, generally, and struggled to be heard within the universe of
political discourse (e.g., Landsberg 1982; O’Connell 1983). Yet greater insight
into these questions can be gained by examining the actual political debates
on welfare mothers that took place and involved a range of political actors.
Of particular interest here is the role played by mainstream feminist organi-
zations. To what extent did the mainstream women’s movement support the
radical voices of welfare mothers, and especially the issue of valuing welfare
mothers’ unpaid labor, and what consequences did its interventions have for
shaping welfare mothers’ political interests?
Mainstream feminism’s response to welfare mother activism

The mainstream wing of the women’s movement consisted of organizations
that were formed in the early 1970s, including governmental and quasi-
governmental organizations such as the Canadian Advisory Council on the
Status of Women (CACSW), provincial Status of Women Councils across the
country, and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women
(NAC).37 This wing of the women’s movement incorporated and reflected
a mix of ideologies, although liberal feminism was dominant by the end of
the 1970s. The typical liberal position (found, for instance in the Royal
Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) assumed that the goal was
to modify, but not eliminate, the structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and the
male-breadwinner/dependent wife family model, and that change was best
achieved through a process of lobbying government and influencing public
policy making. As such, much of liberal feminism’s focus was on achieving
equal opportunity for women in education and employment and eliminating
barriers and discrimination that marginalized women as paid workers,
including shifting the child care burden from women to men and society
(e.g., see Schulz n.d.). This strain of feminism was also concerned with issues
of socialization and marriage breakdown.
It has been generally accepted that the second wave, institutionalized,
women’s movement in Canada was largely solidaristic with poor and margin-
alized women. For example, Adamson, Briskin, and Margaret (1988, 62) have
maintained that the second wave women’s movement has been one that
aimed for, and largely achieved, solidarity across class lines and was as
concerned with bettering the lives of poor women as it was middle class
and wealthy ones. There is some validity to this claim, to be sure. Mainstream
women’s organizations along with progressive social policy organizations
have long been concerned about women’s poverty and did much to politicize
and understand the issue in the 1970s. The focus on the latter began with the
RCSW’s Report (which saw single mothers as prime candidates for a possible
guaranteed annual income) and continued through the 1970s, as evidenced
by the several briefs and reports published on this topic (e.g., see Daly 1975;
Menzies 1976; NCW 1979). Yet this claim of “solidarity” is much more
tenuous when we examine provincial level debates on single mothers and
welfare policy that took place in the 1970s and early 1980s and, in particular,
the stance that mainstream feminism adopted regarding the value of the
unpaid work of welfare mothers.
Indeed, the notion that the unpaid work of single mothers and welfare
mothers should be recognized and valued had some currency within the
mainstream women’s movement in the mid-1970s. A number of papers on
women’s poverty and the one-parent family published in the early 1970s
advanced this position. For instance, a brief by June Menzies (1976) on the
88 W. MCKEEN
one-parent family and published by the CACSW, argued that single mothers
had earned entitlement to equality and social security on the basis of their
unpaid care work: “women, engaged in child/dependent care, have a right to
full, independent economic equality and social security because they have
earned it and are entitled to it even though they are not permanently
attached to the paid labour force, or their attachment is interrupted” (13).
Menzies’s (1976) position was that the one-parent family would not be
improved until the household is regarded as an economic entity for eco-
nomic and tax purposes, and she was concerned that measures to remove
disincentives to employment in some income security policies (including
proposals for a GAI) were in danger of introducing disincentives to doing
unpaid work. Ultimately, Menzies (1976) recognized that “the economic
weakness of the one-parent family and the economic weakness of women
in the economy are indivisible” (25). Similarly, Daly’s (1975) paper, “The
Disadvantaged Woman,” published by the Office of the Privy Council,
viewed single mothers, including welfare mothers, as entitled to support on
the grounds of their unpaid work. Daly (1975) spoke of the lack of real choice
for single mothers who did not have the second income because the expenses
of going to work (e.g., child care) were too high “ … to stay above the
poverty line, a woman with children requires not less (which is what she gets)
or even the same as a man with dependents, but a good deal more. Unlike a
man, she cannot get a wife to do for free what she has been raised to do”
(119). Daly (1975) argued that because society expects the lone mother with
dependent children to perform adequately as both father and mother, society
has a collective responsibility to bear the cost, through, for example, provid-
ing “mother’s help” if necessary, enhanced employment opportunities that fit
into her family responsibilities, supportive services such as day care, latchkey
programs, and legal advice, and by promoting greater public awareness of her
social and economic situation (119). Another possible solution that she notes
is for the state to provide lone mothers with a second income.
Yet the argument that the unpaid work of single mothers should be
recognized and valued, and, therefore, entitle them to social security benefits,
was not to be found when it came to the debate over welfare mothers in
Ontario (Toronto) in the mid-1970s. Such views were noticeably absent from
the discourse of key women’s and progressive organizations involved in that
debate, including that of the Ontario Status of Women Council (OSWC). It
appears that at least two kinds of countervailing factors served to condition
mainstream feminist responses to the welfare mother issue. First, certain
middle-class cultural biases that prevailed at this time within society, includ-
ing the mainstream women’s movement, may have served to distance main-
stream feminists (and other progressive sectors) from the concerns of poor
women and poor lone mothers, including racialized women. Historically, the
largely white, middle-class women’s movement tended toward a paternalistic,
middle-class, and liberal worldview, including a belief in the two-parent

nuclear family ideal and that social assistance was a program of last resort
for those temporarily unable to support themselves. This movement simply
tended to position poor women, especially welfare mothers, as outside of
their own community and not part of their own “moral universe” (Gaszo
2012; Landsberg 1982; Little 1998; McKeen 2012; O’Connor 2001). It had a
history of drawing upon a cultural, as opposed to structural, understanding
of poverty that constructed being poor and on welfare as signs of “depen-
dency,” and a “syndrome,” “cycle,” or “lifestyle” in which individuals were
caught (Goode 2002; McKeen 2012; O’Connor 2001).38 This understanding
was evident, for example, in the Report of the RCSW, but it was also part of
the language of mainstream women’s organizations throughout the 1970s.
Organizations, such as the OSWC, NAC, and CACSW, continued to use the
terms “culture of poverty” and “welfare cycle” through this period.39 While
this culture-focused analysis appeared to draw attention to some systemic
aspects of society and discriminatory attitudes that disadvantaged women
and single mothers and advanced solutions that benefitted welfare mothers, it
also reinforced the notion that being poor and being on welfare were signs of
“dependency” and inevitably put the focus back on the “deficiencies” of
particular “disadvantaged” groups. It tended to position the poor and/or
marginalized woman, including the welfare mother, as a distant “other”—as
a problem of the “disadvantaged woman” or disadvantaged “family,” or as a
“welfare” issue, but not a women’s issue. The exclusion of welfare mothers’
problems from the realm of women’s issues was evident, for example, in
Ontario’s 1973 report, “Equal Opportunity for Women in Ontario: A Plan
for Action,” in which the topic of welfare mothers was not raised and not
seen as relevant to its mandate. Early on, the OSWC was unsure about
whether welfare mother issues were indeed women’s issues.40
Another kind of influence on mainstream feminism as it engaged in this
debate lay in the constraints that emanated from the broader social policy
community involved in the welfare debate. Certain political pressures and
policy community level discourses came into play in narrowing the realm of
debate for mainstream feminism—notably, the OSWC—and influencing its
choices on the issue of welfare mothers. Indeed, it is clear that the OSWC
was initially somewhat open to the more radical politics of welfare mothers.
In its first foray into the welfare mother issue in 1974, the Council stood up
for the value of the unpaid work of welfare mothers and challenged the
conventional “less-eligibility” dictate (which was strongly held by the Ontario
government) that benefits to the welfare poor were always to be lower than
those accruing to the working poor based on their paid work. The Council
picked up on welfare mothers’ demand for “fair pay” by demanding that
benefits paid to “natural” mothers should be made equal to benefits paid to
“foster” mothers, that a clothing allowance be paid to both “natural” and
90 W. MCKEEN
foster mothers for each child on a scale geared to their age, and that the
75 percent reduction on earned income be reduced.41 Some social service-
oriented, community-based organizations that served welfare mothers, such
as Metro Agencies Action for Change (MAAC), Opportunity for
Advancement (OFA), and Times Change, also supported these proposals.
However, the Ontario government was not receptive to the call for benefit
increases for welfare mothers. Social Services Minister René Brunelle rejected
the argument that welfare mothers were doing work equivalent to what foster
mothers were doing.42 He also rejected the idea of reducing the tax back rate
on earnings, citing the long-held principle of the Ontario government, and of
governments generally, of “less eligibility” that persons receiving social assis-
tance should not be in a more advantaged position than those in full-time
paid work.43 The government clearly favored another approach to the whole
issue of welfare mothers, namely, to redefine welfare mothers from unem-
ployable to potentially employable and to reform welfare in ways that would
encourage welfare mothers to transition from welfare into paid employment.
The latter position better fit an austerity agenda that called for cutting costs
of social programs and shifting responsibility from government to indivi-
duals and the voluntary sector. It also meshed well with changing norms with
respect to women’s roles in the family and paid employment and, of course,
deeply held middle-class values and ideologies concerning the ideal family.
Single mother families were simply not the kind of family that “good”
middle-class society wanted to encourage, nor was it the kind of mothering
that society valued (Gaszo 2012; Little 1998; also see endnote 22). This
solution of pushing employability for welfare mothers was initially floated
by the Ontario government in a study on welfare mothers commissioned in
1973 (see James 1973) and was also reflected in the federal government’s
1973 Orange Paper on social security in Canada (Canada 1973).
But the positions of such organizations as the Ontario Council of Welfare
(OWC) and Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto (SPCMT), who were,
ostensibly, allies of feminists and welfare mothers, also came into play in
shaping the realm of the possible for women’s movement organizations.
Given the existing context of austerity, the progressive social policy sector
was largely oriented to simply preserving the social infrastructure that had
been built up, although it pushed for raising benefit rates, which had fallen
seriously because of inflation. On the issue of the employment for welfare
mothers, these left-liberal, middle-class organizations substantially agreed
with the view that welfare mothers were potentially employable. They praised
the Ontario government’s move to introduce work incentive programs (e.g.,
September 1979), although harshly criticized it for failing to provide adequate
support services or taking seriously the employment barriers of sole support
parents. They strongly urged the government to provide the support services
necessary for encouraging and allowing welfare mothers to supplement their
benefits with earnings or to leave welfare for employment, as long as the

decision was left in the hands of each individual (e.g., see Typescript, Settling
1979; OWC and SPCMT 1981).
Community-based social service agencies, such as the umbrella group,
MAAC, and self-help organizations, such as OFA and Times Change (a
YWCA program), were also credible and respected voices in the welfare
debate owing to their long-standing frontline experience working with wel-
fare mothers. These organizations favored a program of enhancing welfare
mothers’ employability, including providing such programs as self-esteem
counseling and skills training. They recommended measures and reforms
that would serve to break down the barriers facing welfare mothers seeking
to transition from welfare to paid work. These groups also played an impor-
tant role in guiding the OSWC in this area. For example, OFA presented an
extensive brief to the Council in October 1975 and successfully influenced it
to put forward certain recommendations to the Minister.44
In summary, then, both cultural biases and social policy community influ-
ences served to reinforce within mainstream women’s movement organiza-
tions a sense of needing to be pragmatic and to accept that enhancing work
incentives to aid women bridge the gap between welfare and paid work was the
best that could be achieved at the time. As pointed out earlier, this approach
also fit with one of the larger goals of the mainstream women’s movement at
this time, which was to defend and assert women’s access to employment and
their right to be treated as workers equal to men (Porter 2003).
Thus, from the mid-1970s onward, the Status of Women Council primar-
ily adopted the role of watchdog on welfare reform: stepping in to identify
the ways the system failed and to call for solutions with respect to providing
the necessary supports and incentives to give welfare mothers a genuine
ability to leave welfare for paid work. In 1975 the Ontario Ministry of
Community and Social Services announced “improvements” that it described
as “re-orientating the Family Benefits Program towards giving greater incen-
tives and opportunities for persons on Provincial Social Assistance to take
employment.”45 In doing this the Ministry claimed that it had addressed five
of the OSWC’s six recommendations.46 The government also introduced a
work incentive program (“WIN”) for family benefits recipients in 1979,
which it described as “a major break from traditional income security
programs which create dependency” and as a program aimed at “removing
disincentives to work” and, thus, encouraging “self-sufficiency” (Typescript,
Press 1979). The OSWC called the changes “important and positive” steps in
recognizing “women’s right to work if they so choose,” albeit, it continued to
point out the program’s flaws and weaknesses (e.g., the inadequacy and
financial inaccessibility of day care facilities, shortage of jobs, unlikelihood
that many Family Benefit mothers would be able to obtain a well-paid or
92 W. MCKEEN
higher status position due to lack of education or training, and that the policy
discourages part-time work) (OSWC 1979, 1).
To be clear, the idea that employability was the best solution for welfare
mothers was also widely accepted across the mainstream feminist and pro-
gressive social policy sector. For example, while the NAC took a somewhat
broader approach in recommending a guaranteed annual income program
for sole support mothers and calling for such services as day care, job
retraining, and transition houses, it continued to emphasize work incentives
and to portray welfare mothers as dependent and caught in a “welfare
cycle.”47 These solutions were also reaffirmed by the analysis of women’s
poverty put forward by the National Council on Welfare (NCW 1979) in
which women’s poverty was seen as related to the way women were socia-
lized to believe that they would be taken care of by a man. According to this
view, the solution was for women to break away from this ideology and for
governments to provide the necessary social programs to ease and help shift
women’s unfair burden of unpaid care work (through, e.g., child care, child
benefits, maternity and parental leaves, affirmative action programs, and
programs to further women’s equality in employment).48
Mainstream feminists (and other progressive actors) clearly had good
intentions in their approach to addressing the problems of welfare mothers.
Its solutions marked a breakthrough in recognizing women’s inequality in
employment and the way it contributes to women’s poverty. It helped to put
a badly needed focus on support services and programs for welfare mothers
with an aim of increasing their access to decent employment. Their inter-
ventions certainly went some way in encouraging society to take the blame
off of women for their poverty. And yet what stands out are the limitations of
mainstream feminism’s analysis with respect to welfare mothers’ unpaid
work and its unwillingness to support a politics of recognizing and valuing
the unpaid care work of welfare mothers. Indeed, the analysis advanced by
mainstream feminists and the progressive social policy sector stopped short
of displacing the “culture of poverty” interpretation that individualized
responsibility for the problem of women’s poverty. By focusing primarily
on issues of socialization and women’s inequality in the labor market, main-
stream feminists failed to adequately confront the deeper structures under-
pinning women’s inequality and oppression and the intimate connection
under capitalism between the devaluation as women’s unpaid work and
their devalued status as paid workers. To the extent that this analysis con-
tained a critique of “the social,” it was a benign one that continually slipped
back to focus on the individual woman’s life choices around education,
career, and family. The critical subtext of their discourse was that stay-at-
home motherhood was a narrow role from which women needed to be
released. To stay home for welfare mothers was considered falling back on
tradition; it was not in the best interests of society and progress.49 This model
also meshed with the views of many agencies in the social service sector,
which imagined poverty and welfare as a “circle” or “trap” and from which
individual welfare mothers could only “spring” by moving through a
sequence of developmental phases that would lead them from “dependence”
to “independence” (i.e., starting with “feeling isolated,” then, joining a pro-
gram where they could build self-confidence and gain access to information
and services, and, finally, becoming employment focused).50 This approach
ultimately implied that the problems of welfare mothers could be addressed
in relatively technical ways—by simply ensuring the right programs were in
place in and around the welfare system. It was not a call for fundamental
changes to the inequitable social structures that trapped and oppressed
women and stripped them of autonomy and voice. It was a retreat from
the position once espoused by key women’s organizations, that the economic
weakness of the one-parent family and the economic weakness of women in
the economy are indivisible.
Conclusions: reevaluating welfare mother activism and feminist

responses in this period, and reflecting on implications for
contemporary struggles
Welfare mothers have been either written out of the history of social policy
politics or presented as gender neutral “clients” of the welfare system and
often cast as backward in trying to reinforce women’s traditional roles as
mothers. Such interpretations may be too simplistic and fail to appreciate the
value, complexities, and nuanced qualities of welfare mother activism.
Welfare mothers were caught in the contradiction society created for
women—of having responsibility for care work that is not recognized and
valued by society, and thus, being vulnerable to exploitation as paid workers.
The politics of the welfare mothers of the 1970s was not the vision of the
1950s stay-at-home mother, however. In many ways it reflected and echoed
the grassroots feminist insight that women’s poverty and their punitive
treatment under welfare were at least partly rooted in the failure of society
to recognize and value their unpaid care work. Welfare mother activists
questioned the belief that full-time paid work was the easy answer for all
women, at all times. They stood up for their rights to both equality in paid
work and respect and support for their unpaid care work.
In many ways, then, welfare mother groups offered a unique and valuable
voice on equality and social justice (what they were, and what they were for)
grounded in the complex material particularities of their lives. While it may
not have appeared as a fully fleshed out political position, it was a demand
for social rights that were equality enhancing and gave them the socially
produced capability to live the life they had reason to value (Siltanen 2007,
370). They wanted to be included in society, have lives that were not
94 W. MCKEEN
isolating, have a decent income to be able to live on par with other families,
have respect, a voice in the policies that affect them, and an ability to live out
holistic lives that allowed them to integrate all of “the complex social
relationships and obligations that their lives entailed” (Siltanen 2007, 360).
Moreover, welfare mother politics in some ways implicitly (and sometimes
explicitly) challenged some key norms and values of the masculinist/capitalist
social order: for example, the false dichotomy between dependency and
independency, where paid work signals independence and unpaid work
and welfare payments signal dependence and deviance (Fraser and Gordon
1994); the implicit norm of the ideal citizen as the full-time paid worker; and
the privileged status of the husband-breadwinner. On some level, too, welfare
mothers were articulating a new conception of the ideal citizen: that of the
“social-individual” who is both worker and carer.51
Why did this radical strain of welfare mother activism fail to gain traction
in the universe of political discourse? Why did a more liberalized, individua-
lized politics come to prevail in the debate surrounding welfare mothers?
While one might attribute these outcomes to the influence of neoliberalism
or to widely held societal discourses and beliefs about lone mothers and
welfare, the choices of political actors within the context of historical struggle
also made a difference. The findings of this article suggest that while main-
stream feminism had an intention of solidarity with poor and marginalized
women and welfare mothers, solidarity was not fully practiced. Within a
policy context that was increasingly hostile to social rights, mainstream
feminism chose to focus on employability as the one and only solution for
welfare mothers. While this approach was well meant and led to some
positive breakthroughs in the treatment of welfare mothers, it was ultimately
a narrow vision that did not sufficiently confront the inequitable structures
that underpinned women’s oppression, specifically, the devaluation of their
unpaid work. It was an approach that slipped back into individualism and
failed to support welfare mothers’ essential claim: that they were already
working, contributing, and deserving. The notion that welfare mothers
should be given a “choice” regarding their paid work and mothering did
not deeply reflect or respect the lived realities of welfare mothers. Without
intending it, then, the mainstream women’s movement played a role in
sidelining and derailing welfare mothers’ claim to deservingness, and to
dignity and value in the here and now on the grounds of their unpaid care
work. Its actions served to undermine welfare mothers’ call for a meaningful,
and truly equity-building response from society. They also had concrete
implications for reducing the political space welfare mothers had for making
claims on the basis of their deserving status as mothers doing society’s care
work. Indeed, by the late 1970s, welfare mother activism had itself shifted
away from more radical perspectives to embrace a more moderate, liberal,
and individualized approach, in which the call to recognize care work had
become a watered down, de-contextualized demand that women be given a

choice about going to work versus staying home.
In hindsight, then, the 1970s debate over welfare mothers was in many ways
a moment in which the status quo gender order was reinforced. Mainstream
feminism (and other actors) made choices at that time that inadvertently re-
legitimized the very social constructs that oppressed and impoverished women
and welfare mothers in the first place: for example, the privileged status of
male-centric paid worker citizen model, the false dichotomy of independence/
dependence, an individualistic ideology that blames the individual for social
problems, the normativity and privilege of the two-parent, heterosexual
nuclear family. In this sense it marked a time and place wherein Nancy
Fraser’s (2009) argument concerning the “cunning of history” resonates in
which the politics of mainstream feminism had unintended consequences for
facilitating the emergence of the neoliberal order. Its actions only served to
corroborate and authorize the Ontario government’s policy agenda of keeping
welfare benefits low (well below poverty levels) and providing narrow work
incentive programs designed to pressure women to leave welfare, but without
ensuring prospects for adequate jobs and pay or the essential social supports
and programs to make employment a realistic option for women, and without
seriously acknowledging and addressing the wider structures of inequality to
which women were subject.
From this perspective it is somewhat misleading to see the mid-1990s as the
critical turning point in the transformation of welfare mothers from unemploy-
able to employable. In reality the Ontario government began decades earlier to
plan and promote employability as the key solution for welfare mothers.
Moreover, while it may be that “work incentives” were an attractive solution to
government for reasons pertaining to the economic crisis, the emerging neolib-
eral agenda, and changing ideals concerning the employability of mothers, its
actions can also be seen in part as a response to welfare mother activists—as a
political move to undermine and foreclose the politicized interpretations that
welfare mothers attempted to bring forward. By the same token, one might also
see these state actions as partly being a response to feminism, insofar as the
Ontario government sought to absorb and co-opt selected demands of feminists
and progressive actors, presumably to diffuse criticism and win support for its
policy agenda (e.g., WIN). While we clearly need more historical research into
the welfare debates in ways that take account of the full range of actors involved,
including especially, government, the findings here suggest that the 1970s and
early 1980s were critical years in which neoliberal and neoconservative forces
gained greater solidity. They gained a new and greater scope for creating reserves
of exploitable workers available to fill the low wage jobs and for imposing a social
and moral order centered on the traditional family model and male supremacy
and in which welfare mothers were cast as villains and threats (Porter 2012). And
96 W. MCKEEN
through this, women, particularly the most marginalized women and their
families, were exposed to increased poverty, vulnerability, and disempowerment.
The important question this story raises is not what else mainstream feminists
could have done, but how can we build a truly socially just and inclusive
women’s movement. In many ways the 1970s to early 1980s represented a
missed opportunity for feminists to respond to the particularities of the needs
of welfare mothers, and thereby, build a more substantive and inclusive femin-
ism and vision for equality. On some level its actions amounted to a failure to
really see and engage with welfare mothers as whole people, to be open to their
issues, and to treat them as equals in the feminist struggle. Instead, a “sameness”
approach to equality was reinforced— one that inevitably worked to the advan-
tage of the dominant group (white, middle-class, normative women).
The issues that welfare mother activists of the 1970s raised are still with us
and still undermine women’s material and social well-being and equality,
with immigrants and the racially and ethnically marginalized particularly
affected. Indeed, the conditions that lone mothers on welfare face today are
very similar to those they confronted and fought against in the 1970s. As
Amber Gaszo (2012) notes, lone mothers on social assistance continue to be
treated as “worker-carers” but in ways that do not provide for their unpaid
work. These conditions serve to jeopardize not only the health of lone
mothers but also their abilities to maintain relationships within their com-
munities and personal networks and to care for their children (Gurstein and
Vilches 2009; Pulkingham, Fuller, and Kershaw 2010). It is important that as
feminists we work to create spaces for the voices of the most marginalized to
flourish and to make their understandings central to critical feminist analysis
and the project of imagining a transformative politics and social policy.
Notes
1. A few authors have addressed welfare mothers in accounts of poverty politics: for
example, Fraser and Gordon (1994, 245) and Margaret Little (1998, 2007).
2. Welfare mothers have also not generally been seen as part of the women’s movement
or figured in accounts of the second wave movement (e.g., Adamson, Briskin, and
Margaret 1988).
3. According to Margaret Little (2007), welfare mothers first began collective protests in
Canada in 1966.
4. Much of the funding for these groups came from the Senate Committee on Poverty or
through the federal Company of Young Canadians Program (Little 2007).
5. As Margaret Daly (1975) describes, women could also be doubly or triply disadvan-
taged by other factors. For instance, she states that “immigrant women” faced “special
disadvantages” as did “Indian” women. It is also important to note how the Canadian
debate on poverty and welfare at this time differed from that taking place in the United
States. While Black and racialized women were a major focus in the US discussion,
these groups were relatively absent from the poverty debate in Canada as well as both
the Canadian welfare mothers’ movement and the institutionalized women’s
movement. For example, a 1972 study of lone mothers on welfare sponsored by the
Ontario government found that of the 414 lone mothers who participated, only 11 were
not born in Canada, and not of British or European descent (James 1973). Possible
explanations include the fact that racialized and immigrant women had difficulty
accessing welfare benefits at this time, their voices were generally suppressed because
of the overall racism of the period, and they also tended to identify their struggles more
in terms of combating racial discrimination than gender discrimination (O’Connor
2001; Daenzer 1997; Thobani 2007).
6. The federal government also began to promote this idea (Canada 1973). The province
of Alberta also introduced incentives to encourage welfare mothers to find employment
or take job training in 1978 (Vickers 1978).
7. This new attitude of spending controls and restraint across the Ontario government
was announced by the Henderson Report in November 1975.
8. For example, the Ontario Minister of Corrections, Gordon Walker, promoted a work-
fare proposal for welfare recipients in 1978 (Winsor 1978).
9. While these groups were mainly active in relation to provincial welfare policy and
related issues, they would occasionally “jump scale” to intervene in relevant debates at
the federal level (e.g., over the Child Tax Credit). For the purposes of simplicity I will
use the following acronyms: Operation Family Rights (OFR); Women After Rights
(WAR); Coalition for the Right to Earn (CRE); Women’s Action Group (WAG);
Mother Led Union (MLU); Family Benefits Work Group (FBWG); Mothers’ Action
Group (MAG), Sole Support Parents Coalition (SSPC).
10. This discussion is largely based on an analysis of the materials produced by these
welfare mother groups.
11. See Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto and Ontario Welfare Council 1977;
Ontario Welfare Council and the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto
(1981); Typescript of brief Women and Children on Welfare—A Poverty Trap by the
Family Benefits Work Group, May 15, 1979, File: Times Change, Fonds 76, City of
Toronto Archives, Toronto, Ontario; Typescript of brief Financial Independence for
Single Support Mothers by the Mother Led Union, May 6, 1974, The Records of the
Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–5, Box 1, File: Welfare Women #1, Archives
of Ontario, Ontario, Toronto, Ontario; Typescript, Protecting 1982.
12. Typescript, Ontario’s (1972); Typescript of brief What is the Real Story Behind Family
Benefits Allowances (Mothers’ Allowance) Allowable Earnings by Coalition for the
Right to Earn, 1974, Social Planning Council, Box 139800, File: 36, Sole Support
Parents, City of Toronto Archives, Toronto, Ontario; Typescript, Women and
Children.
13. Typescript, Financial Independence; Typescript, What is the Real Story; Typescript,
Women and Children.
14. Typescript, Women and Children; Typescript, Protecting (1982).
15. Typescript, What Is the Real Story; Typescript, Financial Independence; Typescript,
Women and Children; Carson (1975).
16. Typescript, Financial Independence; Typescript, What Is the Real Story.
17. Typescript, What Is the Real Story.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. As Peggy Reinhardt (1974) put it: “ … what happens to women robbed of their dignity
and self-respect and what happens to the relationship between mother and child as a
98 W. MCKEEN
result … Who has the right to undermine the role of the mother – when she has lost
her basis of support to maintain her obligations? (54–55).”
22. As Michelle Landsberg (1982) describes: “The whole world beams upon her devoted
motherhood until her husband leaves her. Then what avails her secret brownie recipe,
her gleaming floor? She has no skills worth selling in the outside world, and so must
become the most despised and impoverished of all humans in Canada, the welfare
mother. Now her motherhood has something tainted about it, intimations of filth and
degradation surround her. The shudder we once reserved for illegitimacy is now awarded
to the woman unlucky enough to have children but no longer any man to serve” (66).
23. The late 1970s grassroots women’s movement also turned its attention to more specific
issues, such as abortion, day care, and violence against women (Adamson, Briskin, and
Margaret 1988). To be clear, the distinctions between these strains of feminism only
became clear in the late 1970s.
24. Typescript of Our Story by Women Rally for Action, March 22, 1976, Correspondence
of the Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–8, barcode B176885, Archives of
Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.
25. Doris Power, for example, was a prominent member and organizer of both the Just
Society Movement and the grassroots feminist, Abortion Caravan (McKeen 2004;
Power 1972).
26. Typescript, Financial Independence.
27. Ibid.
28. The rules included the 75 percent tax back rates on earned income and limits on the
amount that could be exempt from this rule.
29. The 1974 changes included a family average increase in allowances of approximately
13 percent (the CPI had increased by 9.3 percent since January 1974), and an increase
in earnings exemptions under family benefits to $50/month for a single person and
$100/month for families (no matter how many children they had) (Correspondence
from Rene Brunelle to Anne Barstow, September 26, 1974, Social Planning Council,
Box 139800, File 36, Sole Support Parents, City of Toronto Archives, Toronto,
Ontario).
30. Typescript, Financial Independence.
31. Typescript of Special Bulletin to Members and Supporters by the Mother Led Union,
March 14, 1976, File: Mother Led Union, Canadian Women’s Movement Archives,
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Another variant of left feminist politics active in Canada in the mid-1970s was the
“wages for housework” campaign. The latter was an import by a far left Trotskyist
group and made some inroads among poor and marginalized women, including
welfare mothers (e.g., Toronto Wages for Housework and the Wages Due
Collective). Wages for housework was not a strategy or end goal that was accepted
by most within grassroots or mainstream feminism in Canada, however. Most femin-
ists agreed that it would not achieve any significant change and risked reinforcing
unpaid domestic work as women’s work (McKeen 1994).
35. The FBWG, which existed between 1978 and 1983, was initially composed of welfare
mothers but came to include representatives from mainstream human service agencies
(e.g., the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, the MAAC, YWCA,
Parkdale Community Services, the Children’s Aid Society and Opportunity for
Advancement). It also received small grants at times from the federal department of
Secretary of State, Children’s Aid Society, and Metro Toronto. The Mothers Action
Group existed in 1982 and described itself as a group of sole support mothers on
welfare “united in its fight for educational incentives, affordable housing and a huma-
nitarian welfare system.” It is described as having a professional, nonvoting advisory
board (Typescript, Protecting 1982).
36. Typescript, Women and Children.
37. NAC was an umbrella group and a voluntary organization partially funded by the
federal government.
38. The “culture of poverty” understanding of poverty that was dominant in the 1960s and
1970s put the focus on moralist/behavioral explanations and, in the United States,
racialized views of poverty, particularly on “controlling black women’s conjugal rela-
tions, reproduction, and family ‘pathology’” (Goode [citing Mink] 2002).
39. The Ontario Status of Women Council held a meeting to discuss the “welfare syn-
drome” in March 1978 (Typescript of Memorandum to Council Members from
Marjorie Pinney, No Date, Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–5, Box 1, File:
Welfare Women, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario). NAC made a presentation to
the federal cabinet in March 17, 1978, in which they referred to single parents and their
children being caught in “the welfare cycle” (Typescript, Presentation to the Cabinet
1978).
40. A 1974 briefing note on the issue of “women and family benefits” has to explain how and
why this is a relevant issue, that is, that the issue is not that male recipients get a better
deal than do female recipients but rather that no one gets a fair deal under welfare, and
that the number of women dependent on Family Benefits makes the problem particularly
relevant to a group concerned with the status of women (Typescript on Brief on Women
and Family Benefits by Ontario Status of Women Council, 1974, The Records of the
Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–5, Box 1, File: Welfare Mothers, Archives of
Ontario, Toronto, Ontario).
41. Ibid.
42. Brunelle insisted that the children that foster mothers raise are more difficult than the
ones that welfare mothers raise (Correspondence from René Brunelle to Laura Sabia,
July 5, 1974, Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–5, Box 1, File: Welfare
Mothers, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario).
43. Ibid.
44. Typescript of Presentation to the Ontario Status of Women Council by Opportunities
for Advancement, October 9, 1975, RG 69–5, Box 1, File: Welfare Women #2, Archives
of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.
45. Typescript of Speech for the Honourable René Brunelle, Minister of Community and
Social Services, to the Ontario Legislature, May 8, 1975, RG 69–5, Box 1, File: Welfare
Women #2, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.
46. Correspondence from Margaret Birch, Provincial Secretary for Social Development to
Laura Sabia, Chairman, Ontario Status of Women Council, May 29, 1975, RG 69–5,
Box 1, File: Welfare Women #2, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.
47. See, for example, Typescript of Conference Report and Minutes of Fifth Annual
Meeting of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Ottawa,
March 17–20, 1978, Correspondence of the Ontario Status of Women Council, RG
69–8, File: NAC, Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario; Typescript of Presentation to
the Prime Minister of Canada and the Members of the Cabinet by the National Action
Committee on the Status of Women, February 22, 1979, Correspondence of the
Ontario Status of Women Council, RG 69–8, Box 142821, File NAC 1977–79,
Archives of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario.
100 W. MCKEEN
48. In fact, the NCW’s report, Women and Poverty (1979), focused very little on the topic
of women on welfare.
49. In response to a letter concerning the solutions for welfare mothers, Laura Sabia, the
head of the OSWC, states that retraining, rather than welfare, and, specifically, a
scheme for a guaranteed annual income with training and retraining as a basis for it,
is “our one hope for advanced and sane thinking” (Correspondence from Laura Sabia
to Cynthia Bled 1974).
50. Typescript of booklet Facts for Advocacy, a Program by Metro Agencies Action
Committee, No Date, Times Change, Fonds 76, Box 167079, File 21, Series 305, City
of Toronto Archives, Toronto, Ontario.
51. It was also a demand that women and parents have the right to make their own
arrangements about mothering/parenting as opposed to having that decision imposed
by others (see Arat-Koc 2006, 86).
Notes on contributor
Wendy McKeen is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work, York University,
Toronto, Canada. Her research interests are in understanding social policy change in Canada
and its impact on gender equity. Her work has been concerned with examining how social
policy debates are shaped in particular historical contexts, including especially the status and
contribution of women in these struggles. Her most recent publication is: “Seen But Not
Heard: The Construction of “Welfare Mothers” in Canada’s Late 1960s/early 1970s “War On
Poverty,” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de as femme 29 (3), Spring/Summer 2012,
107–23. She has also authored Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty
Debate in Canada, 1970–1995, University of Toronto Press, 2004.
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Journal of Women, Politics & Policy

ISSN: 1554-477X (Print) 1554-4788 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wwap20

“Welfare Mother” Activism, Mainstream Feminism,

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“Welfare Mother” Activism, Mainstream Feminism, and the

employment as early as the mid-1970s (Evans 1988). Indeed, a key subject of

Backdrop: welfare mother activism in Ontario in the 1970s

themselves of rehabilitative programs and services to become employable and

Welfare mother activism in Ontario in the 1970s–1980S: the radical

(1982–unknown), and the Sole Support Parents Coalition (1982–85).9 These

Other groups and individual welfare mother activists adopted an angrier

Mainstream feminism’s response to welfare mother activism

middle-class, and liberal worldview, including a belief in the two-parent

benefits with earnings or to leave welfare for employment, as long as the

Conclusions: reevaluating welfare mother activism and feminist

become a watered down, de-contextualized demand that women be given a

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