Chapter 6

The Baby Boom,
Domesticity, and Feminism

I was from a small town, and had found university life so stimulating, so that when I found myself married and living outside of Edmonton on an acreage, I thought the UWC would be a good group to get into—it was quite exciting to come back and find all these other [like-minded] people. The meetings were large and the speakers interesting—there were lots of things going on.

—An Edmonton member who joined in the 1950s1

The decade of the 1950s is popularly defined by the postwar baby boom, which lasted from about 1946 until the early 1960s. After the Depression, followed immediately by war, when unemployment and separation disrupted families, Canada’s birthrate jumped from a low of 227,000 live births per year in the mid-1930s to 343,504 per year in 1946, and peaked in the late 1950s with 479,009 per year.2 National advertisers and governments sent a clear message to women who had worked during the war—they should go home and let returning servicemen rejoin the workforce. The effect of the policy was to increase female unemployment.3 Between 1944 and 1946 more than 300,000 women—25 per cent of the total female workforce—left their jobs, some voluntarily, others involuntarily.4 Most Canadians still believed that the primary breadwinner should be male and advertisers pushed the dream of home ownership, with new cars and the latest domestic technology, in low-density residential communities in which married women were expected to devote themselves to fulltime motherhood and homemaking.5 During the Cold War, McCarthyism in the United States, along with its softer Canadian version and the very real threat of nuclear war, helped make the 1950s a somewhat conventional decade—at least on the surface. But gender stereotypes never reflect exactly what is happening in any society. There was simultaneously a growing trend toward married women in the paid job market, and a substantial number of women did participate in the workforce, even at the height of what has been known as the age of domesticity. At the same time, the number of girls finishing high school rose dramatically between 1945 and 1960, and from 1950 to 1963 the number of women attending university tripled.6 The rise in men’s attendance did not come close to matching this phenomenal growth. In educational terms, women were catching up.

The CFUW president who ushered in the decade was Dr. Marion Elder Grant, who served from 1949 to 1952. Clearly CFUW could still attract prominent academics to its leadership. Grant had a long association with Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia—her mother had been dean at Acadia Ladies Seminary and Marion had grown up in an academic world. She graduated from Acadia in 1921 and taught for a few years before completing a PhD at the University of Toronto. She taught at Baylor College for Women in Texas where she served as dean of women before attending University College, London. Grant then returned to Acadia University to attend to her ailing mother and eventually became dean from 1936 to 1960, head of the psychology department, and a member of the board of governors. She was widely published in the fields of early childhood education, learning disabilities, and the importance of children’s play. She also founded both a university women’s club in Wolfville, as well as the Fundy Mental Health Clinic, the first freestanding clinic of its type in the province. A woman of wide interests, Grant was active in the Baptist Church, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), and various professional associations.7

During her presidency Dr. Grant tried to visit all of the new clubs, travelling by train and bus. She also welcomed the 1951 ground-breaking report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the Massey commission) and witnessed a major initiative in penal reform. Her term ended at the twelfth CFUW triennial conference held in Ottawa in 1952, where guests were entertained at the Dominion Experimental Farm with Ottawa Mayor Charlotte Whitton presiding,8 and an art exhibit at the Château Laurier. The federation created a new fellowship to honour Margaret McWilliams, who had died suddenly in 1952, and commissioned a history of the organization’s first thirty years for IFUW.

Ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Art Exhibit, Château Laurier, Ottawa, August 18, 1952. Dr. Grant, President, is in the centre; Mrs. S. A. Quigg, Ottawa Convenor, is on the left; and Mrs. G. Ross Gibson, National Convenor, is on the right.

This era was also a period of growth for CFUW. By 1959, membership numbers had nearly doubled from those of 1940, to 9,445. This, in part, reflected the staggering growth in the number of women attending university. Many new clubs were formed in the 1950s, especially in the growing suburbs. When the first suburban club was formed in North York in 1951, CFUW tried to persuade the women to join the Toronto Club, but the women objected that it was too far away for young mothers and the fees needed to support the clubhouse were too high. The geographic restrictions that CFUW initially tried to impose did not make sense in the new city configurations and were eventually dropped.9 Catherine Marcellus, historian of the new Abbotsford, British Columbia Club, remembers being recruited as club president. She recalls sitting in her kitchen surrounded by babies and exclaiming, “I could not possibly do that…. I’ve never done anything like that before,” while the more experienced recruiter counters, “Cathy, you don’t know what you can do until you try.”10 The story has a certain 1950s ring to it. She did become club president and the lesson stuck with her all her life, illustrating the important role that the clubs played in developing women’s skills and encouraging them to look beyond their homes. This new club in Abbotsford decided to accept associate members, feeling that women who shared the club’s spirit enriched their ranks even if they did not have degrees. Clubs were also formed in smaller towns such as Cornwall, where the wives of engineers working on the St. Lawrence Seaway, one of the biggest technological projects of this era, had relocated. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island was the only provincial capital to form a new club in this decade.

Many longstanding clubs also ballooned in membership. The Edmonton Club peaked from 1959 to 1961 when the discovery of oil in Leduc, Alberta dramatically increased the province’s population. The Ottawa Club expanded to four hundred members by 1959 and became increasingly active in advocacy.11 President Doris Saunders reported in 1956 that “the file labeled ‘Clubs’ is positively bulging at the seams, and letters telling of the formation of serious groups on education, status of women, libraries and creative arts, etc. ‘make music for our ears.’”12 Never entirely satisfied, however, CFUW presidents bemoaned the fact that their membership was not keeping pace with the increase in university enrolment. As it became less of a novelty for women to go to university, women perhaps had less incentive to seek out a club of like-minded peers. To help counter these trends, the federation produced a recruitment leaflet in 1951, distributing 3,500 in English, and five hundred in French. Many clubs also did their own local recruiting through social events and scholarships.

The federation’s structure and constitution also expanded. After Québec women won the vote in 1940, thanks to campaigns led by CFUW member Thérèse Casgrain and the fact that more and more francophone women were attending university, new French-speaking clubs were formed in Trois-Rivières and Ottawa-Hull; the latter had both an English and a French club. The number of vice presidents fluctuated between two and four, joining the president, past president, and various secretaries on the executive. The Academic Appointments Committee was disbanded in favour of a Status of Women Committee with a broader mandate. In 1958, CFUW created the first office of regional directors in Ontario to help organize regional conferences.13

CFUW further formalized its resolutions procedures, establishing committees on resolutions and administrative procedures and printed instructions to clubs on how to submit resolutions to the national office in the Chronicle: resolutions should “deal with public matters of sufficient importance to be brought to the attention of all members,” i.e., of national concern,14 be brief, well researched, propose some definite action, and indicate the individual, body, government department, or institution to which the resolution was directed. Once received, the national committee arranged for the resolutions to be voted on, first at the club level, and if passed, at the triennial meeting.15

At the back, left to right: Dorothy Flaherty, Dr. Marguerite Ritchie, and unidentified person; in front, left to right: Margaret E. (Pegi) MacLellan and Margaret Gilleland.

Given Canada’s murky jurisdictional divisions, there was often confusion as to who should take the lead in advocacy. The federation would follow up on successful resolutions with letters and visits to the appropriate political leaders and incorporate them into CFUW policy. In some cases this happened at both levels—the local clubs would approach their member of Parliament while the federation wrote or visited a minister or federal department. Regional vice presidents and provincial directors followed up on resolutions that fell under provincial jurisdiction, especially in the case of education. One example of this process was the brief presented by the Alberta clubs to the Royal Commission on Education in 1958 chaired by Senator Donald Cameron that focused on improving academic standards in secondary schools, on library improvements, and on examining requirements for university entrance across the country.16 Improvements to library facilities, bilingual programs, and programs for gifted children were also recommended.

Despite the growth in numbers and officers, CFUW did not achieve its goal of establishing a permanent head office in Ottawa, although the organization did decide in this decade that the paid executive secretary and volunteer president should live in the same city. In 1956, President Saunders described her office, with its typewriter, mimeographing machine, and filing cabinet, as “our little cubby-hole that serves as an Executive Office” from which letters were sent to prime ministers and ministers of finance on legislative matters.17 In 1958, the head office moved with President Vivian Morton to a room in the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Agriculture Building, where the university provided a telephone and access to its stenographic pool.18

The 1950s had begun auspiciously with the report of the Massey commission, a major articulation of cultural nationalism that recommended funding to the arts and sciences and the establishment of the National Library and Canada Council. Reflecting many interests dear to the organization, CFUW had submitted a brief to the commission in which it stressed scholarship and research in education.19 The Massey commission reinforced work that clubs had quietly done in their own communities—sponsoring art exhibits and performances, funding libraries, managing festivals and exhibits, and encouraging members to sit on boards of arts and cultural organizations. The commission led to the establishment of new cultural institutions and the strengthening of existing ones, the latter including the Stratford Shakespearian Festival founded in 1953, the National Film Board, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The establishment of the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957 is also linked to the Massey commission. The federation later lobbied for representation on the Canada Council’s twenty-one-member board, managing to get four women appointed.

Hilda Neatby, CFUW member, historian and educator.

To cap it all off, the government had named long-time CFUW member and former Education Committee chairman Dr. Hilda Neatby as one of the commissioners; it was an immense source of pride for the federation. Neatby had been born into a genteel, poor, but learned family in Saskatchewan. She excelled academically and studied at the universities of Saskatchewan and Minnesota, becoming an expert in post-conquest Québec history. One of the few women who had managed to obtain an academic post during the Depression, Neatby eventually became head of the University of Saskatchewan’s history department, a position she held from 1958 to 1969.

In 1953, Dr. Neatby sparked a national debate with her controversial publication, So Little for the Mind, in which she made an impassioned plea for the humanities in education. One of a number of leading public intellectuals who had been shaped by the experiences of two wars and the Depression, Neatby’s views reflected the 1950s’ distinctive cultural nationalism, a growing bureaucracy built around the social welfare state, and Canada’s emergence as a “middle power.”20 Fearing that the growing emphasis on technical subjects in educational curricula—meant to prepare an ever-widening school population for twentieth-century jobs—would lead to a “dumbing down” of education, she rejected the idea that education should be useful and open to all.21 She feared that Western civilization—as enshrined in the university—was at a crisis point and believed that her generation must provide leadership to restore excellence. Neatby had received funding and encouragement to write the book from Vincent Massey himself, who shared her alarm at the growing trend away from the humanities.

The topic was certainly within the purview of the CFUW, with its focus on education and stress on the humanities.22 The organization actively participated in the debate triggered by So Little for the Mind. While many sympathized with the book’s humanist critique of modern education, and members were proud of their intellectual “celebrity,” progressives in their ranks such as Edmonton’s Donalda Dickie must have taken strong exception to the book. Inspired by the theories of John Dewey, progressive educationalists proposed a child-centred theory of teaching that focused on learning by problem solving, with less emphasis on content. Driven by a belief that education must meet the needs of a democracy, this approach represented a dramatic departure from the traditional classical preparation for university. In the end, the Edmonton group took a diplomatic middle ground, asserting that “the needs of youth would probably be well served by incorporating the best procedures of both systems into the secondary school.”23

Neatby’s more vocal critics, both in the CFUW and more globally, labelled her a conservative and an elitist and some even zeroed in on her gender and accused her of emotionalism. Modern educational theorists, however, believe that Neatby’s book remains a well-reasoned, insightful “liberal humanist critique of educational theory.”24 Whether one agreed with it or not, the book struck a chord, selling nearly 8,000 copies in its first year and going to four printings and a second edition. A regional CFUW conference in Hamilton in May, 1954 held a debate on the question, “Resolved, that So Little for the Mind is an unjust indictment of education in Ontario.” While the always-polite Chronicle did not report on which side won, the article did note that the discussion led to a study on the issue of the “bright child”—what we would today call the gifted child—and led to a request that the minister of education in Ontario provide special training for teachers of these students.25 Similarly the Regina Club studied programs for bright children and, in 1958, made a submission to their public school board that resulted in a pilot project in which children were offered instruction in French. All of this seemed to come out of a discussion of the Neatby critique of diminishing excellence in education.

Stemming from concerns raised before the war, several clubs persuaded the federation to pass resolutions on penal reform, pressing the government, for example, to implement the 1938 Archambault Commission report on federal prison conditions. That reform initiative had been launched by the House of Common’s sole female MP, Agnes Macphail, in the 1920s and 1930s, but the issue had been shelved during the war. The issue was rekindled in 1947 when Major-General R. B. Gibson, appointed as commissioner of penitentiaries by the federal Justice Department, began to initiate reforms that focused on the rehabilitation of prisoners. In the early 1950s, CFUW’s penal reform committee reported that they were pleased with these reforms, particularly with the grants given to the Elizabeth Fry and John Howard societies, and the training for staff and prisoners. Because the criminal justice system straddled federal, provincial, and even local jurisdictions, the federation executive asked the clubs with active study groups to alternate serving as the federation’s penal reform committee. The Halifax Club formed the first such committee, followed by Edmonton and then Regina, the latter two studying the Saskatchewan and Alberta systems.26 In June 1950, the Ottawa Club’s committee formed the CFUW penal reform committee, where the club had helped found the Ottawa Elizabeth Fry Society and assisted the Ottawa Club with jail visits and rehabilitation work, both at the Prison for Women in Kingston and the Juvenile Court in Ottawa.27 In 1952, a group of members from Québec and Montréal, chaired by Dr. P. Cazelais, completed a report on Québec prisons and in 1954, the committee moved back to the Atlantic region.

Based on this research, CFUW put forward various resolutions on their own, as well as in conjunction with the Elizabeth Fry Society, that called for pre-sentence reports on offenders and for more trained probation officers. On a different front, the New Westminster Club in British Columbia, which had conducted a study of emotionally disturbed children, promoted a home for them in Vancouver28 and advocated the creation of family courts, training schools for juveniles, training programs for prisoners, and improved training for prison staff. After the 1956 Fauteux Report recommended that the old ticket of leave system be replaced with a national parole board, CFUW asked for a woman qualified in corrections to be appointed.29 The organization felt strongly that it was important to have a woman’s input to assess the post-release environment of former prisoners, and to have someone who could understand women prisoners, especially given that male prison officials acknowledged that they found women difficult to handle.30 CFUW put forward four names, including that of Margaret MacLellan, and there were some small victories. The St. Thomas Club arranged an open meeting with Daniel Couglin, director of probation services for Ontario, in November 1953 that resulted in the establishment of a county juvenile court.31 In Ottawa, lawyer Margaret Ferguson was appointed probation officer for the Ottawa magistrate’s court and similar appointments were made in Toronto and Windsor. By the end of the decade, however, much of this penal reform work had shifted to the Elizabeth Fry Society and CFUW became less active in it.

The appointment of women to boards and commissions remained a predominant concern of CFUW. In 1951, the Academic Appointments Committee prepared its usual Register of Canadian Women Available for Academic Posts and distributed it to Canadian universities. The previous year, the committee had requested that the National Council of Canadian Universities form a committee to “compile a register listing names of men and women whose qualifications met the standards set by the committee.” The answer they received suggests that most university appointments were still being decided upon by word of mouth or by promoting promising students:

The committee regretfully decided that they could not at present undertake such a compilation…. However, the Conference expressed itself in favour of advertising academic posts and intends to use Saturday Night for this purpose so that men and women in Canada will have a better idea of the posts that are vacant, even if the universities have little previous knowledge of the likely applicants. This will, I hope, tend towards the aims, which your Federation has had in making its own lists.32

It is undoubtedly not a coincidence that the few women who did manage to gain long-term academic posts, such as Doris Saunders at the University of Manitoba, had been educated there. In 1952, the federation decided to disband the Academic Appointments Committee for at least a triennial period and assigned the Status of Women Committee the task of compiling a roster of outstanding women whom clubs considered suitable for public office at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Dubbed the “Best Dressed Minds” list, it was intended to provide names of potential candidates for appointment to senior government and other posts.33 Thus began a new CFUW phase in promoting women to prominent positions in government, business, and academia.

In 1955, the federation sent briefs to Secretary of State Roch Pinard as well as to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, women senators, and members of Parliament, to urge the appointment of a woman to the “three-man” Civil Service Commission.34 They suggested five qualified women, including long-time civil service personnel officer Nora Guthrie and Constance Hayward, a liaison officer in the Canadian citizenship branch who had experience with the League of Nations Society in Canada. Guthrie was a Queen’s graduate who had studied public administration and took on increasing responsibilities in personnel work. Accepted for further study in public administration at the University of Chicago in 1947, her employer refused to grant her leave, informing her that as a senior official she was needed to direct work during the postwar rehabilitation period.35 Neither of these candidates got the job, but in 1957, Ruth Addison was appointed to the rank of deputy minister. Margaret MacLellan congratulated her, noting that such an appointment had first been requested thirteen years earlier and expressing the hope that it would set a new precedent.36 In a letter to then-federation president Doris Saunders, Addison acknowledged, “I am very much aware of the part that women’s groups like the Canadian Federation of University Women have played in making my appointment possible.” She had to distance herself from lobbying for women but hoped that “in the years ahead, greater recognition will be given to women’s place in the civil service.”37

The federation also sought Senate appointments for women. CFUW had asked the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women (CFBPW) for its help in proposing a prominent Toronto woman for the Senate, and they in turn asked for CFUW help in proposing an equally prominent, Western woman. As a result, the slogan “a woman senator for every province” was adopted by both organizations.38 In 1953, PM St. Laurent named the first French-Canadian woman, Mariana Beauchamp-Jodoin an honorary member of AFDU, to the Senate. Active in many organizations, she founded a women’s Liberal club in Montréal named for Wilfrid Laurier.39 Muriel McQueen Fergusson, a member and advisor to CFUW’s Status of Women Committee, was also named that year. Trained in the law, McQueen had been New Brunswick’s regional enforcement counsel for the Wartime Prices and Trade Board and later served as regional director for the family allowance and old age security programs.40

Some within CFUW called for women to run for political office. The Status of Women Committee, for example, saw political involvement as a means of achieving reforms, and women’s groups often worked with sympathetic female MPs on some issues. Apparently, not everyone agreed, however as reflected in a 1951 Status of Women Committee report:

Your committee feels that a great deal has been done to allay the fears of those who felt that the University Women’s Club must not become politically embroiled. We feel that we have established a definite line of demarcation between the political affiliation of the group and the political support by individual club members of a suitable woman for office.41

Still, many clubs supported women at the non-partisan, municipal level, the 1951–1952 Chronicle reporting that twenty-four CFUW members were serving on municipal councils, boards of education, and hospital boards, most notably Charlotte Whitton, mayor of Ottawa.

The career of Whitton certainly illustrates the pitfalls of politics for female candidates. In 1950, she decided to run for city council, asking CFUW, the Ottawa Club, the local council of women and other organizations to support her. It is not clear how much money the Ottawa Club or the federation contributed, but Whitton reasoned that, unlike most men, she had no profession to return to after a defeat and thus needed support. She also felt that women would be more supportive if they had made a financial contribution. When Whitton became eligible to assume the mayor’s chair after the sitting mayor’s sudden death, because she had won the most votes, her male colleagues tried, unsuccessfully, to push her aside. She was a controversial mayor and much resented by those who thought women should be ladylike. But she was hardworking, had a legendary memory for detail, was prudent with city funds, and eliminated the forced early retirement of female city workers. But she was also a little too fond of the trappings of office, and in the end, was given to dramatics that sometimes made a laughingstock of city hall.

In 1958, Whitton set her sights on federal politics, but had to fight her own Conservative Party to gain the nomination in Ottawa West, a solidly Liberal riding. At that time, the party did not allow women to vote at conventions, but she mobilized the West Ottawa Women’s PC Association and threatened to hold a separate convention. She gained the nomination and despite a Diefenbaker sweep, lost the seat with a much smaller-than-expected margin. She believed, quite legitimately, that she deserved a political reward. Sadly, Diefenbaker ignored her entreaties and she ended up going back to municipal politics. While the combative Whitton may have rubbed many people—male and female alike—the wrong way, she certainly did not deserve the shameful treatment she received.42 Her story was a cautionary tale for women with political ambitions beyond the municipal realm.

As always, the local club remained an important social focus for university women hosting Christmas parties, annual dinners, teas and luncheons. Refreshments varied from club to club and adapted to the times. One club reported serving wine at its meetings, something that would have shocked earlier members. Other clubs brought potluck dinners at members’ homes into their social orbit, a concession to the “servant-less era.” The newly formed Abbotsford Club, suggesting a seriousness of purpose and repudiation of domesticity, decided not to “try to out-cook each other.”43 The Toronto Club, which then numbered more than eight hundred members, undertook an extensive renovation and enlargement of its clubhouse with architect Napier Simpson in 1958. They added an elegant foyer, a seventy-two-seat dining room, and an upstairs lounge with French windows facing a sundeck.44 Once a staple of club events, the practice of inviting university students, in the hope that they would later become members, was becoming less common due to rising student enrolment. McGill Alumnae, however, sponsored a public-speaking contest for girls from high schools in Montréal.45

In the 1950s, the CFUW demographic was predominantly young married women with a smaller contingent of single professionals. In Ottawa, for example, 62 per cent of members were married, of which 13 per cent were gainfully employed.46

CFUW’s study groups, lifelong education, social events, and fundraising for scholarships and community projects gave an outlet to those frustrated with domestic work and lack of recognition for volunteer work. Most worked locally, but some members became active on federation committees. These activities were always interwoven with “fun, sprightly conversation, relaxing social times and lasting friendships.”47 Outstanding speakers were often invited to give lectures that raised money as well as educating members. Fundraising was a big component of local club activities often directed toward scholarships. The Regina Club used magazine subscriptions to raise funds and in 1951–1952 awarded a total of $1,500.00, more than any other club in Canada.48

Among the more serious enterprises were the study groups and although the federation often suggested topics such as education, childcare, psychology, international affairs, status of women, and—new to this decade—human rights, ultimately, the local clubs chose the subject matter. Some of the clubs studied royal commission or government reports—the Edmonton Club, for example, followed the recommendations of the Massey commission all through its 1952–1953 season, as did the Abbotsford/Mission City Club. After the Canada Council was established to strengthen funding for the arts, clubs often invited its representatives to speak. Culturally oriented study groups often provided meeting entertainments, including travelogues by members, play or drama readings, musical entertainment, and even barbershop quartets by visiting husbands.

Other groups focused on recreation—hiking and short excursions, for example—and socializing. The St. Thomas’ Jaunters Club went on outings to museums, the Windsor salt mines, the Hydro developments, and Fort George.49 Cultural groups studied art, music, drama, literature, interior decorating, conversational French (or English), and crafts. The St. Thomas Club took advantage of its proximity to the new Shakespearean Festival in Stratford to attend and study the plays. The Vancouver Club, in celebration of the provincial centenary in 1958, brought in the National Ballet, a “glittering opportunity to sponsor this national jewel on a West Coast stage, to contribute to the UBC [University of British Columbia] development fund, and to add to the club’s own building fund.”50

The interest or study groups often generated resolutions of local significance and club members sometimes followed-up on them with great enthusiasm by writing to or visiting members of city council, the school board, or a Member of Parliament. When the Abbotsford Club historian looked back on resolutions the club had passed—such as one deploring nuclear explosions—she remarked, “I am amazed at how frequently we telegraphed or wrote the prime minister, the premier, cabinet ministers, or even on one occasion the president of the United States.” This zeal, she believed, reflected a confidence, less common today, that leaders wanted to hear what they thought.51

Dr. Martha Law, who served as CFUW president from 1952 to 1955, had graduated in 1923 from the University of Toronto with a degree in dentistry, then worked as a dental officer for the Toronto Public Health Department. A financial wizard, she learned to invest through the Toronto Stock Exchange and kept CFUW books in good order during her years as treasurer and as president. Law outlined some of her goals at the thirteenth triennial meeting in Edmonton, Alberta in 1955. One of them was to increase the number of clubs by twenty, which she did achieve, and another goal was to establish a permanent office, which would have to wait. Law knew the importance of a strong volunteer core and praised, in particular, the married women who formed “the backbone of our society.”52 Martha Law also oversaw the creation in 1952 of the $1,500 Margaret McWilliams Fellowship and the CFUW/IFUW fellowship named for astronomer, Dr. A. Vibert Douglas.

During this decade, CFUW also joined the CFBPW, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC) in promoting the establishment of a Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labour. Margaret Wherry of the CFBPW had led the campaign that failed in 1945, but it succeeded in 1954. CFUW had suggested this idea as early as the 1920s, inspired by the American model and its own Vocations Bureau, and was delighted that the government appointed one of its members, Marion Royce, as director of the new bureau. Royce had taught history and English at Toronto’s Moulton College for Girls for five years, then in 1928, became executive secretary of the National Girls Work Board of the Religious Education Council of Canada. In 1940, she was named education secretary for the Montréal YWCA, and from 1942 to 1954, she served as secretary for social and international questions at the World YWCA in Geneva. Her sister, Jean Royce, was registrar at Queen’s University and had earlier presided over CFUW’s Vocations Committee. Initially the Women’s Bureau had a limited mandate of providing research into the needs of women in the labour force, and it served the government’s purpose in managing a growing economy in which employers increasingly looked to women to fill labour shortages. Over time, the Women’s Bureau expanded its role to developing and advocating policies to facilitate equal opportunity for women in the labour force, improving vocational training, and recommending revisions to legislation on equal pay, maternity protection, and child care.53

The mid-1950s also saw some early developments in equal pay legislation. CFUW had long complained about unequal wages paid to women, especially teachers, and joined other women’s organizations in formally protesting this injustice. In 1954, the Edmonton Club protested an Alberta government proposal to address the teacher shortage by lowering the entrance requirements for the faculty of education at the University of Alberta and shortening the training period for teachers. The same club petitioned for the appointment of more women to the faculties of education in Calgary and Edmonton.54 Somewhat ironically, the teacher shortage created by the baby boom led to the lifting of early postwar prohibitions on the employment of married women.

The teacher shortages had little effect on pay rates, however, and some women’s groups were trying to have the standard of equal pay codified in Canadian legislation. The CFBPW won a major victory with the introduction of the Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act in Ontario in 1951, and then established an Employment Conditions Committee to approach the federal and provincial governments. Soon other provinces followed suit, and in 1953 the federal government passed the Canada Fair Employment Practices Act to eliminate gender discrimination in the civil service.55 CFBPW also won a prolonged fight to remove the words “for men only” from job advertisements issued by the Civil Service Commission.”56 The federal government passed the Female Employees Equal Pay Act in 1956, making wage discrimination based on sex unlawful across the board. Unfortunately, passing legislation does not guarantee implementation and employers invariably found ways to differentiate between jobs performed by men and those done by women to justify wage differentials. But it was a beginning.

As had been the case with suffrage, CFUW was late to advocate anti-discrimination legislation. Following the Kingston conference in 1956, CFUW asked the minister of labour, Milton F. Gregg, to implement the principle of equal pay, and he sent them a copy of the bill when it passed.57 At that meeting, some members criticized the legislation as an encroachment upon an employer’s right to choose his or her staff, preferring a program of education and persuasion to the use of legislative force or the evocation of rights.

Local efforts were often instrumental in affecting change as well. For example, President Law praised the Ottawa Club for mounting an effective campaign to secure facilities for women barristers in the plans to remodel the Ottawa courthouse.58 With persistence, solid research, and the creation of an inter-club council with other women’s groups, the club threatened to bring the matter to the attention of the media, thus overcoming protests by the Carleton County Law Association. Despite having no authority in the matter, the latter tried to exclude female lawyers, present and future, from the new courthouse.59 They did not succeed. Similarly, the club defended jury duty for women. In 1951, the Ontario government made women eligible for jury duty but allowed them to obtain easy exemptions; in 1956, both the Ottawa Club and the Elizabeth Fry Society asked that jury duty be made mandatory for women, as it was for men. When this was discussed at a regional meeting, one woman cited the example of a lawyer who insisted that women should not be allowed to serve in traffic cases because they are “bad drivers.”60

Dr. Doris Saunders, CFUW President 1955–1958.

In 1955, Doris Boyce Saunders became CFUW president and served until 1958. An early scholarship winner and the first woman to be appointed full professor at the University of Manitoba, her career matched the CFUW ideal. She was finally awarded the title Dr. only when UBC conferred an honorary doctorate on her in 1957, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Vancouver University Women’s Club. Unable to pursue a PhD at Oxford because it still did not admit women, Saunders enrolled in the bachelor of letters program in English in 1926, although she did not receive her degree until 1936, when Oxford finally granted degrees to women. Saunders’ Oxford degree was finally upgraded to a master’s degree in 1979. Saunders served as president of the women’s branches of the Canadian Institute for International Affairs, the Humanities Association of Canada, and the Women’s Canadian Club. She was also president of the University Women’s Club of Winnipeg from 1943 to 1945 and chaired the federation Scholarship Committee before assuming the presidency.

In 1958, when Saunders presided over the fourteenth triennial meeting in Montréal, it was co-hosted by Yvonne Letellier de Saint-Just, president of L’Association des femmes diplomées des universités (AFDU). This meeting represented the first time that French was officially recognized within the federation. Guest speaker Cardinal Paul-Emile Léger, archbishop of Montréal and president of the University of Montréal, gave the keynote address on bilingualism and humanism. At that meeting, the Library and Creative Arts Committee, home to many artistic women, arranged an art show of members’ works. A similar display of both paintings and books was held at a regional conference at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon in 1958.61

Dr. Doris Saunders, President (seated), in the mayor’s office during the CFUW Triennial Conference 1958, Montréal.

Driven by international developments such as the UN adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the concept of human rights was also beginning to have an impact on women.62 The UN Declaration, which Canadian legal scholar, jurist, and human rights advocate John Peters Humphrey had a significant role in drafting, asserted that everyone was entitled to all the rights in the document “without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.”63 Other events and court judgments were changing the way Canadians thought about the differential treatment of ethnic minorities in hiring, accommodation, and restaurant service upside down as well.64 Nova Scotian entrepreneur and beautician Viola Desmond had protested racially segregated seating in a movie theatre in Nova Scotia in 1946 and, although she lost her court case, she spurred on a movement. Other cases were more successful. After the war, Japanese and Chinese Canadians protested their exclusion from voting rights, and in 1951, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the legality of real estate covenants that had been used to exclude some ethnic groups from buying property in certain neighbourhoods. The logical extension—to include women in a discussion of human rights—did not follow immediately. In 1950, Constance Hayward, a member of the federation’s International Committee wrote an article on human rights in Canada in which she interpreted it as protection of religious and ethnic minority rights. CFUW endorsed human rights in relation to education, particularly articles 26–28 of the declaration of rights that read, “all Canadian children should be entitled, without payment of fees, without regard to place of residence and without regard to race, creed, personal wealth, or social position, to an education to the limit of each child’s ability.”65 Other documents included the 1953 UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women, which the Canadian government did not sign until 1957, perhaps due to its less than stellar record on women’s rights.66 Nonetheless becoming a signatory to this Convention allowed Canada a seat on the eighteen-
member United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), and further linked human rights with women’s rights.

Given the CFUW demographic, it is not surprising that much of their advocacy was centred on the women’s homemaking role. While some women embraced it, others struggled. The Edmonton Club’s president, Mrs. Margaret Greenhill, thought that many university graduates were “frustrated to think that they had spent all those years [studying] and were now changing diapers.”67 One Eastern Ontario regional conference held in Ottawa in 1959 had as its theme “The Educated Woman in the World Today” and included such topics as “Should a Woman’s Talents be Confined to the Home?” and “Barriers of Tradition in Jobs and Careers.”68 Marion Royce, speaking at the 1955 triennial meeting, explained that the modern conjugal family had displaced large kinship groups that had been predominant in an earlier era. The home was no longer a centre of production [for consumer goods such as clothing] and there was a trend toward individualism, but culturally, women were not yet accepted into the workforce. She quoted an American sociologist who observed that women were qualified for most jobs but were excluded by “traditional inter-personal attitudes,” such as the shame that many men felt on being subordinated to a woman boss and the assumption that the sexes should not mix in social groups. Royce politely declined to call it discrimination. Nonetheless, she insisted that “society needs a set of values which provide dignity and fulfillment for both men and women.”69

Women began to seek remedies. The Vancouver Club’s Status of Women Committee worked with the local council of women on a study of older women workers to help women return to the workforce after raising children. The London Club, guided by alderman Margaret Fullerton, successfully lobbied to have a bylaw that prohibited the employment of married women rescinded by the city. Among the CFUW resolutions passed in 1958 was one asking the Department of National Revenue to allow gainfully employed women to deduct expenses for a housekeeper or nurse from their income tax.

One of the major economic issues of concern to all women, whether they worked in the labour force or at home, was succession duties and estate taxes. Just as reformers such as Helen Gregory MacGill had sought to give women, especially married women, greater legal and financial autonomy, postwar women continued to argue for married women to have financial independence. Although the demeaning laws that granted a husband control over the family’s finances, including the wages his wife earned by her own labour, had been changed, for the most part, whoever owned property had the power to dispose of it. As a result, a wife was not entitled to share in family property flowing from her marital status. The same was true of a widow. Money or property bequeathed to her would be subject to federal estate tax and provincial succession duties.

As early as 1948, NCWC had begun to bring this matter before the federal government. After two years studying their brief, CFUW’s Status of Women Committee decided in 1953, to support the NCWC resolution rather than confuse the issue by saying the same thing in a different way. It sought to secure recognition that a widow was entitled to half of a deceased husband’s estate and should therefore not be subject to estate taxes and succession duties. In effect, the resolution asked for recognition of the economic contribution to the family made by wives. As CFUW argued, “it is the wise, faithful, laborious work of wives which leaves the husband free in body and mind to work in office or factory to earn the money which in time becomes their joint estate.”70 Advocates of the reforms pointed out that charities, which contributed nothing to an estate, were entitled to receive unlimited funds tax free while survivors were not. In its public statements, CFUW also drew attention to the fact that other laws had made tentative steps in this direction, including the dower and homestead laws that permitted the surviving spouse a life estate in the home property, as well as the Veterans’ Land Act, the War Veterans Allowance, and the National Housing Act.71

Margaret MacLellan, then convenor of the Status of Women Committee noted, in 1958, that the same recommendations had been made over the previous ten years by NCWC, CFUW, and other women’s organizations. The federal government did eventually introduce a new Estates Tax Act in the dying moments of January 1958, but it failed to pass before a new election was called. Had the legislation been adopted, however, it still would not have met the federation’s expectations. When the election was called, CFUW addressed the leaders of the four political parties and pointed out that the new bill required a wife to prove that the money she had used to acquire joint tenancy of the family home had not been received from her husband. Conservative opposition leader John Diefenbaker made sympathetic assurances and, once elected, had his new minister of finance discuss the CFUW’s proposals with them. When the legislation was passed in 1959, the federation found an improvement but still did not consider it the recognition of partnership they sought.72

The federation asked Ontario Premier Leslie Frost, in September 1957, to amend the Ontario Succession Duty Act to bring it in line with federal legislation and to add brothers and sisters to the preferred class of relatives in order to recognize the economic contribution of a single woman who did housekeeping for a sibling.73 On March 10, 1959, CFUW joined other major women’s groups in a deputation to the provincial treasurer to discuss this change.74 The premier noted that he was studying the federal legislation and would give due consideration to the women’s submissions.

Finishing the decade and moving into the 1960s, Dr. Vivian Brown Morton was CFUW president from 1958 to 1962. The wife and former student of historian Arthur Silver Morton, she completed a BA in history, but did not pursue a career in that field. Instead she studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Dr. Morton was also president and program convenor for the Saskatoon Arts Centre and co-founded the Saskatchewan Arts and Crafts Society and organized many festivals and conferences. She also served with her local branch of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. In the 1960s, Morton would lead CFUW’s first delegation to a prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, to advocate on behalf of women. Later in the decade CFUW led a campaign to persuade Pearson to name a royal commission into the status of women. Turbulent days would be ahead as the organization adjusted to the emerging women’s liberation movement.

Footnotes for this chapter can be found online at: http://www.secondstorypress.ca/resources