The Mother-Citizen and the working girl: First-Wave feminist citizenship claims in canada and discursive opportunities for Twenty-First century childcare policy

Abstract

Canada's welfare state is lopsided: while leading the world in some areas of social investment-most notably health care and higher education-it is a laggard in other areas of social welfare spending, including childcare policies. We find that policy resistance to universal childcare in most regions of Canada today has deep historical roots and is, indeed, embedded into the very framework of the Canadian welfare state: the social citizenship contract. We employ a "bottom-up" perspective on the welfare state focusing on how collective actors, in particular, first-wave feminists and their contemporaries within labor movement organizations, framed and characterized female social citizenship in ways that excluded employed women from full membership and, in this, truncated discursive opportunities by which claims for universal welfare state provisions could be made. © 2013 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.