Money in Their Own Name: The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate in Canada, 1970-1995

178 Pages·2004·9.242 MB·English

by  Wendy McKeen

MONEY IN THEIR OWN NAME:
THE FEMINIST VOICE IN POVERTY DEBATE
IN CANADA, 1970-1995
In Money in Their Own Name, Wendy McKeen examines the relationship between
gender and social policy in Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s. Providing a
detailed historical account of the shaping of feminist politics within the field of
federal child benefits programs in Canada, she explores the critical issue of why
the feminist vision of the 'social individual' failed to flourish.
Canadian social policy has established women's access to social benefits on
the basis of their status as wives or mothers, not as individuals in their own
right. In her analysis, McKeen discusses this persistent familialism that has been
written and rewritten into Canadian social policy, and shows how this approach
reinforces women's dependency. She further demonstrates the lack of contest
by the women's movement toward this dependent status, and the consequent
erasure of women from social policy.
McKeen effectively weaves together sociological theory with concrete ex-
amples of political struggle. She uncovers overlooked aspects of Canadian so-
cial policy politics and subsequently extends our understanding of the political
process. At the same time, by synthesizing the concepts of discourse, agency,
and policy community, she offers a new analytical tool for understanding how
the political interests of actors are shaped.
(Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy)
WENDY E. MCKEEN is an assistant professor at the Maritime School of Social Work
at Dalhousie University.
Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Pollicy
Editors: MICHAEL HOWLETT, DAVID LAYCOCK, STEPHEN MCBRIDE,
Simon Fraser University.
Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy is designed
to showcase innovative approaches to political economy and public policy
from a comparative perspective. While originating in Canada, the series will
provide attractive offerings to a wide international audience, featuring studies
with local, subnational, cross-national, and international empirical bases and
theoretical frameworks.
Editorial Advisory Board
COLIN BENNETT, University of Victoria
WILLIAM CARROLL, University of Victoria
WILLIAM COLEMAN, McMaster University
BARRY EICHENGREEN, University of California (Berkeley)
JANE JENSON, Universite de Montreal
RIANNE MAHON, Carleton University
LARS OSBERG, Dalhousie University
JAMIE PECK, Manchester University
JOHN RAVENHILL, University of Edinburgh
ROBERT RUSSELL, University of Saskatchewan
GRACE SKOGSTAD, University of Toronto
RAND SMITH, Lake Forest College
KENT WEAVER, Brookings Institution
For a list of books published in the series, see p. 169.
Money in Their
Own Name
The Feminist Voice in Poverty Debate
in Canada, 1970-1995
Wendy McKeen
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-8544-X
Printed on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McKeen, Wendy, 1954-
Money in their own name : the feminist voice in poverty debate in
Canada, 1970-1995 / Wendy McKeen.
(Studies in comparative political economy and public policy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-8544-X
1. Women - Government policy - Canada. 2. Canada - Social policy.
3. Poverty - Canada. 4. Feminism - Canada. 5. Women - Canada -
Social conditions. 6. Women - Canada - Economic conditions.
I. Title. II. Series.
HQ1236.5.C2M325 2003 362.83'0971 C2003-902487-3
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 3
1 Solutions for Women-Friendly Social Policy: The Radical Potential
of Individualized Entitlement 9
2 Understanding How the Interests of New Political Actors Are
Shaped: Discourse, Agency, and 'Policy Community' 20
3 The Mainstream Poverty Debate in the 1960s and the Emergence
of a Feminist Alternative 30
4 Feminism, Poverty Discourse, and the Child Benefits Debate of
the Mid- to Late 1970s: 'Writing Women In' 51
5 Feminism and the Tory Child Benefits Debate of the Early to
Mid-1980s: Money in Their Own Name? 67
6 Feminism and Child Poverty Discourse in the Late 1980s to
Mid-1990s: 'Writing Women Out' 89
7 Conclusions: Implications for Current Struggles for
Women-Friendly Social Policy 108
Appendix: List of Interviews 123
vi Contents
Notes 125
References 141
Index 165
Preface
Canadian social policy is deeply biased in a way that detrimentally
affects women, especially vulnerable groups of women, in their day-to-
day lives, and this policy is working against any possibility for real
gender equality. The problem is not explicit discrimination, as was
previously the case, but that governments continue to ignore the issue
of social reproduction and the bulk of unpaid care work carried out
primarily by women. As feminists have argued, there is a major dis-
juncture between the economic system and the social policy system: we
have a dual-breadwinner economic system harnessed to a single-bread-
winner social policy system, and it is disproportionately women who
are paying the price in terms of higher rates of poverty and growing
stress levels. Under neo-liberalism, moreover, the social policy system
has moved even further from recognizing social reproduction and the
contribution of unpaid work to our society. Official policy has backed
away from the blanket assumption that all women are dependents (i.e.,
are mothers and housewives) to adopt the equally damaging view that
social context and social difference does not matter at all. Thus, single
mothers on social assistance are being exhorted to enter the workforce,
with little acknowledgment of, or real help with, their home and child
care responsibilities. Social policy is also being refamilialized in many
areas: for example, entitlement to child benefits and some aspects of
Employment Insurance benefits are now based on total household as
opposed to individual income. As feminists have identified, such crite-
ria disproportionately disqualify women from benefits and reinforce
the long-term cycle of their poverty (e.g., see Phipps et al., 2001). All of
this has occurred as governments have abandoned a universalistic
approach and embraced a more targeted and punitive one that places
viii Preface
increasing amounts of responsibility on individuals and families for
defending themselves against poverty and other social risks. Women's
prospects for equality, then, continue to decline as growing numbers of
them face the desperation of a life of juggling low-wage, contingent
paid work with a growing burden of unpaid care and domestic work at
home.
This book contributes to a recognition that these developments were
not accidental - that they were, in fact, the result of complex and subtle
processes that occurred largely between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s,
in which both neo-liberal ideas prevailed, and radical, women-friendly
alternatives were successfully resisted. I argue in this book that the
second-wave women's movement did advance an alternative vision for
social policy in the mid-1970s that was sophisticated and went right to
the heart of the matter: the failure of state policy to recognize the social
context of individual lives. The campaign ultimately failed to flourish,
however, and this book is mainly concerned with understanding its
defeat. While macro-level influences such as social and economic changes
and the rise of neo-liberalism were critical, I highlight the constraining
effects that the 'social policy community' had in shaping 'women's
interests' in the field of federal social policy.
This book is important for two reasons. First, the alternative 'social
individual' model for social policy that feminists advanced was a sig-
nificant and far-reaching vision for change - one that still needs to be
pursued if we are to solve issues of gender and other forms of inequal-
ity and work towards a more humane, solidaristic model for society.
Second, this story has important lessons for understanding the politics
of social policy in Canada more generally. Indeed, this book provides a
concrete illustration of a position that is increasingly advanced within
political studies - that the strategies and orientations of even mar-
ginalized political actors also count in shaping political debate and
moving the agenda forward in particular directions. One of the find-
ings of this study is that a wide range of organizations and social forces
(most notably, left-liberal social policy and anti-poverty organizations)
participated in shaping the parameters of the social reform process in
ways that were readily incorporated into the emergent neo-liberal so-
cial policy regime, with its emphasis on targeting and its reassertion of
a male-centred, familialist approach. In this new neo-liberal social policy
landscape, gender issues and women's concerns have slipped from
view, while in their stead stand 'Canadian children,' somehow stripped
of their family connections and the gender relations they embody.
MONEY IN THEIR OWN NAME
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