Women and Wage Labour in Australia and Canada, 1880-1980‪.‬

ONE OF THE MOST important, yet subtle revolutions in the labour force of the industrialized countries over the past 100 years has been the increasing growth of female participation in formal wage work. The most significant and rapid changes have come in the post-World War II years, as women's participation rate in the labour force has climbed steadily, along with significant changes in the marital and family profile of women workers, who are increasingly partnered, and/or have dependent children. Since 1940, for instance, the female share of the labour force has more than doubled and the female participation rate has tripled. (1) In some ways this revolution, or feminization of the workforce has simply involved a re-deployment of women's work, a change in the locale of their daily labour. As Jill Matthews has pointed out for the Australian case, the increased employment of married women in the 1950s and 1960s reflected the penetration of capital into the informal economy, where married women had been diligently working, producing goods and services for many years. (2) Similarly, Marjorie Cohen's economic study of 19th-century Canadian women argues that even in the family-based agricultural economy, women's domestic labour and especially their generation of small cash through activities such as dairying facilitated the accumulation of land and capital for rural families. (3) Notwithstanding this important reminder that women have always worked, and taking into account the under-representation of women, especially non-Anglo women, in labour force statistics (discussed below), this article will focus primarily on women's formal labour force participation, concentrating especially on the changes which occurred since the late 19th century.