On October 27th, 1979, Toronto-based women’s organizations Employment Services for Immigrant Women (ESIW) and The Housewives Initiative co-sponsored a forum titled “A View from the Kitchen: Immigrant Women Speak Out on the Value of Housework.” This forum, held at Ryerson's Jorgensen Hall, sought to unite immigrant women and Canadian housewives in the struggle for economic recognition of women’s domestic labour. One of the forum’s featured speakers was Joan French, president of the National Union of Democratic Teachers in Jamaica. According to a press release by the Housewives Initiative, French was visiting Toronto “on a fact-finding mission regarding the status of West Indian women in Canada.”1 In her presentation “Housework in the Third World,” French identified the devaluation of women’s labour as a worldwide problem: “Women not only produce the workforce of all countries but also bear the primary responsibility for training, nurturing and maintaining them, tending them in times of disability or illness, and caring for them when society no longer needs their labour. No society, regardless of its political system, has yet solved the problem of housework.”2
In this speech, French argued emphatically against global capitalism, a system in which the West exploits Third World peoples for their labour and their land’s natural resources.** But she also acknowledged that socialist revolution had failed to address women’s economic emancipation:
The possibility for the full equality of women does not exist within the exploitative economic and social relations of capitalist society. Capitalism exploits women, and through them their men, by paying for the labour of one worker when they benefit from at least two... Capitalists make more profits because women are not paid for their work. Then they turn around and make men pay from their already meagre wages. But they also invent a whole philosophy about the role of the female which is designed to keep the woman in her place as society’s household slave labour. Part of this philosophy concerns the form and role of the family, the guardian of all those wonderful traditions which keep us working for free and keep us and our men tied together for economic rather than emotional reasons. This philosophy is as alive in the socialist countries as it is under capitalism. The idea that women’s work has no value, is non-productive or even degrading, is a foundation pillar of socialist theory as we presently have it. This insidious assumption of capitalist society leaked into socialist theory and practice because when Marx was writing... the women’s movement had not yet developed the strength of conviction to insist that the revolution deal with the problems of their ‘private’ lives.3
In 1979, this gendered exploitation was particularly acute for Third World women who, according to French, performed “the hardest, most backbreaking and most time-consuming work of any women in the world yet have access to the least in terms of benefits.” Just as socialist revolutions around the world sought to improve conditions for the working class but failed to address the problem of women's economic emancipation, women's liberation movements in North America improved conditions for the integration of white women into the workforce while neglecting the question of immigrant and racialized women’s exploitation. Throughout her presentation, French locates both forms of exploitation within capitalism as an economic system that devalues women’s traditional labour and generates profit for Western corporations by extracting resources from economically poorer countries.
Immigrant domestics who arrived in Canada prior to 1970 were awarded “landed status,” meaning they could apply for Canadian citizenship after living and working in the country for a certain amount of time. However, “The policy of welcoming immigrant domestic workers as permanent residents changed in the 1970s when the government introduced temporary employment visas.”4 Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Programs specifically targeted women from the Caribbean to perform low-waged domestic labour in Canadian family homes. Under these contracts, immigrant domestics were required to live with their employers, were not protected by minimum wage legislation, and often had to work unpaid overtime. Although these workers contributed to social security, they had no right to obtain social benefits such as welfare or pensions. Moreover, their presence in Canada was based entirely on their continued employment as domestic workers, and they were not permitted to obtain other forms of work. Often, these women were exploited, overworked, and abused due to lack of government regulation, and their livelihoods were at the mercy of employers who could threaten them with deportation on a whim.5
“In modern times,” said French, “this is as close to the slave trade as makes little difference.” French connected “the struggle of immigrant domestics” with “the Third World Struggle to redress the economic imbalance between developed and developing countries” by arguing that “profits from Third World countries end up in developed countries, so we come to developed countries like Canada to reclaim some of that wealth.” Immigrants, she stated, “are here by right—the right of their labour performed on behalf of the developed countries both in the Third World and in those developed countries when they go there as immigrants.”6 Though many view immigration as an act of charity toward immigrants, French emphasized the Canadian State’s reliance on immigrant domestics for housework and other economically devalued jobs, in addition to corporate practices which extracted minerals and resources from “Third World countries” to manufacture technologies for the improvement of Western lifestyles. Consequently, she underscored the racist and white supremacist hypocrisy that sometimes saturated Canadian versions of “women’s liberation,” not to mention capitalist conceptions of charity and international development.
“A View from the Kitchen: Immigrant Women Speak Out on the Value of Housework” would eventually result in the formation of INTERCEDE, also known as the International Coalition to End Domestics’ Exploitation, which sought to connect the women’s liberation movement with immigrant women activists who opposed capitalist exploitation of their domestic labour. Beginning as a coalition between Employment Services for Immigrant Women (ESIW), The Housewives Initiative, Labour Rights for Domestic Servants (LRDS), and the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee, INTERCEDE outlined the following five demands at their inaugural meeting in November 1979:
- The government of Ontario must immediately reintroduce and pass a bill that would include domestic work under all minimum wage legislation.
- The contract signed by the Ministry of Employment and Immigration and employers of domestics on work permits should be signed by the domestic worker concerned, and this contract must be legally binding.
- Independent community agencies must be funded by the government to ensure that the minimum wage legislation and the terms of the domestic workers’ contracts are observed by employers of domestic workers.
- All women who are presently in Canada on work permits must be allowed to apply for landed immigrant status immediately.
- Welfare rates must be raised immediately to a living wage, and immigrant women must be allowed to apply for welfare with no threat of deportation.7
Over the following decade, INTERCEDE grew to include immigrant women’s organizations across Ontario and throughout the country, and they performed essential advocacy work in addition to education and political lobbying. The coalition especially benefitted from its relationship to Caribbean and Filipino activists who brought essential political analysis, organizing strategy, and cultural experience to the struggle for domestic workers’ rights. Alongside the immigrant women workers who risked abuse and deportation to stand up for Canadian labour rights, these activists were essential to new protections for domestic workers which were obtained throughout the 1980s. Ultimately, however, these reforms fell short of granting landed status to all domestic workers, thus perpetuating the sexist devaluation of women’s domestic labour and the racist devaluation of immigrant women’s economically valuable skills.
This year, in support of the Migrant Rights Network’s #MigrantSpring campaign, the Women’s Archives at the University of Ottawa wishes to celebrate immigrant women and their contribution to obtaining human rights in Canada. This is part one of a series of blog posts on the 1980s struggle for domestic workers rights, leading up to International Domestic Workers’ Day on June 16th, 2024. Visit https://migrantrights.ca/take-action/pr-for-careworkers/ to read more about the ongoing struggle for migrant care workers’ rights and demand #StatusforAll.
**Note on language: The author of this post uses the term “Third World” not only to better reflect French’s analysis of domestic labour, but also to emphasize the international movement for Third World solidarity which developed during the Cold War (c. 1950s-1980s). In this period, “The Third World” defined countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO (The First World), or the Communist Bloc (The Second World). “Third Worldism” developed during an era of widespread decolonization and national wars of independence which took place in Africa, Southern America, and Asia. This movement, initiated by Third World peoples, emphasized solidarity and cooperation between Third World countries in their shared struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Click here to read more about how the use and meaning of “Third World” has changed over time.
Notes
1. Housewives’ Initiative, Kensington Counselling and Information Center. Press release for “A View from the Kitchen” (10 October 1979) Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa, 10-008-S6-F8
2. Joan French. “Housework and the Third World.” Presentation prepared for the forum “A View from the Kitchen: Immigrant Women Speak Out on the Value of Housework” at Ryerson College, Toronto (27 October 1979) Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa, 10-008-S6-F8
3. ibid.
4. Marilyn Barber, “Domestic Service (Caregiving) in Canada,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/domestic-service
5. ibid.
6. Joan French. “Housework and the Third World.” Presentation prepared for the forum “A View from the Kitchen: Immigrant Women Speak Out on the Value of Housework” at Ryerson College, Toronto (27 October 1979) Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa, 10-008-S6-F8
7. INTERCEDE Steering Committee, “What is INTERCEDE?” (July 1980) Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa, 10-094-S2-SS1-F6
