Indigenous, Racialized, Immigrant/Ethnic, and Low-Income Women’s Groups and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women

The creation of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) in 1967 was a watershed moment in Canadian women’s activism. The continued pressure of women inside and outside the corridors of political power led Lester Pearson’s Liberal government to establish a Royal Commission to explore women’s issues. Following nation-wide hearings (April-October 1968), the commission released its report with 167 recommendations in December 1970.

The commission stimulated women’s activism across Canada as groups mobilized to write submissions and present at the hearings. This momentum helped to establish the  National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) in 1971. NAC was the first umbrella group to represent women’s activist groups across the country, and it pledged to continue to lobby governments to implement the RCSW recommendations. 

But we want to better understand how Indigenous, racialized, immigrant/ethnic, and low-income women’s groups engaged with the RCSW. How did they articulate their marginalization in racial, ethnic, gender, and class terms? How did the RCSW receive their insights?

The Alternative Visions Project explores this moment (among many others) to capture the complexity of women’s activism during this period. And Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive is helping us to do that. 

Here, we report briefly on how we use the context of the RCSW to explore the issues and policy solutions raised by these marginalized women’s groups.* We found important differences between the priorities of these groups and those of more mainstream women’s groups. 

Of the 468 briefs submitted to the RCSW, only a small number came from Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income women’s groups, and none from racialized women’s groups. There were two submissions from Indigenous women’s groups and a few individual submissions from Indigenous women leaders. Of the eight submissions from immigrant and ethnic women’s groups, six came from Jewish women’s groups.

The RCSW report states that there were at least 215 organizations of the poor in Canada at the time [For materials on women and poverty in the Rise Up archive, see  Women and Poverty – Rise Up]. However, only three submissions to the RCSW came from explicitly identified low-income women’s groups.

Taken together, we found similarities and differences in the issues addressed in the different groups’ respective submissions.

For example, the Indigenous women’s groups were the only groups to detail the extensive and on-going impact of colonialism on their communities.

The submissions highlighted the high rates of child apprehensions, the criminalization of Indigenous Peoples, discriminatory Indian Act status issues, inadequate housing, and barriers in access to health services. 

Regarding poverty, Indigenous and low-income women’s groups centralized poverty in all their submissions. Differences also emerge. Whereas Indigenous women’s groups addressed how their poverty was a result of colonial practices, low-income women’s groups focussed on inadequate welfare rates, unenforceable child support, and limited educational opportunities. Also, the low-income women’s groups were the only groups marked by race, Indigeneity, immigrant status, or low income that insisted upon the value of unpaid mothering work and that advocated for a Guaranteed Annual Income. 

By contrast, immigrant/ethnic women’s groups did not address poverty in as comprehensive a manner.  Most members of these groups were at least second or third generation in Canada. When they did mention poverty, they generally did so as experts and as professionals who did paid or unpaid volunteer work with low-income women. Only the leftist Women’s Committee of the United Ukrainian Canadians presented a strongly worded critique of the problems facing immigrant women, noting that immigrant women working in industry and at home are “doubly discriminated against by sex and ethnic origin.”

All of the immigrant and ethnic women’s groups that made submissions were white ethno-cultural and immigrant groups (i.e., Acadian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish). The Jewish groups avoided identifying as Jewish because, it seems clear, they thought recommendations issued by women who appeared “unmarked” by ethnicity or religion and who were viewed as neutral professional volunteers would be taken more seriously. By contrast, Christian women’s groups clearly felt comfortable using plenty of Christian rhetoric.

The absence of racialized women’s voices is deafening. However, we know from our larger Alternative Visions project, from other scholars’ work, and from archives like Rise Up, that Black women’s activism and other racialized women’s activism was strong and growing during this era. 

That not one racialized group made a submission to the RCSW might suggest that these groups did not believe that they would be heard in that context.

Our research makes it clear that we must not only study Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, ethnic, and low-income women’s distinctive activism in Canada but should also seek to understand how these activisms speak across and to each other during important historical moments like the creation of the RCSW and its subsequent report. 

We presented our respective findings at the conference Between Postwar and Present Day: Canada 1970-2000, held at the University of Toronto on May 8, 2021. The presentations included: Lynne Marks, “Unmarked but not Necessarily Secular: Submissions from Ethnic and Religious Women’s Organizations to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women;” and Sarah Nickel, “‘We Must Make Our Children Proud’: Indigenous Women, Activism, and the Aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.”

We thank Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive for facilitating this research through public access to the records of RCSW and NAC as well as women’s activist newsletters and magazines from this era.

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The article above is the second installment in a series of articles written by the Alternative Visions research team. Alternative Visions is a 5-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project to explore Indigenous, racialized, immigrant/ethnic, and low-income women’s activism
through archival sources and oral history interviews. The first article, “Researching Alternative Visions with Rise Up: A project on Indigenous, racialized, immigrant, and low-income women’s activism in Canada, 1960s-1980s”, introduced some preliminary findings of this research.
This article focuses on how these women’s groups engaged with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.

Margaret Little is an anti-poverty activist and academic who works in the areas of single mothers on welfare, neo-liberal welfare reform, and retraining for women on welfare. She is jointly appointed as a Professor of Gender Studies and Political Studies at Queen’s University

Lynne Marks is a Professor of History at the University of Victoria. She teaches Canadian history, and women’s and gender history, as well as the social history of religion. She is the author of Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia (UBC Press, 2017).

Sarah Nickel is Tk’emlupsemc (Kamloops Secwépemc), French Canadian, and Ukrainian. She is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. Her research examines twentieth-century Indigenous politics through community-engaged oral history and archival methods, with a particular focus on the gendered nature of activism and resistance.

* In our archival research, each of us focused on the submissions made by one or more of these groups. Nickel focused on Indigenous women’s groups (see “We Now Must Take Action’: Indigenous Women, Activism, and the Aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women”); Little on low-income women’s groups (“An Unexpectedly Significant Finding’: Poverty and the Royal Commission on the Status of Women”); and Lynne Marks with Andrea Eidinger on immigrant and ethnic women’s groups, (“Unmarked but not Necessarily Secular:  Submissions from Ethnic and Religious Women’s Voluntary Organizations to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women,” submitted to Between Postwar and Present Day, ed. by Ben Bradley and Nancy Janovicek (book manuscript in progress).