Crossing the Line: Women’s Opposition to the Winnipeg General Strike

Ella Prisco

This essay is part of a 2-part series. See the other entry here.

“They have borne the lonely hours with fortitude,” stated the Winnipeg Citizen in its coverage of scabbing women during the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.^[1] Indeed they had, taking up positions as telephone switchboard operators and waitresses in response to the nearly thirty thousand workers who walked off the job in Canada’s largest general strike to date.^[2] The strike had put the middle and upper classes on edge. They understood the strike as moving beyond a demand for collective bargaining and signaling a desire for socialist revolution.^[3] This anxiety only increased as the strike expanded beyond the purview of the public sphere and encroached on the private sphere of the home, resulting in middle- and upper-class women being unable to fulfill their traditional domestic duties. As a result, these women were motivated to intervene, becoming scabs and engaging in anti-strike activity to prevent the strike’s immoral force from further impacting the domestic sphere and ‘tainting’ society at large. In doing so, these women extended their accepted social roles as nurturers, caregivers and guardians of the domestic sphere into the public sphere, justifying their entrance into the workforce as a form of socially acceptable political activism rooted in traditional femininity.

The perception of the strike as immoral was importantly tied to the ways in which it was understood to be disproportionately impacting women and the domestic sphere. This phenomenon can be seen most clearly through the stoppage of bread and milk deliveries. Although eventually permitted by the Strike Committee, the strikers’ governing body, the fact that bread and milk deliveries were initially halted caused outrage among the strike’s opponents.^[4] It was perceived as a deplorable attack on the city’s sick as well as women and children, groups that were understood to be particularly vulnerable. An article in the Winnipeg Citizen, a newspaper run by the anti-strike Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand (Citizens’ Committee), demonstrates how impactful these shortages were, stating that, “The bread and the milk supply were cut off by the strike. Now, we have a three-month-old baby in our home, being brought up on modified milk – and I want to tell you that after the strike started, that baby was two days without food!”^[5] Another described the Strike Committee as “primarily responsible for bringing about a condition that may very readily result in the death of children.”^[6]  These reports pictured the strike as moving beyond the public sphere of work to the domestic sphere of the home. By depicting the strike as a direct attack on children, the strike could then be understood as both a tangible and existential threat to women’s traditional roles in the home, disabling them from performing their duties as mothers, nurturers and caretakers.

It is important here to take a moment to explore what women’s roles were and the expectations placed on wives and mothers at the turn of the twentieth century. While the separate sphere ideology, which posited that women’s societal role was confined to the home (private sphere) and men’s was in politics and enterprise (public sphere), was waning in this period, women continued to be perceived as mothers and wives, responsible for the maintenance of the home and the well-being and morality of its members.^[7] The perception of women’s nature as selfless, passive, nurturing and caregiving was understood to suit their specific societal role within the domestic sphere.^[8] It should be emphasized that gender norms and expectations varied depending on numerous factors, such as class, race and ethnicity. However, it is important to acknowledge the strategies employed by some middle- and upper-class women who sought to embody and maintain this particular gendered identity.  

One way this occurred was through the mobilization of “maternal feminism,” which re-emphasized this traditional gender role to advocate for women’s place in the public sphere on the grounds of their so-called feminine qualities, including their experience as mothers, wives, caregivers, and guardians of morality. This form of feminism reinforced women’s sexual segregation while extending their public participation, justifying their employment as nurses, teachers and secretaries on the basis of their so-called feminine qualities.^[9] Maternal feminism was also an extremely prevalent motivator for women’s activism and political involvement during this period. By positioning themselves as inherently more moral than their male counterparts and as having a larger capacity for caregiving, middle- and upper-class women were able to extend their influence to fields previously unavailable to them.^[10] This was especially the case for societal problems that were understood to be corrupting forces, like alcoholism and child labour, wherein women were able to take a significant part in the development of legislation and public policy.^[11]

It is possible to draw a connection between the prevalence of maternal feminism and the opposition of Winnipeg’s middle- and upper-class women to the Winnipeg General Strike. The women who opposed the Strike were participating in a political movement, crossing the line between public and private, and doing so as women to protect Winnipeg from possible disrepute and chaos. As the strike began to impact women’s ability to perform the domestic tasks allotted to them, especially women’s responsibility to nourish the family, it is likely that they began to perceive the strike as a threat to their households as well as the city more broadly. In line with the tenets of maternal feminism, they justified their participation in the political realm by emphasizing the feminine nature of their activism. Indeed, through their participation in strike opposition, the women of Winnipeg were extending their roles as harbingers of morality in the home to guardians of society at large.

This can be most clearly seen through the characterization of women’s opposition to the strike by the Citizens’ Committee and their newspaper, The Winnipeg Citizen. From the get-go, the Citizens’ Committee was focused on shutting down the strike. The group was composed of Winnipeg’s economic and political elite who were not pleased with the loss of business, nor the possibility of revolution in the city.^[12] As such, the Citizens’ Committee mobilized quickly to form an opposition movement that was ultimately focused on galvanizing popular frustration with the strike, portraying itself as acting in the interest of Winnipeggers at large.^[13] One of the ways in which the Citizens’ Committee was most focused on dismantling the strike movement was by replacing striking labour. This included the development of transportation networks to transport strikebreakers to work and the creation of volunteer brigades that served as firemen, sanitation servicemen and a citizen volunteer army.^[14] Importantly, the strikebreaking efforts of the Citizens’ Committee were not limited to men; women, too, were scabs. As scabs, middle- and upper-class women filled the positions left open by the striking women.^[15] They took up work as telephone operators, newspaper saleswomen, waitresses and gas station attendants.^[16]

In addition to their own strikebreaking efforts, scabbing women also strove to support the labour of the strikebreaking men through numerous volunteer endeavours, namely through the development and management of volunteer kitchens, where they prepared and served food to volunteer firemen, sanitation servicemen and the citizen’s army.^[17] The labour of these women was vital to the success of the Citizens’ Committee in their strikebreaking efforts and, importantly, was framed as being in the service of the community at large. This can be seen through an article’s analysis in the Winnipeg Citizen, wherein women were described as having “made great sacrifices…labor[ing] early and late for the cause.”^[18] In this excerpt, it is possible to see how women’s contributions to the strikebreaking campaign as scabs were valued not on the basis of the individual labour performed by each woman, but for the ways in which their collective efforts contributed to the broader good of the community.

At this moment, when the city of Winnipeg was understood to be under threat from an immoral group of revolutionaries, it is possible to understand middle- and upper-class women’s scab activity as an extension of their assigned domestic roles. Indeed, as harbingers of morality in the home, women had a duty to protect themselves and their families from disrepute. As the labour movement had begun to move beyond the public sphere, entering the home through the prevention of milk and bread deliveries and thus impeding women from performing their assigned roles, the strike began to threaten the morality of the private sphere as well as society at large. Acting in line with the prominent form of women’s activism at the time, scab women extended their assigned roles as guardians of the home to protect the city.

In this way, women’s opposition to the General Strike was taken up as a defence of their homes and families, and by extension, the city of Winnipeg. The specific threat that the strike posed to women’s capacity to perform their domestic duties, as well as the perceived loss of control and immorality of the strike movement among the middle and upper classes, prompted women to defy the strike. By extending their assigned roles as protectors, nurturers, and caregivers, in line with popular women’s activism, scabbing women were able to mobilize acceptable modes of transgressing gender norms (i.e. maternal feminism) to participate in the public sphere and fight the perceived immoral threat of the general strike.

Ella Prisco is a recent graduate from the history program at McGill University. The majority of her work has focused on changes in women’s status and labour from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, spanning different international and cultural contexts. She hopes to further her research in a graduate program.

This post was edited under the auspices of the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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^[1] “Citizenship and Excelsis,” Winnipeg Citizen, June 9, 1919.

^[2] “Citizenship and Excelsis.”

^[3] Dennis Lewycky, Magnificent Fight: The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike (Fernwood Publishing, 2019), 30.

^[4] Lewycky, Magnificent Fight, 35.

^[5] “Babies and Milk Supply,” Winnipeg Citizen, June 5, 1919.

^[6] “The Counsel of the Soviet,” Winnipeg Citizen, June 6, 1919.

^[7] Linda Kealey, A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s-1920s (Women’s Educational Press, 1979), 45.

^[8] Kealey, A Not Unreasonable Claim, 6, 8.

^[9] Kealey, 6, 8, 10.

^[10] Kealey, 7.

^[11] Kealey, 2.

^[12] Lewycky, Magnificent Fight, 21.

^[13] Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens’ Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 21.

^[14] “Citizenship and Excelsis”; Lewycky, Magnificent Fight, 21.

^[15] Mary Horodyski, “‘That Was Quite a Strike Alright…:’ Women and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919,” Fireweed 26 (1988), 13.

^[16] Horodyski, “‘That Was Quite a Strike Alright…’,” 13.

^[17] “Citizenship and Excelsis.”

^[18] “Citizenship and Excelsis.”