Joan Sangster

Dreams of equality : women on the Canadian left, 1920-1950

Canadian women on the political left in the first half of the twentieth century fought with varying degrees of commitment for womens rights. Womens dreams of equality were in part a vision of economic and class equality, though they also represented profound desires for equality with men - both within their own parties and in the larger society. In both the Communist Party of Canada and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a male-dominated leadership seldom embraced womens causes wholeheartedly or as a doctrinal priority. So-called womens issues, whether birth control, consumer issues, or equal pay, usually took second place to an emphasis on the general needs of workers or farmers. Nonetheless, many women continued to promote their feminist causes through the socialist movement, in the hope that, eventually, the socialist New Jerusalem would see their dreams of equality fulfilled. In Dreams of Equality, Joan Sangster chronicles in fascinating detail the first tentative stages of a politically aware womens movement in Canada, from the time of womens suffrage to the 1950s when the CPC went into decline and the CCF began to experience the changes that would evolve into the New Democratic Party a decade later.

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

A CENTURY of women’s work history in Australia and Canada reveals both similarities and contrasts. Women workers in both countries have faced persistent occupational segregation and lower pay, just...

On Gender, Labor and Inequality by Ruth Milkman (review)

Goldman mocked, “Bartlett rose to the ceiling and way above.” (129) Haverty-Stacke’s Trotskyists On Trial is an account of an important episode in the struggle for civil liberties, waged by those whom the state, employers, and a hard core within labour’s reactionary officialdom were willing to demonize. It has much to recommend it, constituting an extended treatment of one of the most vigorous and principled labour defence campaigns in the history of the modern left. The book concludes with an account of a 1986 vindication of the Socialist Workers Party, which won a case against fbi surveillance of the Trotskyist organization that reached back to 1940. Judge Thomas Griesa ruled that the fbi’s use of informants to spy and report on political meetings, demonstrations, and other lawful events was “unconstitutional and violated the swp’s First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.” (220) This late but liberal victory, Haverty-Stacke suggests, speaks well of justice and its capacities in our current age, shrouded as it is in the threat of terrorism. This should give us hope, she claims, that “Americans can be vigilant and effective in preserving the life of the nation while they protect the freedoms that give life to their nation.” (226) As I finished this book, I had a different thought. It was about one of the Smith Act trial victims, Carl Skoglund. Born into poverty in Sweden in 1884, ‘Skogie’ immigrated to the United States in 1911. One of the “undocumented” of his time, Skoglund joined the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, then became an early convert to communism. Expelled from the Communist Party, USA in 1929, Skoglund joined the Trotskyist Communist League of America (Opposition), and was one of the key strategists of the successful 1934 Minneapolis uprising. He helped to found the swp in 1938. Threatened with deportation, and offered citizenship papers by the fbi if he would inform on his comrades and make common cause with the Committee of 99, Skoglund refused and served his time as a convicted Smith Act defendant. But he was never thereafter out of the collective sights of Dan Tobin and the ibt bureaucracy, J. Edgar Hoover and the fbi, the Department of Justice, and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. Jailed, and hounded repeatedly by the state, Tobin’s ibt blacklisted Skoglund, and job sites where the socialist Swede found work were quickly picketed by his former union, driving the swper from paid employment. The left-wing workers’ movement defended Skoglund from deportation until the day he died in 1960. Skoglund, in our times, would be the equivalent of ‘Mexican’ or ‘Muslim’, with the added designation of being a convicted seditious conspirator. Justice for people of his political stripe was and is seldom so much vigilant as it is vigilante. Bryan D. Palmer Trent University