Gendered States: Women, Unemployment Insurance, and the Political Economy of the Welfare State in Canada, 1945–1997

Abstract

Gendered States: Women, Unemployment Insurance, and the Political Economy of the Welfare State in Canada, 1945–1997, Ann Porter, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 355It is amazing that Canadian society has been consistently bewildered as to the social, political and economic placement of women. In her new book, Ann Porter explains that the labour requirement that enabled women's participation in the workforce during the Second World War created a post-war environment that was inequitable, illogical, gendered, and “regulating.” Thus, progressive measures were to produce regressive results, as they were taken for the sake of nationalism and not gender equality. Porter documents the change in Unemployment Insurance (UI) policy from limited coverage for certain groups of male workers that could not engage in productive labour to “site of contestation over women's entitlement to state benefits” (66).