Gendering Corporate Welfare Practices: Female Sports and Recreation at Eaton's During the Depression

Abstract

Historians have done much to uncover and analyse men's sport and men's leisure. Some scholars have examined women's sports and issues related to control of women's bodies. However, little is known about structured leisure and the role companies played in providing such opportunities for Canadian women during the early part of the twentieth century. This research attempts to help fill that void by examining social forces and business practices that affected the leisure activities of female employees of the T. Eaton Company in Toronto (Eaton's). Examining this issue is meaningful because it helps illuminate influences on leisure patterns of working women, an area of Canadian history accorded limited consideration. This work is also meaningful as it addresses power from a different perspective. Eaton's, by purposefully providing leisure opportunities for its female employees, served to construct a leisure culture for those employees. The moral and social reform movement prevalent in Canada heavily influenced this undertaking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Findings of this research show that Eaton's employed programmes and facilities of the Eaton Girls' Club and Shadow Lake Vacation Camp to expose female employees to 'appropriate' forms of leisure practices (e.g. modified sports, domestic skills, opera and 'serious' theatre as opposed to vaudeville).