Settler Feminism, Race Making, and Early Social Work in Canada

Abstract

Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, hegemonic imperial discourses, and settler colonial structures of governance worked as formative factors in the birth of Canadian social work and illustrate this with the life of an early Toronto social worker, Joan Arnoldi (D.O.B. 1882).