Mothers of the Municipality: Women, Work, and Social Policy in Post-1945 Halifax. Judith Fingard and Janet Guildford, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005; illustrations; 318 pages; ISBN 0-8020-8693-4; $35.00 (paper).
As the second wave of feminism swept into Canada, women historians began searching for the hidden history of their foremothers. One of their discoveries was something, beginning in the nineteenth century, that has come to be known as "social feminism." As contrasted with the more familiar feminism that seeks equality for women because they are like men, social feminism grew out of a valorization of women distinctiveness. Initially, it focused on women's unique capacity for reproduction. Having children, raising children - these were noble roles that implied both a capability and an obligation to take into public life the virtues that women exemplified in private life. So women organized clubs and service groups and gradually moved on to influence and participate in public policy, especially around the social issues that most obviously affected women and children. From this grew a wider mission to play a significant role as citizens.
The new historians were a bit dubious about this sort of feminism. Regrettably, these early activists shared many of their society prejudices. Perceptive about the exclusionary consequences of gender, they were not always as enlightened in their responses to differences of race and class and sexual orientation. Most seriously, the social feminists were thought to accept and thereby to reinforce the gender distinctions that feminist historians of the second wave wanted to abolish.

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But that was more than an academic generation ago. Revision has followed revision, and those of us who study women history and feminism have come to a more balanced judgment. We see how our foremothers changed gender relations while modestly disclaiming any such intention. By 2005 the University of Toronto Press felt able to publish a book whose title reflects the rhetoric of the nineteenthcentury "woman movement": Mothers of the Municipality: Women, Work and Social Policy in Post-1945 Halifax.
This collection of original essays, edited by Judith Fingard and Janet Guildford, is the product of a five-year research project. It presents material concerning a time and a population that are still under-researched: the immediate post-war period and the urban women of eastern Canada. The Maritime provinces are often thought of as conservative, even backward, in respect to women's situation, even though E. R. Forbes effectively debunked the first disparaging accounts of their suffrage movement and recent survey research has shown that this is not an anti-feminist region (see O'Neill and Erickson in Atlantis 27.2, spring 2003). What Mothers of the Municipality supplies, hearteningly, is a picture of the lively ferment of Halifax women activism post-1945, as well as their solid, continuing involvement in social policy around issues including child and maternal welfare, childcare, and home nursing. Most innovatively, Judith Fingard presents the range of women's organizations in Halifax in this period, Frances Early outlines the founding of the Halifax branch of Voice of Women, and Janet Guildford gives a description and analysis of the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women. There is also an exceptionally interesting article, by Wanda Thomas Bernard and Judith Fingard, on the work and lives of African-Nova Scotian women in Greater Halifax in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Mothers of the Municipality documents the energy and diversity of women and the women's movement at a time when feminism had not yet been re-admitted to the news. It is a solid contribution to the history of women in Canada.
Naomi Black York University and Mount Saint Vincent University