Instead of looking at the separate experience and interests of specific social classes, genders, races and cultures within the Canadian state, public school and most post-secondary curriculum teach the history of dominant institutions, groups and philosophies (For example, parliamentary history, the Upper Canada male elite, federalism and multiculturalism...). The vast network of labour, love and pain that soothes the wheels of economic and social life remains unspoken, and for the most part unresearched. Constructing a curriculum for teaching women's labour studies requires an innovative view of history; one that combines feminist methods with labour and, oral history traditions.

The history of working class women cannot be reduced to simply sprinkling information on a few key women into an institutional history of union organizations.

A thorough examination of the history of working women requires that we uncover the suppressed everyday history of both genders of working people as this material explains the experiential elements that motivate social change or status. Research and analysis of family structures and the nature of women's domestic labour provides a key to the types of work women perform in the labour force and which limits their workforce activity. We need to understand conditions specific to women's work, while recognizing that the labour force is made up of many different groups of women with varying levels of consciousness about their experience as workers and as a sex. We need information on the role of women in traditional union structures, in other forms of workplace resistance and organization, and in working class community organization.

Women of colour, immigrant women, Native women, women in Quebec, Eastern Camada, British Columbia, in urban centers and countryside, did not share the same work opportunities, union structures, family life. Yet they did share similar experiences in discrimination, limits of legislation, and the burden of the double day. What emerges is a restatement of the history of working class institutions, communities and social structures from the perspective of women; that is, a point of view which both aligns and differentiates from that of their male counterparts.

WOMEN IN THE WORK FORCE: ANALYTICAL TOOLS

A number of patterns emerge in primary materials, oral history interviews and from secondary sources concerning working and union women's history. The rhythms of working women's history tend to defy the traditional notion of human history as constantly progressing through conflicts or evolution to a higher stage. Rather, women's relationship to the workplace is, in part, defined by marriage and childrearing, and tends to be cyclical. Women's positions within the labour market also fluctuate with the rhythm of the economy because they are considered to be a reserve labour force. Issues such as equal pay, childcare, access to non-traditional work, emerge again and again without a final resolution.

Women's attitude towards paid work and subsequent choices of strategy for improving work- ing conditions is related to their commitment to long-term employment, which in turn is linked to domestic status. In the 1930s and 1940s, young women who planned to leave the workplace when they married favored immediate, militant action to change difficult working conditions. Older, single women or married women who had returned to work, or women committed to staying in the workforce tended towards unionization. Such activity improved the status of their occupation and offered long-term strategies for change. Women with young children historically have had the most difficulty in becoming active in workplace organization.