"A Proper Independent Spirit": Working Mothers and the Vancouver City Creche, 1909-20

Abstract

This article examines the Vancouver City Crèche, established in 1912 as Canada’s first such public institution, as a way to gain insight into the boundaries of social citizenship as they related to work and motherhood. The debates about public responsibility for working mothers in Vancouver revealed that, from the state’s perspective at least, negotiations at the boundaries of social citizenship were contingent not upon maternal service to the state, but upon a mother’s role as a wage-earner and as the breadwinner of a working-class family, one in which the work ethic needed to be preserved and welfare dependency prevented.