“Substitute Mothers,” “Rehabilitative Mothers”: Historical Framings of State-Funded Visiting Homemakers in Ontario, 1950-1980


Patricia Roach, University of Toronto

Scholars have traced how definitions/distinctions around “domestic work,” “care work,” and “healthcare work,” reflect and perpetuate racial, gendered, and classed hierarchies in paid social reproductive labour (Armstrong, Armstrong, and Scott-Dixon, 2008; Boris and Klein 2012; Duffy 2011) This literature has illustrated processes of devaluing types of work and invisibilizing workers who perform the work (whether paid or unpaid). Building upon this work, this paper examines the ideological construction of state-funded “visiting homemakers” in the province of Ontario. In 1958, as part of Premier Frost’s initiatives for “social betterment” the province of Ontario passed the Homemakers and Nurses Services Act. This Act introduced a state-funded program for services provided to eligible residents in their own households. Although these programs were already available via charitable organizations such as the Red Cross and the Visiting Homemakers Association, this marks one of the earliest state-funded programs for in-home support services in Canada. Since its inception, this program has been cost-shared by provincial and municipal governments, with the municipality implementing the program often through contracts with existing service providing organizations. The legislation is still in force in 2024, and the City of Toronto continues to provide services through its program. While the definition of what constituted “homemaker” services was not included in the 1958 legislation, the Act laid out who could be eligible for receiving these services. It distinguished between two broad categories of households: households with adults requiring part-time homemaker or nurses services in order to stay in their own home; and households in which a child would be unable to stay in their home without the services of a homemaker due to the temporary absence or illness of their primary caregiver. While the first category may resonate with current conceptualizations of “home care,” this paper focuses on the second category to explore the implications of state-funded in-home “mothering” and the process of devaluing state-funded household support in Ontario. Drawing upon newspaper and archival data, this paper unpacks narratives of this program in its early years (1950-1980), to reveal its ideological functions in post-World War II Ontario. In this paper, I ask how has the discursive definition of paid “homemakers” developed in post-World War II Ontario, and what are the implications of this construction? My preliminary findings suggest initial framing of visiting homemakers as “substitute mothers,” but as the program develops, it comes to incorporate a “rehabilitative mother” framing. In the substitute mother framing, the visiting homemaker’s role is to “maintain” otherwise “functional” heteronormative nuclear family by temporarily replacing mothers who are unavailable due to acute illness. In this framing, the program serves to prevent men from taking on the “feminized” work of childcare. Instead, the “ideal” replacement is an older white woman whose primary qualification is her own experience as a “successful” mother. By contrast, in the “rehabilitative mother” framing, visiting homemakers become disciplinary actors for the state, modeling ideal mothering by “teaching” mothers deemed “dysfunctional” or “problematic” through home visits. In both cases, paid visiting homemakers are framed as “good mothers” whose willingness to work for low pay demonstrates a gendered civic duty of maternal sacrifice. Through this historical analysis, this paper contributes to our understanding of the ideological underpinnings which have justified the devaluation of home support work, and more specifically reproductive labour that does not fit within a medicalized model of care.

This paper will be presented at the following session: