It is amazing that Canadian society has been consistently bewildered as to the social, political and economic placement of women. In her new book, Ann Porter explains that the labour requirement that enabled women's participation in the workforce during the Second World War created a post-war environment that was inequitable, illogical, gendered, and “regulating.” Thus, progressive measures were to produce regressive results, as they were taken for the sake of nationalism and not gender equality. Porter documents the change in Unemployment Insurance (UI) policy from limited coverage for certain groups of male workers that could not engage in productive labour to “site of contestation over women's entitlement to state benefits” (66).

The book offers a combination of theoretical and empirical analyses, although it is much stronger in the latter regard. The theoretical arguments put forth are sophisticated and appropriate yet require from the reader a significant degree of philosophical prowess. Feminism and political economy, the two main conceptual components, provide a suitable framework for the empirical study. However, the arguments from the “regulation school,” as a subset of the political economy approach to political problems, are somewhat difficult to interpret in the context of the overall argument. Is Porter suggesting that economic requirements generate social policies that “regulate” the social behaviour of women, men, individuals, and families? Or that mores concerning women, men, individuals and families structure economic and social expectations? Are both true? Can causality run in both directions? Porter states that “[the UI program] was a further way in which state policies reinforced women's dependency on a male breadwinner and perpetuated gender inequalities” (62). She also makes this assessment: “the postwar regime did, however, contain many points of tension. Contradictions in the family-work-state nexus and pressures from a range of sources provided the momentum to bring about changes. In terms of economic and material conditions, a major contradiction of the postwar period was the inability of most Canadians in single-earner, male-breadwinner families to buy the new consumer goods or even, by the 1960s, to maintain family living standards” (60). What designated, prior to the war, the traditional family as an economic unit? What, exactly, is the relationship between the economy and the family? Are social values merely a product of economics? I don't think that it is categorically necessary that political analyses identify causality. However, the regulation approach seems to promise a more concrete understanding of political, economic and social relationships, so one might expect reliable causal determinations. In fact, the argument relies on social, political and economic factors in varying combinations and concentrations. Sometimes social factors are primary, and sometimes economic factors circumscribe and extinguish social policy options.

Throughout the book, Porter makes an interesting and compelling argument about rights. She explains that the social right to income security was contingent on several factors, not the least of which was the discretion of UI eligibility assessors: “UI was a rights-based program, yet for a pregnant woman, entitlement was based on myriad factors including appearance, public visibility, attitude to work, and family circumstances” (72). Further, like the “welfare queens” of American social policy, there was the perception (held, most alarmingly, by the state) that married and pregnant women would abuse the system. This required, therefore, more surveillance, regulation and, in the end, restricted access to benefits.

At a foundational level, the work addresses questions about the role of the state. In the 1960s, “pregnancy and maternity were seen as an individual and familial responsibility rather than a social one” (80). This would begin to change later that decade with action on the part of the women's movement, labour unions, sustained “negotiations” (applications and appeals) between pregnant women and UI program officials or “umpires,” and, most critically, from the state itself. Unfortunately, gains for women were made at the moment that social policy retrenchment began. The changing economic circumstances of the 1970s required social policy adjustment, and, ultimately, a new relationship between citizens and the state. The discriminatory effects of policy “progress” and the changing nature of the workforce (there were increasingly more part time and temporary jobs) were the concern of women's and labour groups; many of the proposed changes to UI threatened to impact disproportionately women and seasonal workers. In the end, Porter argues, it was the neo-liberal policy orientation of the 1990s that most vehemently damaged women, men and families. Porter explains that “one of the key characteristics of the new form of welfare state, then, is that there has been a clear move away from the male-breadwinner model on which the Keynesian welfare state was based toward a multi-earner family model” (212).

In the context of Porter's analysis, the future looks bleak for Canadian women as independent earners. One of her main conclusions is that “overall, restructuring has made it more difficult for women to gain access to a rights-based, state-provided income security program, thus increasing the difficulty that women, or at least some women, face in providing for themselves and their families” (235). The economic and political barriers to gender equality and social progress will, for Porter, likely not abate until there is significant change to the current neo-liberal global order.