Family Matters: Immigrant Women’s Activism in Ontario and British Columbia, 1960s -1980s

is  article  uses  oral  history  interviews  to explore  the ways  in which different attitudes  towards family  and motherhood  could  create  major  tensions between mainstream feminists and immigrant women activists in Ontario and British Columbia between the 1960s  and  the  1980s.    Immigrant  women’s  belief  in the value of the family did not prevent immigrant wo­ men  from  going  out  to  work  to  help  support  their families  or  accessing  daycare  and  women’s  shelters, hard  fought  benefits  of  the  women’s  movement. However, these women demanded access to job train­ ing, English  language  classes,  childcare,  and women’s shelters  on  their  own  terms,  in ways  that minimized the racism they faced, respected religious and cultural values,  and  respected  the  fact  that  the  heterosexual family remained an important resource for the major­ ity of immigrant women. Immigrant women activists were less likely to accept a purely gender­based analysis  than mainstream  femin­ ists. ey often sought to work with men in their own communities,  even  in  dealing  with  violence  against women.  And  issues  of  violence  and  of  reproductive rights often could not be understood only within the boundaries  of  Canada.  For  immigrant  women  viol­ ence against women was often analyzed in relation to political  violence  in  their homelands, while demands

Les immigrantes militantes étaient moins susceptibles d'accepter une analyse purement sexospécifique que les féministes traditionnelles. Elles cherchaient souvent à travailler avec les hommes dans leur propre communauté, même dans le domaine de la violence contre les femmes. Et les questions de violence et de droits génésiques ne peuvent souvent pas être comprises uniquement à l'intérieur des frontières du Canada. Pour les femmes immigrantes, la violence à l'égard des femmes était souvent analysée en liaison avec la violence politique dans leur pays d'origine, tandis que leurs exigences en faveur de la pleine réalisation de leurs droits génésiques s'appuyaient sur des expériences de coercition tant au Canada que dans d'autres pays. B y the 1980s the staff at the Rexdale Women's Centre (RWC) in Toronto surprised themselves by organizing their first men's group. "Would I have be lieved that we were having these services for men? Never, never, never. In my head it's a women's organiz ation and women, women, women only. But I was wrong," laughs Fatima Filippi. Filippi is an immigrant herself who has been an immigrant women activist for almost 40 years and is now Executive Director of the RWC. "We did rights and advocacy particularly re lated to violence against women. And I remember one woman saying to me, 'I know my rights but I'm not punching myself in the face, it's the men who are do ing it to us. Why aren't you doing something with them?' And so, she taught me, and we hired female and male facilitators to work with men and women in the immigrant communities to talk about viol ence" (Filippi 2016). rough this experience the staff realized that immigrant women's activism was distinct from other feminist activism of the 1960s through 1980s. Immigrant women were often concerned about the same issues as other feminists-paid work, viol ence against women, and reproductive rights. And yet, even when the issues were similar, the politics were or ganized in a manner that often centralized mother hood and family. is focus on motherhood and family was partly a result of the Canadian state's im migration and multiculturalism policies that defined and confined immigrant women's experiences. It also reflected other differences in experiences and perspect ives between immigrant women activists and white feminists. is article explores how questions of family and motherhood were understood by immigrant wo men activists and shaped their politics.
In this article we examine the issues of paid work, viol ence, and abortion/reproductive rights primarily in the context of Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria. is is our first article on issues related to feminism, immig rant women, motherhood, and family. It is part of a larger SSHRCfunded project that will examine these issues and related ones in five provinces. 1 As a result, we see the findings in this article as a preliminary over view of a complex topic. We plan to explore these questions in more depth, with more regional diversity, and a more finegrained lens over the next few years. is research involved archival investigation and oral Atlantis Journal Issue 41.1 / 2020 107 history interviews. We conducted 50 oral history inter views, 25 with racialized immigrant women activists, and 25 with white feminists, all of whom were activists from the 1960s1980s. e former were immigrant women who were active in immigrant women's ser vices as social workers and organizational leaders. e latter included a few who defined themselves as im migrant women activists. e rest of the white femin ists defined themselves as socialist or liberal feminists, active leaders in labour unions and/or local and na tional feminist organizations that we would now call "mainstream feminists" although they may not have defined themselves as such at the time. 2 Our research is also based on liberal, radical, and so cialist feminist journals, particularly Kinesis and Broad side, as well as in immigrant women's journals, including Diva and Tiger Lily. We also explored the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) newsletters and archival material, as well as archival material from other women's groups found in the University of Ottawa's Women's Movement Archives collection. We are grateful to the works by Tania Das Gupta (1986Gupta ( , 2007, Makeda Silvera (1989), Vijay Agnew (1996), Judith Ramirez, Roxanna Ng (1982), Micheline Labelle, and Martin Goyette (1993) and others for their important scholarly and political work about immigrant women's organizing.
We are indebted to Canadian critical race scholars Yas meen AbuLaban (1998), Rita Dhamoon, Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson (1999), Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera obani (2010) for ad dressing how the Canadian state and/or mainstream feminists have addressed race. 3 We acknowledge that the first two authors of this article are writing this work from a place of relative privilege-while Lynne Marks immigrated to Canada in the 1960s as a young child, her South African Jewish parents were English speaking and middle class, her father an academic, and Margaret Little was born into an Ontario farming/set tler family and the first generation to leave the farm and receive university education. We have been in volved in some antipoverty and feminist activism over the years, but recognize that we are relative outsiders to the story we tell here. In focusing on immigrant wo men's activism, we hope to contribute to work that is transforming our understanding of the history of "second wave feminism" in Canada, challenging the version of this history that Chela Sandoval calls "hege monic feminism." 4 ere has been significant work on the history of im migration by Canadian historians and increasingly good work on the history of immigrant women. But there has been less work on immigrant women's organ izations, particularly in the 1960s to 1980s, the period which saw the emergence of the second wave women's movement in Canada (Epp and Iacovetta 2016;Iacov etta 2006). Little attention has been paid to the ab sence of immigrant women from mainstream feminist organizations in Canada. In the postwar era, with a significant increase in immigration from Europe, there was a growing demand for support services for new immigrants. Most of the support work with new im migrants in the 1940s to early 1960s was done by pro fessional AngloCanadian social workers and AngloCanadian volunteers. is work helped affirm the burgeoning social work profession and its expert ise. Simultaneously, as Franca Iacovetta has argued, this immigrant support work attempted to shape new comers into the postwar AngloCanadian ideal of im migrant citizens. 5 is article focuses on the period immediately follow ing the postwar era, the late 1960s to the 1980s, when more immigrants began to arrive from Asia, the Carib bean, Latin America, and the Middle East. Even though the postwar era saw the expansion of the so cial safety net for white citizens, immigrant women of ten did not benefit from these new policies. During the immediate post World War II era an explicitly racebased immigration policy ensured that the major ity of immigrants arrived from Europe, first from Bri tain and northern Europe and then increasingly from southern Europe. But the introduction of the points system in 1967 based on education, ability to speak English or French and job skills, officially eliminated racial barriers to immigration to Canada and Europeanborn immigrants slipped from 90% of all Canadian immigrants prior to 1961 to 25% by the 1980s (Iacovetta 2006 Women of colour were always perceived as immig rants with distinctive cultures who were never fully, unquestionably accepted as full citizens (Ahmed 2000, 104). Consequently, multiculturalism defined immig rant women as preservers of culture through their fa milial duties. And the Immigration Act of 197677 defined immigrants into two main categories: the in dependent class and the family class. e independent class was designed to meet labour market needs and immigrants were approved based on a points system that calculated the applicant's level of education, occu pation, and work experience. In contrast, the family class allowed immigrants already in Canada to sponsor family dependents into the country but he, and it was usually a he, was financially responsible for those he sponsored for up to 10 years. us, these sponsored immigrants had to rely upon their sponsor, rather than the state, for housing, food, clothing, and ultimately, survival. As such, the immigration rules reinforced the power of the male head of the immigrant family and ensured that most immigrant women were dependent within these families. Sponsored immigrants were denied welfare, housing, and oldage security and were restricted in their access to language and jobtraining programs (obani 2000, 134138). e exception to these two immigrant types was immigrant domestic workers who, as independent workers, should have been defined under the point system but instead were in a separate category that defined them as temporary workers with severe restrictions for their longterm status in the country as well as their working and liv ing conditions. In previous decades, foreign domestic workers were mainly white Europeans who "suffered class subordination and middleclass paternalism but were welcome to Canada as central participants in na tionbuilding and were treated as future 'mothers of the nation'" (AratKoc 1999, 215221). Such was not the case for racialized domestic workers who arrived during the 1960s and onwards-their working and immigration circumstances were extremely oppressive.
Given the racist, sexist nature of immigration and so cial policies, immigrant women activists like Fatima Filippi began to demand specific improvements to these policies. While AngloCanadians continued to work in immigrant support services, over these decades immigrant women began to unite together to assert the need for services for themselves and for other fe male immigrants. ese immigrant women activists, often racialized, asserted that they were best placed to help other immigrants from similar cultural and reli gious backgrounds and organized to provide much needed culturally appropriate services that had not previously existed. Many of these activists were femin ists. Many came to Canada as feminists while others became active as feminists here. Other immigrant act ivists who did not identify as feminist (sometimes be cause of the Western connotations of the term), came with social justice perspectives developed in their countries of origin.
During this era there was a plethora of new services founded by immigrant women activists, including English language classes as well as other services inten ded to help immigrant women fit into Canadian soci ety. In some ways these services were not that different from those offered to new immigrants in the 1950s and earlier decades. In other ways they were quite different in that even basic programs like Englishlan guage classes were much more shaped by activist efforts to determine the needs and interests of the im migrant women themselves. 6 e services and ad vocacy provided by most of these organizations were also shaped by the issues of gender inequality and gender oppression raised by the broader feminist movement, such as the need for paid employment for

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 109 women, raising awareness and finding solutions to vi olence against women, and struggles for reproductive rights. At the same time, despite providing services and advocacy related to these issues, immigrant activists had quite different analyses of these issues, and of the solutions needed to solve them.
A range of feminist and antiracist scholars have looked at certain elements of the conflicts between im migrant and racialized women and other feminists. ese scholars have both identified and analyzed the inability of most white feminists at this time to recog nize intersectionality, that other factors besides gender -such as racialization, class, immigrant status and sexuality-are intertwined with gender in the way they impact women's lives (see Agnew 1993;Dua and Robertson 1999;Razack, Smith, and obani 2010). ey have identified, from early in this period, the differences in the concerns and socioeconomic realit ies between many immigrant women and white femin ists. e Leila Khalid Collective, a militant group formed in Toronto in 1970 to integrate women's liber ation with those of colonized peoples around the globe, understood the complexity of multiple oppres sions: "Women with little time, little education, with families and jobs, or women who have to fight hard to survive on welfare aren't interested in coming to weekly meetings to talk about sexuality and to read En gels" (Leila Khalid Collective in Agnew 1993).
ere has been significant scholarly work by racialized and immigrant women on intersectionality. However, few works in the Canadian context have looked at the extent to which questions of family and motherhood might have been understood differently by white Ca nadian feminists and immigrant women activists, and the way these differences may have helped to shape different responses to and strategies around issues such as paid work, violence against women, and reproduct ive rights. 7 Some scholars have explored these ques tions in the American context, but while we have been influenced by this work, the Canadian context was different in a number of ways, including the distinct nature of Québec, and the far greater levels of immig ration to Canada in the 1970s and 1980s as compared to the United States. 8  (Das Gupta 1986;. While levels of immigration to Vancouver were not quite as dramatic, the city also saw a relatively large number of new immigrants over these decades, particularly from the Philippines, China, and South Asia, and some important immigrant women's agencies and organizations were founded, including the Pacific Immigrant Resource Society, the India Mahila Associ ation, the Philippine Women Centre of BC, and the Vancouver Society of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women. Fewer immigrants came to Victoria in this period, but the city did witness the creation of immig rant support organizations in both Victoria and nearby Duncan, organized by local immigrant women activ ists.
Immigrant women who came to Canada over these decades faced a range of challenges. For some, who came speaking English or French, with some financial resources and with professional credentials that were recognized in Canada, the situation was somewhat less challenging. European immigrants from Portugal and Italy may have faced somewhat less racism than other immigrant groups, but poverty, language difficulties, immigrant status, and being racialized as "not quite white" still meant that they faced serious barriers. For the many racialized immigrants who came to Canada in this period, the racism of Canadian society posed major difficulties. All married immigrant women faced additional legal problems, particularly in the 1970s

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 110 and early 1980s, when as noted above, the sponsorship programs limited sponsored women's access to Cana dian social programs. e "head of household" (the husband) had access to extensive government funded English as Second Language (ESL) training, but his sponsored "dependents" did not. Sponsored married women also faced the possibility of deportation if the couple separated. We realize that the situation of wo men from different immigrant groups (and within im migrant groups) cannot be homogenized and that diversity of culture, religion, and class was (and is) very real. While recognizing significant differences among immigrant women, we will also be focusing in this art icle on certain similarities, similarities that were identi fied by immigrant women activists.
ere are many reasons why motherhood and family were crucial issues in immigrant women's politics. Multiculturalism policies reduced race and racism to cultural differences, defining immigrant families as a hearth to nurture and preserve linguistic and cultural traditions. Immigration laws defined most immigrant women as dependent wives and mothers. New welfare state policies often excluded immigrant women, thus making them even more economically dependent upon their male spouses. Together these multicultur alism, immigration, and welfare state policies encour aged both new immigrants and others to view immigrant women as economically dependent moth ers whose main goal was to maintain and preserve the culturally distinctive family. To cement immigrant wo men's relationship to their families further, the family was often a bulwark in a racist society, a place where immigrant women, men, and children found shelter from a profoundly racist society. us, it is not surpris ing that immigrant women activists tended to shape their political issues around the familial and maternal needs of immigrant women. is did not mean that they were uncritical of the patriarchal oppression faced by many immigrant women-but it meant that they had a far greater recognition of the need to be sensitive to issues of family and motherhood than other femin ists. Below we explore three key issues in immigrant women's activism: paid work, violence against women, and reproductive choice. While these were political is sues that immigrant women and other feminist activ ists shared, the former shaped these issues differently, in a manner that recognized and appreciated immig rant women's family demands and political realities.

Paid Work
Both immigrant women activists and other feminists were deeply concerned about paid work issues during this era. Paid work was an economic necessity for most immigrant women and their families. Even if poorly paid, working in exploitative conditions, immigrant women were critical wage earners to help ensure family survival in the new country. Consequently, employ ment was a central issue for immigrant women's polit ics. But immigrant women and white liberal and socialist feminists tended to approach employment is sues differently. Whereas white liberal and socialist feminists were focused on pay equity, childcare, union ization, and paid work that led to economic independ ence from men, immigrant women activists tended to organize around employment issues that were shaped by family responsibilities. For most immigrant women, paid work was a necessity but it was also critical that this paid work complement unpaid caring work at home. Many immigrant women were lifelong workers but had interruptions in this paid work due to family issues such as pregnancy, childcare, illness, or a hus band's employment constraints. Consequently, our archival and interview data show that immigrant wo men activists prioritized the following employment is sues: employment equity, workplace health, ESL training, accreditation, foreign domestic workers' rights, and in some cases, unionization.
While the wages they brought in were essential, most immigrant women needed their paid work to be sec ondary to their work in the home. As a result, many immigrant women worked as nighttime office clean ers, homebased garment workers, or other paid work that allowed them to care for their children and pre pare the meals for their families. "Janitorial cleaning was a good job for immigrant women because it's at night. And so, they would be with the kids all day, the husband got home from construction work, and the woman would leave for her job, so that someone was always there with the kids…. But they maintained the primary responsibility for household labour," explains Susan Miranda (2016) A 1979 article in Kinesis noted that immigrant women were choosing to do industrial sewing at home, even though it was very exploitative, with low wages, so that they could remain at home with their children (17).
As wife and mother, immigrant women played a cent ral role between the home and a racist society. ey witnessed the male head of the household having little economic or social power in the broader society and they watched their children, who were often more flu ent in English and the new country's values, challenge their father. While there were still unequal power dy namics at work in the immigrant woman's household, she often took pride in her position as the primary educator of cultural and religious values-as the per son who sheltered her husband and children from the alienation they experienced outside the door. "It was always about the kids first," explained Hortensia Houle, who helped run the Cowichan Valley Intercul tural and Immigrant Society, north of Victoria, BC. "We never neglect the children. For us, the main goal wasn't to be employed but how we can raise our chil dren…how we can be part of this community" (Houle 2016).
Scholars have echoed these arguments, noting that for various immigrant groups in this period, women's role in the home was considered crucial for keeping the family together. 9 is has been discussed in relation to a range of different immigrant groups (Agnew 1996(Agnew , 2000Ng and Ramirez 1982). A study of Uruguayan immigrants in this period noted: "Motherhood is gen erally regarded as the ideal state for a woman. She may take a paid job, but if her family demands her presence at home there is no argument: her first obligation is to them" (Alberro and Montero 1976, 131148 (Ramirez 2016). Rather than pay equity, immigrant women activists interviewed about paid work spoke about their desire for homemaker pensions, increased welfare rates and services that re cognized the very busy lives and multiple responsibilit ies of immigrant women. Some of these policies would allow women to do less paid work, not more. As one immigrant woman activist recalls with a chuckle, "I never got the white girls' focus on the right to work. Work?! We [immigrant women] had work. We wanted less work" (Interviewee O3 2017).
Instead of pay equity, immigrant activists were more interested in employment equity, legislation to increase the representation of not just women, but people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples and racialized peoples, both women and men. As Debbie Douglas explains, We knew that race was so central to a lot of the discrimination that we were facing. And the men in our lives were facing. So as Black femin ists we organized around women's equity but we also had to organize around our communities. And our communities tended to be our famil ies…. So Black men's realities were important to the work that we were doing in terms of the kind of societies we were wanting to build. (Douglas 2017) erefore, even when immigrant women activists and other feminists were talking about employment issues it was different employment policy, with different goals.
Because of the distinct nature of immigrant women's work, child care was framed differently amongst im migrant women activists. Publiclyfunded, affordable, highquality childcare was often a central demand of white socialist and liberal feminist groups during this era. ey saw childcare as key to women entering the paid workforce (Pasolli 2015). Immigrant communit ies, on the other hand, were more mixed about child care issues. Daycare did not work for those immigrant women who worked nights and were at home with their children during the day. Other immigrant wo men preferred to stay home and raise their children, if economically possible, ensuring that their children had cultural and linguistic skills from their home country. Or, if not, they had extended family members provide care, or sponsored their parents to come to Canada as a way to provide informal athome care for their chil dren. "e practical realities of life often meant that many of the immigrant women would take care of these things within the family. You know, parents or aunts and uncles, because you have to solve the prob lem. You can't wait for big policy changes to get to the factory the next morning," explains Ramirez (2016). Some immigrant women also opposed the racist atti tudes they experienced at child care centres. Miranda recalls, "the daycare sometimes brought in speakers to say, 'is is how you should raise your child'.… ey told [immigrant] mothers they can't spank their kids… e women didn't like it that much so there definitely were tensions with daycare centres" (Miranda 2016).
Whereas immigrant women activists were careful in how they advocated around public childcare, many of them strongly advocated for workplace health. Ramirez recalls the importance of the mobile health clinic van that parked outside the factories where the immigrant women worked.
When we set up the immigrant women's centre the first thing we addressed was the fact that these women had a double work shift. Many of them were working outside the home at factor ies, and then they were coming home to the re sponsibilities of the family. eir children were in school. eir husbands came home tired. ey had to cook and clean. So, what do we do? We set up a mobile health clinic, the van comes to the factory. We negotiate with the employer, you give them a half hour off during lunch and they come in, they see the doctor, the nurse. (Ramirez 2016) e politics of the mobile health clinic makes clear

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 113 that immigrant women activists understood that health care and any other immigrant woman's issue had to be shaped around their family and work lives (Das Gupta 1986, 5456). rough this concern about health emerged a number of immigrant health centres (Das Gupta 1986).
Immigrant women activists realized that their clients wanted ESL training for a variety of reasons. Govern mentfunded ESL was provided for immigrant men but not for immigrant women, if they were depend ents of their husbands. Immigrant women wanted these skills. In some cases, they wanted ESL to get or keep their jobs or to get better paid jobs. Deb Barndt (2016) who worked with Latin American immigrant women and was known for her Freireinspired com munity participatory work, remembers offering ESL classes at the factories. "We would teach English to workers in their workplaces so we met with them after work in the cafeteria." Barndt was a photographer so they created photo stories to learn ESL: "ere were stories of just trying to get through the transit system but as a metaphor for how you survive in a new con text and also how to…[negotiate] your first job inter view." Out of this emerged ESL survival kits, songs, radio soap operas, videos, books-all used as teaching and political organizing tools. "ese women were see ing themselves in these materials and that their lives mattered and it gave them dignity," Barndt explains. rough these communityparticipatory educational projects emerged the Women Working with Immig rant Women coalition and the Working Women Centre (Barndt 2016;Marino and Barndt 1983).
Immigrant women who were staying home also wanted ESL because they wanted to be able to advoc ate for their children in the school system. Beverly Nann, who helped found Pacific Immigrant Resources Society in the 1970s, recalls they did a lot of outreach with immigrant mothers and preschool children. For example, they offered a Head Start program that helped immigrant mothers and their preschool chil dren, simultaneously, get ESL skills before the children went to school (Nann 2016). Hortensia Houle, former president of the Cowichan Valley Intercultural and Im migrant Society, recalls that she advocated for ESL training for men as well. "We had ESL classes for wo men but then the [immigrant] men realized that they were relying on their children to translate for them. Some of them weren't learning English in their work places and they wanted the same training that their wives were getting." So, although Houle started by providing ESL classes for immigrant women she later applied for government grants to provide the same classes for immigrant men (Houle 2016).
Accreditation was another important employment is sue for immigrant women. "We lobbied for years around accreditation," recalls Hortensia Houle. Many immigrant women arrived with postsecondary educa tion and credentials that were not recognized in Canada. Houle helped women get accreditation in the health care sector and in translation. "ey already had the skills, they just weren't recognized," she explains. Soon Houle had immigrant men coming to her asking her to advocate for their accreditation as well (Ibid).
An employment issue that was a rallying cry for many immigrant women activists was the plight of foreign domestic workers. is issue exposed the racist and elitist state immigration and employment policies which permitted middle class and predominantly white women to leave their homes for paid work and growing economic independence while relinquishing their caring work to immigrant and predominantly ra cialized women. Simultaneously, this issue bound caring work and paid employment together. Many im migrant women were brought to Canada on tempor ary work permits. ey were forced to work in Canadian homes doing childcare and housework for many hours and were afraid to complain about their exploitative situations for fear of deportation. ey were indentured workers with no mobility rights. Im migrant activists worked with them to try and organize domestic workers' unions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with limited success. Immigrant organizers fought for these women to be included in employment standards legislation, to limit their hours of work, and to give them the rights of landed immigrants. Makeda Silvera's pathbreaking book Silenced (1989) spoke about the struggles of workingclass Caribbean immig rant women, many of whom were domestic workers. "Makeda really gave a profile to domestic workers' is sues," explains Debbie Douglas. "ese women often

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 114 only had Saturday night and Sunday morning off be fore they had to go back [to work]. And she [Silvera] would meet them at parks or any place where they could gather to talk about their experiences and she captured their stories in the book" (Douglas 2017). Silvera made it very clear that the situation of the do mestic workers was the obverse of the mainstream feminist ideal of women's employment. Many of the employers of the exploited domestic workers were pro fessional women, whose independence in the work force was at the expense of the immigrant women they employed at low wages to care for their children and do the housework. ese immigrant domestic workers worked long hours to send their wages home to sup port their own children, left behind in their homelands (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997).
In 1979 Judith Ramirez played a central role in found ing INTERCEDE, a major Torontobased organiza tion that defended the rights of immigrant domestic workers. Gradually, over the course of the 1980s, IN TERCEDE won some victories, including changing the law in 1981, so that after two years of domestic work, these women could apply for landed immigrant status. However, many barriers remained, and INTER CEDE continued over this period to advocate to im prove the rights of immigrant domestic workers. is issue was primarily of concern to immigrant activists but a number of highprofile white mainstream femin ists also came out in support of immigrant domestic workers, helping to put more pressure on the govern ment to change its racist policies (Agnew 1996, 180 191).
For Judith Ramirez, who helped found INTERCEDE, there was a direct connection between the plight of immigrant domestic workers and the international so cialist feminist organization called Wages for House work (WFH), which argued that women's work in the home needed to be valued, and that those doing housework should be paid by the state. "Wages for Housework is an abstract analysis in a certain sense…a focus on the woman in the home. But with INTER CEDE it was very specific to the foreign domestic workers who were coming under these very harsh reg ulations," explains Ramirez (2017). "It's a very intract able issue, the undervaluing of women's work in the home, and outside the home when they're doing housework like activities for others…. Immigrant wo men were being locked into double workloads that were so punishing." Ramirez argued that other femin ists: had such a blind spot about the value of wo men's work that was not in the paid work force…. We were pushing against that view quite forcefully…I'm sure that if you asked those mainstream feminists they would at least pay lip service to "of course what happens in the home is also important," "raising children is im portant" etc., etc. But that's not quite the same as actually giving it the kind of weight that is necessary when you're tackling issues and decid ing what you're going to fight for. (Ibid.) Wages for Housework's focus on supporting women's work in the home in fact led to quite a negative reac tion from mainstream feminism's umbrella organiza tion, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC). As other scholars have noted, in 1979 the NAC rejected WFH's application for membership in NAC (Marks et al. 2016;McKeen 1995;Vickers et al. 1993). In justifying this decision NAC President Kay Macpherson explained that while NAC and WFH agreed on short term goals such as childcare, job train ing, and improved services for women, the two organ izations differed tremendously on long term goals. Macpherson wrote: What NAC is aiming for in the long run -equal opportunities, equal pay and end to sex role stereotyping, appears to be in contradiction to the basic goal of the WFH groups, since the aims of Wages for Housework-pay for house work, even the housework done in keeping one self clean and fed…ultimately reinforces the stereotype of women in the home. (Marks, Little et al. 2016) e NAC's refusal to admit WFH led to some push back even from some white, professional women, who noted that WFH did important work with immigrant women, lesbians, and women on welfare, who NAC did little to support at that time (Ibid. Association talked about the many burdens immigrant women face: they suffer all the handicaps that white women suffer in Canada, and moreover, they face ra cism and have to fight back against domination and exploitation by the men within their own community (Kinesis 1980, 3).
Finally, unionization was a complex employment issue for many immigrant women. It was often difficult for immigrant women to organize into unions because of their poverty, their lack of adequate English, their fo cus on their homes and families, and their extremely long double days, both in the workforce and looking after their families. In the 1970s this sometimes meant that feminist trade union women ignored immigrant women in workplaces since they felt that these women did not take advantage of available opportunities. As a result, some immigrant activists organized immigrant women separately from feminist trade union women or the mainstream labour movement. Some efforts to encourage unionization were successful. Miranda re calls that immigrant women activists went to down town buildings at night and handed out leaflets to the immigrant women cleaners, to help them understand their collective agreements and their rights as workers. ey founded the Cleaners' Action Program to sup port these women and their jobs as companies started contracting out the cleaning. Community centres in the downtown Kensington Market area of Toronto be came quite political as the Cleaners' Action Program and politicized English as Second Language classes were held there (Das Gupta 1986, 20;Miranda 2016). Immigrant women activists helped support immigrant women cleaners when they refused to work because they were given dirty or malfunctioning equipment (Interviewee O2 2017). Miranda believes that the highlight of the Cleaners' Action Program was the protest in 1985 at First Canadian Place in downtown Toronto on Bay Street when 250 women, mainly im migrants, were on strike (Miranda 2016). is was a pivotal moment of immigrant women's politics: "ey were on the picket line for six weeks…. It was a very grassroots kind of movement…but I think [it] defin itely contributed to an immigrant women's movement that kind of paralleled the formal women's move ment" (Ibid.). Another important political moment for immigrant women was a general strike of garment factory workers that shut down Spadina Avenue. As one activist recalls, "It was a massive strike for working conditions for that sector. It was an allday, daylong strike; it was really exciting because there were immig rant women taking to the streets and fighting back and saying 'We demand our rights'" (Interviewee O2 2017).
Many immigrant women activists dedicated their political lives to employment issues. But because of state policies that enforced immigrant women's eco nomic dependence upon their spouses, immigrant wo men needed to shape their employment around the needs of their families. us, immigrant women's political issues around employment were also affected by these familial demands. Consequently, employment equity, workplace health, ESL training, accreditation, and domestic workers' rights were key issues for im migrant women's employment activism. Sometimes this politics took place on the union shop floor but more often, these politics played out in places that were not traditionally considered political sites, such as immigrant women's homes, in mobile health clinic vans, and in immigrant service and community centres.

Violence against women
Immigrant women activists and other feminists were both concerned about violence against women but they approached the issue quite differently. Whereas white liberal and socialist feminists tended to under stand violence against women as rooted in male power and privilege, immigrant women activists nuanced this analysis to appreciate how racist state policies and po lice impacted both immigrant men and women. As a result, immigrant women activists saw the home as both a source of violence and also a haven from the ra cist violence of a hostile new land. In some cases, im migrant women activists and other feminists came together as they lobbied and staffed women's shelters. But shelters were both a site of collaborative politics and a site of racism. Vijay Agnew in her important book, In Search of a Safe Place (1998) has explained the challenges for racialized women when they engaged with women's shelters. She explains how social service agencies, including women's shelters, have 'monocultural models' of delivering ser vices, that European and North American cul tural values and norms influence the way service providers define the problems of abused women and the solutions they offer. ey often alienate women with vastly different cultural values, and the women withdraw from seeking services from these agencies. (Agnew 1998, 9) e immigrant women activists interviewed for this re search project agreed with Agnew's assessment of the challenges facing abused immigrant women at wo men's shelters. One immigrant woman activist who had worked at women's shelters explained the struggles within the shelter movement: We were all working in the shelters and we were all young and gungho, going to bring a pro gressive feminist politics (what today we would call an intersectional feminism) to [the shelter] collectives but many of the women were en trenched in their own ways and wanted you to just come in and work relief and shut up. ey were not into power sharing. (Interviewee O1 2017) Agnew argues that most women's shelters often neg lected the social, economic and political context in which violence is perpetrated, focusing instead on gender relations (Agnew 1998, 164). As Amarjit Bhalia, who was involved in the Indo Canadian Asso ciation in BC explained, some women, who were defined as dependents by the immigration laws, risked deportation if they admitted to abuse. "ese women who didn't speak the language were terrified, thought they were going to be sent home." Because of the diffi culties accessing women's shelters, Bhalia met abused immigrant women in their homes (2016).
Racism was also an issue that was not recognized in many of the shelters. Kay Blair from Jamaica left her abusive husband and went to a shelter in Toronto. However, at the shelter she had a "devastating" experi ence, in which the shelter workers reinforced racist ideas about Black men being particularly violent, and "stereotypes about Black women and the acceptance of violence" (Lior, 2012, 58). is experience was not unique to Blair, as immigrant women often faced ra cism at women's shelters, as well as comments regard ing stereotypes of immigrant men being particularly likely to be abusers and immigrant women acting as passive victims (Agnew 1996). What shelter staff did not appreciate is how state policies (especially immig ration and multicultural policies) helped produce this particular racist understanding of the immigrant fam ily. Immigration laws ensured the male was the eco nomic head of the family (obani 2007, 131). Multicultural policies that encouraged the celebration and conservation of cultures encouraged the belief that immigrant families were culturally backward and im pervious to change (Ahmed 2000, 95113;obani 2007 (esp. chapter 4)). ese state policies shaped im migrant families, increasing the power of male heads of households and diminishing the power of women. Yet, shelter staff assigned full blame to immigrant men rather than acknowledging the role of the state and saw immigrant women as helpless victims of this hy permasculine domination.
As well as dealing with racism, nonChristian women often found a lack of sensitivity to religious and cultur al traditions, as well as language issues in many wo men's shelters (Marks, Little et al. (n.d.)). Shelter staff associated immigrant cultures with oppressive values

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 117 and were ignorant of their own internalized cultural norms. ey were quick to dismiss any cultural tradi tions other than their own and they did not recognize the depth of the barriers created for immigrants who did not speak English.
e racism and cultural and language barriers experi enced in women's shelters prompted a group of im migrant and racialized women's shelter activists to found Shirley Samaroo House in the early 1980s, the first shelter in Toronto specifically catering to abused immigrant and racialized women. e shelter was named Shirley Samaroo after a Black woman who left a shelter and was subsequently killed by her husband (Agnew 1998, 100). At Samaroo House, the staff ad dressed racism when it occurred at the shelter. As one of Agnew's interviewees stated, "At Shirley Samaroo House we could not [overlook] racism-as some other shelters [might] gloss over it…. We would make it an occasion for conflict mediation or conflict resolu tion" (Agnew 1998, 138). e shelter collective was clear that they needed to do public education that reached far into immigrant communities. "I think we were probably one of the very few shelters who saw public education and policy as part and parcel of the work that we did…. It wasn't only about counselling and women's right to leave and all of that" (Douglas 2017). at's why Samaroo House staff went out into the immigrant communities, gave public talks about violence against women, left brochures in community and religious centres, and spent time meeting with community and religious leaders.
Other immigrant women activists explained how they would connect violence issues with other pertinent is sues facing immigrant women. Fatima Filippi, another immigrant woman activist, recalls how "we would bring all the needs together, offer a variety of services. We had a Wendo selfdefense course for women…. We did counselling. We did English classes. We did rights and advocacy. It was a hodgepodge of everything" (Filippi 2016).
As part of this integral approach to violence against women, immigrant women activists learned to include men in the solution. At the request of immigrant wo men clients, these activists created men's groups and individual counselling sessions for men. "It challenged our own biases and how we worked with immigrant women…. Here we were victimizing the women again [by deciding what services they needed and wanted].
We had to think about empowerment and how we cre ate opportunities for empowerment, and recognizing that women do have power but helping them to ad dress it, and to find it and to use it [in their own way]," explains Filippi (2016). Similarly, across the country, Hortensia Houle recalls creating men's groups to discuss violence at the Cowichan Valley Intercultur al and Immigrant Society (Houle 2016). And so, over time these immigrant women's organizations offered services to men. ey also incorporated violence against women into their other services. "It's a paradigm shift…. If we did English classes that in cluded men, we did violence education in that group, you know, we have International Women's Day and we invited men, we talked about violence against women, about women's empowerment" (Filippi 2016).
While immigrant women activists did support wo men's independence, they also respected women's choices to remain or return to abusive men. ey un derstood that racist state policies created greater eco nomic dependency for immigrant women and explained the repeated use of shelters as necessary for immigrant women's economic survival. Tomoko Okada noted that, as a member of Immigrant and Vis ible Minority Women BC: We had a joint conference with the transition house group, who helped abused women…we felt, for abused immigrant women, when they go to transition house, the shelter, it's not the appropriate service for immigrant women, be cause at transition house, many workers are kind of prowomen's movement advocates. So, they really actually focus on immigrant women to become independent, and just leave the hus band. But most of the immigrant women, they just want to improve the home situation, to change the husband's attitude. So, I think, this is an…issue about transition house, just force the woman to leave the husband. (Okada 2016) In many cases, the husband provided the majority of the family income and immigration laws ensured that

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 118 they, as immigrant women, may have been denied the English language skills to find a wellpaid job to provide economic independence for themselves and their children. Also, immigration policies meant many immigrant women were sponsored by their husbands to immigrate to Canada and thus feared deportation if they left their abusive husbands.
Immigrant women activists also learned to frame the issue of violence in a way that incorporated an under standing of a violent state. Two of the immigrant wo men activists interviewed said their violence agenda needed to shift to include police violence. Black im migrant mothers desperately wanted to talk about and to organize against the police violence that their broth ers, partners, and sons experienced (Douglas 2017;Kohli 2016). "ere was violence against women and violence against young Black males because of police brutality. We couldn't look at one and not the other," explained Rita Kohli, who was involved in immigrant women's and shelter politics. She explained that they needed to extend the politics of violence to address mi gration, crossing borders, carding, and other violence and harassment that Black immigrant women and their families experienced daily (Kohli 2016).
Some of the immigrant women activists said other feminists who worked on violence against women is sues, focusing exclusively on gender oppression, did not appreciate their more broadly political and family centred approach to violence. "We took a lot of grief for that, let me tell you. We were perceived as anti feminist…. We just stuck by what was right for our clients" (Filippi 2016). Immigrant women activists ap preciated that violence against women issues needed to be situated within an understanding of racist immigra tion and multicultural policies that reinforced immig rant women's economic dependence upon men. ey also understood that they could not address domestic violence and ignore all the other types of violence that occurred in subtle and aggressive forms when immig rant women and their families interacted with employ ers, landlords, welfare administrators, and the police.

Reproductive Justice
Reproductive justice was another issue that differed in how it was shaped by immigrant women activists. During this era there were many prochoice marches and rallies. Feminists would come out in huge num bers to chant "Not the church. Not the state. Women must control their fate." But although many feminists argued for reproductive choice they could be unaware of the complexity of choice for immigrant women. For many immigrant women, state policies and cultural traditions situated discussions of a woman's rights to control her body within the context of family and community. One immigrant woman activist recalls differences between immigrant women activists and other feminists over reproduction: ere were some interesting tensions around the Morgentaler Clinic. I think a lot of it was a mainstream approach versus understanding how cultural communities would react to those things…some of these were Catholic cultural communities who were opposed to abortion… So yeah, there were some major tensions. ey were painfully aware that immigrant and racial ized women often were prevented from mothering by a racist state. At the same time, they certainly wanted the right to choose when and whether to have chil dren. ey demanded free abortion on demand, and free and safe birth control, noting: "We want services that recognize that immigrant women often refuse contraception because our experiences have taught us to be suspicious of the methods available, and not be cause we are 'backward.'" In order to be able to choose freely (whether or not to have children) they also de manded living wages, fully paid maternity leave without loss of seniority, and funding for 24hour childcare "controlled by us with paid staff both in our neighbourhoods and in every sweatshop where we are forced to work" (Ibid).
Reproductive rights also had implications for the transnational lives of immigrant women activists. Im migrant domestic workers who were denied the ability to bring their children into Canada focussed on family reunification issues rather than abortion rights. ese women wanted the right to reproduce, the right to live with and care for their children and they were very aware of how Canadian immigration and labour policies limited their reproductive freedoms.
What immigrant women activists learned, time and again, is that there was not one clear position on repro ductive issues. Individual immigrant women activists made personal alliances with mainstream feminists but they often could not bring this politics into the im migrant communities they served. And reproductive rights could look very different for women who valued motherhood and had often faced a state, either in Canada or abroad, that used its power both to deny women the right to have children, and the right to live with and care for their children.

Conclusion
As we have seen, issues related to family and mother hood could create major tensions between immigrant women's activists and other feminists, and at times between immigrant women and immigrant women activists. Canadian state policies such as immigration, multiculturalism, labour, and welfare policies rein forced immigrant women's economic dependence upon the family. us, immigrant women's politics were shaped by their familial and maternal responsibil ities. While many immigrant women were lifelong paid workers, their working careers were often distinct from their male partners and from other feminists. Sometimes their working hours were at night so they could juggle family responsibilities during the day. Sometimes they took several years off paid work when their children were young, because this was important to them, in part so they could teach their children lin guistic and cultural values that were central to their family. Sometimes their children were in their home country while they toiled in a Canadian family's home, caring for someone else's children. As a result, immig rant women's politics were shaped by their everyday lives. While they were often concerned about some of the same issues as other feminists-paid work, viol ence against women and reproductive rights-we see how they shaped these issues around motherhood and family concerns. In regards to labour, they demanded access to job training, English language classes, health care on the job, and employment equity for racialized women and men. When it came to violence against women they demanded shelters, as did other feminists, but they exposed the racism they experienced in fem inist shelters and began to build shelters specifically for

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Issue 41.1 / 2020 120 immigrant and racialized women. ey also demanded domestic violence programs that included men. And they expanded their politics of violence to protest against racialized police violence. In regard to repro ductive justice, immigrant women had different per spectives, but all supported their right to have children and to care for their own children. us, they embod ied a politics that acknowledged and challenged the ra cism they faced, respected religious and cultural values, and acknowledged the fact that the heterosexual family remained an important resource for the majority of immigrant women.
Immigrant women had many different experiences and perspectives in Canada. But they all wanted more rights and more prosperous lives free of racism and in equality. ey also knew that their everyday lives were deeply enmeshed with the needs of their families. ey were conscious of the many racist state policies that made them economically dependent upon their famil ies. And similarly, they were aware of how their famil ies provided support and cultural continuity in a racist society.

Notes
We would like to thank Franca Iacovetta and the an onymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on this article.
For the interviews we conducted, some women wished to be anonymous, so are listed as O1, O2, etc. 2. We use the term "mainstream feminists" cautiously. We are aware that many of these women would not define themselves or their activism as mainstream. Yet, more recent scholarship has defined the work of liberal and socialist feminists of this era who challenged but did engage with the state as "mainstream feminists."

Endnotes
3. ere are many more we could name but these are the Canadian critical race scholars who have left the biggest imprint on our understanding of race and ra cism.
4. We are aware of the slipperiness of the term "second wave feminism" and the imprecision with which it at tempts to demarcate women's activism during the 1960s to 1980s in the global North. At the same time, from this preliminary archival and interview data it is clear that there are distinctions that need to be made between the women's activism that has been previous detailed in feminist politics texts and the activism of women who were advocating for less privileged wo men (Sandoval 2013, 4142).
5. ere are some publications produced by members of the immigrant activist community about immigrant women and organizing in the 1970s and 1980s. See, for example, Lior (2012) and Das Gupta (1986).
6. See, for example, Dian Marino and Deborah Barndt, Immigrants Speak Out (1983), which includes booklets immigrant women created to practice their English. In these booklets, women wrote stories and songs about their everyday lives, such as their work in textile factories.
7. Earlier work that does deal with motherhood and family among immigrant women in relation to some of these issues includes Roxanna Ng and Judith Ramirez (1982) and Agnew (1996). ere are also differences between immigrant and mainstream femin ists related to questions of religion, which we have ex plored elsewhere (Marks and Little et al. n.d.).
10. By 1982 a range of these organizations had affili ated with the organization 'Women Workers in the Home,' a 'group of women and organizations con cerned about the status of women in the home.' It seemed to have been organized primarily by local WFH activists. Kinesis (1982Kinesis ( , 1215; Kinesis (1982Kinesis ( , 1415; Kinesis (1980, 3). Also see interview with Ellen Woodsworth (2016).