This thesis examines the history of female immigrant domestic labour in Canada from a socialist feminist perspective. Over the past hundred years, Canadian immigration policy with respect to domestic workers became increasingly regressive with the shift in the racial composition of foreign female domestics. The women's movement contributed to this change as gains in Canadian women's public rights did not effectively challenge the dominant social paradigm of women's roles, and so left intact the public-private divide and the sexual division of labour to which were allied biases of race and class. The women's movement thus became an unwitting participant in the formulation of regressive immigration policies which rebounded on the women's movement itself, reinforcing its internal divisions.

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Anglophone women, working in a new capacity as federal civil servants, exercised a significant influence on Canadian immigration policy in the interwar years. This dissertation focuses on the women's division of the Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization, an agency charged with recruiting British women for domestic service from 1919 to 1938. The division was a product of the women's wing of the social reform movement and prevailing theories of gender difference and anglo-superiority. Tracing its nearly twenty years of operations shows how the division, initially regarded as a source of imperial strength and a means of English Canada's cultural survival, came to symbolize the disadvantages of Canada's connection to Great Britain and supposed weaknesses inherent in the female character. This institutional study explores the real and imagined connections among gender, imperialism, and the changing socio-economic landscape of interwar Canada.

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