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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