Abstract
Canada was one of the civilizing outposts that formed part of the British plan of imperial hegemony. This liberal democratic white settler society is the context where the new female-dominated social work profession developed. Using various historical archives of the mission statements and practice of early Canadian social work, I critically examine how first-wave feminisms, hegemonic imperial discourses, and settler colonial structures of governance worked as formative factors in the birth of Canadian social work and illustrate this with the life of an early Toronto social worker, Joan Arnoldi (D.O.B. 1882).
Keywords
The Canadian social work profession took shape at the turn of the 20th century, at a time when white settler Canada was not yet 50 years old and the industrial revolution was transforming the economic, political, and social landscape. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, new liberal institutions were established in Canada such as the census, the poorhouse, hospitals, and the police (Henderson, 2003; McKay, 2005). These organizations were structured around the practice of categorizing the vulnerable and the poor into the deserving and the undeserving (O’Connell, 2013). New public service jobs were developed; and in the context of limited public funding, women assumed a role in the voluntary sector (Johnstone, Chambon, Lightman, 2014; Roberts, 1979; Strong-Boag, 1979). Female dominated, voluntary and often church-based, this new occupation of social work provided an opportunity for some women to acquire “a relatively powerful identity as rescuers, reformers, and even experts” (Valverde, 2008, p. 29). Thus, still unfranchised, legally nonpersons, and unable to own property, early 20th century white bourgeois settler women in Canada expanded their roles into benevolent work through the church and philanthropic organizations. At the time, the women’s movement was on the rise and first-wave feminisms developed in national and transnational contexts (Johnstone, 2015).
Sangster (2006) suggests that we need to understand the national context when studying women’s lives and pay “attention to the way in which women were differently excluded, marginalized or punitively viewed by, and within the nation” (p. 260). In her study of early white settler feminist texts, Canadian English literature scholar Jennifer Henderson (2003) used the term settler feminism to describe how white Canadian women became part of the governance and racial constitution of a white settler colony. These women were characterized by feminist aspirations of female leadership in the political and social realm in combination with a loyalty to British imperialism and the creation of a white settler Canada. As political participants, they became involved in the management of the unruly classes, notably those sections of the population regarded as “foreign” in Canada, notably catholic francophones, peasants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and First Nations people (Forestell & Moynagh, 2014; Iacovetta, 1992, 2006). This was most evident in immigration settlement work: home visiting; welcoming newcomers at ports of arrival; designing, implementing, and providing assimilation programs to Canadianize new citizens and in the development of child welfare and child rescue programs (Jennissen & Lundy, 2011; James, 2001, Author). The settler feminist constructed a subject position which incorporated liberal norms of conduct and was premised on her own conviction that she represented valuable racial stock and was therefore amply qualified to “help” those of lesser stock. It became an avenue for political self-assertion as well as a commitment to domestic “missionary work” (Heron, 2007; Lewis, 1992; Mitchinson, 1987; Pickles, 2002; Roberts, 1979; Valverde, 2008).
I begin the article with a discussion of settler colonialism, the role of race making and settler, and imperial feminisms, and I argue that these formative influences were incorporated into the emerging female-based profession of social work. Recent scholarship has cautioned against generalizing the beginnings of feminism and encouraged the exploration of more “origin stories” in order to better understand the different ideas, affiliations, and perspectives, which circulated across the political spectrum (Forestell & Moynagh, 2014). In this article, I document the life of an early Canadian social worker, Joan Arnoldi, as a case example of settler feminism and early social work. To recreate her life, I collected data from a number of archival sources. Written (textual) documents were gathered from two key organizations where Arnoldi’s career unfolded; the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire Fonds (MG 28, 1 17) which is in the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) held in Ottawa and West End Creche Child and Family clinic papers (F4336) held in the Archives of Ontario. I consulted the Arnoldi Family Fonds (MG25-G303) held in LAC, and additional information was collected from early social work journals and historical newspaper collections. These data sets were cross-referenced with secondary sources. Data analysis employed the frames of critical feminist enquiry (Burton, 2011; Heron, 2014; Pickles, 2002; Ram & Jolly, 1998; Stoler & Cooper, 1997) and whiteness studies particularly the work of scholars who have examined the role of white supremacy in British imperialism and white settler societies (Henderson, 2003; Heron, 2014; McWhorter, 2005; O’Connell, 2013; Razack, 2002; Veracini, 2015). I will begin with a discussion of these theoretical constructs, then briefly discuss the Canadian context of the time, expand on the career of Joan Arnoldi, and then conclude with a discussion of what this analysis means to social work.
Race Making and Settler Colonialism
By the end of the 19th century, the work of natural historians and early biologists had changed the meaning of the term race from physical differences to developmental deviation. Racial types were believed to represent arrested stages of development on a continuum which began with savagery and peaked with modernity or civilization (Henderson, 2003; McWhorter, 2005). The idea of superior and inferior human types or races was considered a biological fact so that “less fit, inferior races were taken to be deviant elements within national populations that had to be either controlled or eliminated so as not to threaten the health of the population as a whole” (McWhorter, 2005, p. 543). Critical social work scholar Anne O’Connell (2009) traces the path of British parliamentary investigations in the 1830s including the Royal Commission on the Poor law (1834), which set in motion the categories for deserving and undeserving populations. “Imparting civil rights (in the appropriate amount) and measuring industriousness, civilized conduct, and domestic arrangements became the vehicle promoting White bourgeois norms in highly gendered and racial terms” (p. 189). O’Connell (2009) points out that the abolition of slavery was accompanied by reports and policies, infused with an authorial assumption of racial superiority, which outlined the “readiness/unreadiness” of ex-slaves for liberty and the need for regulation and civilizing. At the same time, the Select Committee on Aborigines targeted the inhabitants of the colonies and set out how to civilize, enlighten, and order the lives of these people. These studies provided “evidence” that supported the discourses of white superiority. The idea that human groups are arrested in development led to the idea that some groups develop in reverse or degenerate, and this notion became a seminal part of eugenic thinking and strategies for preventative social reform. Normalization discourses and the discourse of the deserving and nondeserving poor, adopted race as a kind of abnormality and unworthiness, which then became grounds for eugenic interventions.
Henderson (2003) states that “race is a highly mediated and historically variant construct that works to organize knowledge and to justify various forms of exclusion and discipline” (p. 18). The construction of race was an important tool of exclusion in the British Empire that became a critical part of scientific racism and eugenic thinking. Liberal governance changed sovereign power to disciplinary power and documents, forms, and case records coordinated and regulated everyday operations and relations (Chambon, Irving, & Epstein, 1999; Foucault, 2003). There was no longer a need to exercise sovereign power such as legislating slavery, but instead “scientific” reports on economic disparity or academic achievement in different regions were generated to govern public opinion on who is superior to “others.” This subtle institutionalization of racism makes it critically important to reflect on how early social workers embodied and negotiated white settler colonial racism into their practice.
At the turn of the 20th century, Canadians were split between loyalty to Canada (nationalists) and loyalty to Britain and the Empire (imperialists), and two wars became a testing ground. The Boer or South African war began in 1899 and was essentially an imperial dispute between Britain and the Netherlands. The overseas deployment of Canadian troops was a first time occurrence since confederation in 1867, and it polarized Canadian loyalties between those who were loyal to Britain and those who were non-British Canadians (the French and non-British immigrants) who believed that Britain’s issues had nothing to do with Canada (Berger, 1998; Boileau, 2011). World War I (1914) witnessed the same debate among the Canadian people, and this was further exacerbated by the discovery that many recruits were in poor physical shape and this created a fear of not having robust stock to defend Canada and fight in a war. These fears infused early social welfare legislation alongside the racial and colonial ideas which were already prevalent.
The British imperial plan was to establish overseas extensions of Britain in strategic locations around the world, in particular the white settler societies of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (Bannerji, 2000; Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, 1995; Thobani, 2007). In 1922, The Empire Settlement Act was passed which was a British postwar emigration plan to encourage the settlement of British people in British territories, especially in the Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Assistance for passages and land settlement for 15 years was offered, and an annual budget of £3 million was allocated (Pickles, 2002). Noteworthy was the establishment of an imperial alliance, a Council of Empire (1887–1937), whereby representatives from the settler colonies joined with the ministers of the British government to discuss governance strategies, such as keeping and strengthening “Britishness” in settler countries. For example, in 1907, there was an extended discussion on immigration, and it was laid out that immigrants of British stock should settle within the Empire and should be discouraged from settling under another flag: There is boundless room for settlement…and that settlement not only enhances the prosperity of that part of the Empire, and not only increases its trade with the Mother country, but is a guarantee for the permanence of the control of those great territories by our own people and by our own race. I use the word “race” here generally and in no invidious sense. We quite recognise that in Canada and South Africa we have two races with whom we are most intimately associated. We look forward in these countries to a gradual merging into a common stock. (Ollivier, 1954)
The settlement acts were crafted to enable white settlers, and a clear illustration of neutralizing migrants is the Chinese head tax that was introduced as a method of discouraging/preventing Chinese laborers from settling and gaining citizenship in Canada while at the same time encouraging them to come as an important source of labor. When the head tax failed to stop Chinese people from remaining in Canada, it was raised, and eventually in 1923, the Chinese Immigration Act was passed which specifically barred Chinese people from immigrating to Canada (Anderson, 2008). Another example is in 1914, a Japanese steamer Komagatu Maru entered Vancouver’s harbor with East Indian passengers holding British passports who hoped to settle in Canada. Only 24 of the 376 were permitted entry, and a regulation stating that legal immigrants had to arrive by a nonstop voyage was used to justify the exclusion (Grace & Helms, 1999). For aboriginal people, it was different as they could not be stopped or sent back and so calculated policies intended to assimilate aboriginal people into the dominant culture were enacted. Traditional practices were banned (potlatch), children were apprehended and placed in residential schools, and aboriginal knowledges were discounted and derided (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRCC], 2015). Thus, the “othering” of non-British migrants and indigenous peoples was historically situated in white settler discourse and still pervasively dominates the governance of migration and the fiduciary obligations to indigenous Canadians. The construction of immigration programs and services continues to focus on assimilation (neutralizing) newcomers and services for indigenous peoples are chronically underfunded.
One of the ways white settlers were enabled was with the idea of terra nullius which is fundamental in settler colonialism and is expressed in the notion of “empty land” and the justification of “higher use.” The confiscation of indigenous lands and rights was justified on the grounds of indigenous failure to qualify as “civilized” communities, and indigenous peoples were deemed unfit to govern the land (Lawrence, 2002; TRCC, 2015; Veracini, 2015). The white settler society’s destruction of indigenous life worlds was a combined process of direct genocide and indirect genocide through the establishment of policies which governed who had a right to live a decent life or die. Indeed, Canadian national identity continues to be deeply entwined in the idea that Canada is a vast unoccupied northern wilderness that has been only partially tamed by intrepid white settlers. Aboriginal activist and scholar Bonita Lawrence (2002) thus observes that in order to sustain this myth, the “official” history of Canada has long omitted the settler history of erasure, and she states that the silencing of Native people in national discourses ensures that this myth is perpetuated.
Woodsworth (1874–1942) is best remembered now as a progressive pioneer of the Canadian social democratic movement. However, prior to his political career, he spent 10 years as a settlement worker and published a manual for immigration social workers, Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians (1909). This manual was taken up nationally and was widely acclaimed. A close analysis of his writing reveals the pervasiveness of the white settler discourse with the polarizing construct of helpers who are advanced, civilized (and white) assisting those who are less advanced, uncivilized, and in the extreme savage. In the introduction to his manual, he stated: I can with confidence commend this pioneer Canadian work on this subject to the careful consideration of those who are desirous of understanding and grappling with this great national danger. For there is a danger and it is national! Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. (p. 4, Woodsworth’s italics)
Positioning the Birth of Canadian Social Work in Settler Colonialism
In early 20th century Canada, settler colonial assumptions were pervasive, and white bourgeois power was established in a context of ideas and values around poverty, labor, class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Canada’s robust immigration program recruited a work force that could complete the nation-building tasks, but that at the same time fulfilled a gatekeeping function that maintained the white settler dream. New laws and regulations were promulgated to preserve the power, rights, and opportunities of the white British majority. To stave off American expansion, the Dominion Land Act (1872) offered land to settlers, but a strict policy of racial exclusion denied access to Africans, Asians, and Southern Europeans (Boyko, 2008).
It was in this period that Canadian social work emerged with the development of a vibrant voluntary sector of mostly middle to upper class women who dedicated themselves to charity work. Home visiting, hospital work, immigration support services, poverty relief assistance, and childcare day nurseries were established in major urban centers. By 1912, Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg had formed Associated Charities, an organization with a mix of public and private funding, designed to coordinate and regulate social services (Jennissen & Lundy, 2011). The first Settlement Program was established in 1870 in Toronto and others followed in the early 20th century (Irving, Parsons, & Bellamy, 1995). Child welfare became a driving concern, and in 1891, the Children’s Aid Society was set up in Ontario followed by the Child Protection Act in 1893 (Jones & Rutman, 1981). In 1914, the first professional university program in social work opened at the University of Toronto, and in 1926, the Canadian Association of Social Workers was formed. A new generation of professional social workers graduated, some of whom had been voluntary workers for many years prior to the availability of university training. In 1920, the national organization Canadian Council on Child Welfare was set up with Charlotte Whitton, a university graduate, at the helm (Jennissen & Lundy, 2011).
Joan Arnoldi: A Case Example of Canadian Settler Feminism and Early Social Work
Living with her family of origin, Joan Arnoldi was part of the generation of women born in the 1870s and the 1880s, who were seeking social and political participation rights, through suffrage, ownership of property, entry into higher education, and the masculine domains of the professions. Arnoldi pursued executive positions in organizations and service in the military and assumed an active voluntary working life joining women’s clubs and occupying new workspaces for women. In the 50 years between 1914 and 1964, Arnoldi’s contributions as a voluntary social worker were gradually superceded by paid professional social workers, but the relationships between these groups were entwined and complex as the story of Arnoldi’s public life will show. As the eldest daughter of a prominent established Church of England family in the Anglo-Protestant–dominated world of Ontario in the late 19th century, Arnoldi enjoyed the comforts of affluence, with three “domestics” living in the house allowing her the time to pursue her own interests. As a fourth generation Canadian, her father, Frank Arnoldi, was not only a respected and well-known Crown Attorney in Toronto, but he was also a staunch Dominionist and loyal member of the British Empire and belonged to a number of imperial patriotic clubs (Morgan, 1912). As a lifelong spinster, Arnoldi continued to live in her childhood home and provided care for her parents as they aged. She devoted her life to public service, and this work fell into three main areas. Firstly, like many women of her time, she was very active in the women’s club movement, specifically the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire (IODE), and so I begin with a discussion of this and then specifically describe her role in organizing a tour of British schoolgirls to promote white settler Canada and lastly discuss her role in founding of a children’s day care center.
A Founding Member of the IODE
In 1901, at the age of 19, Arnoldi became a founding member of a new woman’s club, the IODE, when it began in Toronto. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Toronto and a structural hierarchy of local, municipal, provincial, and national chapters (Pickles, 2002). IODE club members were committed to the imperial goal of service to “God, King, and Country”; and as feminists, they were committed to challenging the historical exclusion of females from the exercise of power and public leadership. Their fathers, husbands, and brothers expressed imperial affinities at exclusive men’s clubs such as the Empire Club, the Orange Lodge, or the United Empire Loyalist Associations and the IODE was created as a female image of these masculine institutions. Premised on maternal feminism, the IODE became a widely respected and powerful national hub of imperial immigration work in Canada.
It is not surprising that Arnoldi chose to become a “daughter of the empire” as imperial discourses and codes of conduct were disseminated in her family, her church, and her social networks. This new woman’s club adopted the metaphor of family calling the members “daughters” thus conforming to the popular use of a domestic veneer in the imperial imposition of culture and authority. By mobilizing the social organization of families, namely, the subordination of women and children, in the structure of the Empire, the new white settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa became the children of the Empire, and the metaphor of Mother England conveyed benevolence and nurturance that masked the accompanying violence, exclusion, and exploitation of colonization (McClintock, 1995).
In 1902, the IODE began publishing a quarterly magazine called Echoes, which was a large glossy production filled with updates about the order, with articles by prominent Canadians on topics of interest such as the social services, immigration, conferences, and congresses, and of course patriotic news about the English monarchy as well as advertisements. This magazine 1 was distributed across Canada and had a guaranteed readership of IODE members and their families. When Woodsworth’s manual for settlement work was published in 1909, it was reviewed enthusiastically in Echoes magazine. In an article entitled “The Assimilation of the Foreign Born” which appeared in Echoes magazine shortly afterward, the problems of assimilating a million foreign-born (non-British) immigrants was discussed.
Many of these are from the countries South and East of Europe, who will not readily assimilate and who do not comprehend our democratic institutions—such as Galicians, Hungarians, Poles, Serbians, so on. They reside in little colonies and in some cases aim to retain their foreign institutional and communal organizations, use their own spoken language, learn English very imperfectly, or not at all ( Echoes magazine, Oct. 1914, p. 20).
Reflecting the same views as Woodsworth, the author discussed the monumental task of teaching English ways to newcomers who must learn these things to become Canadian citizens. Domestic political battles around unionism, labor rights, and fears around the rise of communism were widespread at the time, and Eastern European immigrants were targeted as a threat to national unity (Iacovetta, 2006; McKay, 2005). Assimilation programs that overrode locally organized groups “they reside in little colonies” were promoted by the state to counter local resistance. However, this was not as insurmountable as the problem of “oriental immigration”: The Chinese and Japanese immigration is a peril to white civilization. Many undesirable nationalities may settle in colonies and present a very difficult problem for assimilation, but the oriental races absolutely will not assimilate. If the number of yellow men and women increase, the inevitable will follow—a struggle as to whether or not the Pacific coast of our fair Dominion shall remain a possible white man’s home—now the white laboring man has been superseded in the saw mills, the fishing industry, etc. by the oriental, who works for less wage, and the whole equilibrium of the industrial life of the West has been affected by depressing wages. (
Echoes Magazine, October 1914, p. 21)
Joan Arnoldi enlisted shortly after war was declared and led the Canadian Field Comforts Commission that was part of the Canadian Army Medical Corps. The program collected home comforts such as socks, blankets, tobacco, candy, and reading material and distributed them to the troops. It was this work that swept her to national prominence in the IODE, and after the end of World War I, Arnoldi was voted national president. Her opening address is an appeal to the aggregate power of organized women: There is no question as to what the Daughters of the Empire stand for. They stand for the greatest good of the Dominion of Canada, which is her British foundation and her British traditions and her British connection. We went into the war a body of organised women. We emerged from the war a body of organised citizens. (Echoes, December, 1920) The IODE is a Canadian organisation devoted to the best interests of Canada, and firmly convinced that its best interests lie in the direction of Canada’s natural and national development within the commonwealth of the nations of her own race. (Echoes, June 1923, p. 11)
At confederation, it was determined that immigration was a shared responsibility between the federal and the provincial governments with the provinces responsible for providing welfare services to immigrants. The IODE participated in the federal concern with the flow of immigration into the country, and the entry conditions, as well as the provincial settlement work such as Canadianization and employment for immigrants. Nationally, the Canadian Council for the Immigration of Women organized chapters across the country in settlement work—welcoming and assisting newcomers as they arrived in the country, and the IODE were active members of this organization. They not only operated in the national contact zone between immigrant women and their new communities but also transnationally between British women’s emigration services and Canadian immigration services (Chilton, 2007; Pratt, 2008). Arnoldi was on the IODE immigration committee for many years with 1 year as convenor (1923). In that leadership role, she actively participated in the white settler agenda of enabling white Anglo-Christian settlers and she also contributed toward the white settler agenda of neutralizing other immigrants.
The British Schoolgirls Tour
Canadian federal immigration programs were set up to support the 1922 British Settlement Act and offer assistance and motivational packages for prospective white British immigrants. The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, sponsored British teachers to move to Canada as permanent white settlers and the Head of the Woman’s Department of Colonization and Immigration, requested that the IODE welcome the teachers. Arnoldi enthusiastically volunteered “this is the first definite offer made to us by the government for cooperation and follow-up work, and I am most anxious that we should do it effectively” (IODE, Annual General Meeting [AGM], 1923, p. 39). In her capacity as convenor of the IODE immigration committee, Arnoldi organized a national response ensuring that each provincial branch was set up to oversee the local chapters. Shortly afterward, the Overseas Settlement of British Women (OSBW), which was a London-based women’s immigration organization, proposed sending groups of three women such as a teacher, a nurse, and a dressmaker to work cooperatively and thus become a part of new white settler communities, and Arnoldi organized the IODE as the Canadian host organization for the scheme and coordinated all the arrangement with the OSBW (IODE, Vol. 12, 1, AGR, 1923).
In 1928, Arnoldi put a proposal before the IODE executive to host 25 senior British schoolgirls on a tour of Canada. As Arnoldi put it “I do not think we could have found a more splendid piece of Empire propaganda” (IODE, AGR, 1928, p. 139). Twenty-five schoolgirls from the best English “public schools” were selected for the 10-week educational tour of Canada. Arnoldi carefully planned the route to showcase the history of white settler Canada, terra nullius with indigenous history erased and settler colonial strategies of cultural genocide hidden from view: It was felt that the wisest thing to do was to begin with the history of Canada so the girls will stay two or three days in Quebec on landing and go down through the Maritime Provinces, where they will see the cradle of the Canadian race and get some idea of how the whole nation has spread from east to west. (IODE, AR, 1928, 140) A thoroughly up to date little British Columbian town with model schools and public buildings. There we visited an Indian school and it was interesting to see the children show us England on the map, and on being asked the (to us) somewhat puzzling question, “What is the other name of that country?” to hear them all respond without hesitation “Our Motherland.” What a quaint world it is. (Echoes Magazine, December 1928, 9)
Founding of the West End Crèche (WEC)
For Joan Arnoldi, working with children and families was very much a part of her settler colonial vision of a nation and an empire united in Christian values, a whole world ruled by a single faith. She stated: We daughters of the Empire have in our hands the shaping of our future citizens both men and women. We should try to realize that the whole outlook of the world could be changed in one generation by the training of the children. Think for a moment what our world would be if every child between the ages of five and eighteen could be trained in the teachings of Jesus Christ. (Echoes magazine, June, 1922, p. 17) the year’s report will, I hope, convince you of the wisdom and foresight of Miss Tate and Miss Arnoldi, with whom the idea originated. We have, of course, encountered the usual adverse and ingenious arguments which can always be found to oppose any charitable or other undertaking. In our case those have been that a crèche tends to discourage home life, that women should not be breadwinners, etc. Broad arguments which overlook particular cases, and it is for these particular cases that we justify our existence. We maintain, and our experience bears us out, that we do not encourage women to leave their homes, but we do enable those to go out to work, who, from being widows, or deserted wives, or having incompetent or drunken husbands, find themselves under the necessity of doing so. (WEC, 1st Annual Report 1909–1910)
Postcolonial feminist scholar Anna Davin (1997) identified that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a linkage between central maternal ideas and imperial race-based ideology which then situated infant and maternal mortality as a national problem. Child-rearing and good motherhood were seen as part of national strength, racial health, and purity; “motherhood was to be given new dignity: it was not just the duty and destiny of women to be ‘the mothers of the race’ but also their great reward” (p. 91). Thus, establishing the WEC was a further development in practice rooted in a settler feminist ideology.
Participation in the IODE, residency in Britain, and travels to the United States exposed Arnoldi to the new child study approaches and nursery school programs in operation, and in 1925, Arnoldi wanted the WEC to be a model day care, and so she introduced a nursery school program which was designed to provide early childhood education and produce better citizens (Johnstone et al., 2014). The WEC annually published demographic data that showed place of origin, language spoken, and living conditions such as the number of rooms the family occupied. Foucault (2003) notes that documentation, recording, classification, and surveillance which social service bureaucracies were implementing at this time are all important tools in the new webs of governance and social control. In 1930 under the direction of Arnoldi, the WEC set up a testing center in cooperation with the psychology Department at University of Toronto. It was the introduction of IQ testing that fueled the eugenics movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s helping in the identification of persons who were subnormal in intelligence. The belief that “feeble mindedness” could be scientifically established was used to justify institutionalization and sterilization (McLaren, 1990). This introduction of testing services into the WEC corresponds with the shift in attention to early childhood by the mental hygiene movement, which relied heavily on these new assessment methods, working with the idea that if children were not raised “properly” then their individual lack of mental health became part of a collective threat to the progress of civilization (Varga, 1997). While social progress was the goal of these new services, the underpinning ideas of settler colonialism were inherent.
The new programs Arnoldi introduced reflected the new developmental understanding of the child which became central to professional approaches to childcare. The universities were grappling with the suitability of teaching applied knowledge within the university, and the demand for applied training resulted in a search for suitable teaching locations. Arnoldi became part of this early development of field placement and professional supervision within the university setting as she not only instituted a nursery school program but she also set up a program to train nursery school teachers. As a self-educated voluntary worker, Arnoldi embarked on a sophisticated course by introducing a professional program to the crèche. This complex task required administrative skills and an understanding of the new professional expert discourse. She hired new paid staff who were social work university graduates (University of Toronto began the first social work university program in 1914) and understood early childhood education, psychology, health care, professional public health, mental hygiene, and family work. Arnoldi introduced a new position of director of the nursery school, which became the most senior highly paid position in the agency and upstaged the authority of the previous staff group of a matron, nurse, and housekeeper. Unsurprisingly, there was an extended period of friction and instability among the paid staff group with a succession of staff problems: conflicts, complaints, demands for pay increase, request for vacations, resignations, and replacements. Arnoldi set up a regular staff meeting as a subsection of the executive meeting to deal with these issues; and over time, she succeeded in establishing a more stable team (WEC Papers, 1926–1931).
The authority structure at the WEC club was hierarchical with the executive committee at the topmaking decisions that were then disseminated downward to the rest of the club members. Even with the creation of a job position of director and the hiring of a staff team of educated professional experts, there was no expectation that the executive authority of Arnoldi and the WEC clubwomen would be diminished. Similarly, the gulf between the subject positions of the helpers and the helped remained vast. A striking example of this is an incident reported in committee meeting minutes where one of the children was hurt while playing and taken to the hospital for treatment. When the mother arrived to pick up her child, the situation was explained to her and the mother expressed her thanks to the staff but later laid a complaint with City Hall. The executive committee with Arnoldi at the helm decided to suspend this mother “for behaving in this manner.” The discussion surrounding this incident revolved around outrage that a service user could question their decisions or the behavior of the helpers at the WEC and then report this to a “higher authority” (WEC papers, 1926–1931).
Throughout her long voluntary social work career, Arnoldi remained committed to her patriotic vision of a strong white settler Canada and she viewed her work as we are helping them in the name of the greater good: We realize that the children who come to us are our responsibility to a great extent. If we merely provide a parking place for these children so that they might be kept from physical harm we are shirking this responsibility. Children that have to go to nursery school are amongst the most underprivileged in the community. Their future is very vague and hopeless and what opportunity have they to learn how to live? Our aim is to give these children as good opportunities of learning this lesson and becoming contributing citizens instead of public burdens. (WEC papers, 22nd Annual Report, 1930)
Concluding Remarks
In considering the long social work career of Joan Arnoldi, it is evident that her values as a settler feminist with a passionate commitment to participating in the British imperial vision of a white settler Canada directed her practice. Firmly sure of her own worth as “good racial stock,” she worked energetically to not only enable white settlers by increasing white British immigration but also worked toward their successful settlement upon arrival. She initiated programs that would neutralize immigrants to white Christian homogeneity through her educational and settlement initiatives in the IODE and through the creation of the WEC. She set up an employment brokerage system for finding domestic labor for these women, which further entrenched their social position as servile laborers for white bosses. As a feminist, Arnoldi was committed to women assuming a leadership position in public life and using their abilities to lead and create, but as a firm adherent of white settler ideology, this was a practice which was built on racial management and imperial ideas of white British supremacy. Arnoldi is presented here as a representative of a “typical” social worker of her time and while her contributions perhaps weren’t extraordinary, nevertheless they were part of collectively constructed practices that reflected dominant discourses in white settler societies which then became part of the fabric of what we know as social work. We still have settlement services all over the country which were built out of the notion of assimilation and cultural hegemony—so to what degree are these ideas still a part of the practice in these programs? There is no evidence to suggest that Arnoldi ever questioned the relationship between her values and her practice or experienced any doubts about the value of the work she was doing. In retrospect, we can clearly see that the polarized subjectivities of the helpers and the helped were embedded in the services being offered.
Social work practice today continues to operate in the same nexus of opposing subject positions between the helpers and the helped. Often tasked with assessing risk in multiple contexts (child welfare, corrections, personal crisis/suicidality, school failure, and employability), social workers assume a position of power in the lives of others. Anti-Oppressive Practice strives to reconstitute social work and finds ways to adhere to a mission of social justice that addresses and redresses the race-making inequities of past practices and the polarized subjectivities between the helpers and the helped. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) calls to action ask that Canadian social workers be aware of Canada’s white settler history in relation to indigenous peoples and that they respect aboriginal knowledges and facilitate culturally appropriate services. However, as Jeffreys (2007) points out, we continue to struggle with the conundrum of the power differentials that challenge liberal subjectivity and radical practice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
I would like to acknowledge and give thanks to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SHHRC) postdoctoral fellowship.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.