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Bucking Conservatism: 4. Fed Up with the Status Quo: Alberta Women’s Groups Challenge Maternalist Ideology and Secure Provincial Funding for Daycare, 1964–71

Bucking Conservatism
4. Fed Up with the Status Quo: Alberta Women’s Groups Challenge Maternalist Ideology and Secure Provincial Funding for Daycare, 1964–71
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“4. Fed Up with the Status Quo: Alberta Women’s Groups Challenge Maternalist Ideology and Secure Provincial Funding for Daycare, 1964–71” in “Bucking Conservatism”

4 Fed Up with the Status Quo

Alberta Women’s Groups Challenge Maternalist Ideology and Secure Provincial Funding for Daycare, 1964–71

Tom Langford

It is a list of organizations that are not usually thought of as incubators of radical critique and activism: the University Women’s Clubs of Edmonton and Calgary, the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Edmonton, the National Council of Jewish Women, branches of the United Church Women, the Federation of Medical Women, the Calgary Home Economists Association, the Calgary Local Council of Women, and the Junior League of Calgary. Nevertheless, this wide range of women’s organizations played a crucial role in challenging the entrenched maternalist notion in Alberta of the 1960s that, inasmuch as mothers provide the ideal care for young children, full-scale, government-supported daycare programs “are for the birds.”1

Admittedly, these women’s groups did not act alone in challenging maternalist orthodoxy in Alberta; they participated in a diverse coalition that included social workers, pediatricians, educators, and young people politicized during the 1960s. Social workers, particularly those employed in municipal social services departments, were forceful proponents for public investment in daycare to support working mothers. Their leadership in advocating for daycare in Alberta, beginning in the mid-1960s, parallels a key development on the national stage, where a network of social workers shaped the demand for child care in Canada before women’s liberation activism became widespread in Canada.2 Also challenging the sanctity of maternalism were pediatricians like Dr. Gerry Holman of the University of Calgary and Dr. Jean Nelson, who served together on the Day Care Centres Committee of the Canadian Pediatric Society in the early 1970s.3 The coalition also included members of a nascent movement for quality in early childhood education, led by educators such as Sheila Campbell of Edmonton (who was active in the Canadian chapter of OMEP—Organisation mondiale pour l’éducation préscolaire) and British-trained “nursery nurses” Mary Hull (director of the Community Day Nursery in Edmonton between 1966 and its closing in 2001) and Nancy Hall (the first director of the Bowness-Montgomery Day Care in Calgary), both of whom were strong advocates of a “learn through play” curriculum. Finally, this diverse coalition was topped off by young people, many of them women with preschool-age children, who had been politicized in the 1960s and accordingly brought the values of participatory community development and women’s liberation to the struggle for quality daycare. These young activists also brought a sense of urgency to the struggle against an untenable status quo. Al Hagan, who was appointed as the city of Calgary’s first daycare counsellor in 1969, recalled that during his early years on the job there was a steady stream of traffic into his office at city hall: “I’d come to work and there’d be about six people in my office to bug me about some issue or other.”4

As will be described below, the coalition challenging maternalist orthodoxy formed episodically at different crucial junctures between 1964 and 1971. At these junctures, an important strength of the coalition was its inclusion of a number of women’s organizations that were connected to well-established social institutions (such as universities, the medical profession, and faith communities). Consequently, these women’s organizations could agitate in favour of enhanced provincial government support for daycare while being treated respectfully and attentively by the powers that be. In other words, they could “buck conservatism” from a position inside rather than outside Alberta’s institutional status quo. Hence, the women’s organizations that joined the coalition helped to legitimate the movement against maternalist thinking and policies. They made it much easier for Premier Ernest Manning to justify making initial provincial investments in high-quality daycares and family day home programs during his last years in office, between 1965 and 1968, and paved the way for significant growth of those investments after Premier Peter Lougheed assumed power in 1971.

This chapter first sets the context for activism on daycare by women’s organizations in the 1960s: it discusses the history of women’s maternalist philanthropy in Alberta, with particular attention to the establishment and operation of the Edmonton Creche, which existed from 1930 to 1964. It then addresses three questions about the wave of activism for quality daycare in the 1960s. First, how and why did these women’s organizations become concerned about and involved in the question of daycare in the province? Second, how far did they go in challenging maternalist orthodoxy, how successful were they, and how long did they stay involved in the struggle for significant provincial government support for quality daycare? Third, was the experience of activism transformative for any of the members of these women’s organizations? Specifically, were any of them politicized by their positive interactions with the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s (including feminism) and their frustrating encounters with government officials, and thereby transformed into a deeper hue of radical in the 1970s and beyond? My affirmative answer to the third question will be illustrated by the profile of Sheila Campbell that concludes the chapter. Campbell transitioned from volunteer work with organizations like the University Women’s Club of Edmonton in the late 1950s and early 1960s to roles as early learning professional and administrator beginning in the early 1970s (while still actively participating in the movement for quality child care). Her early years of volunteer activism and subsequent career experiences helped Campbell to develop a radical critique of the ill effects of conservatism and patriarchy in Alberta.

Backstory: Women’s Philanthropy and the Edmonton Creche, 1930–64

What made the women’s organizations listed at the beginning of the chapter so “radical” on the question of daycare in the 1960s is that they challenged the logic and past practices of women’s philanthropic sponsorship of daycare in Alberta. This may seem to be a low bar for defining what is “radical,” but it is a meaningful one because of the ways that conservatism had become deeply entrenched in Alberta under the extended premiership of Ernest Manning between 1943 and 1968. Combining the perspectives of Christian evangelism and economic individualism in his worldview, Premier Manning consistently resisted federal proposals for new universal social programs such as the Canada Pension Plan and medicare.5 He instead favoured private initiatives to meet human needs. In the field of child care, this meant that the Manning government preferred maternal care of young children whenever possible. When maternal care was impractical, however, the government preferred daycares run by private organizations like the Edmonton Creche rather than government sponsorship.

There is a long history of women’s philanthropic involvement in the provision of daycare in Edmonton. Indeed, Alberta’s first day nursery was an initiative of the Local Council of Women in Edmonton. In 1908, this group established a crèche “patterned after the highly successful day nurseries of eastern cities.”6 Located near the city’s Immigration Hall, it was designed to serve the children of newly arrived women who needed to engage in paid labour for their families to survive. The philanthropy behind this early crèche included the establishment of “a free employment bureau” that linked registrants seeking domestic work to any “ladies requiring workwomen who telephoned.” The project was thus animated by the somewhat self-serving benevolence of Edmonton’s “ladies” with telephones—the elite.7

The first Edmonton crèche went through several incarnations during the First World War and then disappeared, with the result that, during the 1920s, no subsidized daycare existed in Edmonton.8 However, a new crèche was established in 1930. According to a story recounted by Campbell, in 1929, in Edmonton, “five small children, left home alone while their mother worked, were barely rescued from their burning home by a passerby.” This prompted Lady Rodney, convener of child welfare in the Local Council of Women, to personally investigate the care of young children in the inner city. She reported finding “unsanitary conditions, children locked in rooms while their mothers worked, irresponsible caregivers, overcrowded care situations and, in one case, six or seven babies in a home, some lying on the floor holding their bottles.” Lady Rodney’s investigation led to the establishment, in 1930, of the Edmonton Creche and Day Nursery Society, which, with support from the city, opened a new crèche with a capacity for eighteen children.9 This account of the origins of the Edmonton Creche illustrates the combination of “noblesse oblige, pity, and sense of women’s particular responsibility for children” that likewise infuses stories about the origins of the first day nurseries in the mid-nineteenth-century United States—an ideology that has been described as “sentimental maternalism.”10 As illustrated in the impulse behind Lady Rodney’s initiative in Edmonton, sentimental maternalism represents elite women as showing leadership by extending their maternal role into the public realm, thereby protecting little children whose working-class parents were presumed to be unable or incapable of doing so.11

The Edmonton Creche operated continuously for thirty-four years, until 1964; during these years it was the only subsidized daycare in Edmonton and indeed in all of Alberta. It represented the privatized, philanthropic alternative to provincially funded and organized daycares. Demand for subsidized daycare in Edmonton always exceeded the capacity of the Edmonton Creche, at no time more than during the Second World War, when women’s labour was needed to keep wartime industries going. I estimate that in 1944 there were thirteen thousand female industrial workers in Edmonton and Calgary, with the working mothers in this group numbering in the low thousands.12 Despite the recognition at that time that government-subsidized daycares would facilitate mothers’ entering and remaining in the labour force, the Manning government decided against joining with the federal government to establish wartime day nurseries in the province.13 It is noteworthy that even the women’s groups that favoured the establishment of wartime day nurseries in Alberta did not challenge the prevailing maternalist orthodoxy. For instance, in 1944, the Catholic Women’s League (CWL) of Edmonton, although supportive of wartime day nurseries because of the large number of women with young children in the labour force, asserted “that women’s proper sphere is her own home and that her work as the mother of a family is her noblest career.”14

However, both the logic of maternalism and the efficacy of the care provided by lightly regulated daycares lacking structured programs (whether the Edmonton Creche or commercial alternatives) came under increasing scrutiny in the late 1950s and into the 1960s. At the economic level, the economy and population of Alberta had expanded rapidly after the discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947. Between 1951 and 1961, the number of married Alberta women in the paid labour force grew from 21,000 (just 10 percent of all married women) to 77,000 (26 percent of all married women). By 1971, there would be 157,000 married women in the paid labour force (43 percent of all married women).15 What this trend implies is that the male-breadwinner ideal of yesteryear was now under challenge from the two-wage-earner family norm. Both the job opportunities in the expanding economy and the desire of families for increased disposable income made the involvement of such a high proportion of married women in the paid labour force a permanent rather than a temporary phenomenon. Maternalist orthodoxy could not handle this new reality.

A companion social change was the growing number of educated, married women who aspired to the challenge of a career alongside their mothering responsibilities. As will be shown below, these women were initially influential as volunteers in groups that raised searching questions about the status quo in daycare in Alberta in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This women’s activism was quite distinct from the “sentimental maternalism” of the Edmonton Creche and Day Nursery Society of the early twentieth century in that it was ignited by professional working women (rather than philanthropic, elite homemakers) and searched for the latest research and opinion on how daycares should be organized, regulated, and funded (instead of assuming that cheap, custodial care would suffice). This change in focus reflected the fact that the professional women of the early 1960s had a vision of daycares that would be suitable for their own children (and by extension, all children) while the crèche had been designed as a bare-bones service for the children of low-income women. For educated, professional women in the 1960s, establishing high-quality, publicly subsidized daycares was both a matter of women’s empowerment (allowing women with young children to continue on career paths) and a question of children’s rights. The “sentimental maternalism” behind the crèche, in contrast, saw daycare in a far more limited way—as a means to foster individual responsibility and labour market participation by poor working-class women.

A third change of import was a shift in social scientific portrayals of the effects of non-maternal care on young children. During the 1950s and into the early 1960s, many of those concerned about the care of young children in Alberta accepted what was then the conventional interpretation of John Bowlby’s research on children institutionalized during the Second World War: “that it is essential for young children and babies under three years of age to have the constant and consistent mothering of one person, that the child recognizes as belonging specifically to him.”16 However, as noted by Campbell, the applicability of Bowlby’s research on wartime orphans to the experience of children in daycare was being seriously questioned in the early 1960s.17 Indeed, new research began to establish that daycare organized on a sound basis could have a number of positive benefits for young children, like improving readiness for school. By the mid-1960s, a new cultural understanding of daycare was in wide currency: rather than being a poor substitute for maternal care in the home, high-quality daycare could be a positive intervention, enhancing children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development and potentially compensating for any deficiencies in their family situation.18

Despite the magnitude of the economic, social, and cultural changes discussed above, both the provincial government of Ernest Manning and the philanthropic women of the Edmonton Creche Society tried to carry on into the 1960s with a maternalist orthodoxy that was no longer in step with the times. Their obduracy was a key factor in mobilizing professional women’s groups to become strong advocates for high-quality, government-subsidized daycare. As shown in the next section, the strange end to the Edmonton Creche in 1964 was the first turning point in the struggle to get the provincial government to subsidize the care of young children.

Professional Women Challenge the Status Quo on Daycare

In Edmonton in the late 1950s, a number of groups of professional women began to take an active interest in the state of daycare in the province. In addition to the University Women’s Club, which made its first submission on daycare to the provincial government in June 1958, two other such groups were active at this time. The Study Group on Family Welfare Services—led by Marg Norquay, a minister’s wife who held a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Toronto—conducted a study on daycare in 1960. A third group was based at St. Paul’s United Church and led by Anne Lightfoot; among its accomplishments was the creation of a study guide on daycare for United Church Women groups.19

During these years, Campbell participated in all three Edmonton groups and also began her association with OMEP-Canada. She offered the following explanation for the commitment of professional women to daycare advocacy at that time:

I think we felt some obligation to do something in the community. I think we wanted some interest outside the home. We were all of us at that time stay-at-home moms. I think we just had to have something else in your life, especially professional women. We’d all been doing professional things, then all of a sudden you’re not doing them. This is a way to do something that’s rather meaningful. Like there were also book groups for reading, but this is more meaningful. I think the University Women’s Club itself had had an orientation towards that kind of activity, more meaningful kind of activity than bridge playing and so on.20

The involvement of these women’s organizations with daycare was encouraged by an early success. The University Women’s Club’s submission to the provincial government in 1958 was based upon a study of child care offered through advertisements in the Edmonton Journal. Until this time, the province had not enforced its requirement that facilities caring for four or more children be licensed, and as a consequence, only one of the fifty-four businesses surveyed in 1958 held a licence. In response to continued lobbying by the University Women’s Club, the province promised to license all day nurseries and to investigate those that advertised child care services. Then, in 1960, the province hired a civil servant, Frances Ferguson, to take charge of the area, and in 1961 the first set of standards for daycare was issued, standards that were upgraded in 1963. Nevertheless, those standards fell far short of what was recommended in the latest research on early childhood education and care. In Alberta at that time, the only qualification for staff was that they be “sympathetic to the children’s welfare,” and the minimum staff-to-child ratios were set at one to twenty for children between two and seven years of age and one to ten for children less than two years old.21

The intense study of daycare standards and needs by Edmonton organizations in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to the opening of a second front of advocacy: the quality of care at the Edmonton Creche (which by this time was caring for over 120 children). The Creche Society had turned its back on education by discontinuing employment of a kindergarten teacher and used a television set to keep the children amused during long unstructured stretches in the daily schedule. A formal complaint about the quality of the Edmonton Creche’s program was investigated by the Council of Community Services in 1962, and although the investigation did not find major fault with the crèche, the volunteer members of the crèche’s board, as well as the staff, felt they were under attack. In the words of the chair of the board at the time, Mrs. H. H. Stephens, “We just got fed up. We had all worked very hard and were getting nothing but abuse for our troubles.”22 The matter came to a head on 31 March 1964, when the board of the Edmonton Creche Society made the shocking announcement that it intended to close its daycare. This decision showed there was a limit to the noblesse oblige of the philanthropists on the board. It also demonstrated that “sentimental maternalism” was incapable of adjusting to the new societal needs for daycare and contemporary understandings of how a “learn through play” curriculum led by well-trained teachers could benefit young children. The crèche had been established in 1930 to provide custodial care of young children so that poor, female lone parents could take on paid work. This was philanthropy with a class agenda. In 1964, the members of the board of the Creche Society were unwilling to rethink this dated and extremely restrictive view of which families deserved help with daycare. They wanted no part in facilitating any woman’s engagement in paid work when that woman could afford to pay the market rate for commercial daycare. The implication of this position was that no daycare subsidy should be granted to a woman who willfully chose the independence and fulfillment of paid work ahead of the maternalist ideal. Indeed, in defence of families that sacrificed to maintain that ideal, the board rejected the notion of subsidized daycare for families with two working parents, on the grounds that such a “family is maintaining a higher standard of living at public expense.”23

The tumult caused by the decision to close the crèche led to further study and heated rhetoric in Edmonton. After the Edmonton Creche closed for good at the end of May 1964, Community Day Nursery immediately opened in the same location, sponsored by the City of Edmonton and two community service agencies. The next year, when a new location for Community Day Nursery needed to be found, provincial officials agreed to contribute to building-renovation costs and to share the cost of the daycare’s yearly operating deficit with the City of Edmonton and United Community Fund. For the first time in Alberta’s history, the provincial government had agreed to financially support a daycare.

Despite this approval, however, considerable support remained for the ideals of maternalism and family responsibility for young children around the provincial cabinet table. Indeed, in 1965, the minister of public welfare, L. C. Halmrast, reported to Edmonton’s mayor, “When discussing the matter with Cabinet there was a definite feeling that there should be no subsidy for those who could well afford to pay for the care of their children from their own resources.”24 That sentiment re-emerged with a vengeance in 1967 after the premier appointed Alfred Hooke as the new minister of public welfare. Minister Hooke attempted to put the brakes on the expansion of provincial subsidization of daycares by rejecting the City of Edmonton’s application for Preventive Social Service (PSS) funding for a city-run daycare to be located in the Glengarry recreation centre.25 This unexpected decision, along with the minister’s inflammatory arguments—including the “for the birds” comment quoted at the beginning of this chapter and a remark to the effect that he would rather pay needy mothers to stay at home with their children than support daycare centres—sparked an avalanche of protest from women’s and social service organizations.26

Letters opposed to Minister Hooke’s position flooded into the premier’s office; the writers included eight women’s organizations, three church groups, three non-profit social service agencies, two community groups, and thirty-four citizens, including Judge Marjorie Bowker. After weeks of controversy, Premier Manning called a meeting to discuss this matter with city officials. Keith Wass, then Edmonton’s director of social services, believed that the premier came around to supporting the Glengarry Day Care Centre proposal after a chance remark by Wass about how children in city-run daycares would not watch TV. Even if serendipity factored into Manning’s reversal of Hooke’s initial decision, the overwhelming support for the daycare from women’s professional and church organizations in Edmonton undoubtedly helped to pave the way. The widespread protest against Minister Hooke’s original decision demonstrated that many urban women’s organizations were no longer comfortable with maternalist orthodoxy as the guide for provincial policy on daycare; as a consequence, the premier was forced to recognize that continuing rejections of municipal applications for PSS daycares would threaten his party’s political fortunes in urban areas.27

Women’s professional and church organizations also actively contributed to the establishment of a trail-blazing, community-run daycare in Calgary. In 1968, there were two separate initiatives aimed at establishing PSS daycares in Calgary. The first was led by Phil Lalonde, a community organizer with the Company of Young Canadians (CYC), who used a list of fifty names of residents of the neighbourhoods of Bowness and Montgomery, gathered during a survey by the Social Planning Council, to start “organizing the community around the issue of day care.”28 The CYC’s involvement in this project demonstrates the importance of young people politicized during the 1960s to the growing movement for expanded provincial subsidization of daycares.

Initial meetings organized by Lalonde in March 1968 led to an ambitious plan to develop a proposal for a PSS daycare using widespread community input: a number of subcommittees were struck, each charged with researching and writing a section of the proposal. So many community volunteers were needed for this effort that Lalonde recruited other CYC members in Calgary to find additional residents of Bowness and Montgomery who would be willing to contribute to the project. A great deal of work was accomplished in a short time, and a formal proposal “for a community day care centre in Bowness-Montgomery” was submitted to the City of Calgary’s Social Services Committee in June. Furthermore, in September 1968, a door-to-door canvass was organized to confirm community support for the initiative.29

The second initiative on daycare in Calgary in 1968 involved six women’s organizations, including the University Women’s Club, the Local Council of Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Junior League of Calgary. They first met in May to begin organizing a proposal for a “model day care” in the city. Quality programming in daycare had now become a primary focus of women’s organizations, demonstrating how the focus of these groups differed from the “sentimental maternalism” of yesteryear. The initial proposal for this “model day care” was quickly pulled together and submitted in July 1968; shortly thereafter, the city rejected it because it would have been too costly and the group did not have a location in which to house the daycare. After a few months of trying to find a way to salvage their model daycare, the sponsoring organizations finally accepted the Social Planning Council’s suggestion that they amalgamate forces with the Bowness-Montgomery Day Care Association (B-MDCA). This merger, in early 1969, brought significant benefits to the B-MDCA. The Junior League donated fifteen thousand dollars and promised to provide volunteers to improve the quality of care in the centre. The National Council of Jewish Women donated six thousand dollars. Furthermore, the involvement of these women’s organizations increased the credibility of the proposal and meant that there was a strong push to make the project a model for quality care. Both the city and province approved a revised proposal from the B-MDCA in 1969, and a combined daycare/satellite family day home agency opened with PSS subsidization in a converted elementary school on 1 May 1970.30

Government sponsorship of daycares through the PSS program had started to increase during the final years of Social Credit’s hold on the provincial government but really took off during the first term in office of Premier Peter Lougheed (1971–75). By 1975, there were forty-seven PSS daycare centres across the province, licensed to care for over two thousand children. PSS centres held about one-quarter of the licensed spaces in Edmonton and Calgary and fully half of the licensed spaces in the rest of the province.31 A high-quality alternative to often-inferior commercial daycares had become firmly established in Alberta by 1975, with three Alberta cities—Edmonton, Medicine Hat, and Calgary—recognized as being among the national leaders on quality daycare. The PSS sector had the expertise and person-power to champion its own cause and was effectively supported in advocacy by municipal social services bureaucrats (many of whom were social workers) and a new specialized interest group, the Alberta Association for Young Children (AAYC), founded in 1971. The resources that professional and church women’s organizations brought to struggles over daycare in Alberta in the late 1950s and 1960s—political credibility and committed volunteer work that could embarrass under-resourced civil servants—were no longer of decisive import in the 1970s. Nevertheless, these women’s organizations had played a key role not only in helping to convince the Social Credit government in the 1960s and early 1970s to abandon maternalist orthodoxy and subsidize high-quality daycares but also in getting the new Progressive Conservative government of Peter Lougheed to see expansion of PSS daycares as a way to solidify its support in urban areas.32

Sheila Campbell’s Professional and Political Educations

Sheila Campbell was one of the Edmonton-based women whose persistent volunteer activism in the late 1950s and the 1960s helped to change the landscape for the care of young children in Alberta.33 Campbell learned a great deal from these experiences and subsequently became an early childhood educator and administrator. Simultaneously she deepened her advocacy for young children. Her life’s trajectory demonstrates how individuals involved in issue-based activism in the 1960s (such as the movement for quality daycare) could become politicized in a fundamental way. This happened not only because of the lessons learned from fighting a stubborn and oftentimes reactionary provincial government, or from personal experiences of sexist organizational cultures but also through eye-opening interactions with activists connected to some of the prominent social movements of the era.

Sheila Campbell graduated with a Bachelor of Education degree in 1952. She taught for a short while before leaving the paid labour force for about a decade while her children were young. During these years, her volunteer activities focused increasingly on early childhood education (ECE) and daycare. Her professional career from the mid-1960s onward included earning her master’s degree (1972) and her doctorate (1981) in ECE, designing and founding the ECE program at Grant MacEwan College in 1971–72, working for a year as director of daycare services for the City of Edmonton, serving as an assistant professor in early childhood curriculum instruction at the University of Alberta for seven years, and working as a self-employed daycare consultant for the remainder of her career.34

Campbell’s politicization included interacting with activists from the new movements of the 1960s. For instance, she commented that a meeting on daycare she attended in Washington, DC, in 1970 was her “first experience with Black Power.”35 Further, in her leadership role in the AAYC as well as her year as director of daycare services for the City of Edmonton, Campbell had a great deal of interaction with young people who had been politicized through participation in the social and political movements of the 1960s and early 1970s and were now the backbone of support for the expanding network of PSS daycares in the city. Among the youthful activists pushing forward the quality daycare agenda at that time was David Leadbeater, a left-wing economist with master’s degrees from the University of Alberta and Oxford University. Leadbeater, who had been active in student politics while at the University of Alberta, served a term as an Edmonton alderman from 1974 to 1977. As an alderman he was the most reliable advocate for PSS daycares at city hall, even arguing—unsuccessfully—that Edmonton should continue to build more PSS daycares in the face of provincial funding cutbacks.36

Campbell was also politicized by her experiences of sexism in the labour force. First, she left Grant MacEwan College in 1972 after she perceived that an all-male hiring committee had made fun of her candidacy for the position of chair of the community services department. Second, she bristled at the sexist culture she encountered while working at the City of Edmonton in 1972–73 that included a male co-worker withholding crucial information from her, exclusion from decision making that occurred in informal male networks (“in the washroom, the beer parlour, someplace”), and instructions to skip the city’s administrative staff meetings since they involved male administrators playing poker and telling jokes.37

Campbell also developed a finely tuned political consciousness through her many years working to educate parents, politicians, and civil servants on what daycare in Alberta should look like. She commented that she and other activists were initially politically naïve in the way they “misjudged parents. I never realized that they were so much more interested in how much it cost them to pay for their kids’ care than in what kind of care their kids got.” She also argued, “I don’t think any of us really understood the political process. That what we were up against was, you know, a mind-set in favour of private enterprise, against rocking the boat.”38 She even learned, after Lougheed’s historic victory in the 1971 provincial election, that “the mind-set of the cabinet that came in was still very traditional [. . .]. ‘Yeah, mothers should be at home with their children.’”39 Old-fashioned maternalism therefore continued to haunt advocacy for quality daycare even after the historic change in government of 1971. Campbell and other advocates navigated this perilous situation by adopting techniques that would get the attention of MLAs regardless of their underlying beliefs, such as advocacy campaigns that mobilized local residents to pressure every MLA in the province. However, as someone with a professional’s interest in the latest research on child care, Campbell was consistently frustrated by the orientation of many provincial civil servants in the 1970s: “You were dealing with professional civil servants [who] had no professional background and they didn’t relate to the issues at all, except in the light of ‘Is this going to cause trouble? Is this something the Minister isn’t going to like?’”40 This situation perturbed Campbell and other leaders of the AAYC who were trying to steer the Lougheed government toward sound policies on the education and care of young children.

Campbell’s days of interacting directly with and lobbying provincial civil servants ended when one of the senior provincial bureaucrats lacking professional training on daycare informed her, “We’re tired of seeing you people around here. It’s the same old faces all the time, and telling us the same old thing. We don’t want to see you anymore.” Campbell continued, “And that’s when I vowed I would never show my face before the government again, which I didn’t.”41 Instead, from the late 1970s onward, she continued her professional career and advocacy on behalf of young children while eschewing the work of directly lobbying the politicians and civil servants who found her so troublesome. Her committed work with the AAYC, Early Childhood Professional Association of Alberta, and Clifford E. Lee Foundation stretched into the new century and helped to keep alive the tradition of quality child care in Alberta at a time when the provincial government was reducing spending, loosening regulations, and cutting the capacity of regulatory staff.42

Campbell’s radical views on defending the rights of young children still shone through in my interviews with her in the late 1990s, some forty years after she first became involved in daycare advocacy. For instance, this is how she explained the position she took on the disputed issue of the long-term effects (if any) of daycare on children: “I always used the argument that I don’t give a damn about the long-term effects, what I care about is right now. I don’t like being in an uncomfortable setting. Do you like being in an uncomfortable setting? Then why do we do that to children? [. . .] As long as I can show you that [a] setting is uncomfortable for the child right now, who cares if eight years down the road it’s bad or good? Children matter now.”43

In the 1960s, Campbell and her colleagues in professional and church women’s groups challenged conservative and maternalist orthodoxy and argued in favour of provincial investments in high-quality daycares in Alberta. They were a crucial part of the coalition of advocates who worked to secure the extensive network of PSS daycares, including the Glengarry Day Care Centre in Edmonton and the Bowness-Montgomery Day Care Centre in Calgary, that by the mid-1970s had made Alberta a national leader in daycare services. In their daycare activism, Campbell and her colleagues simultaneously asserted the right of women with young children to professional careers and the right of young children to early childhood education and quality care. In Campbell’s case, volunteer issue-based activism in the 1950s and early 1960s set the trajectory for a professional career as an early childhood educator and administrator, as well as forty years of activism on behalf of young children. Over these decades, she deepened her critical understanding of conservatism in Alberta, ran into sexist treatment that is still all too common in today’s world, and challenged the status quo on daycare so effectively that a senior provincial civil servant told her, “We don’t want to see you anymore.” Campbell’s subversive answer was to leave the lobbying to others while diligently working behind the scenes to keep alive a legacy of quality daycare around the province.44

NOTES

  1. 1. The assessment was offered by Alfred J. Hooke, then minister of Alberta’s Department of Public Welfare: “Province-Backed Day Care Plans ‘Are for the Birds,’ Says Hooke,” Edmonton Journal, 23 October 1967.
  2. 2. Rianne Mahon, “The Never-Ending Story: The Struggle for Universal Child Care Policy in the 1970s,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2000): 588.
  3. 3. “Standards for Child Development Programs, Including Day Care Centres and Family Day Homes,” Alberta Association for Young Children [AAYC], April 1973, AAYC fonds, PR2377, Provincial Archives of Alberta [PAA], Edmonton. Dr. Nelson, appointed as deputy minister of community health in 1975, was the first woman ever to be appointed to a deputy minister position in the Alberta government. Her distinguished career as a civil servant was cut short when she died of cancer in 1979. W. H. Hunley, “Dr. Jean Nelson: Courage and Spirit,” CMA Journal 120, no. 10 (19 May 1979): 1276.
  4. 4. “‘Day Care Has Turned Full Circle,’ Says City Consultant,” Calgary Herald, 3 August 1978.
  5. 5. Alvin Finkel, The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), chap. 6; Leslie Bella, “The Origins of Alberta’s Preventive Social Service Program” (Department of Recreation Administration, University of Alberta, 1978).
  6. 6. “The Edmonton Creche,” Edmonton Bulletin, 5 December 1908.
  7. 7. “Is Not the Proper Maintenance of This Institution Worth a Thousand Dollars Annually to Edmonton?” Edmonton Bulletin, 17 April 1909. Tom Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy: From 1908 to 2009 and Beyond (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2011), 15–16.
  8. 8. Nor was there subsidized daycare in Alberta’s other larger cities (Calgary, Medicine Hat, and Lethbridge) at that time. However, a different sort of non-profit, group initiative led to the organization of a new daycare in Drumheller in the mid-1920s. A women’s organization associated with the communist movement, the Women’s Labour League, established a daycare with a strong political mission: the group depicted the daycare as “free from bourgeois influence” (The Worker, 12 July 1924, as cited in Charles A. Seager, “A Proletariat in Wild Rose Country: The Alberta Coal Miners, 1905–1945” [PhD diss., York University, 1981], 378).
  9. 9. Sheila Campbell, “Acting Locally: Community Activism in Edmonton, 1949–1970,” in Changing Child Care: Five Decades of Child Care Advocacy and Policy in Canada, ed. Susan Prentice (Halifax: Fernwood, 2001), 82–83. Campbell’s account is based on a letter written by Lady Rodney in May 1929, RG 11, class 32, file 2, City of Edmonton Archives [EA]. See also Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 18–19.
  10. 10. Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 12. Michel (314n4) credits the term “sentimental maternalism” to Molly Ladd-Taylor, in Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 7.
  11. 11. Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 11–14.
  12. 12. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 20, drawing upon Donna J. A. Zwicker, “Alberta Women and World War Two” (MA thesis, University of Calgary, 1985).
  13. 13. Order-in-Council PC 6242, dated 20 July 1942, authorized the federal minister of labour to enter into a cost-sharing agreement with any province for the establishment of “day nurseries, crèches and recreation centres for children.” In August 1943, Alberta became the third province, after Ontario and Québec, to enter into such an agreement. However, in the spring of 1944, the Alberta cabinet decided against implementing the agreement following a negative recommendation by a provincial advisory committee that “deliberately ignored the strong evidence that one wartime day nursery was needed in Calgary, at least two were needed in Edmonton, and extensive out-of-school care programs were needed in Edmonton.” Tom Langford, “Why Alberta Vacillated over Wartime Day Nurseries,” Prairie Forum 28, no. 2 (2003): 191n1, 185.
  14. 14. From a resolution passed at the CWL of Edmonton’s annual meeting as reported in a letter from president Rosemary G. Gaboury to A. Miller, 22 April 1944, attached to a letter from S. W. Field, president of the Edmonton Council of Social Agencies, to R.A. Andison, clerk, executive council, 1 May 1944, GR1969.289/0882, PAA.
  15. 15. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 40, table 3.1, which is mainly based on Alberta Bureau of Statistics, An Historical Profile of the Alberta Family (Edmonton: Government of Alberta, 1981).
  16. 16. “Report to the By-Laws Committee of the City of Edmonton from the Study Group on Family Welfare Services,” 8 December 1960, MS 323, class 2, file 18, EA.
  17. 17. Campbell, “Acting Locally,” 87. For additional details of Bowlby’s research findings, see Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights, 155.
  18. 18. A summary of the research supporting this new cultural understanding of daycare was published by Howard Clifford, then the director of daycare services for the City of Edmonton, in the early 1970s. Clifford, Let’s Talk Day Care (Edmonton: Canadian Mental Health Association, n.d. [1972]).
  19. 19. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 44.
  20. 20. Sheila Campbell, interview by the author, 17 April 1996, tape recorded.
  21. 21. “Report to the By-Laws Committee”; Campbell, “Acting Locally,” 86; Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 45–46.
  22. 22. “Final Chapter Written in the History of the Edmonton Creche and Day Nursery,” Edmonton Journal, 4 December 1968.
  23. 23. “Creche Board Explains Closure,” Edmonton Journal, 15 May 1964; Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 47–48; Larry Prochner, “A History of Early Education and Child Care in Canada, 1920–1966,” in Early Childhood Care and Education in Canada, ed. Larry Prochner and Nina Howe (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 47.
  24. 24. L. C. Halmrast to V. Dantzer, 7 June 1965, RG 11, class 32, file 16, EA.
  25. 25. Introduced in 1966 to coincide with the Canada Assistance Plan, the Preventive Social Services Act allowed municipalities to initiate new preventive social services that would be cost-shared by the federal government (50 percent), provincial government (30 percent), and municipality (20 percent). However, both senior levels of government had to approve a PSS project proposed by a municipality. See Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 51.
  26. 26. Bella, “Origins,” 227, 243; Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 60. On the involvement of women’s organizations in the fight to secure provincial funding for the proposed Glengarry Day Care Centre, see the letters in the PAA, 77.173, file 702.
  27. 27. Keith Wass, interview by the author, 13 April 1996, taped; Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 60–62.
  28. 28. Ada Brouwer and Howard McDiarmid, “The Founding of a Day Care Programme: A Documentation of the States of Development of the Bowness-Montgomery Day Care Association” (School of Social Welfare, University of Calgary, 1970), 8–9.
  29. 29. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 67–68; Brouwer and McDiarmid, “Founding of a Day Care,” 10–14.
  30. 30. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 69–70, 96; “Bowness-Montgomery Day Care Program: City of Calgary Preventive Project Submission,” August 1969, box 28431, Preventive Services Reports binder, City of Calgary Archives. It should be noted that combining the forces of community members and conventional women’s organizations did not always go smoothly. The first director of the Bowness-Montgomery Day Care, Nancy Hall, recalled that a Junior League member on one of the early boards of the B-MDCA proved to be difficult to work with and was quietly removed. Hall, interview by the author, 19 April 1996, taped.
  31. 31. Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 91, table 4.2.
  32. 32. Prior to the 1971 election that ended the thirty-six-year run of Social Credit government, Peter Lougheed told Calgary’s daycare counsellor, Al Hagan, that his party “was going to push day care and that was part of their platform.” Hagan also recalled, “Prospective candidates for the Conservative Party . . . wanted a lot of information about day care, and wanted to make that a major platform item.” Hagan, interview by the author, 16 April 1996, taped.
  33. 33. Except when otherwise noted, the information in this section comes from taped interviews I conducted with Campbell on 17 and 25 April 1996 and from my notes on conversations we had in the AAYC office on 12 and 13 November 1998. It is unlikely that Campbell and other advocates for quality daycare in the late 1950s and the 1960s self-identified as “activists” or saw their demands as “radical.” However, their political interventions fit the definition of activism proposed by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards: “A regular woman becomes an activist when she rights some glaring human mistake, or recognizes a positive model of equality and takes the opportunity to build on it.” Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 282.
  34. 34. Campbell resigned from her assistant professor position because of a family move and the frustration of not being able to finish her dissertation because of the grind of teaching and administrative responsibilities. She later regretted leaving the University of Alberta, however, because she missed conducting research (her specialization was the organization of space in daycare centres); she had expected that she could readily secure research grants as a researcher unaffiliated with a university—an expectation that proved mistaken.
  35. 35. Campbell, interview, 17 April 1996.
  36. 36. David Leadbeater to Edmonton commissioner A. H. Savage, 14 September 1977, Children’s Services 1975–78, box 5, file: City Council Correspondence and Memos, Edmonton Community and Family Services; Langford, Alberta’s Day Care Controversy, 90–93.
  37. 37. Campbell, interview, 17 April 1996.
  38. 38. Campbell, interview, 25 April 1996.
  39. 39. Ibid.
  40. 40. Ibid.
  41. 41. Ibid.
  42. 42. Campbell joined the board of directors of the Clifford E. Lee Foundation in 1973. Clifford E. Lee had been a leader of the Alberta CCF during the Second World War. After the war he made a large amount of money through a chain of pharmacies and as a land developer and house builder. The Lee family established the foundation in 1969 “to give back to the community the prosperity Clifford achieved” (Lila Lee obituary, Edmonton Journal, 19–22 July 2006). Mr. Lee died in 1973 but the foundation continued to operate until 2004. In 1998, the foundation’s executive director (and daughter of Clifford E. Lee), Judy Padua, stated, “It was basically Sheila who shaped our policy on, or thrust, in the area of day care, absolutely, for years.” During this time the Clifford E. Lee Foundation made many grants to daycares and child care organizations, supporting initiatives such as new playground equipment, conferences, and strategic planning exercises. Padua, interview by the author, 3 March and 18 August 1998, taped.
  43. 43. Campbell, interview, 25 April 1996.
  44. 44. Sheila Campbell died on 18 April 2020 at the age of 90. To honour Sheila’s “dedication and passion in a profession that has a lasting impact on so many lives,” MacEwan University has established the Dr. Sheila D. Campbell Founders Award.
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