Governments and women's movements: explaining child care and anti-violence policy in Ontario and British Columbia, 1970--2000

The thesis concludes by suggesting that movement actors can improve their policy fortunes by strengthening alliances with left-wing governments instead of promoting strategies of non-partisanship. While a tendency to cast movement demands in a gender neutral light improved immediate policy results, it had the potential to blunt feminist demands for longer-term improvements to women's overall equality. This dissertation comparatively examines government policy responses to provincial women's movements in the areas of child care and violence against women in Ontario and British Columbia between 1970 and 2000, It argues that policy responses have been diverse across time and place and cannot be explained by theories of provincial welfare state retrenchment convergence. Although these values can cross-cut party differences, evidence shows that left-wing parties had consistently higher levels of feminist consciousness than right-wing parties and therefore tended to enact pro-feminist child care and anti-violence policies most often. However, at times, the impact of party differences was mitigated by incentives from strong women's movements and by disincentives, which arose when provincial economies performed poorly. Strong women's movements exerted influence as members of the core constituency of left-wing governments and by projecting a perceived electoral payoff to right-wing governments in the lead-up to a provincial election. Poor provincial economic performance led both left- and right-wing governments to sometimes curb child care and anti-violence expenditures, but this impact was more consistent and pronounced under right-wing regimes. While strong women's movements and poor provincial economic performances had mitigating effects, these variables were not strong enough to offset party variables. Instead, the thesis employs a modified version of the partisan theory of public policy to explain positive and negative policy responses to feminist child care and antiviolence movements. It argues that, while left-right party differences help us understand policy diversity, partisan theory needs to measure feminist consciousness levels within the extra-parliamentary party and party leadership in order to adequately explain diverse women's policy results.

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