Toronto Carpet Manufacturing Factory

Women at the Looms

In the late 1880s, there were increased calls for women to join the workforce in southern Ontario. Women who had typically performed unpaid domestic work began to take paid jobs in cities. This was the case at the Toronto Carpet Manufacturing Company. The Factory employed a large female workforce, drawing on many women’s experience with weaving or working with yarn. 

At the time, factory work could be dangerous, with few healthy and safety guidelines to keep workers safe. Workers at the Toronto Carpet Factory were expected to work 60 hours each week. In 1902, a new system reduced workers’ lunch hour to under 45 minutes.

On July 16, 1902, Carpet Factory workers fought back, beginning one of the first recorded strikes in Toronto. Nearly 300 weavers, spinners, and carders walked out on the job, half of which were women. Workers fought advocating for a 55-hour work week as well as a ten-cent raise for most departments. During the strike, the workers organized into a branch of the Textile Workers’ League which allowed them to negotiate for better working conditions.

Toronto Carpet Manufacturing Factory

Taking Risks

During the early twentieth century, women with jobs outside the home could face public shame and insults. They also usually earned a lower wage than their male colleagues. But, increasingly, women took these risks for the economic and social freedom a job could provide. 

In 1913, a young woman named Benedictine Wiseman left Montreal and her husband to take up a job in a Toronto department store. She made this move under a new name and identity: Jimmy. Benedictine worked as “Jimmy” for three months. Unfortunately, the police eventually caught Benedictine and she was brought before the Toronto Women’s Court for a vagrancy offence. At the time, it was considered a moral transgression for a woman to assume a male identity as she had done. 

Toronto Carpet Manufacturing Factory

The Emergence of Canadian Teenagers

But why were women like Benedictine flocking to cities, and in some extreme cases, taking risks to work in these factories? 

For the first time in Canada, working women had more economic freedom. Their city factory jobs may not have been lucrative, but their pay checks offered them the opportunity to do what they wanted in their personal time. As more women participated in leisure activities outside the home, such as spending time with friends, and going out dancing, many women strayed from the domestic space of family life towards what was considered as an ‘unpredictable’ lifestyle by society.

Toronto Carpet Manufacturing Factory

Protecting Young Women

There were many opinions on whether women’s increased independence was a ‘good’ thing during this period. While their participation in the workforce could be seen as patriotic, some were concerned that doing “men’s work”, particularly manual labour in factories, was luring women into lives of crime. Early 20th-century legislation was occasionally aimed at women workers in factories, such as limits on the hours of day they could work. In 1906, a proposed law sought to prohibit women from factory work prior to 6 a.m. or after 9 p.m.

Although some professional vocations were considered “appropriate” or particularly suited to women, such as nursing or teaching, an enduring concern during the early twentieth century was about the state of the “Canadian home.” If women were not at home, who would take care of the future generations of Canadians?