Post by conumbra on May 8, 2017 18:31:45 GMT
In early 20th century Canada, many people believed there were sinful ways to spend and save your money. Greed and the hoarding of wealth were of course seen as immoral, but this manifested in other less obvious ways.
In this time period after the Industrial revolution, many people from the late 19th into the early 20th century were seeing the effects of industrialization and capitalism on society, and thus were reacting to its influence in various ways. This, in part, lead to the great sweep of social movements that sprung up around this time, stemming in part from a desire to make God’s will occur on Earth.
This is really just a broad overview of the prevailing moral mindsets at this time, and how they reacted to and reflected the changing times.
Protestant Producerism
Producerism is, to put it simply, a concept which emphasizes the idea that wealth made from one’s own hard work is virtuous, contrasted with the idea of wealth created through other means, such as speculation, or selling weapons/drugs. Selling the food you farm is noble, while taking advantage of your community through operating bars, speculating financially, or running a gambling den were seen as immoral ways to earn wealth, the mark of someone either lazy or morally bankrupt. One's money shouldn’t be hoarded either, instead spent in the local community to provide economic benefits; people who took wealth out of the community by taking advantage of addiction were seen as sinful for what they sold and the unproductive effects it had on the community.
This ties into the concept of the Protestant work ethic, that being the idea that doing good, honest work is a noble, godly thing to do in and of itself. This idea fed naturally into the already-present communal spirit in the more agrarian societies. Farmers in Canada had already set up what were in effect local insurance pools to protect against bad harvests or natural disasters; others set up communal grain storage. This idea of doing honest work and giving back to the community took fruit very easily within these communities.
This growing Protestant ethos was part of why the Moral Reform movements at the time fought against such things as alcohol and gambling. The Prohibition movements at the time, both in the US and Canada, were mostly Protestant and tended to heavily subscribe to these beliefs. Under this ethos, alcohol was a distraction, a waste of one’s money and time that -since men were most often in control of the family finances- could devastate entire family units. This issue is part of how early feminist movements allied with the Moral Reform and Tolerance movements of the time, through the common desire not to see women disadvantaged via men wasting all their money on addictions.
A similar logic extended to gambling, and from gambling this belief extended to financial speculation. In fact, in some of the more extreme cases, the very idea of the stock market itself was tied to gambling, painted as a system that produced immoral wealth for a select greedy few. These more pointed critiques represented another aspect of Protestant belief at the time, the idea of the Social Gospel, or the belief that one should try to operationalize the Lord’s Prayer, specifically this:
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”
Many Protestants (mostly among the clergy) took this to mean that they should try to make God’s will manifest on Earth via the active removal of societal inequalities. Mostly this focused on class and so the clergy tended to create privately-run charities to minister to the poor and homeless. YMCA and the Salvation Army are two current organizations with roots in that time and ideology. Many of those who espoused the Social gospel believed the private charity model was the best solution, and in fact, at one point in Canada a child wellfare group specifically lobbied against expanding government welfare for needy mothers on the grounds that it would be better to take the children away rather than throwing government money at them.
An unsurprising result of these ideologies was that many Reformers and Protestants at the time, urban and rural, joined or supported labour groups, through the belief that it was more virtuous to support the poor workers who put in honest work rather than the managers and bosses who made money off their labour. If this is starting to sound socialist, you’re not wrong, it’s this alliance with Labour groups that ultimately spawned the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth) party, a party whose first premier in Saskatchewan was a pretty strong Christian socialist. This is the forerunner to the modern NDP which has mostly secularized.
Prohibition on Alcohol and Gambling
Unlike in the US, there was never a time in Canada where there was federally legalized prohibition on alcohol (outside of WW1, but that had more to do with resource conservation). There were periods where many of the provinces did have alcohol bans, but those were often temporary and tended to waive restrictions for locally-produced alcohol. The federal government in the early 20th century however declined to make such a law, opting to leave it up to the provinces and municipalities to decide on their alcohol allowance, some cities and towns choosing to go completely dry after holding referendums.
One of the main reasons why such a law was never passed during this period despite loud protests was the prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. There’s way too much to talk about with this man, he’s probably one of the most important Canadian leaders ever, but what’s relevant here is that he tended to want to wait until the last minute before going through with something and often times desired for there to be cooperation and compromise. So when the issue of alcohol prohibition was brought to his attention, he delayed and ultimately kicked the responsibility down to the municipal and provincial level. Most provinces repealed their prohibition measures in the twenties after WWI.
The situation with gambling is more interesting. Gambling had, excepting certain instances (racetrack betting, travelling country fairs, charitable raffles) been mostly banned in the country though there was a thriving gray and black-market gambling scene. In fact, one of the major issues the Moral Reformers faced in getting gambling outlawed were that often, in small rural communities, major political figures like mayors and police chiefs would participate in illegal poker games in the back of restaurants or the like. The traditional stereotypes also had racial elements, as the stereotype at the time were that Chinese peoples often used their restaurants as gambling dens. Oftentimes many ordinary people didn’t really take issue with the practice, despite the moral preaching and potential legal penalties. This behaviour was often encouraged, as traveling country fairs often exposed children to raffles and gambling games and the like when they were young; in cities shell games and three-card monty were frequently set up, and even when busted tended to reappear later due to lax penalties.
Some regulations were passed to try and limit gambling, but often these had loopholes that were exploited. For example one regulation stipulated that gambling couldn’t be conducted at racetracks in “stationary buildings” (unintuitively, not permanent residences, but actually referring to tent-style set-ups that could be easily set up outside). In some cases, bookkeepers simply put their set-ups on wheeled carts pulled by horses, so when police arrived they could demonstrate that they obviously weren’t stationary.
There was a long debate over whether horserace betting should be banned. During WW1, a total prohibition on horse-race gambling was enabled to make sure funds would be focused on the war effort, and arguments were made to extend it, but these ultimately fell through. The horse racers argued that these races provided jobs and economic benefits of course, but one of the weirder arguments was that horse racing promoted horse breeding, which strengthened Canada’s military strength by way of its cavalry and logistical needs. This despite the fact that the breeders for racing horses didn’t breed war horses and that racing horses are generally poor when it comes to carrying heavy loads. But in any event, this measure proved ultimately unsuccessful, and in fact gambling would continue to become more and more accepted in Canada over the years despite protest from Moral Reformers
Economic and Moral Justifications for Intolerance
An interesting subset of the labour movement at the time was their widespread dislike and intolerance towards Asian people, most often Chinese people. Labour groups across the country lobbied for the reduction or banning of Chinese immigration, supporting measures like the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion act.
One might chalk this up to the simple and pervasive racism at the time, but the truth is actually rather complex. Labour groups, for example, while predominantly white and undoubtedly racially biased, specifically singled out the Chinese. There are reports, for example, of Labour groups supporting initiatives for black and First Nations unions at points (though this was hardly universal), yet the vitriol directed towards the Chinese is singular and focused.
The major reason is a familiar one, but the rhetoric used to justify it is interesting. It was based off the idea that the Chinese would come to Canada and steal jobs from the hard-working white workers, a not unknown concept to modern viewers. The reasons for this were couched in Pro-Labour rhetoric: the Chinese would take the jobs because they were willing servants of the Capitalists. They were debased and docile, willing to work for so little money that the Capitalists would only be too happy to hire them over an honest Canadian worker who would want more money. This was a reflection of the simple belief that Asians were less than white people, that they were able to live in such squalid conditions and on so little sustenance that a similar Canadian worker would starve. These beliefs were seen across Canada, even in areas where there were few if any, Asian workers; the simple fear of an incoming flood of Asian people helped spread this belief. As well, attempts to increase Asian immigration were often framed as the government only caring about greedy monopolists, and this was painted as a sign of governmental corruption, the government taking money from businesses in exchange for giving managers obedient, low-earning servants,
Another intolerance closely linked with Protestant movements at the time was the pervasive Anti-Catholic bias. Honestly, aside from the complaints about terrorism, you can take word-for-word much of the rhetoric spouted today about Muslims and it’s almost guaranteed that it was said back in the day about Catholics to one degree or another. “They’re incapable of assimilating, they’re immoral, they cause crime.” In the US, anti-Irish immigration was primarily race-driven. In Canada, religion played a much bigger role, owing largely to the great big Catholic sea sitting right outside the majority Protestant center of Canada in Ontario.
Yes, Quebec’s presence is part of the reason Catholics were not thought of well in Protestant Canada. The Moral Reform’s strict intolerance towards alcohol saw the relative lax attitude Catholics had to both it and gambling (Catholics imbibed wine and regularly held charity raffles in church basements), and with great gusto painted the picture of Catholics being loose with their morals. Of course, this was largely untrue, in fact many Catholics at the time also made complaints against liquor and gambling, but this division was believed to be the case all the same. Protestant Canada saw next door a large and foreign culture that was aggressively un-English and un-Protestant, thus fueling rhetoric about differences in culture being too great and adding to the rhetoric against Catholic immigration. Didn’t help that Ireland knowingly smuggled Irish sweepstakes lottery tickets to Canada even when lotteries were illegal in the country in order to fund Ireland’s healthcare system.
An example of this was the presence of the Orange Order in Canada. A militantly pro-Protestant group, the Orange Order (founded in Northern Ireland) endeavoured to seize control of the political system in Toronto and other parts of Ontario, and it mostly succeeded, at least with Toronto. Starting the 1860s there wasn’t a Non-Orangist mayor in Toronto until 1954. The Orange Order wielded large amounts of power in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting dozens of anti-Catholic riots and largely getting away with it, the order only going into full decline once the 1940s hit.
First-Wave Feminism and Separate Spheres
First-wave feminists desired three things: increased legal recognition as persons, access to voting and government office, and access to education. The first-wave in Canada was largely based off the notion that women were naturally maternal figures, and that giving them access to the legal, political and educational systems would have a civilizing aspect on society. Politics at the time was seen as overtly brutish and aggressive, and it was promoted that women would be able to temper down politics and make it more polite.
This was largely a rebuttal against the idea of “separate spheres”, a facet of gender dynamics that started to show up during the Industrial Revolution in England and then North America. In brief, before the rapid Industrialization of the Revolution, men and women tended to both contribute to a rural farmstead’s existence, though they performed separate tasks. Men did fieldwork while women maintained the house but also produced goods such as eggs, dairy products or clothing as well as tending to the livestock, all things which were sold along with the farm’s main planted crops that the men were maintaining. Thus, while they performed separate tasks, both sexes tended to have their work equally valued as so far as both maintained the household economically, men performing their jobs outside the main home while women performed their jobs within or near it.
However, with the advent of Industrialization coupled with a move to urban life, it became common for men to continue to go outside for work, and this notion that men ventured outside the house translated into men going out and doing factory work while women often maintained the home. Of course now only one form of labour was providing economic benefits, thus over time it became more valued socially. This translated into the notion that a man’s wages would be all a family needed to survive on and that he would provide for their family.
In reality this was largely not the case. While men were paid more than women due to this belief, this was largely not enough to sustain a family. Women would often be required to earn income through other methods, whether it be performing chores for neighbours, selling clothing, or doing secretarial work. In the cases that they were given paychecks along with the men, they were frequently paid less due to the belief that they were only doing this to supplement family income rather than being providers, and thus their income was not strictly necessary. However due to high birth rates, providing for a family often required that women generate some income and oftentimes while the notion was that women shouldn’t work outside the home, they frequently had to due to rent or high urban prices.
This “civilizing effect” is a large part of the reason (besides their religion) that many of the first-wave got involved with Temperance movements. Temperance was seen as a way to “civilize” society and make it less aggressive and sinful by removing the negative effects of alcohol.
It should be made clear that outside of these areas, most first-wave feminists did not really subscribe to what we would consider as “equality”. Most (though certainly not all) for example, were proponents of eugenics, as the pseudoscience was very popular in the time. First-wave feminists were predominantly white middle-class women and some who got into power passed laws that specifically enhanced women’s rights...unless they weren’t white. Hence why -though women in general could theoretically vote after around the twenties in most of Canada- Chinese, Japanese and Indigenous women were still barred from the voting booth until decades later (late forties for Asians, 1960 for Indigenous people). As well, since many first-wave feminists were quite religious, access to contraceptives and abortion were not important factors and in fact many campaigned against them.
Despite these negatives, it was mostly their efforts that brought equal voting and legal personhood to women during this time period, as well as opening up educational facilities to women, either by starting women’s colleges or by getting other colleges to allow women into their schools, especially doctors, who up until the late 19th century, had to travel to the US to get medical training and then practice unlicensed in Canada.
Conclusion
As with everything, it should be noted that these are merely trends, not absolutes. The majority of the Protestant laity, for example, often didn’t hold to a Moral Reformists or Social Gospel viewpoint, these tending to be undertaken by either the clergy or wealthier members of the parish. There were first-wave feminists who didn’t cop to Eugenics. As well, I didn’t talk about many other things I could have.
In this time period after the Industrial revolution, many people from the late 19th into the early 20th century were seeing the effects of industrialization and capitalism on society, and thus were reacting to its influence in various ways. This, in part, lead to the great sweep of social movements that sprung up around this time, stemming in part from a desire to make God’s will occur on Earth.
This is really just a broad overview of the prevailing moral mindsets at this time, and how they reacted to and reflected the changing times.
Protestant Producerism
Producerism is, to put it simply, a concept which emphasizes the idea that wealth made from one’s own hard work is virtuous, contrasted with the idea of wealth created through other means, such as speculation, or selling weapons/drugs. Selling the food you farm is noble, while taking advantage of your community through operating bars, speculating financially, or running a gambling den were seen as immoral ways to earn wealth, the mark of someone either lazy or morally bankrupt. One's money shouldn’t be hoarded either, instead spent in the local community to provide economic benefits; people who took wealth out of the community by taking advantage of addiction were seen as sinful for what they sold and the unproductive effects it had on the community.
This ties into the concept of the Protestant work ethic, that being the idea that doing good, honest work is a noble, godly thing to do in and of itself. This idea fed naturally into the already-present communal spirit in the more agrarian societies. Farmers in Canada had already set up what were in effect local insurance pools to protect against bad harvests or natural disasters; others set up communal grain storage. This idea of doing honest work and giving back to the community took fruit very easily within these communities.
This growing Protestant ethos was part of why the Moral Reform movements at the time fought against such things as alcohol and gambling. The Prohibition movements at the time, both in the US and Canada, were mostly Protestant and tended to heavily subscribe to these beliefs. Under this ethos, alcohol was a distraction, a waste of one’s money and time that -since men were most often in control of the family finances- could devastate entire family units. This issue is part of how early feminist movements allied with the Moral Reform and Tolerance movements of the time, through the common desire not to see women disadvantaged via men wasting all their money on addictions.
A similar logic extended to gambling, and from gambling this belief extended to financial speculation. In fact, in some of the more extreme cases, the very idea of the stock market itself was tied to gambling, painted as a system that produced immoral wealth for a select greedy few. These more pointed critiques represented another aspect of Protestant belief at the time, the idea of the Social Gospel, or the belief that one should try to operationalize the Lord’s Prayer, specifically this:
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”
Many Protestants (mostly among the clergy) took this to mean that they should try to make God’s will manifest on Earth via the active removal of societal inequalities. Mostly this focused on class and so the clergy tended to create privately-run charities to minister to the poor and homeless. YMCA and the Salvation Army are two current organizations with roots in that time and ideology. Many of those who espoused the Social gospel believed the private charity model was the best solution, and in fact, at one point in Canada a child wellfare group specifically lobbied against expanding government welfare for needy mothers on the grounds that it would be better to take the children away rather than throwing government money at them.
An unsurprising result of these ideologies was that many Reformers and Protestants at the time, urban and rural, joined or supported labour groups, through the belief that it was more virtuous to support the poor workers who put in honest work rather than the managers and bosses who made money off their labour. If this is starting to sound socialist, you’re not wrong, it’s this alliance with Labour groups that ultimately spawned the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth) party, a party whose first premier in Saskatchewan was a pretty strong Christian socialist. This is the forerunner to the modern NDP which has mostly secularized.
Prohibition on Alcohol and Gambling
Unlike in the US, there was never a time in Canada where there was federally legalized prohibition on alcohol (outside of WW1, but that had more to do with resource conservation). There were periods where many of the provinces did have alcohol bans, but those were often temporary and tended to waive restrictions for locally-produced alcohol. The federal government in the early 20th century however declined to make such a law, opting to leave it up to the provinces and municipalities to decide on their alcohol allowance, some cities and towns choosing to go completely dry after holding referendums.
One of the main reasons why such a law was never passed during this period despite loud protests was the prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. There’s way too much to talk about with this man, he’s probably one of the most important Canadian leaders ever, but what’s relevant here is that he tended to want to wait until the last minute before going through with something and often times desired for there to be cooperation and compromise. So when the issue of alcohol prohibition was brought to his attention, he delayed and ultimately kicked the responsibility down to the municipal and provincial level. Most provinces repealed their prohibition measures in the twenties after WWI.
The situation with gambling is more interesting. Gambling had, excepting certain instances (racetrack betting, travelling country fairs, charitable raffles) been mostly banned in the country though there was a thriving gray and black-market gambling scene. In fact, one of the major issues the Moral Reformers faced in getting gambling outlawed were that often, in small rural communities, major political figures like mayors and police chiefs would participate in illegal poker games in the back of restaurants or the like. The traditional stereotypes also had racial elements, as the stereotype at the time were that Chinese peoples often used their restaurants as gambling dens. Oftentimes many ordinary people didn’t really take issue with the practice, despite the moral preaching and potential legal penalties. This behaviour was often encouraged, as traveling country fairs often exposed children to raffles and gambling games and the like when they were young; in cities shell games and three-card monty were frequently set up, and even when busted tended to reappear later due to lax penalties.
Some regulations were passed to try and limit gambling, but often these had loopholes that were exploited. For example one regulation stipulated that gambling couldn’t be conducted at racetracks in “stationary buildings” (unintuitively, not permanent residences, but actually referring to tent-style set-ups that could be easily set up outside). In some cases, bookkeepers simply put their set-ups on wheeled carts pulled by horses, so when police arrived they could demonstrate that they obviously weren’t stationary.
There was a long debate over whether horserace betting should be banned. During WW1, a total prohibition on horse-race gambling was enabled to make sure funds would be focused on the war effort, and arguments were made to extend it, but these ultimately fell through. The horse racers argued that these races provided jobs and economic benefits of course, but one of the weirder arguments was that horse racing promoted horse breeding, which strengthened Canada’s military strength by way of its cavalry and logistical needs. This despite the fact that the breeders for racing horses didn’t breed war horses and that racing horses are generally poor when it comes to carrying heavy loads. But in any event, this measure proved ultimately unsuccessful, and in fact gambling would continue to become more and more accepted in Canada over the years despite protest from Moral Reformers
Economic and Moral Justifications for Intolerance
An interesting subset of the labour movement at the time was their widespread dislike and intolerance towards Asian people, most often Chinese people. Labour groups across the country lobbied for the reduction or banning of Chinese immigration, supporting measures like the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion act.
One might chalk this up to the simple and pervasive racism at the time, but the truth is actually rather complex. Labour groups, for example, while predominantly white and undoubtedly racially biased, specifically singled out the Chinese. There are reports, for example, of Labour groups supporting initiatives for black and First Nations unions at points (though this was hardly universal), yet the vitriol directed towards the Chinese is singular and focused.
The major reason is a familiar one, but the rhetoric used to justify it is interesting. It was based off the idea that the Chinese would come to Canada and steal jobs from the hard-working white workers, a not unknown concept to modern viewers. The reasons for this were couched in Pro-Labour rhetoric: the Chinese would take the jobs because they were willing servants of the Capitalists. They were debased and docile, willing to work for so little money that the Capitalists would only be too happy to hire them over an honest Canadian worker who would want more money. This was a reflection of the simple belief that Asians were less than white people, that they were able to live in such squalid conditions and on so little sustenance that a similar Canadian worker would starve. These beliefs were seen across Canada, even in areas where there were few if any, Asian workers; the simple fear of an incoming flood of Asian people helped spread this belief. As well, attempts to increase Asian immigration were often framed as the government only caring about greedy monopolists, and this was painted as a sign of governmental corruption, the government taking money from businesses in exchange for giving managers obedient, low-earning servants,
Another intolerance closely linked with Protestant movements at the time was the pervasive Anti-Catholic bias. Honestly, aside from the complaints about terrorism, you can take word-for-word much of the rhetoric spouted today about Muslims and it’s almost guaranteed that it was said back in the day about Catholics to one degree or another. “They’re incapable of assimilating, they’re immoral, they cause crime.” In the US, anti-Irish immigration was primarily race-driven. In Canada, religion played a much bigger role, owing largely to the great big Catholic sea sitting right outside the majority Protestant center of Canada in Ontario.
Yes, Quebec’s presence is part of the reason Catholics were not thought of well in Protestant Canada. The Moral Reform’s strict intolerance towards alcohol saw the relative lax attitude Catholics had to both it and gambling (Catholics imbibed wine and regularly held charity raffles in church basements), and with great gusto painted the picture of Catholics being loose with their morals. Of course, this was largely untrue, in fact many Catholics at the time also made complaints against liquor and gambling, but this division was believed to be the case all the same. Protestant Canada saw next door a large and foreign culture that was aggressively un-English and un-Protestant, thus fueling rhetoric about differences in culture being too great and adding to the rhetoric against Catholic immigration. Didn’t help that Ireland knowingly smuggled Irish sweepstakes lottery tickets to Canada even when lotteries were illegal in the country in order to fund Ireland’s healthcare system.
An example of this was the presence of the Orange Order in Canada. A militantly pro-Protestant group, the Orange Order (founded in Northern Ireland) endeavoured to seize control of the political system in Toronto and other parts of Ontario, and it mostly succeeded, at least with Toronto. Starting the 1860s there wasn’t a Non-Orangist mayor in Toronto until 1954. The Orange Order wielded large amounts of power in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting dozens of anti-Catholic riots and largely getting away with it, the order only going into full decline once the 1940s hit.
First-Wave Feminism and Separate Spheres
First-wave feminists desired three things: increased legal recognition as persons, access to voting and government office, and access to education. The first-wave in Canada was largely based off the notion that women were naturally maternal figures, and that giving them access to the legal, political and educational systems would have a civilizing aspect on society. Politics at the time was seen as overtly brutish and aggressive, and it was promoted that women would be able to temper down politics and make it more polite.
This was largely a rebuttal against the idea of “separate spheres”, a facet of gender dynamics that started to show up during the Industrial Revolution in England and then North America. In brief, before the rapid Industrialization of the Revolution, men and women tended to both contribute to a rural farmstead’s existence, though they performed separate tasks. Men did fieldwork while women maintained the house but also produced goods such as eggs, dairy products or clothing as well as tending to the livestock, all things which were sold along with the farm’s main planted crops that the men were maintaining. Thus, while they performed separate tasks, both sexes tended to have their work equally valued as so far as both maintained the household economically, men performing their jobs outside the main home while women performed their jobs within or near it.
However, with the advent of Industrialization coupled with a move to urban life, it became common for men to continue to go outside for work, and this notion that men ventured outside the house translated into men going out and doing factory work while women often maintained the home. Of course now only one form of labour was providing economic benefits, thus over time it became more valued socially. This translated into the notion that a man’s wages would be all a family needed to survive on and that he would provide for their family.
In reality this was largely not the case. While men were paid more than women due to this belief, this was largely not enough to sustain a family. Women would often be required to earn income through other methods, whether it be performing chores for neighbours, selling clothing, or doing secretarial work. In the cases that they were given paychecks along with the men, they were frequently paid less due to the belief that they were only doing this to supplement family income rather than being providers, and thus their income was not strictly necessary. However due to high birth rates, providing for a family often required that women generate some income and oftentimes while the notion was that women shouldn’t work outside the home, they frequently had to due to rent or high urban prices.
This “civilizing effect” is a large part of the reason (besides their religion) that many of the first-wave got involved with Temperance movements. Temperance was seen as a way to “civilize” society and make it less aggressive and sinful by removing the negative effects of alcohol.
It should be made clear that outside of these areas, most first-wave feminists did not really subscribe to what we would consider as “equality”. Most (though certainly not all) for example, were proponents of eugenics, as the pseudoscience was very popular in the time. First-wave feminists were predominantly white middle-class women and some who got into power passed laws that specifically enhanced women’s rights...unless they weren’t white. Hence why -though women in general could theoretically vote after around the twenties in most of Canada- Chinese, Japanese and Indigenous women were still barred from the voting booth until decades later (late forties for Asians, 1960 for Indigenous people). As well, since many first-wave feminists were quite religious, access to contraceptives and abortion were not important factors and in fact many campaigned against them.
Despite these negatives, it was mostly their efforts that brought equal voting and legal personhood to women during this time period, as well as opening up educational facilities to women, either by starting women’s colleges or by getting other colleges to allow women into their schools, especially doctors, who up until the late 19th century, had to travel to the US to get medical training and then practice unlicensed in Canada.
Conclusion
As with everything, it should be noted that these are merely trends, not absolutes. The majority of the Protestant laity, for example, often didn’t hold to a Moral Reformists or Social Gospel viewpoint, these tending to be undertaken by either the clergy or wealthier members of the parish. There were first-wave feminists who didn’t cop to Eugenics. As well, I didn’t talk about many other things I could have.