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Various studies conducted over the past three decades have highlighted the social, political, and economic impact that women homesteaders had on the western prairie region. Their involvement on the family homestead, whether taking part in subsistence and domestic chores or as workers in the fields, was a necessary aspect of the development and success of family farming and an agriculture-based economy in Western Canada. This paper reveals details of another aspect of family labor that often fell on the shoulders of women, that is, the provision of medical care needed to ensure the health of themselves, their spouses, and their children. Given the labor-intensive nature of the frontier lifestyle, the associated physical hazards, the number of disease-susceptible children in the region, and the scarcity of medical institutions and personnel, women were often called upon by their families and neighbors to deal with outbreaks of disease, injuries, and health crises. Using survey data collected by the Saskatchewan Archives Board in 1955 to illustrate the nature of the work performed, this paper argues that women's health care labor efforts were vital to the preservation of homesteading families in the prairie region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst quantitive and 'positivist' modes of comparative social policy can reveal significant structural factors involved in the making of welfare states, they too often ignore the role of human agency, intention and political processes. A critical-historical comparative case study of the introduction of 'child endowment' and of 'family allowances' respectively in Australia (1941) and in Canada (1944) reminds us of the interplay between structural constraints and human agency in the history of welfare states. Detailed analysis suggests that institutionalised arrangements in Australia after 1905 to resolve capital-labour conflict via arbitral and wage fixation mechanisms put the question of the adequacy of wages in meeting family needs and with it proposals for child endowment onto the public agenda as early as 1920. In Canada the absence of such mechanisms, and alternative welfare arrangements to deal with family welfare, combined to keep such proposals off the public agenda. After 1939 the development of 'war economies' in Australia and Canada created common contradictions for governments, trying to maintain both industrial peace and anti-inflation policies, which the introduction of family allowances in both countries were attempts to resolve. Consideration is also given to a range of political problems and contexts in both countries which this particular policy measure attempted to deal with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the relationship between relative income (i.e., actual income in relation to the expected income of one's socioeconomic group) and fertility, using data collected by the 1967-1968 Canadian Family Growth Study (Balakrishnan et al., 1975). We broaden the tests of relative income beyond cumulative fertility to spacing behavior and then examine some of assumptions included in the relative income model of fertility. Results of the tests, in brief, are as follows: (a) Relative income is found to be more closely related to spacing than to cumulative fertility; and (b) the relationship between relative income and fertility is strongest among those couples who plan their life ahead and have a high level of education and occupation, and when temporal alignment is brought between the measures of relative income and fertility. For the relative income model to receive confirmation, it was specified that the following hypotheses must be confirmed: (a) that fertility behavior would vary positively with relative income but the fertility norm would show no relationship with relative income: and (b) that consumption norms and behavior would show no relationship with relative income. The outcome of these tests are in the expected direction, giving support to the relative income model. In addition, there is some evidence of predictive capability of the relative income model for correlative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]