Canadian consumerism could be seen as a tool for excluding women from the work force. This was a major theme that emerged from readings regarding Canadian consumer history. In defence of consumerism Donica Belisle writes that “for many poor, working, and middle-class women [consumerism]  has been vital to social activity and cultural identity” [1]. While consumerism may have provided this opportunity for women, it also eludes to the idea that women were not meant to have a social or cultural identity in the workplace and instead were meant to stay in their “sphere”[2] of homemaking. We can see numerous cases of evidence for this in Miriam Wright’s article “Government Attempts to Create a “Modern” Fisheries Workforce in Newfoundland”. “The male breadwinner model was strengthened by the practice of issuing social benefits of various kinds based on the marital status of the fisher” [2]. These benefits were intended to encourage women to marry, and allow the male breadwinner narrative live on. This was reinforced by the fact that “no such programmes of financial assistance were extended to the female members of the workforce” [2]. Historically fishing in Newfoundland was a family affair that required the men to fish, and the women to cure the fish [2]. This modern consumerist market disrupted this way of life and introduced a new, unnatural gender roles for fishing communities. The culture and social life that these women shared curing fish was stripped from them when modern fisheries was introduced, and it seems was an attempt to keep women consuming instead of contributing. In reality women didn’t need to be liberated from work, but it benefited consumerism and ideologies about gender roles if removed from the workforce.

From 1891 to 1951 women’s presence in the workforce doubled from 11% of the workforce in Canada to 22%[3]. If it was intentional or not to remove women from the work force so that they could consume and support the economy, it did not work entirely. Although an attempt was made to remove women from the workforce by underpaying, and under benefiting, consumerism doesn’t seem to have been able to pull women from work.