At the beginning of the 1990s, the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario, almost 75 years old and 40,000 strong, is a powerful voice for Ontario’s elementary public school women teachers and for Canadian women in general. It has not always been easy.

In the 1880s, when the first women teachers’ organizations were formed, women were paid about half as much as men, and their opinions were neither asked for nor heeded. Women teachers organized at a time of general ferment about women’s rights, and many were part of the struggle for the right of women to vote and to attend university. It is more than coincidence that the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario was formed in 1918, the same year that Canadian women got the right to vote in federal elections.

A paper read at the Federation’s founding meeting asked “why women with the same training and qualifications as men are relegated to the less remunerative positions.” Women teachers, those humble servants of their communities whose calling was to serve with self-sacrifice and gentility, had begun to search for social justice. Their search continues to this day.
 

Some high-spirited Toronto teachers, one of them daringly hatless, photographed in 1915.

The Federation, with other teacher organizations, has fought for professional and union rights from the time it was founded, winning a standard contract with protection from unjust dismissal, collective bargaining rights including the right to strike, improved pay and working conditions. At the same time, the Federation has taken very seriously its obligation to improve the professional status of teaching and has offered courses, summer programs, publications and workshops for its members.

Unique in being an all-female professional organization, FWTAO has played a central role in the Canadian women’s movement for many years. The Federation helped to found the National Action Committee on the Status of Women which now speaks for three million women, and took part in the struggle to have women’s rights included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. To ensure compliance with the Charter, the Federation helped fund the establishment of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), which handles Charter cases for women. Work goes on in support of pay equity, employment equity, improved child care and prevention of violence against women and children.
 

Most women teachers taught in country schools like this one of the turn of the century.

The founders of the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario might be surprised to know how much of their dream has been accomplished; we hope they would be proud to know that the struggle for full equality for women teachers and for other women has not been abandoned.